Should we also include Shakespeare and other dramatists among the authors
Elizabeth would have been acquainted with, since we know (or I think we
know) that she attended the court performance of various plays, such as MND
and (to go from the sublime to the, well, not so sublime) Gorboduc?
Should we make a firm distinction between reading and attending a play?
Peter C. Herman
At 01:58 PM 7/21/2006, you wrote:
>Susan Felch and I are just finishing up a Norton Critical Edition that
>gathers together major works witten by, for, and about Elizabeth. Most of
>the items published before 1603 are, at least potentially, things that she
>was familiar with. Anyone who'd like to see our table of contentents
>should drop me a note off line ([log in to unmask]). The anthology is not
>comprehensive, by any means, but it's large and gives a pretty good idea
>of the best English work written directly for the Queen's eyes. Called
>/Elizabeth I and Her Age, /it includes about 470 printed pages of such
>material.
>
>As Sean Gordon indicates, however, it's hard to know which of these works
>she actually took the time to read. Items directly presented to her by
>court figures with access to her inner circles--Essex, Oxford, Ralegh,
>Sidney, Mary Sidney, Harington, Bacon, etc--seem pretty safe bets. Works
>by figures outside that sphere of familiarity--Spenser, Chapman, Davies,
>Lyly, Peele, Drayton, etc.--are harder to be sure about. The most
>demonstrably certain are, of course, the works she translated (Boethius,
>Navarre, etc.), the civic-entry pageants, the summer-progress
>entertainments, the devices for Accession Day tilts, and the plays known
>to have been been performed before her (for these last, Chambers's
>/Elizabethan Stage /is still the best source). For some of the performace
>pieces, we even have indications of the Queen's reactions to what she was
>seeing, and printed accounts often indicate precisely which of the planned
>festivities she was present for and which were cancelled or performed
>without her.
>
>Donald Stump
>
>
>
>William Oram wrote:
>
>>Can anyone tell me where (if anywhere) I can find out what English
>>authors Elizabeth I was familiar with? (To a lesser extent I'm also
>>interested in what she knew of French and Italian writers.)
>>Thanks, Bill Oram
>>
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