Elizabeth I as Stepmother

Abstract

As a number of scholars have shown, Tudor male subjects were able to arrogate to themselves unprecedented powers by playing gender against class hierarchies. This essay considers how tropes of surrogacy furthered this process of political enfranchisement. As Victor Turner suggests, recurrent tropes are dynamic phenomena, which change meaning over time in a way that reveals the “emotional and volitional dimensions” present in social contexts. The prevalence of surrogate mothers in Elizabethan political and literary discourses reflects such a volitional dimension: writers (e.g. Lyly and Shakespeare), courtiers (e.g., Sir Philip Sidney), and politicians (e.g. members of Parliament) used images of stepmothers in consciously manipulative ways. Because of the ambiguous nature of figurative language, these men posited innovative ideas indirectly long before it became possible to articulate them directly. The evil stepdames of Tudor lore form an important precedent for John Locke's enlightened “foster father,” whose acquired authority undermines the divine rights of fathers and kings. Stepmother tropes provided an alternative to the dominant analogies between family and state—analogies that aimed at suppressing disobedience and rebellion and at naturalizing the status quo. While men like Sidney and John Stubbs probably intended only limited applications for their stepmother tropes, this essay shows that these tropes called their monarch's absolute rule into question and justified their own political activity. Elizabethan writers thus contributed to the process of unmooring the English monarchy from divine right ideology, a process that culminated, intellectually speaking, in Locke's insistence on the consensual nature of government. (J.V.)

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