Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"
Telltale Women is an important book that will set the terms of scholarly inquiry on these matters for years to come."—Katherine Goodland,
Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal"Allison Machlis Meyer provides a welcome intervention in a nexus of divergent fields—source studies, feminist criticism, and historiography. By considering the shifting ways in which early modern queens have been represented across genres, Meyer offers a new treatment of the relationship between historical narratives and history plays, making a case for the ways in which history writing—in all of its myriad forms—wrestles productively with larger cultural desires."—Emma Katherine Atwood,
Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England"The treatment of histories and plays as intertexts is an exciting, fresh approach that offers new insights and approaches to history scholars."—E. A. Nicol,
Choice“Allison Machlis Meyer’s thoughtful and compelling book has in effect given the field two studies it needs badly: an analysis of women’s political roles in early modern narrative historiography and a new examination of how these roles are transformed—and limited—in dramatic representation.”—Dan Breen, associate professor of English at Ithaca College
“Meyer’s historically alert and rhetorically savvy argument introduces a novel approach to source studies. Lucidly and engagingly she attends to long-term developments of the early modern chronicle and historical drama genres while richly delineating the contexts of the early authors’ political and personal allegiances and rivalries. Students of gender and book history alike will benefit from this insightful study of the shaping of cultural attitudes toward the political agency of royal women and their use for the consolidation of a citizen-centered English nation.”—Kirilka Stavreva, professor of English at Cornell College and author of
Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern EnglandTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Early Modern Royal Women and the Historical Record
1. A Very Prey to Time: Rewriting Elizabeths in Tudor Historiography and William Shakespeare’s Richard III
2. Your Hope Is Gone: Narrowing the Nation in The True Tragedy of Richard III and Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV
3. From a Noble Lady to an Unnatural Queen: Imagining Queen Isabel in Chronicle History and Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II
4. So Masculine a Stile: Gender and Genre in Elizabeth Cary’s The History of Edward II
5. You Must Be King of Me: Queens and Rivals in Francis Bacon’s The History of King Henry VII and John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck
Coda: Double Drowned in the Gulf of Forgetfulness
Notes
Bibliography
Index
