Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-wpx84 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-23T09:29:08.199Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 2 - The Progress of Romance (I): Kenilworth, 1575

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Alex Davis
Alex Davis
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews
Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance , pp. 73 - 98
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×