Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 5, No. 0208.  Thursday, 10 March 1994.
 
From:           Phyllis Rackin <
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Date:           Wednesday, 9 Mar 1994 16:11:06 -0500 (EST)
Subject: 5.0202  Imagining Gloriana
Comment:        Re: SHK 5.0202  Imagining Gloriana
 
It seems to me that Queen Elizabeth has become a magnet for misogynist
fantasies in respectable academic criticism as well, where she also appears as
a jealous, aging coquette, desperate for male erotic attention, and the object
of her male subjects' secret contempt and resentment. Although the discourse of
serious scholarship requires that these fantasies be presented as historical
facts and documented with carefully chosen quotations from early modern texts,
they seem to me to be equally anachronistic, equally the products of our own
cultural moment rather than that of the world they purport to describe.