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Dido Queen Of England Essay

555 Words3 Pages

In his article, “Dido, Queen of England”, Deanne Williams remarks the personal aspect of the life of the Queen in 16th century England: “From Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Roy Strong, [who were] Queen Elizabeth I 's observers …. Elizabeth managed to avoid it for decades, maintaining, when pressed, that she considered herself wedded to England” (Williams 31). According to the Renaissance royal biographers William indicates that a tangle of invitations, courtships and suitors, and the hedging and equivocation that did not cease until Elizabeth was long past meno- pause (Williams 31). Yet, Love was encouraged by the authors that are focused on in this research paper, yet, all the same, they depict love as a downfall in two female characters that embody power and authority: Faerie Queene 's Britomart and Dido, Queen of Carthage 's Dido”. In these two heroines, one can flesh out three aspects that can be interpreted as a negative role …show more content…

In Book III of Edmund Spenser 's Faerie Queene, Spenser manages to hide the picture of Queen Elizabeth’s sexuality and motherless fate under the enchanting plot of a unblemished princess—Britomart—going on a quest to find her supposedly future husband that she saw in her father’s enchanted mirror. Julia Walker argues and “also, holds true for the work of Edmund Spenser as he pro- duced perhaps the greatest portrait of Elizabeth 's reign: Britomart in The Faerie Queene. Spenser 's Elizabeth portrait surpasses all the painted panels, however richly encoded with meanings, because through the force of epic narrative it can present a changing image, one confronted by physical and political realities and altered by those confrontations” 172-4).Julia Anderson described the heroine in the following: "Britomart is the figure of a young woman vested in armor that forms and masks, expresses and veils, protects and contains her" (Anderson 74), wherein she "has become a complicated cultural signifier implicated in cultural conceptions of gender"

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