Book review: “Elizabeth I: A Feminist Perspective” by Susan Bassnett

It was, perhaps, the high point of Elizabeth I’s forty-four-year reign as Queen of England and Ireland. It was certainly a moment of great victory.

Just a few days earlier, the Spanish Armada had been destroyed and driven from the Strait of Dover by contrary winds and the English fleet. Now, on August 9, 1588, despite the warnings of those who feared for her safety, the Tudor monarch was going among her soldiers at the port town of Tilbury.

Dressed in white, carrying a small silver truncheon in her hand, and with her orange wig uncovered and plainly visible, she addressed the troops:

Let tyrants fear. I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.

Elizabeth, at this point, was in her mid-fifties and had been on the throne more than half her life. As Susan Bassnett makes clear in Elizabeth I: A Feminist Perspective, she was well aware of the difficult task that always faced her as a female monarch, particularly in time of war.

I know I have the body but of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.

 

Echoed down the centuries

It was a line that sounds like Shakespeare and has echoed down the centuries.

But it was pure Elizabeth with its clarity, spirit and challenge. One of the Queen’s many talents was the delivery of powerful and persuasive speeches that she wrote herself. In addition, as Bassnett notes, she often, in this way, confronted biases of the males who served her and turned it to her advantage.

While not recognizing any inferiority in herself on account of her sex, Elizabeth often paid lip-service to the prejudices about women that circulated in her realm, not least of which was the belief in woman’s inherent weakness. It was a useful oratorical device and an effective way of silencing critical voices.

 

Moderation and tolerance

It wasn’t only her gender that set Elizabeth apart in the era that came to be called the Elizabethan Age. Another was her lifelong policy of steering away from extremes.

In the age of Machiavelli, Elizabeth still seems to have believed in moderation and tolerance in matters of State, Church and personal relations.

Even so, she couldn’t always keep the middle path, especially when friends and enemies were taking extreme positions and then acting on them.

Elizabeth’s advisors, for instance, maneuvered her into ordering the execution of the Mary, Queen of Scots, her cousin and fellow monarch, but only after decades of that headstrong, ill-starred woman’s plots to overthrow (and kill) her.

 

Never married

Similarly, Elizabeth never married, much to the consternation of her advisors, Parliament and the nation who wanted an heir to ensure a peaceful succession at the Queen’s death. (As it happened, Elizabeth eventually agreed to designate James VI of Scotland, her cousin’s son, as her heir.)

This, Bassnett notes, has fueled the imaginations of generations of historians, biographers, novelists and filmmakers who have felt the need to develop elaborate psychological and even physical theories to explain the Queen’s actions, or non-actions, as it were.

All these assumptions have been based on a view that marriage is desirable and that without it a woman is unfulfilled.

Yet, she argues, there are more rationale reasons to consider for Elizabeth’s approach.

 

Charting her own destiny

This was a time when the status of women in England and Europe was being diminished and when marriage was being seen as the “natural” state for adults. And also a time when women were increasingly being seen as inferior to men. (Hence, Elizabeth’s mention at Tilbury of her feeble woman-ness in order to counter with her kingly spirit.)

During Elizabeth’s first twenty-five years, she was a pawn in English politics and often feared for her life. With the death of her older sister Mary Tudor, she had the throne, and, for the first time in her life, could chart her own destiny.

She had, finally, acquired power and had moved from a position of powerlessness to one of total control. Had she married, she would have remained Queen but still have found herself in a subservient position to her husband, and she must have had strong feelings about the undesirability of that state of affairs.

 

“A woman of striking achievement”

Insights such as these are what gives Bassnett’s book its subtitle, A Feminist Perspective.

In a calm, straight-forward manner, Bassnett rejects that tendency over many centuries to view Elizabeth’s femaleness as a problem of one sort or another. Instead, she sees the Queen not just as another woman but as another human being. Elizabeth’s choices certainly can be seen to make sense without bringing gender into the picture.

Bassnett asserts that “even without a kingdom Elizabeth would have been a woman of striking achievement.” Indeed, she sees the Queen as a Renaissance woman, a term equivalent to Renaissance man, but rarely used.

As a scholar, artist and patron of the arts and sciences, Elizabeth was remarkable, and she could not have combined that part of her life with the hard work of government without reserves of energy and determination not to give up activities which she enjoyed and needed for self-fulfillment.

 

Survival

Elizabeth was criticized in her lifetime and has been down the years for being a woman who didn’t know her mind. Her advisors and her enemies, her Parliament and her nation, often couldn’t tell what she was planning and what she would do.

But Bassnett writes that her flexibility on so many questions had nothing to do with female fickleness. As a young princess, “Elizabeth learned that flexibility could mean survival.” And she goes on:

This tactic worked so well in her youth that it must have become second nature. As monarch, she continued to use it, surer now in the strength of her position and therefore deliberately choosing to keep even those closest to her in a state of permanent insecurity…

Rather than interpreting this character trait as quintessentially feminine, it is more useful to see it for what it was — a behavioral pattern learned in childhood and carried to extremes once she was out of immediate danger. It is the clue to Elizabeth’s survival.

Not just survival as a princess, but survival in the more powerful but still dangerous position as Queen.

She kept her counsel and kept her wits about her. And it’s called the Elizabethan Age for a reason.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

5.29.26