"Susan Frye's Elizabeth I is an exciting and original book, a richly detailed discussion of the way the queen constructed her image and deployed her authority. The argument is indebted to feminist and new historicist modes of analysis, but it is primarily informed by a concern with biography and the intricacies of history. It offers the reader a continual sense of discovery."--Stephen Orgel, Stanford University"Excellent.The book draws on a multitude of original sources and succeeds in recontextualizing Elizabeth and the allegory that proved her most effective means of self-representation."--Choice"Susan Frye's Elizabeth I is an exciting and original book, a richly detailed discussion of the way the queen constructed her image and deployed her authority. The argument is indebted to feminist and new historicist modes of analysis, but it is primarily informed by a concern with biography and the intricacies of history. It offers the reader a continual sense of discovery.

"--Stephen Orgel, Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities, StanfordUniversity"Susan Frye's book is one of the single most useful studies of Elizabeth I's impact on her culture that I have yet read. Arguing that there was a 'competition' over the power to represent Elizabeth, Frye reads three moments of Elizabethan culture--the coronation progress, the Kenilworth pageants, and Busryane's masque at the end of Book III of The Faerie Queene--to show how Elizabeth continually had to contend with a male nation which continued toresist her female rule. Frye makes her arguments with great tact, learning, and not a little bit of daring."--Maureen Quilligan, Judith and Howard Steinberg Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania"Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation is an impressive book, substantial in length, wide-ranging in its primary and secondary scholarship, written with great clarity, and sophisticated in its theory. Her discoveries about the myth of Elizabeth's cross-dressing at Tilbury call into question a goodly number of recent pronouncements about the gender instability inherent in that famous episode. Frye makes this a truly literary (rather thanpurely historical) study by focusing on Elizabeth's self-construction through language, and on corollary constructions by authors such as Spenser. Her explorations of allegory and of sexual violence are subtle and illuminating."--Linda Woodbridge, University of Alberta, Edmonton"Especially revealing of the mercantile interests involved in the construction of the Queen's image as she passed through the City of London to her coronation.

A book with many good things in it, and the introduction especially is a lucid critique of and response to work in the field."--Women's Studies"A densely argued, thoroughly scholarly work."--Renaissance Quarterly"The book's strength.is in its complexity and subtlety, its deft handling of sophisticated historical analysis, its patient and often brilliant teasing-out of the multiple voices of some very difficult texts.[an] excellent study."--Shakespeare Quarterly.