The central audience of Elizabeth’s poetry would have been her royal court, where the circulation of poetry by manuscript was becoming a fashionable, and enjoyable, pastime. It also allowed voices to be heard, and favour to be gained. ‘It is important to remember that when Elizabeth ascended the throne the language of love was almost exclusively a male domain’ says Bell, and I shall now explore the workings of a love lyric by Elizabeth. The literary culture was a system of networking – as demonstrated in The Faerie Queen (1596), Edmund Spenser’s literary praise of his monarch. However, Elizabeth’s interference into the Petrarchan love lyric is interesting. The likes of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey traditionally dominate the image of this fashionable Renaissance literary form. In ‘Whoso List to Hunt’ (1557) for example, Wyatt fixates upon an unattainable lover, likely Anne Boleyn, through possessive language depicting a chase. These Petrarchan verses position the woman as the prey, and the male the predator. Elizabeth opposes this, initiating her own fashioning of the love lyric, one of mutuality and courtesy.
Sir Walter Raleigh, an iconic figure of the Elizabethan court, wrote a famed sonnet for his Queen, that obtained much attention. However, though Greenblatt dismisses Elizabeth’s response to ‘reassuring but demeaning pleasantries’, he totally misses what exactly she has done. It is also key to posit here that his would have undoubtedly been a very public poem, and thus is undeniably a part of monarchic ‘image-making’.
The exchange of these poems takes place around 1587, a point at when Raleigh’s reputation was quickly declining. The tide was turning – one of Elizabeth’s high-regarded favourites was losing his status. Raleigh claims ‘fortune hath stolen’ his lover in the openings of his stanza:
‘Fortune hath taken thee away, my love,
My life’s joy and my soul’s heaven above;
Fortune hath taken thee away my princess,
My world’s delight and my true fancy’s mistress’
This stanza typically adheres to Petrarchan norm
