ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the construction of Renai ssance queenship in The Recess and Scott's The Monastery, The Abbot, and Kenilworth. Modern editors have meticulously annotated the divergences from fact. The chapter explores the ways in which the texts' representations of female political status and power negotiate with Romantic gender expectations. Lee invokes the romance trope of female cross-dressing repeatedly, beyond its usual use as a plot device. Female inheritance is impotent in the face of the need for masculine defensive power. Scott's view of Elizabeth's unfeminine power is more laudatory than Lee's but more ambivalent than Hays's. Elizabeth's engagement with gender ideology is usually proactive, but conscious of a general need to resist definition by the discourses that surround her. Relying more on the one-sex model, Scott, like Hays, did not preclude a praiseworthy and masculine royal career if the private feminine self was sacrificed, though Lee is dubious about such a possibility, and sees it as unnatural and 'barbarous'.
