ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Tudor knew the power of display. She also knew how to display her power as queen. This is not to say that even so powerful a monarch as she could determine the conditions for effectively displaying political power. Upon her accession, if not well before, Elizabeth found herself thoroughly inscribed within a system of political meaning. Marie Axton explains:
for the purposes ofthe law it was found necessary by 1561 to endow the Queen with two bodies: a body natural and a body politic. (This body politic should not be confused with the old metaphor of the realm as a great body composed of man y men with the king as a head. The ideas are related but distinct.) The body politic was supposed to be contained within the natural body of the Queen. When lawyers spoke of this body politic they referred to a speCific quality: the essence of corporate perpetuity. The Queen's natural body was subject to infancy, error, and old age; her body politic ... was held to be unerring and immortal.! (emphasis mine)
The "lawyers," as Axton observes, "were unable or unwilling to separate state and monarch. "2 Elizabeth also insisted upon identifying her body with England on grounds she embodied the mystical power of the blood. Her natural body both contained and stood for this power. It did so at a moment when England was ready to understand power in nationalist terms and Elizabeth was bent on displaying her power accordingly. Her sexual features figured into a representation of the monarch's body and redefined the concept of the body politic in certain characteristically Elizabethan ways. At the same time, I will insist, the monarch's sexuality was always just that, the monarch's sexuality.3 As such, the features of
Elizabeth's body natural were always already components of a political figure which made the physical vigor and autonomy of the monarch one and the same thing as the condition of England. The English form of patriarchy distributed power according to a principle whereby a female could legitimately and fully embody the power of the patriarch. Those powers were in her and nowhere else so long as she sat on the throne. They were no less patriarchal for being embodied as a female, and the female was no less female for possessing patriarchal powers. In being patriarchal, we must conclude, the form of state power was not understood as male in any biological sense, for Elizabeth was certainly represented and treated as a female. The idea of a female patriarch appears to have posed no contradiction in terms of Elizabethan culture. This chapter pursues several implications of this iconic notion of the queen's body by way of considering the conditions for political display.
