ABSTRACT
A potent cultural myth has long associated the figures of William Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I. Helen Hackett's study of this historic conjunction of preeminent monarch and preeminent poet, and the erotic and romantic narratives and projections that have emerged to connect them, positions both Queen and Poet as rhetoricians and the people as their joint audience. 1 This is a cultural myth of ideal audience rather than rhetorical performance. Elizabeth's famous face, that effective apparatus of propaganda, caked in ceruse and framed with jacinth hair, is the iconic audience face of the period. I begin this consideration of the place and force of the face in early modern performance and its audience with an early but well-documented instance of Elizabeth's responsive, eloquent, and mobile audience face.
