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Elizabeth I of England, as a female monarch who did not heed counsel, particularly in the events surrounding the marriage proposal from the much younger Roman Catholic Duke of Alençon and Anjou (c 1579–1586), aroused anxiety and frustration in her Protestant male courtiers. Two of these, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, expressed their dissatisfaction about the ""courteous cruell"" queen in their literary works and letters. The relationship between the two men was also complex, united as they were in politics, arguing for a strong interventionist role for England in Europe, but divided in poetics. Sidney advocated a classical model for English vernacular poetry while Spenser favoured a homegrown English strain harking back to Chaucer and Skelton. Thoroughly researched and written in an accessible style with close readings of all the major works of Sidney and Spenser that are linked to Elizabeth I, along with a look at their correspondence, this book provides a new way of interweaving the narratives of history and literature, and will be of interest to the academician and the lay reader alike in its analysis of the workings of gender, desire, politics and poetics in the reign of Elizabeth I.

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9781527503212

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Shormishtha Panja is Professor of English at the University of Delhi, India, having received her PhD from Brown University, USA, where she was awarded the Jean Starr Untermeyer Fellowship. Her publications include Performing Shakespeare in India: Exploring Indianness, Literatures and Cultures (2016), Shakespeare and the Art of Lying (2013), Word Image Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture (2009) and Signifying the Self: Women and Literature (2004). She has also published over thirty articles on Renaissance studies in various international journals and collections, such as English Literary Renaissance, Journal of Narrative Technique and Shakespearean International Yearbook. She has been awarded a fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Mayers Fellowship at the Huntington, and has been Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.

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