English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Death Of Elizabeth I: Remembering And Reconstructing The Virgin, Catherine Loomis

Catherine A. Loomis

The death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 was greeted by an outpouring of official proclamations, gossip-filled letters, tense diary entries, diplomatic dispatches, and somber sermons. English poets wrote hundreds of elegies to Elizabeth, and playwrights began bringing her onto the stage. This book uses these historical and literary sources, including a maid of honor’s eyewitness account of the explosion of the Queen’s corpse, to provide a detailed history of Elizabeth’s final illness and death, and to show Elizabeth’s subjects—peers and poets, bishops and beggars, women and men—responding to their loss by remembering and reconstructing their Queen.