ABSTRACT
The construction and manipulation of political iconography and idealized representations of sovereign power were a key part of Elizabeth’s strategy for asserting the legitimacy and integrity of her own identity as queen. Elizabeth’s sex required a form of negotiation achieved through the construction of a series of mythological identities and artificial bodies. The critical attention that the mythologization and so-called ‘cult’ of Elizabeth has long attracted provides a record of the many different representational practices and strategies used in the construction, embellishment and perpetuation of the body politic as it is figured in Elizabeth, and of the various characters or fictions through which she appeared. These included the transcendental beauty-figure of Petrarchan or neoplatonic discourses; the goddess Astraea; the biblical heroines Esther, Judith and Deborah; the Virgin Mary, or vestal virgin; and the chaste Diana or Cynthia figure.1 However, whilst Spenser’s great romance-epic The Faerie Queene has been drawn upon heavily as a central example of Elizabethan myth-making at work, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to the figure of the fairy queen herself. E. C. Wilson does not include her in his survey of the different personae constructed and adopted in the figuration and celebration of Elizabeth, and she is only discussed in passing in Frances Yates’s wide-ranging, though disjointed essay on Elizabethan chivalry.2
