How can there be any more need for yet another book on Elizabeth I of England? One answer is that the proliferation of biographies and “considerations” of the queen are not written by academics or professionally trained scholars. Two new books by literary critics, Ilona Bell and Catherine Loomis, answer that question by highlighting aspects of Elizabeth’s image that are not part of the traditional Elizabethan story: her skill as a writer and her death and after-death figurations.

Ilona Bell, in Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch, is not attempting to produce a critical edition of Elizabeth’s works to rival the definitive Collected Works of Elizabeth I, edited by Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. Rather, Bell has picked out a few poems and speeches of Elizabeth that Bell feels deserve closer examination. Among them are Elizabeth’s speeches responding to Parliamentary petitions that she marry and the queen’s lament at the end of her last serious courtship with a French prince, “On Monsieur’s Departure.” Bell does not promise or deliver a full analysis of Elizabeth’s overall corpus. She privileges the work of the younger queen. Therefore, Elizabeth’s “golden” Parliamentary speech of 1601 is frequently mentioned but not subject to the intense reading similar to that Bell performs on Elizabeth’s brief epigram etched on a windowpane at Woodstock (allegedly) when, as a young woman, she was under house arrest there. This is not because Bell prefers youth to age but because, for her, Elizabeth was a maverick figure who regularly challenged patriarchal conceptions of sex and gender. For Bell, this is most clearly seen when Elizabeth deliberately undermined those conceptions in her speeches and writings on politics and marriage. Several sections of the book have previously been published, with the result that there is a narrow focus only on how politics and notions of wifely subordination shaped discussions of the queen’s marriage. In turn, this leads to an abrupt end to the book, with a close reading of “On Monsieur’s Departure.” However, there is a thematic unity to the selections and analysis. This is a well-researched study that places Elizabeth’s conflict with Parliament over her marriage in the historical context of gender ideology and courtship poetry. It has applications for teaching, in that chapters can be assigned in discrete sections for graduate classes. A refreshing aspect of Bell’s study is the profound respect the author exhibits (without slipping into reverence) for the queen’s rhetorical abilities. Bell lucidly highlights how Elizabeth deployed her formidable rhetorical skills to negate the threat posed by her unmarried feminine state, while simultaneously asserting her sovereign authority.

Introducing a new perspective on Elizabeth I is also a feature of Catherine Loomis’s The Death of Elizabeth I. The book’s first chapter is an exhaustive survey of the descriptions of Elizabeth’s last days as reported by ambassadors and witnesses. This is followed by chapters on elegies for the dead queen and one focusing on a hostile eyewitness account of Elizabeth’s death. The closing chapter is on Jacobean drama that features dead or abused virgins that Loomis argues are figurations of the dead Virgin Queen. The claims of the last chapter, which Loomis admits rests largely on inference, actually make it the strongest chapter in the book. As Loomis points out, it is hard not to see a correlation between Heywood’s explicit figuration of Elizabeth in If You Know Not Me as a passive maiden in distress and the proliferation of intimidated and cowed virgins decorating the Jacobean stage. The book is not without its problems, the most significant of which is Loomis’s claim that the elegies for Elizabeth and descriptions of her last actions were an attempt to legitimate the succession of James I. It would be more accurate to state that these elegies and descriptions were an attempt to claim that Elizabeth endorsed James as her successor. There was no need to legitimize James’s succession because he was the next legal successor, according to common law, whether Elizabeth named him or not (irrespective of Henry VIII’s will). Traditionally, it was not part of the sovereign’s prerogative to designate a successor. Of course, monarchs could indicate their preference. In any case, both Mary I and Elizabeth I suppressed Henry’s will, which after the death of Elizabeth in 1603 had no legal standing. James VI of Scotland was, according to common law, the next legal heir. The pressure on Elizabeth to indicate her choice of successor and the depictions that Loomis presents of Elizabeth naming James were to help ease the accession of a Scottish monarch to the English throne by providing an alleged benediction from the last English monarch, rather than to legitimate the claims of a legal claimant. Nevertheless, the legal status of the Scottish king does not change the significance of Loomis’s insight that elegies, plays, and descriptions of Elizabeth’s last days are as much about James as they are about Elizabeth. Loomis’s central point that Elizabeth’s death caused a rupture in the traditional fabric of politics and culture cannot be ignored. Like Bell’s work, this book has useful pedagogical application. Although conceived as an integrated work, individual chapters can be assigned for graduate reading. The prose is accessible without being showy, and the research is formidable.

Both of these books have been published as part of the important series Queenship and Power edited by Carole Levin and Charles Beem. Both belong in this series, as Bell explores how Elizabeth used her rhetorical skills to claim sovereign authority even as she felt its personal cost, while Loomis looks at how Elizabeth’s status as a woman and a monarch was exploited for political and cultural purposes in early modern England. Both offer fresh insights into the challenges and prohibitions Elizabeth faced as a ruling queen. To answer the question of why we need yet another book on Elizabeth I, it is because, as Bell and Loomis show, there is still much more to say with original research and new perspectives.