Queens in the Margins: Allegorizing Anxiety in A Mirror for Magistrates

Abstract

The past two chapters have focused on how, in sixteenth-century chronicles, representations of queens exercising political agency have been contained to varying extents and with varying degrees of success. As Abraham Fleming’s commentaries in the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles have illustrated, moralizing discourses became one of the more frequently deployed techniques—by mapping queens’ actions onto a moral spectrum rather than treating them as political creatures, chroniclers were able to deflect and displace questions of what it meant to be a queen trying to function in the political world. Those moralizing discourses can be adapted to handle political questions—as one can argue they were in More’s History of King Richard III and in later Tacitean histories such as Francis Bacon’s history of Henry VII (1622) or John Hayward’s suppressed history of Henry IV (1599)—but in the later half of the sixteenth century we find a similar blend of self-awareness and deconstruction, not in chronicles but in poetry and drama, two mediums performative by nature.