SOURCE: Mazzola, Elizabeth. “‘O unityng confounding’: Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart, and the Matrix of Renaissance Gender.” Exemplaria 12, no. 2 (fall 2000): 385-416.

In the following essay, Mazzola discusses the portrayals of Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart (also known as Mary Queen of Scots) in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's King Lear in terms of gender discourse in Renaissance poetry.

For almost two decades in the sixteenth century, a specter haunted England. The twisted shape of twin queens, the closely linked bodies of Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary Stuart, aroused a range of fears and hopes, some secret, some openly expressed, and a variety of speculations political, psychological, or biological. To be sure, bodies are as much the stuff of fiction as they are the hard material of history; if their limits and cavities are easily detected or quickly registered through sensation, their opacities always remain hypothetical. But...