The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power.

Like her earlier book Propaganda in the English Reformation: Heroic and Villainous Images of King John, Carole Levin's current study of Elizabeth I focuses on the court's manipulation of images of royalty and the public's reaction to them. Levin is particularly concerned with "the special difficulties of self-representation of the unmarried, childless Elizabeth" and with "the way her Court, foreign ambassadors and the countries they represented, and the mass of English people responded to her" (2-3). The Heart and Stomach of a King takes a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach, drawing from private diaries as well as Parliamentary speeches, popular ballads as well as Shakespearean comedies. The result is an intriguing though somewhat fragmented portrait of Elizabeth both as she wanted to be seen and as her people actually viewed her.

The first two chapters of Levin's study, "Elizabeth as Sacred Monarch" and "The Official Courtships of the Queen," treat images and issues most prevalent in the early years of Elizabeth's rule, while the last two chapters, "Elizabeth as King and Queen" and "Dreaming the Queen" focus on her later years. The two middle chapters, "Wanton and Whore" and "The Return of the King," examine rumors about the Queen's sexuality, childbearing and suppression of rivals to the throne that cut across Elizabeth's reign. The advantage of this partly chronological and partly thematic organization is that the chapters tend to function as discrete essays, making the book's contents easily accessible to the wide range of readers Levin addresses. Those studying allusions to Elizabeth's marriage negotiations in The Shepheardes Calender, for instance, would find Levin's concise but thorough discussion of the Queen's courtships particularly useful, while students of early modern gender roles and stereotypes would be most interested in the chapters on Elizabeth as "sacred monarch" and "wanton and whore." The disadvantage of the book's organization, apart from the occasional repetition it entails, is that it leaves in doubt the relationship between the elements of Levin's argument. Indeed, the subtitle of the book signals a certain interchangeability in these elements - the reader is never certain why the book couldn't as well be about the power of politics and sex (or for that matter, the sexuality of power politics) as the politics of sex and power.

The chapters concerned primarily with Elizabeth's self-representation, while providing original research, rarely advance a new argument. As Levin acknowledges, much work has already been done in this area, and her own research tends to confirm ideas previously developed by new historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt and Stephen Orgel on early modern fashioning of the self and the staging and production of royalty. When Levin does offer a competing interpretation of Elizabeth's self-presentation, she has to strain to do so. In "Elizabeth as King and Queen," for instance, Levin backs herself into a corner by attempting to differentiate her reading of the Queen's "double nature" from the widely held view that Elizabeth exploited a traditional distinction between a monarch's natural and political bodies, and from the more recent argument, advanced by Constance Jordan, that the Queen and her court promoted a concept of "political androgyny" to explain how she could be both ruler and female. Levin's alternative interpretation draws less on early modern concepts of politics and gender than on simple biology, leading her to insist repeatedly that "Elizabeth might incorporate both male and female in her sovereignty, but her body was a very human female one" (147) - as if Elizabeth, her subjects, or modern scholars might be in doubt on this point.

Levin's analysis of the English people's response to the Queen develops a stronger historical argument. In "Wanton and Whore," Levin provides a compelling survey of rumors about the Queen's sexual activity and supposed child-bearing. Taken together, these rumors from various letters, diary entries and legal proceedings paint an image of the Queen as tirelessly promiscuous and fertile, engaging in sex with bishops as well as the usual cast of courtiers, and stealing off periodically to give birth to yet another child - girl, boy or monster - whom she then conceals or kills. Levin suggests that the variety and persistence of such rumors express ambivalence over the image of the Virgin Queen, an image which, however widely embraced by the English public, continued to disturb strongly held gender and religious beliefs.

In the succeeding chapter, "The Return of the King," Levin focuses on rumors that King Edward VI remained alive and in hiding during his half-sister's reign, and on claims by commoners, both men and women, to be the children of Henry VIII, Edward VI, or Mary I, and so potential heirs to the English throne. Levin convincingly demonstrates that these rumors and claims occurred most frequently in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, when the public was particularly anxious over having a woman ruler, and in the late years, when (the rumored illegitimate children notwithstanding) Elizabeth was too old to produce an heir. Here and in her last chapter on dreams of the Queen, Levin's work points to promising areas for further study, a testament to the continuing hold Elizabeth I exerts on our imaginations.

CYNTHIA GARRETT Wells College