Fair Vestal Throned by the West

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream | Henry VIII)

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy king Oberon recalls:

“My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememb’rest

Since once I sat upon a promontory,

And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back

Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath

That the rude sea grew civil at her song,

And certain stars shot madly from their spheres

To hear the sea-maid’s music...

That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,

Flying between the cold moon and the earth

Cupid, all arm’d; a certain aim he took

At a fair vestal, thronèd by the west,

And loos’d his love-shaft smartly from his bow,

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;

But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft

Quench’d in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon;

And the imperial vot’ress passed on,

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.” (MND II.i)

The fairy king’s report sounds fantastical, but he’s actually referring to an historical event, the pageant at a lawn party thrown for Queen Elizabeth. “At the entertainment at Elvetham in 1591, Elizabeth was throned by the west side of a garden lake to listen to music from the water; the fairy queen came with a round of dancers and spoke of herself as wife to Auberon.”1 Having apparently spied on this event, Shakespeare’s Oberon saw something no one else did: the Greek godling Cupid firing an arrow. It made sense for Cupid to show up, since the Elvetham party was engineered as a blind date, an elaborate scheme to set Elizabeth up with some nobleman. But the watchful moon foiled the plot and the archer’s arrow hit a bystanding pansy.

But why would Shakespeare refer to this exclusive garden party in the play? Very few in the original audience would know of it, and only the nerdiest of modern scholars have heard of it. This is the kind of triviality that nerdy scholars pick on nerdier scholars about. Writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare had to explicitly locate the “fair vestal” virgin Queen offstage to protect her from the implication that she was represented onstage by the fairy queen Titania, who would soon be shown snuggling with a donkey-monster. More importantly, Shakespeare had to protect himself from any suspicion that he’d satirically presented the Queen engaging in sexual bestiality. Or worse, of cuddling a common handyman.2 In 1597, the Puritan John Stubbes published a pamphlet prying into the Queen’s personal life, and as punishment, they hacked off his writing hand “(As his right hand was publicly removed, Stubbes is reported to have lifted his hat with his left and shouted ‘God Save the Queen!’)”3 So we can only imagine what a playwright might have faced for presenting the Queen getting cozy with an ass-man.

William Shakespeare dodged that cleaver and also paid the Queen a compliment: she was so chaste that Cupid had to make a custom arrow with enough aphrodisiac to turn the whole world upside down. That’s what the flower’s name “Love-in-Idleness” meant, not laziness but total madness. Harold Bloom wrote, “It is as though Elizabeth’s choice of chastity opens up a cosmos of erotic possibilities for others, but at a high cost of accident and arbitrariness replacing her reasoned choice.”4

That word, “choice,” is at the center of our most heated modern political debates. And it was also at the center of the biggest political debate in Elizabethan England: should the queen be allowed to choose not to marry and spawn a successor? Throughout her forty-five-year reign, the English people went to bed every night wondering if the queen might choke on a mutton bone and unexpectedly die, leaving the nation without a rightful heir. Shakespeare himself got famous writing plays about contested royal successions and civil wars. That’s why he wrote seven plays called “Henry”! The prospect of a monarch dying childless could tear apart all of England, grinding the whole stiff-Brit experiment into a bloody, soupy, apocalyptic chaos.

Queen Elizabeth herself was adamantly independent. In her mid-twenties she stood firm before Parliament, declaring “I have already joined myself in marriage to a husband, namely the kingdom of England. Better beggar woman and single than Queen and married.” And in her mid-forties, she remained resolute: “If I were a milkmaid with a pail on my arm, whereby my private person might be little [noticed], I would not forsake that poor and single state to match with the greatest monarch.” Whether she was physically a virgin all this time is another subject. She does seem to have been somewhat foot-loose and “fancy-free,” but marriage and maternity held no appeal.5

A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place in ancient Athens, 1,500 years before the birth of Jesus. So, when Oberon refers to Elizabeth as a vestal virgin and votary, he doesn’t mean a Christian nun but a priestess of the lunar goddess Diana. Was Shakespeare implying that England’s queen was a pagan? That gets a bit complex.

Because Elizabeth had come to power amid the civil strife of the Protestant Reformation, one of her first decrees in 1559, was that the theater must avoid “matters of religion.” In shutting the door on the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, she opened the windows to Classical gods who came swarming onto the English stage. Whether intentionally or inadvertently, Queen Elizabeth became a protective patron saint of paganism in the arts. It can’t have escaped her notice that the Christian Trinity is an old boys’ club, no girls allowed, and that Classical mythology made space for the divine feminine. One could go so far as to say that, after centuries of medieval Christian mystery plays and devotional art, Ovid’s Metamorphoses became the Elizabethan artists’ scripture.

Shakespeare very seldom refers to the Christian Trinity or Biblical stories. His characters use the Roman god Jupiter’s nickname “Jove,” occasionally to mean the God of the Bible, but usually it refers to the pagan thunderlord. And Shakespeare’s works show a fascinating balance of male and female deities, with a great interest in the mysterious ways of the divine feminine.

How might Elizabeth have felt about being symbolically placed within a pagan pantheon? Well first off, if the word “pagan” fills our minds with witches on broomsticks, naked torch-dancers, and fertility figurines, that’s not what we’re talking about. Nobody was comparing Elizabeth to the voluptuous, lusty Venus. Shakespeare refers to Elizabeth as a devotee of the virgin huntress and moon-goddess, Diana. And the queen herself was known to encourage this association: “The pearls Elizabeth wears in royal portraits replicate the moon’s luminous surface, and in the ‘Rainbow’ portrait [the] crescent moon is depicted above her headdress.”6

A textual example of Elizabeth as Diana (moon-like, eternally virginal, and shut-up-about-her-personal-life-choices) survives in a ballad by an admirer:

“Prais’d be Diana’s fair and harmless light;

Prais’d be the dews, wherewith she moists the ground;

Prais’d be her beams, the glory of the night;

Prais’d be her power, by which all powers abound!

Prais’d be her nymphs, with whom she decks the woods;

Prais’d be her knights, in whom true honor lives;

Prais’d be that force by which she moves the floods!

Let that Diana shine, which all these gives!

In heaven, queen she is among the spheres;

She mistress-like, makes all things to be pure;

Eternity in her oft-change she bears;

She, Beauty is; by her, the fair endure.

Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide;

Mortality below her orb is plac’d;

By her the virtues of the stars down slide;

In her is Virtue’s perfect image cast!

A knowledge pure it is her worth to know:

With Circes let them dwell that think not so!”7 (“Circes” meaning untrustworthy witches)

In masques and pageants, Elizabeth was celebrated for her autonomy, including a show where Diana herself congratulated her favorite votary (the thinly veiled “Zabeta”), singing “I joy with you, and leave it to your choice what kind of life you best shall like to hold. And in meanwhile I cannot but rejoice to see you thus bedecked with glistering gold.”8 Virginia Mason Vaughan writes that, like Elizabeth, “the moon is self-contained and unobtainable. It rules over others and can never itself be ruled. The moon is magic; it can entrance, but it can also bewitch. The moon is constant, but it undergoes change.”9

The identification with the virgin huntress Diana also came with a veiled threat. In a well-known story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses a young hunter once stumbled into a grove where the goddess was bathing, and for the crime of seeing her naked she transformed him into a stag to be torn apart by his own hounds. Similarly, anyone who bumbled into Elizabeth’s private affairs quickly found himself in deep trouble. The Diana iconography was a political statement, warning that forbidden knowledge of semi-divine royalty would transform any voyeur, gossip, or tattletale into a frightened fugitive, a hunted deer. We take a closer look at the story of Diana and Actaeon in chapter X.

Elizabeth was also often compared to the virgin goddess of justice, Astraea, who ascended from the earth in disgust as humanity fell from grace, ending the paradisal “Golden Age” in the first chapter of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Some Elizabethan poets celebrated her reign as Astraea’s return, heralding a new “Golden Age” in England: a return to peace, prosperity, and propriety. This identification continued throughout her reign and even after it. Shakespeare’s biography of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII climaxes with a prophecy of how the newborn princess will bring peace and plenty to England.

“This royal infant - heaven still move about her!

Though in her cradle, yet now promises

Upon this land a thousand blessings,

Which time shall bring to ripeness.

[And] all the virtues that attend the good,

Shall still be doubled on her. Truth shall nurse her,

Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her;

She shall be lov’d and fear’d. Her own shall bless her:

Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,

And hang their heads with sorrow. Good grows with her;

In her days every man shall eat in safety

Under his own vine what he plants, and sing

The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours...

She shall be, to the happiness of England,

An agèd princess; many days shall see her,

And yet no day without a deed to crown it.

Would I had known no more! But she must die -

She must, the saints must have her - yet a virgin;

A most unspotted lily shall she pass

To th’ ground, and all the world shall mourn her.” (H8 V.v10)

This birth song is actually an epitaph, written about ten years after the Queen’s death. William Shakespeare likely knew her in person, but not personally; this loving tribute is distant and lacks the warmth of friendship. The author’s familiarity with Elizabeth is obviously open to all kinds of conjecture, but it’s clear he admired and perhaps even idolized her.

1Barber (1972) p. 121

2On the topic of distinguishing Titania from Queen Elizabeth, Jonathan Bate wrote, “Shakespeare cannot afford to license the interpretation of this as an image of the Queen in a perverse encounter which upsets both the natural and the social order; if such an interpretation were at all prominent, the Master of Revels would not have licensed the play.” (Bate, 1993 p. 141) “Master of Revels” is as Orwellian as it sounds; it meant the chief bureaucrat of the theatrical Thought Police.

3Paster (1999) p. 233

4Bloom (1998) p. 159

5Elizabeth Truax brings up a fascinating parallel between the virgin Queen Elizabeth and the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost: she arrives on a diplomatic mission but becomes embroiled in a royal courtship. Yet she skillfully evades engagement and, in the end, when her father dies, she becomes sole ruler of a kingdom. This is Shakespeare’s only comedy that doesn’t end with wedding and bedding. (Truax, 1992 p. 87).

6Vaughan (2020) p. 131

7Raleigh, Sir Walter, “The Shepherd’s Praise of his Sacred Diana” from The Phoenix Nest (1593)

8Gascoigne, George, excerpt from Princelie Pleasures at Kenelworth Castle (1587) quoted in Vaughan (2020) p. 133.

9Vaughan (2020) p. 140

10There is a possibility that Shakespeare co-wrote Henry VIII with his protégé John Fletcher (co-author of The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio). In their collaborations they would take turns writing sections, with Fletcher handling subplots and in-between scenes. The climactic monologue about Elizabeth does appear to be Shakespeare’s work.