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The Harefield Entertainment and the Cult of Elizabeth I
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2011
Extract
In the summer of 1602 at Harefield Elizabeth I was presented with the last great country-house Entertainment of her reign. Although it survives in fragments, it is possible to see that the Entertainment both adheres to the traditions of the court cult of the Queen and develops and adds variety to them. Pastoral is tamed into the world of Home Counties farming. The identification of the Queen with the Queen of the Fairies, instead of being that of a romantic heroine, is domesticated into the folk tradition of the fairies who reward good housewives. Other personifications of the Queen as good housewife are remarked. The entertainment has an elegiac tone, appropriate to the sense that the Queen's age must make her death increasingly possible.
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- Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1986
References
Notes
1 For the text of the Entertainment see Nichols, J., The Progresses, and Public Processions, of Queen Elizabeth, new edn., 3 vols. (London, 1823), iii, 570–96Google Scholar.
2 He married the Countess of Derby in October 1600, and bought Harefield in 1601, the conveyance being to Sir Thomas, to his wife, and to her three daughters by the late Earl. See Nichols, , op. cit., iii, 570, 581Google Scholar.
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5 George Carey, second Lord Hunsdon, was the son of Henry, first Baron, who was the son of Mary Boleyn, sister of Anne, born after her marriage to William Carey, but while she was still Henry VIII's mistress. Henry Carey was thus Elizabeth's first cousin and may have been her half-brother. Elizabeth was close to all the Careys.
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40 All types of apple.
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48 A Midsummer Night's Dream, v.i. 378-9.
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57 Personal communication by Professor Anne Barton.
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62 The other half—the Amerindians and the peoples of the Far East—see a rabbit.
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74 The bucolic note was maintained in the incidental amusements offered to the Queen at Harefield. A letter from Sir George Savile to the Earl of Shrewsbury of 14th August 1602, now in the Nottinghamshire Record Office, mentions playing ‘Barley Breaks’, country dancing by the Boys of the Chapel, and tumblers. I am grateful to Miss Marion Colthorpe for making her transcript of this letter available to me. Savile MSS, Nottinghamshire Record Office. Volume of letters 1545-1611. 1D/14.
75 In Pinto, V. de Sola and Rodway, A. E. (eds.) The Common Muse (Harmondsworth, 1969Google Scholar; first published 1957), 60.