Mathew XIII, Elizabeth I, commonwealth, Puttenham, Mary Queen of Scots, 1568
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Mathew XIII, both in its distinguishing clearly between loyal and disloyal subjects and in the strategy of mediation used to disseminate the verse.
104
Although Elizabeth responds in person, moreover, she is addressing a fellow monarch whose verse she construes deliberately as threatening to the commonwealth, and therefore she does not face the problem of exposing herself to the indignity of meeting a social inferior upon even ground. The poem had drastically more favourable repercussions than James’s verse epistle to his people and, like much of her other answer-poetry (some of which is discussed in Chapter 5), reveals Elizabeth to be a canny manipulator of the poetics of response. Whereas James attracts further criticism by way of an answer in kind, Elizabeth’s poem provides inspiration for two further answering verses that declare their loyalty to her emphatically. Seen in the light of this eventuality, it seems especially illuminating that Puttenham selected this poem and, so it turns out, an answer-poem, as an example of English verse at its best.
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Jennifer Summit argues convincingly that Elizabeth’s poem is a “direct rebuke” to Mary Queen of Scots’ verse petition for sanctuary in England (beginning “Une seul penser qui me profficte et nuit”: “A longing haunts my spirit, day and night”).
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Mary’s French verse epistle of 1568 is one among many letters that she wrote to Elizabeth pleading for refuge following the hostile reaction of her subjects to her suspected complicity in the
104 Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose (London and Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 2000), pp.133-4. See, for instance, Jennifer Summit’s discussion of Elizabeth’s use of the gardening conceit in ‘“The Arte of a Ladies Penne”:Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship’, ELR, 26 (1996), 395-422 (p.417).
105 Puttenham (repr. 1968), p.207.
106 Summit (1996), p.414. The poem is quoted from The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance<, ed. Betty Travitsky (London and Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981), pp.259-60 (text) and p.198 (trans.).
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