The Face of Queenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) investigates the aesthetic, political, and gender-related meanings in representations of Elizabeth I by her contemporaries. By attending to eyewitness reports, poetry, portraiture, and discourses on beauty and cosmetics, this book shows how the portrayals of the queen's face register her contemporaries' hopes, fears, hatreds, mockeries, rivalries, and awe. In its application of the theories of the meaning of the face and its exploration of the early modern representation of faces, this study argues that the face was seen as a rhetorical tool and that Elizabeth was a master of using her face to persuade, threaten, or comfort her subjects.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
I. Plain Queen, Gorgeous King: Tudor Royal Faces
II. "Let nature paint your beauty's glory": Beauty and Cosmetics
III. Meeting the Queen: Documentary Accounts
IV. "Mirrors more than one": Elizabeth's Literary Faces
V. Portraiture: The Painted Texts of Elizabeth's Faces
Part I: Elizabeth and Hilliard
Part II: Augmenting the Canon
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