Elizabeth I
(1533 - 1603)

This poem is found with many variations in five manuscripts. We follow Leicester Bradner, The Poems of Queen Elizabeth, in using the British Museum's Harleian 7392 as the basis for our text. The Bodleian Library's Rawlinson manuscript, written between 1590 and 1600, also contains a version of the poem and states, furthermore, that it was written when Elizabeth "was suposed to be in love with mounsyre," that is, her French suitor, the duke of Anjou. Some modern scholars doubt that Elizabeth wrote the poem, but all accept it as an important cultural document about her.

Poem

Comments

Text History

Historical Considerations

Essays

When I Was Fair and Young (ca. 1585)

QuickTime Required

     When I was fair and young, then favor graced me.
     Of many was I sought their mistress for to be,
     But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore:
     Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

5     How many weeping eyes I made to pine in woe,
     How many sighing hearts I have not skill to show,

     But I the prouder grew and still this spake therefore:
     Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

     Then spake fair Venus' son, that brave victorious boy,
10     Saying: You dainty dame, for that you be so coy,
     I will so pluck your plumes as you shall say no more:
     Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

     As soon as he had said, such change grew in my breast
     That neither night nor day I could take any rest.
15     Wherefore I did repent that I had said before:
     Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

Editor´s Comments

Sometimes people are nervous about reading a poem because they're afraid they don't know enough about the poet, or about the history of the time when the poem was read. Even if you feel that way the best thing to do is still to make a start by reading the poem. But the question of how to use what we know of the world around the poem is an important one. Elizabeth is a wonderful case in point. She was one of England's greatest monarchs, reigning for decades during a crucial time in the development of the English state. Most people who do know anything about her know about her as a ruler, but not so many people know that she also wrote poems.

So how can we read this little poem about lovers being held at arm's length? We could just try to decode it, like detectives looking for clues into Elizabeth's private life. Or we could pretend we don't know who wrote it and read the poem as if it appeared by magic one day on someone's printing press. Well, I doubt if we could forget that Elizabeth was the author, and as for the other choice, we would be naive if we thought that poems record a person's life in any simple or straightforward way. But while the record of a poem may not be simple, the poet did live at a particular moment in history, and she spoke the language of that time. It matters that Elizabeth was a woman wielding great power in a man's world, that she was writing in a form that mostly belonged to men. But that's not what the poem means, it's just where the poet was when she began to write her poem. If the poem is a kind of self-conscious performance, as so many of Elizabeth's portraits are, then what did she choose to do, at that moment, with the historical circumstances in which she found herself? What role had she chosen to play? Who was the audience for this poem, and what message was she sending them? Poets aren't passive, like tape recorders. They do things with their words.

Text History

Arthur F. Marotti's "The Transmission of Lyric Poetry and the Institutionalizing of Literature in the English Renaissance" explains how Elizabethan lyrics were written, circulated, and preserved.

Historical Considerations

England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I attained new levels of power and wealth. It was also a time of uncertainty and danger, from potentially hostile alliances on the part of the continental powers, to continuing religious strife between Catholic and Protestant, to the threat of renewed struggles over the succession to the throne. In a highly patriarchal culture, and particularly in the eyes of Protestants, a female monarch was an anomaly. The success and stability of Elizabeth's rule rested on her subjects's recognition and awe of her sovereignty.

In this famous portrait, Elizabeth has a map of England literally under her feet.

In this unstable climate, it was in Elizabeth's interest to control the ways in which she was represented to her subjects. She believed, like many Renaissance monarchs, in the idea of royal absolutism, the theory that ultimate power was quite properly concentrated in her person and indeed that God had appointed her to be His deputy in the kingdom. Opposition to her rule, in this view, was not only a political act but also a kind of impiety, a blasphemous grudging against the will of God. This view of the Queen's power was reiterated in speeches, political tracts, and from the pulpits of churches, where they were incorporated in the Book of Homilies that clergymen were required to read out to their congregations.

Although she presented herself as a defender of the Protestant nation, Elizabeth also ensured that her subjects would revere her by reaching back to the Middle Ages and to the cult of the Virgin Mary. By defining herself as the Virgin Queen, she appropriated the popular emotion that had throughout England's long Catholic era been attached to Mary, and this allowed her to claim authority outside of conventional gender roles.

In this portrait, Elizabeth I asserts the identity she had defined for herself by holding a sieve, a traditional symbol of virginity.

The Poet´s Life and Work

Biography

The Poet's Craft

Critical Essays

Poem

Comments

Text History

Historical Considerations

Essays