Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on style and dates
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: the ‘idol’ ceremony of coronation
- Chapter 1 Why crown a king? Henry VIII and the medieval coronation
- Chapter 2 ‘Come my love thou shalbe crowned’: the drama of Anne Boleyn's coronation
- Chapter 3 ‘But a ceremony’: Edward VI's reformed coronation and John Bale's King Johan
- Chapter 4 ‘He hath sent Marye our soveraigne and Quene’: England's first queen and Respublica
- Chapter 5 ‘A stage wherin was shewed the wonderfull spectacle’: representing Elizabeth I's coronation
- Epilogue: ‘Presume not that I am the thing I was’
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 5 - ‘A stage wherin was shewed the wonderfull spectacle’: representing Elizabeth I's coronation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on style and dates
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: the ‘idol’ ceremony of coronation
- Chapter 1 Why crown a king? Henry VIII and the medieval coronation
- Chapter 2 ‘Come my love thou shalbe crowned’: the drama of Anne Boleyn's coronation
- Chapter 3 ‘But a ceremony’: Edward VI's reformed coronation and John Bale's King Johan
- Chapter 4 ‘He hath sent Marye our soveraigne and Quene’: England's first queen and Respublica
- Chapter 5 ‘A stage wherin was shewed the wonderfull spectacle’: representing Elizabeth I's coronation
- Epilogue: ‘Presume not that I am the thing I was’
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The anxieties raised by the coronation of Mary Tudor in 1553 resurfaced in 1559. Elizabeth's legitimacy of birth, uncertainty about her religion, the re-establishment of the supremacy and the fact that she was another unmarried English queen were as problematic for Elizabeth as for her sister. Elizabeth's coronation contains echoes of her mother's and siblings' coronations. Certain images, themes and words reverberate. The procession pageantry of 1559 recalls Anne Boleyn and her procession of 1533, and alterations to the coronation liturgy, perhaps even the oath that Elizabeth swore, rekindle the revisions introduced at Edward's service. Most of all, the attempt to crown Mary as a parliamentary queen surfaces again at Elizabeth's coronation and is given explicit visual expression in a pageant scene reminiscent of Nicholas Udall's Respublica. In terms of the Reformation, Elizabeth's coronation service has become a fraught and contested site for meaning, fought over for its declaration of the regime's religious policy. The interpretative confusion and possibilities for plurality generated by Mary I's coronation were also present in 1559: at the centre of Elizabeth's ceremony is the intriguing but unsolved mystery of what happened during the mass. It is as an integral counterpart to the fragile context of Elizabeth's accession and coronation, and the ambiguity of the direction that religion would take, that Richard Mulcaster's celebrated procession text, The Quenes majesties passage, appears on the scene.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Drama of CoronationMedieval Ceremony in Early Modern England, pp. 146 - 172Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008