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is made possible by the change in power relationship to her audience. By this point, Elizabeth’s power as England’s monarch allows for a more active verse, although the self-deprecating tone which claims her gender may still limit her ability remains. I believe however that admittance of her ‘weak’ gender is itself a sign of resistance. She is once again not allowing potential opponents to seek out problems when she herself has negotiated them.
In other poems addressing an international audience, Elizabeth similarly tackles gendered concepts. In ‘The Doubt of Future Foes’ (1571), a poem about the relationships between political enemies, Elizabeth ends a very probing poem with a very powerful rhyming couplet: ‘My rusty sword through rest shall first find his edge employ / To poll their tops that seek such change or gape for future joy’. Not only does Elizabeth physically possess a weapon, ‘My rusty sword’, but she controls ‘it’; or, as she genders it, ‘him’. This consolidates the notion that Elizabeth is very much in control of ‘male’ objects and domains, despite her sex. As Leah Marcus argues, Elizabeth was a ruler who often created an image of herself as androgynous. She acknowledged the capacities of her female body, but ‘raised’ her mind to that of a male’s.
The adjective ‘rusty’ also implies that the speaker has experience with being questioned and undermined. A sword being rusty suggests that it has been previously used, hinting at Elizabeth’s experience in battles with those who seek to defy her. The provocative verse dares one to doubt the dominance of the realm. Moreover, the single syllable of the final word strengthens the message of the poem. This verse does not so much rely on ambiguities, and this, I argue, stems from the relationship between poet and audience. The earlier epigrams from Elizabeth’s imprisonments are similarly directed at an enemy, but when at Woodstock Castle the poet is not a monarch with ‘subjects’. She may have possessed royal blood, but the vulnerability of the earlier epigram establishes her lack of dominion in relation to her readership.
