ABSTRACT
Every queen co-exists with a created image of queenship – but the British Isles in the sixteenth century saw a movement towards the conscious self-fashioning of a reigning queen’s image. In letters and portraits, imagery and embroidery, Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart aimed the one to render more palatable her controversial female monarchy, and the other to shape her posterity. Their work reflects the dual nature of the queen as both an individual intent on self-expression, and a political animal aiming at a particular effect. Both women have been the subject of extensive biofiction, but this essay queries to what degree those later fictions, whether on page or screen, were prefigured or contradicted by their own versions of their stories.
