ABSTRACT

The debate articulated in the courtly pastimes, concerning the modes of courtiership appropriate to the servants of an unmarried queen, reveals that the discourse of Elizabethan courtliness was the site of a contest for sexual as well as political authority. But in a series of courtly comedies by John Lyly, written and performed during the decade of the 1580s, the grounds of this courtly conflict shifted. Lyly’s plays reaffirmed the thesis which was promoted in entertainment and tilt, that Elizabeth’s absolute power was founded in her unmarried situation. Yet the combination of his own aesthetic interests with the political and religious concerns of the Burghley faction (to which he was allied by ties of patronage) produced significant alterations in the original formulation of Elizabeth’s courtly cult.