Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transcription
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Not Knowing Their Parents’: Reading Chivalric Romance
- Chapter 2 The Progress of Romance (I): Kenilworth, 1575
- Chapter 3 Castles in the Air: Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage
- Chapter 4 ‘Gentleman-Like Adventure’: Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury
- Chapter 5 ‘The Lady Errant’: Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance
- Chapter 6 The Progress of Romance (II): Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages
- Conclusion: ‘The Chronicle of Wasted Time’
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Chapter 2 - The Progress of Romance (I): Kenilworth, 1575
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transcription
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Not Knowing Their Parents’: Reading Chivalric Romance
- Chapter 2 The Progress of Romance (I): Kenilworth, 1575
- Chapter 3 Castles in the Air: Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage
- Chapter 4 ‘Gentleman-Like Adventure’: Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury
- Chapter 5 ‘The Lady Errant’: Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance
- Chapter 6 The Progress of Romance (II): Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages
- Conclusion: ‘The Chronicle of Wasted Time’
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
As for [her] lighter points of character, –as that she allowed herself to be wooed and courted, and even to have love made to her; and liked it; and continued it beyond the natural age for such vanities; –if any of the sadder sort of persons be disposed to make great matter of this, it may be observed that there is something to admire in these very things, which ever way you take them. For if viewed indulgently, they are much like the accounts we find in romances, of the Queen in the blessed islands, and her court and institutions, who allows of amorous admiration but prohibits desire. But if you take them seriously, they challenge admiration of another kind and of a very high order; for certain it is that these dalliances detracted but little from her fame and nothing at all from her majesty, and neither weakened her power nor sensibly hindered her business.
WITH THE benefit of some four hundred years' worth of hindsight, we might go further than Francis Bacon's famous analysis of the way in which relations between Elizabeth I and her courtiers tended to gravitate towards an explicitly fictional ideal of conduct. Far from detracting, however slightly, from her subsequent fame, the atmosphere of ‘romance’ that surrounded that Queen has now come to constitute a major element of her posthumous reputation. We tend to think of amorous ‘dalliance’ an as inherently private thing, but the subsequent resonance of many encounters between the monarch and her desiring subjects might be put down to the fact that, far from being intimate affairs, they were actually often just about as public as the late-sixteenth-century state could make them.
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- Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance , pp. 73 - 98Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003