Narrating Queens in the Fifteenth Century -- 'By Meane of a Woman': Changing the Subject in Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia and Sir Thomas More's History of King Richard the Third -- 'The point of a very woman': Gendering Destabilization in Edward Hall's Union and Raphael Holinshed's Chronicle -- Queens in the Margins: Allegorizing Anxiety in A Mirror for Magistrates -- Performing Queenship in Legge's Richardus Tertius, The True Tragedy of Richard III, and Heywood's Edward IV -- 'A Queen in Jest': Queenship and Historical Subversion in Shakespeare's First Tetralogy -- 'The Fetters of Her Sex': Voicing Queens in the Historical Poetry of Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel
Summary
"Most modern accounts of fifteenth-century queens understandably focus on separating what really happened from what was fabricated. What has not been considered in any detail, however, is the fabrications themselves as narratives, and as reflections of questions and anxieties that haunted their writers. By focusing on the relationship between gender and genre and the way embedded literary narratives echo across texts as disparate as chronicles, parliamentary proceedings, diplomatic correspondence, ballads, poetry, and drama, this study reveals hitherto unexplored tensions within these texts, generated by embedded narratives and their implications"-- Provided by publisher
