From Mistress to Master: Political Transition and Formal Conflict in Measure for Measure - Critical Essay

Criticism, Fall, 1999 by Stephen Cohen

By locating the source of her resistance in a private persona--sympathetically presented as a conventionai figure of female innocence--she displaced responsibility for her notorious temporizing. At the same time, the depiction of this private self as external and inessential, an "upper garment" to be removed at will, assured her subjects that behind the timid milkmaid stood the responsible politician.

Elizabeth, of course, never did "put off" her resistance to matrimony. As hopes for the queen's literal marriage faded, they were replaced by a figurative national romance in which Elizabeth was the unattainable object of desire. Pastoral allegory flourished along with the rhetorics of courtly and Petrarchan love, providing Elizabeth with a series of conventional feminine personae distinct from her powerful body politic. By shifting attention and responsibility from the body politic to a fantasy version of the body natural, Elizabeth's rhetoric of romance worked to mystify or displace the exercise of power, containing and managing political conflict by recasting it as courtship.(12) When the economic and political difficulties of the 1590s put increasing pressure on her political authority, Elizabeth's response was thus twofold. On the one hand, she continued to reinforce the crown's divine-right powers both legally and ideologically.(13) On the other, she continued to employ the rhetoric of romance to construct a relationship with her subjects based not on power but on reciprocal love. In the "Golden Speech" of 1601, delivered to a parliamentary delegation in the wake of a bitter conflict over monopolies, she acknowledged her feminine weakness, only to balance it with a recompense equally rooted in gender difference: "though you have had and may have many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had nor shall have any that will be more careful and loving." Yet even in this sentimental apotheosis of the feminine power of love, we find a reminder of the divinely-ordained royal authority that lies behind it: the speech continues, "Shall I ascribe anything to myself and my sexly weakness? I were not worthy to live then; and, of all, most unworthy of the mercies I have had from God, who hath given me a heart that yet never feared any foreign or home enemy."(14) Three years after her death, Harington recalled the success of Elizabeth's rhetorical strategy:

   Her speech did winne all affections, and hir subjectes did trye to shewe
   all love to hir commandes; for she woude saye, 'hir state did require her
   to commande, what she knew hir people woude willingely do from their owne
   love to hir.' Herein she did shewe hir wysdome fullie: for who did chuse to
   lose hir confidence; or who woude wythholde a shewe of love and obedience,
   when their Sovereign said it was their own choice, and not hir compulsion?
   Surely she did plaie well hir tables to gain obedience thus wythout
   constraint: again, she coude pute forthe suche alteracions, when obedience
   was lackinge, as lefte no doubtynges whose daughter she was.(15)