Elizabeth, Schede, compliment, objectification, male gaze, disempowering, limitations, courtly, subjects, self-representation

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249

Vtere me servo domina; ingenuoque ministro
Sis hera, qui laudes incinat usque tuas. (ll.8-10)

I place myself beneath your royal yoke.
Make me your bondsman, lady and be mistress
To a freeborn slave who ever sings your praises. (ll.9-11) ⁴¹³

In her answer Elizabeth suggests how such addresses might be uncomfortably constraining upon her freedom of expression and self-representation. Her answer can be read as both a return of Schede’s compliment and, more pertinently, a complaint against her objectification. When she writes “Haud nostrum est arctis vates includere septis” (“It is by no means our custom to keep poets within narrow confines”, l.5), she makes her reader conspicuously aware that it is instead the tendency of poets to create their idealised subjects within the “narrow confines” of the pedestal upon which they place them. ⁴¹⁴ Although Elizabeth’s verse is a well-executed courtly compliment thanking Schede for his verse, she also realises the threat posed to her ability to manoeuvre by such apotheosising verses, and she is aware of the way they attempt to manipulate the power dynamics of service. She writes,

Sed vatum es princeps; ego vati subdita, dum me
Materiam celsi carminis ipse legis,
Quem regum pudeat tantum coluisse poetam,
Nos ex semideis qui facit esse deos? (ll.9-12)

But you are prince of poets, I a subject to a poet when you choose me as the theme of your lofty verse. What king would it shame to cherish such a poet, who makes us from demigods to be gods?

Elizabeth draws attention here to the disempowering limitations imposed by being fixed under the male gaze. In the act of making her a “god” Schede becomes her “prince”, and the author of

⁴¹³ The Latin text is quoted from Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus eds, Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals (London and Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 2003), p.150. The translation is from Marcus, Mueller and Rose eds (2000), p.301.

⁴¹⁴ Poems of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Leicester Bradner (Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1964), p.10 (text) and pp.77-8 (trans.).

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