What is the relationship between infidelity and attachment in women?
have suggested that this poem is more direct in its resistance because Elizabeth is now positioned much higher than her audience. Whilst I am confident in the truth of this – historically, it was written over a decade later – the debate of the ‘public versus the private’ must be considered in every analysis, with Herman even labelling the debate the ‘burden’ of his critical work. The first epigram was written on a window, with a diamond by a young woman not yet queen. Comparatively, this poem’s reception was a public one, of world leaders: ‘This poem […] was doubtless written by Elizabeth in response to the threat posed by the Catholic queen’s flight into Protestant England in 1568 […] this was the most frequently anthologised of all of Elizabeth’s verses’. I argue that this is why the resistance in this later poem is not so ambivalent. An audience of the world’s most powerful demands a confidence.
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.
