ENGL 143: The Age of Elizabeth

Dr. A. Eastwood

ESSAY 1

Write an essay of 1,500 words (5-6 pages) on one of the following choices:

1.  Choose a trope or a rhetorical strategy from Elizabeth I’s speeches that, as we have discussed in class, she used to attempt to define herself (e.g., as a wife, a mother, a private person, a virgin, an androgyne etc.).  Discuss the way this trope is deployed in an early speech and a later one.  Then, analyze the way in which this same trope figures in one of the courtly entertainments we have read in class (e.g., the Queen’s Progress, The Four Foster Children of Desire, the Lady of May).  Your essay should make an argument about the relationship between the way the Queen attempts to shape her audience’s perceptions with that trope, and the way in which her politically invested courtiers use the trope.

2.  Discuss the production details of each of the works we have read so far.  Your argument should take shape around the issues raised by the layers of mediation between the event itself (the progress, the joust, or the masque), and the act of recording it.  What are the interests of the people involved in each production?  How do they position themselves as authors?   How do they represent the Queen?