Early Modern Allusions, Boudicca, and the Failure of Monologic Historiographies

36 Pages·2014·0.21 MB·English

“As liuing now, equald theyr vertues then”:
Early Modern Allusions, Boudicca, and the
Failure of Monologic Historiographies
Laura Schechter
University of Alberta
I
ntroduction
While Elizabeth i rarely encouraged explicit comparisons between herself
and martial women of the literary or historical past,1 brief allusions to
and more extended treatments of leaders such as Boudicca are relatively
common in popular early modern historiographical texts with encomiastic
and nationalist passions. Indeed, as Julia M. Walker notes, “To represent
Elizabeth as a woman warrior while she was alive was a delicate proposi-
1 With few exceptions, for example, sanctioned visual representations produced
in Elizabeth i’s lifetime did not explicitly depict her as martial: the queen wears
a jeweled crescent moon in her hair in images such as Isaac Oliver’s Rainbow
portrait (circa 1600 to 1602), the ornament recalling Amazon women’s shields
and Diana’s affiliation with the crescent moon, as well as the peaceful moon
goddess Cynthia; and she wears a brooch decorated with an Amazon woman
and mermaids in the unattributed Darnley portrait (1575). Thomas Cecil’s 1622
engraving Truth Presents the Queen with a Lance is a positive representation of
a martial Elizabeth produced after her death, and while John Fletcher’s Bonduca
(circa 1612) is often misogynistic it employs representations of the first-century
tribal and military leader Boudicca, in order to further a nostalgic understanding
of Elizabeth’s resistance to Spanish incursion. This nostalgia develops simulta-
neously with a larger cultural anxiety about James i’s friendlier relations with
Catholic leaders.
ESC 39.2–3 (June/September 2013): 181–215
tion” (Elizabeth 40). Certainly, Elizabeth’s own self-presentation did not
regularly suggest martial impulsivity or ferocity so much as divine protec-
tion and favour in times of turmoil. As early as her letters to Queen Mary i
Laura Schechter in the 1550s, Princess Elizabeth presented herself as accountable to God
completed her doctorate first and foremost (“Princess Elizabeth” 41). A sense of closeness to and
at the University favour from God was strengthened in a speech given the day before her
of Alberta, and she coronation, as she compared herself to Daniel, spared by God because of
continues to teach in the loyalty and faith (“Richard Mulcaster’s Account” 55).
Department of English Elizabeth also was obviously comfortable presenting herself as both
and Film Studies. Her virginal and as a mother to her nation. Court advancement was often
interests include early predicated on young men maintaining courtly love relationships that fol-
modern women’s writing lowed the patterns of Petrarchan romances—hopeless suitors promising
and history, poetry, service to Elizabeth, the beautiful, but untouchable and prevaricating mis-
court culture, and tress. Official visual representations of the queen include George Gower’s
travel and exploration series of Siena “sieve” portraits (circa 1579), which portray Elizabeth as
literature. She has been Tuccia, the Vestal virgin who, as a testament to her virginity, carried water
published in Renaissance in a sieve without spilling a drop. In her first speech to Parliament, as she
and Reformation and addressed petitions that she marry, the queen stressed that, while she
the edited anthology would find it acceptable to live and die a virgin, she was also already mar-
Narratives of Citizenship. ried to the nation (“Parliament” 58–59), and she returned to this familial
relationship in a 1563 speech, claiming that her subjects would never enjoy
a more devoted mother than her (“Queen Elizabeth’s Answer” 72). Thomas
Bentley similarly praises Elizabeth in the opening Epistle for Monument of
Matrones (1582), describing her as the “naturall mother and noble nurse”
who watches over the Church of England, and James Aske continues this
presentation of the queen as mother to England in his 1588 poem Eliza-
betha Triumphans, as he describes the queen’s laws as both breast milk
and a crib (12).
When Elizabeth was connected to martial women during her lifetime,
other associative values were usually stressed: Diana, goddess of the hunt,
was often used in court literature, but authors would link Elizabeth to her
chastity and beauty rather than any explicitly violent tendencies—The
Faerie Queene’s virginal huntress Belphoebe, for example (Spenser 1590
and 1596).2 Instead, Elizabeth’s self-presentations and sanctioned courtly
2 Certainly, Edmund Spenser received a lifetime pension for The Faerie Queene,
which also includes a lengthy treatment of Britomart, the Knight of Chastity
and an implicit representation of Elizabeth. Britomart battles the evil Amazon
queen, Radigund, in order to affirm traditionally gendered social structures
and to provide an appropriate model for female rule. I suggest that Britomart’s
interests in marriage, political dynasty, and the future well-being of her Brittonic
people actually create a site of critique for the unmarried, childless Elizabeth’s
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representations stressed Petrarchan beauty, chastity, personal faith, divine
favour, princely virtues, and, occasionally, maternal devotion to the nation
(see also Berry; Walker, Elizabeth). Despite the queen’s apparent distaste
for monarchical representations that might suggest violence in her king-
dom or unnatural female qualities in her person, early modern authors
did regularly connect Elizabeth to martial figures from mythology, history,
and the Bible, particularly after her death as the queen’s leadership during
the Spanish Armada became mythologized in and of itself. Martial valour
was, of course, only one of several monarchical traits that were taken up
by writers producing nationalist texts that placed Elizabeth’s reign within
larger Brittonic histories.
Indeed, when given the chance to praise the queen, early modern
authors frequently relied on a well-established set of allusions aimed at
lauding various combinations of the queen’s chastity, beauty, intelligence,
militancy, fortitude, peaceful disposition, and generosity. The allusions are
perhaps only intended to serve as brief references, as signals for whichever
of Elizabeth’s qualities the author will praise in more detail in the larger
work. At the same time, even as authors celebrate the queen, often fur-
thering a sense of national identity in the process, their use of the literary
device may in fact reveal more than superficial laudation.
The women referenced were praised for their possession of individual
traits that were thought to be perfected and to reside in whole in Elizabeth.
In addition to Boudicca, figures from mythology, classical literature, and
the Bible—Diana, Cynthia, Pallas Athena, Astraea, Hippolyta, Penthesilea,
Deborah, Judith, and Esther for example—are all commonly used in enco-
miastic and nationalist texts, while Elizabeth is also connected (although
less frequently) to figures such as Zenobia, Semiramis, Artemisia, and
Camilla. In the preliminary pages of Elizabetha Triumphans, which cel-
ebrates the nation’s victory over the Spanish Armada, Aske connects
Elizabeth to Pallas Athena in order to highlight the leader’s intelligence,
bravery, and sense of justice, and he references Zenobia to suggest Eliza-
beth’s fame and successful female rule in adversity. Aske alludes to Voada
(or Boudicca) to indicate the queen’s bravery when besieged by enemies
and, similarly, to Penthesilea, who valiantly died fighting for Troy, the city
upon which early modern foundational mythologies of England rested (23).
refusal to name a political successor in the 1590s. Indeed, Britomart, Elizabeth’s
fictional ancestor and alter ego, may in part reveal moments of Spenser’s wishful
thinking as she vanquishes Radigund, the tyrannical Amazon who insists on
gender inversion in her territory by emasculating her male captives.
“As liuing now” | 183
Beginning with the iconography used in her 1559 coronation entry into
London, Elizabeth was linked to Deborah when authors and artists strove
to highlight the queen’s sense of justice, leadership, and intelligence (Berry
86), while memorial inscriptions describe the queen as Judith for “ ‘Spaines
Holifernes’ ” (for victory over the Spanish Armada and Philip ii, in other
words), as Deborah and Esther for, respectively, fame and sacrifice for her
people, and as “ ‘an Amazon’ ” in battle (Walker, Elizabeth 43).3
While these allusions arguably serve to highlight Elizabeth’s sexual
purity, female leadership, and personal resolve, among other things, the
references to the various women also move the English queen away from
any immediately intelligible narrative of an uncomplicated, ethnically pure
British past to which she and the nation can be attached. I suggest that
while nationalist historiographers make use of allusions as part of their
efforts to create an authoritative, monologic English history and sense of
stable, honourable national origins, the allusions themselves may disable
this nationalist function by suggesting a multiplicity of origins, a panoply
of literary, cultural, and experiential standpoints that do not align neatly.
Allusions to various other mythological, Biblical, and historical figures
could be fruitfully explored, but my focus here will be on allusions to
and larger literary treatments of Boudicca, because of similarities in the
mythologized narratives for her and Elizabeth. Themes of national defence
and cultural integrity align Boudicca’s campaign against the Romans with
Elizabeth’s resistance against the Spanish at Tilbury, for example, and the
Tudors’ own preference was to trace their historical lineage to Brute and
Trojan origins, highlighting a Brittonic heritage (MacDougall 7).
Julie Crawford goes so far as to declare Boudicca “the ultimate English
female worthy” in the catalogue tradition, and “the most appropriate and
deployable allegorical representation of Queen Elizabeth” (359), yet Jodi
Mikalachki contends that early modern authors “rarely invoked” the Brit-
tonic queen in representations of Elizabeth and that Boudicca did not gain
popularity in England as a symbol of national resistance and endurance
“until well over a century after Elizabeth’s death” (117). However, the queen
3 Other examples of relevant allusions can be found in Thomas Heywood’s Ex-
emplary Lives (1640) and Troia Britanica (1614). Allegorical and other creative
representations of the queen (as any number of literary, historical, or mythologi-
cal figures) open up even more literary works and political performances for
study. Such texts include various courtly entertainments held throughout her
reign (see Berry 83–110), George Chapman’s The Shadow of Night (1594), John
Lyly’s Endymion (1591), Sir Walter Raleigh’s Ocean to Cynthia (1592), William
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (circa 1594), and Spenser’s The
Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596).
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is connected explicitly to Boudicca in minor texts such as Aske’s Eliza-
betha Triumphans and more well-known ones such as John Fletcher’s Bon-
duca (circa 1612). Edmund Spenser also includes allusions to the Britons’
leader in The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596), and he has a slightly lengthier
depiction of the figure in The Ruines of Time (1591), a long poem on the fall
of Verulam, a Roman stronghold that was attacked by Boudicca’s forces.
The two women are also aligned clearly (if less explicitly, perhaps) in several
key historiographies and catalogues published during Elizabeth’s lifetime
and in the decades following her death. Thomas Heywood’s Exemplary
Lives (1640), for example, devotes a chapter to Boudicca (Bunduca in his
account), and he presents each of the eight women chronicled as provid-
ing an honourable trait that is perfected in Elizabeth, the ninth woman
to be profiled. Bunduca’s “masculine spirit” is developed in the leader
(Exemplary 68, 185), according to Heywood, who sees the Tudor queen
as a culmination of sorts, a body possessing and unifying all previously
distinct virtues possessed by the individual women.
Beginning in earnest in the decades following the Spanish Armada,
Boudicca’s military campaign against the Romans in 60/1 ce was often
feted as confirmation of a proud Brittonic heritage and of resistance to
foreign incursion, as in Heywood’s description of
a gallant British Lasse,
[whose army … ]
in one battaile (if report be true,)
Full fourscore thousand valiant Romans slew. (Troia 423)
In Elizabetha Triumphans Aske notes that the Brittonic leader, “once
Englands happie Queene,” who “Pursued her foes with horror of the day,”
perished alongside her daughter “with constant courage” (23). As Aske
recounts Elizabeth’s presence at Tilbury, he explicitly connects the two
women, alluding to Boudicca (Voada in his account) and suggesting that
“Voada once Englands happie Queene” and her warlike daughter “Are now
reuiu’d, their vertues liue” in Elizabeth, “now Englands happie Quéene”
(23). A similarly positive account of Boudicca’s acts can be found in Ester
Sowernam’s 1617 text, Ester hath hang’d Haman, in which she describes the
Briton as “the valiant Boadicea, that defended the liberty of her Countrey,
against the strength of the Romans, when they were at the greatest, and
made them feele that a woman could conquer them who had conquered
almost all the men of the then known world” (19). These references to
Boudicca’s battles against the Romans are of special importance when
considering that Elizabethan and Jacobean writers and historians actively
“As liuing now” | 185
shaped a sense of nation that included the threat of and opposition to
international Catholic encroachment.4
The early Brittonic resistance against the Roman conquest is notori-
ous for its violence (spurred on as it was by Boudicca’s daughters report-
edly being raped by Roman soldiers). Despite the ultimate failures of her
campaign, the heavily mythologized leader becomes an important symbol
for, at different times, national integrity, honourable origins, maternal
devotion, and military leadership but also for unnatural or monstrous
female rule. Samantha Frénée-Hutchins argues that Boudicca’s historical
positioning as “druidess, prophetess, and goddess” in her struggle against
Roman occupation connected to Elizabeth’s place as religious leader stand-
ing strong against Catholic incursion, yet Frénée-Hutchins also posits that
“the darker [pagan] side to Boudicca’s religious activities” and the violence
of her response to the Romans likely made the Briton a less useful model
for encomium than the Virgin Mary, whose iconography was imported
into Elizabethan representations from the 1570s (145). The queen certainly
took care to craft and encourage the circulation of a multitude of personae
and iconographies, many of which were nostalgically strengthened after
her death. Indeed, Aske’s Elizabetha Triumphans, which makes use of
multiple allusions to celebrate the queen’s victory against the Spanish
Armada, invokes a nationalist historiography that is developed in several
Jacobean texts, including Heywood’s Exemplary Lives and Fletcher’s Bon-
duca, both of which look backward to make authoritative connections
between past and present.
Although Heywood’s and Fletcher’s treatments of Boudicca are
extended beyond the allusion, I suggest that they follow other authors’ allu-
sions to the Brittonic leader as they laud aspects of Elizabeth’s leadership
and suggest a long tradition of defence against foreign incursion. Fletcher’s
play in particular fits into a larger preoccupation with and perception of
Jacobean internationalism, including James i’s support for Prince Henry’s
4 Notable early modern publications with references to Boudicca include Poly-
dore Vergil’s English History (circa 1512–13; published 1534), Hector Boece’s
Chronicles of Scotland (1531), Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), William
Camden’s Brittania (1610 in English), Fletcher’s Bonduca, Heywood’s Exemplary
Lives, and John Milton’s The History of Britain (1670). The authors generally
follow some combination of the earliest historiographical work on the leader—
Tacitus’ Annals and Dio Cassius’ Roman History—although some historians
follow their source material more closely than others. Tacitus focuses on the
personalized attacks against the Iceni leader and her children in his presenta-
tion of her impetus to go to war, while Dio removes all mention of the Romans
raping Boudicca’s daughters. He instead focuses on the Iceni leader as a figure
who inspires dread in the feminized Roman forces.
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Spanish Match in the 1610s. I argue that while literary treatments such as
Exemplary Lives and Bonduca do at times support Mikalachki’s conten-
tion that early modern historians and writers attempt to displace con-
cerns about native Brittonic savagery on specific female leaders (4, 11, 13),
Fletcher’s play also suggests a Jacobean inability to recover or possess an
original national purity.
Female misrule can certainly be noticed in the play, and the text has
several misogynistic descriptions of Bonduca’s and her daughters’ partici-
pation in military efforts. However, the drama just as frequently engages
in conversations about the permeability of British borders. Apprehensions
about the inevitable Romanization of British culture and fractures already
noticeable among British tribes in the play likely speak to negative reac-
tions concerning James’s conciliatory gestures to Catholic Spain and his
attempts to officially unite Scotland with England and Wales, while Bon-
duca’s efforts to keep Roman influence and political control at bay allow
a nostalgic look backward to Elizabeth’s leadership during the Spanish
Armada. These points will be discussed in greater detail, but I first argue
that allusions to Boudicca do in fact hold a special place in historiograph-
ical attempts to construct comprehensible, singular national myths for the
Elizabethan and Jacobean populations. As well, the early modern failure
to identify and develop a comprehensive narrative for a national origin
free of corruption by other cultures actually speaks to problems of origin
associated with the historiographical allusion itself.
The Allusion and National Histories
To showcase this multiplicity of and uncertainty about origins, I will ana-
lyze allusions to the mythologized leader Boudicca within the context of
lengthier descriptions of the woman. These more extensive representa-
tions treat the same anxieties and negative possibilities inherent in the
allusions, but the allusions themselves actually hold a unique place in
understandings of Elizabethan nation building. The very nature of the
allusion as a literary device may hinder its efficacy in early modern authors’
nationalist projects. As the authors attempt to foster national identity by
looking to Elizabeth’s mythologized Brittonic origins, the allusions always
fail to produce an original source for the figure with whom Elizabeth is
conflated, just as they fail to produce meaningful, material proof of an
initial British cultural purity upon which national identity can be based.
The allusion as a form of intertextuality encourages the reader to look
backward for recognition, to make meaningful connections between past
and present. Mikhail Bakhtin stresses the specificity of social context in
“As liuing now” | 187
language production and usage, and he focuses on the importance of the
“utterance,” which is always produced in response to other utterances. Julia
Kristeva later defines the utterance as “an operation, a motion that links,
Texts can never
and even more so, constitutes what might be called the arguments of the
operation, which, in the study of a written text, are either words or word
be interpreted as
sequences (sentences, paragraphs) as sememes” (37). The multiple voices
and uniformly valid interests—the dialogism, polyphony, hybridization,
wholly separate
and heteroglossia—present in a text always interrupt and throw into ques-
tion any attempt at an authoritarian, monologic explanation for culture
from others, of
or art, although more monologic iterations of state authority will attempt
to quell those dialogic critiques (Bakhtin 6–7). While historiographers
course.
might attempt to construct authoritative, monologic narratives of the
nation’s development, allusions encourage polyphonic reading experi-
ences in which the text, author, and reader all change and “join a process
of continual production” and meaning is altered with each textual experi-
ence (Allen 34). Intertextuality can thus mark a language usage that works
against monologic readings—that opens up a multiplicity of meanings,
origins, and relationships—while still placing texts within larger social
contexts.
Texts can never be interpreted as wholly separate from others, of
course, and are, as Kristeva suggests, “mosaic[s] of quotations” (66),5 but
allusions allow for more immediate proof of past works and events than a
slightly spectral sense of cultural “influence” or historical “interest” might.
Allusions need not point to a simple, single source text: indeed, critics
have misunderstood Kristeva’s work on intertextuality if they focus simply
on source study rather than on the implications of the text as “a dialogue
among several writings” (65). Allusions do suggest the possibility and
continuation of origins, however, and they encourage historicization by
drawing links between earlier and present cultures, by implying some sort
of commonality between the hypotext and the hypertext, to use Gérard
Genette’s terms. These textual connections occur, even if the hypertext can
sustain meaning on its own without the reader being forced to reference
the past text, or hypotext.6 While allusions place texts within “a network
5 Julia Kristeva also sees the text as a “permutation of texts” (36), while Roland
Barthes refers to it as “a tissue of quotations” (“Death” 149) and the reader as
“a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost”
(s/z 10).
6 One might be reminded, too, of Mikhail Bakhtin’s argument about what type
of material is “essential” in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work (29). Bakhtin maintains
that in the author’s novels, “the essential” must be capable of “simultaneous
coexistence” in time: “That which has meaning only as ‘earlier’ or ‘later,’ which
188 | Schechter
of textual relations” (Allen 1), they also allow the reader to consider works
as “space[s] in which a potentially vast number of relations coalesce” (12).
Each allusion can suggest a multiplicity of origins or sources, thus drawing
the reader away from any one history, meaning, or certain interpretation,
even as nationalist historiographers make use of the literary device to
direct the reader to certain reference points.
Allusions to Boudicca simultaneously signal multiple, often conflict-
ing stories about the leader, for the figure is essentially a fragmentary,
palimpsestic intertext referenced in several other works, no one past text
more important or more closely linked to an original source than any
another. The allusions reference texts with various production and circula-
tion dates, and they operate in relation to the woman’s presence in multiple
genres—poetry, drama, historiography, catalogue—yet the allusions can
never produce anything other than a vague, nostalgic sense of Elizabeth’s
role in nation building (a vague sense that can just as quickly backfire and
remind readers of damaging connections between Elizabeth and danger-
ously unconventional, martial women of the mythologized past).7
While Mikalachki contends that Boudicca’s crudeness, her failures,
and her notoriously brutal military campaign would make her an entirely
unsuitable model for Elizabeth’s own self-presentation—essentially her
“native origins [ … and] her savage femininity [ … providing] the nega-
tive complement to Elizabeth’s chaste embodiment of national security”
(129)—I suggest that allusions to Boudicca may also fail for reasons that
have yet to be fully explored. I do not propose that the two figures were
lacking in representational similarities, however (similarities that encour-
is sufficient only unto its own moment, which is valid only as past, or as future,
or as present in relation to past or future, is for him nonessential and is not
incorporated into his world” (29). For Dostoevsky’s characters, then, the past
is only recalled if it continues to be part of their current worldview, if the past
is “that which is still experienced by them as the present” (29).
7 In a study on dramatic representations of Boudicca, for example, Wendy C.
Nielsen has suggested that portrayals of the Brittonic leader are often disap-
pointing for audiences, because the figure is asked to do too many, often con-
tradictory, things for various dramas, giving the audiences little to hold onto
in terms of familiarity: Boudicca has been a character “resisting empire (the
Romans) and embodying British expansionism”; while some plays stress the
figure’s role as a stoic mother defending her children, others focus on her un-
usual status as a military leader; her actions are either criticized excessively or
not enough (595). In short, Nielsen maintains that “Boadicea does not really
work as a national icon because she evokes too many contentions for British
audiences” (595).
“As liuing now” | 189
aged early modern historiographers to include the allusions in the first
place).
Indeed, early modern texts include conflations of the land with Bou-
dicca, just as they do with Elizabeth (Mikalachki 116– 17), and both women
were known for their rousing speeches, “especially,” as Mikalachki notes,
“with regard to inspiring nationalist sentiment and inciting their people
against foreign invaders” (116). Standing on a map of England in Marcus
Gheeraerts the Younger’s Ditchley portrait (circa 1592)—thus presented
both as the nation and as its sovereign, and linked clearly to English
imperial expansion in Gower’s Armada portrait (circa 1588) in the king’s
crown placed directly above the globe upon which the queen’s hand rests—
Elizabethan and Boudiccan representation both “[suggest] not simply [a]
championship of the island, but [a] virtual identity with it” (Mikalachki
117), echoes of which can be heard in textual accounts and creative rep-
resentations of the Brittonic leader’s speeches to her people.
In Heywood’s summary of the Iceni leader’s life, for example, Bunduca
offers a series of contrasts between Brittonic fortitude and Roman weak-
ness or daintiness (Exemplary 75–77), much of which can also be found
in Bonduca’s opening speech in Fletcher’s play (1.1.1–11). Indeed, Bunduca
claims that the Britons’ lack of supplies and food over the years has made
the forces resilient and able to make do with the materials needed for basic
survival: “any roote or stocke serves them for food: water will quench their
thirst, and every tree is to them a Roofe, or Canopy” (Heywood, Exemplary
75). The Romans, on the other hand, will revolt or their army collapse into
weakness without personal luxuries like “bread or ground Corne, Wine,
and Oyle…. [T]he Romans must have their warme bathes, their catamites,
their dainty fare, and their bodyes suppled with oyle” (Exemplary 76).
The resilience and national spirit of Bunduca’s troops make them hardy,
however, and they can survive with few physical comforts.
In her speech at Tilbury Elizabeth similarly concedes that her troops
have yet to be paid for their service, that they ought to receive “rewards and
crowns” in recognition of their “forwardness” in defending their nation,
but she turns their lack of remuneration into proof of their loyalty and
evidence that the English deserve to defeat the Armada (“Armada” 326). In
Elizabeth’s speech, bravery and national survival are thus the overwhelm-
ing priorities, not personal gain, individual security, or comfort. The queen
presents a version of the English nation that is unified against the foreign
threat, that seems to not have divisions of gender, religion, ethnicity, or
class, for example (see Greenfeld 3), and that shares a vision for future
190 | Schechter