Elizabeth’s Bedfellows
Author: Anna Whitelock
Publisher: Bloomsbury, Rs 599
Itihas or history, in Indian literary traditions, has been a multivalent term: (a) narratives inherited from traditions, especially those narrating the past to instruct and inspire us to understand the path of dharma (moral duty), artha (political economy), kama (desire), moksha (liberation); (b) narratives of heroism; (c) tradition; (d) historical evidence, etc. Also, any work that employs multiple narratives and is descriptive is called itihas-prabandhana or history/historical writing. In this sense, the essential element of katha or story-telling can hardly be separated from the act of history-writing in Indian contexts. It is also worth mentioning that the aim of history/historiography is primarily to impart wisdom about the world and the purusharthas (the cardinal principles of life) through stories or kathas.
Surprisingly, this incontrovertible correlation between the new historicist notion of history as a plotted narrative and Indian notion of itihasa has largely been ignored in the field of contemporary theory. For example, Hayden White, an eminent new historicist critic, in his book Metahistory, treats the “historical work as a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse” — the content of which is as much invented or imagined as can be found. In this way, history-writing, which is but a kind of narrative-writing, comes close to India’s katha tradition.
It is in this sense that Anna Whitelock’s Elizabeth’s Bedfellows foregrounds and addresses, through the mode of katha, the hitherto least-known aspects of the life and times of perhaps the mightiest woman the world has ever seen — Queen Elizabeth I. Her charisma and power gave the country and its Protestant church a national identity during the Elizabethan Age (1558-1601), ushering in an era of British colonialism, imperialism and empire-building. (For example, the East India Company that set up its first factory at Surat in 1600 had the military and strategic support of the Queen.) No wonder, she remained the subtext of the works of many writers of her age — Edmund Spenser (who allegorised her as the “Faerie Queene”), Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas lodge, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, John Donne, etc. It is in this context of narrativising history in the Indian mode of itihasa that Whitelock’s Elizabeth’s Bedfellows gains significance. The author structures her narrative of Elizabeth’s life and times into about 63 racy, loopy and engaging chapters.
Whitelock’s fascinating narrative enables a reader to learn with aesthetic delight about Elizabeth’s life. After the death of her mother (Anne Boleyn), Elizabeth, who was declared an illegitimate child and might have been subjected to an incestuous assault (by Thomas Seymore, her stepfather), was involved in a host of provoking and provocative sexual relationships. Her body transformed into the bodypolitik — the very state of England: “The experience of 1547-48 with her stepfather had taught Elizabeth that her sexual reputation was an important political currency and the ladies who attended on her were the key custodians of her honour.” As the first woman Head of the State, she was also proclaimed as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England in 1559 and it became the law of the land that anyone “writing, teaching or preaching that Elizabeth should be subject to the authority of a foreign power (including the Pope) would lose all his or her property and moveable possessions” and “repeated offences would be judged high treason and incur the death penalty”.
To substantiate how headstrong and ruthless Elizabeth could be, mention may be made of the fact that in order to teach the protesting Irish Catholics a fitting lesson, she ordered a brutal assault on Ireland in 1582. She resorted to wholesale massacre and “scorched-earth-tactics” that starved more than 30,000 Irish people. Whitelock also highlights how cleverly Elizabeth affiliated her sexual politics to the cultural/national politics of the day. One such example would be the dizzying rise (and later the fall) of Robert Dudley — a keeper of the royal stables and her lover — to the position of the Earl of leicester.
The burden of keeping her sexual reputation intact fell on the women of her Bedchamber — especially on Kate Ashley who looked after the Queen with motherly affection. Whitelock comments, “The Queen and Dudley were spending all their days together, dancing, feasting and hunting throughout the summer progress of 1560” and the story that “ Elizabeth was pregnant had spread across the country that year”. The chapter with overtly erotic overtones — “Carnal Copulation” — deals with Elizabeth’s sexual relationship with Dudley.
Whitelock also narrates how so many conspiracies were hatched either by the Catholics or the agents of King Philip of Spain to assassinate the Queen, rendering the court a hotbed of intrigues and murderous plots — an image that was frequently used by dramatists like Thomas Norton, Thomas Sackville, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, etc. In fact, Whitelock rightly points out that the first English tragedy — Gorboduc or The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex — was staged before the Queen to remind her that her realm was “thrown into chaos by an unresolved succession” and it sought to “spur her to marry and produce an heir”. Even when her face was scarred because of the attack of smallpox, Whitelock interestingly tells us, “an official narrative of Elizabeth’s immaculate beauty and perfect complex was adopted, embellished in poems, plays and state-controlled portraits”. Thus, Elizabeth could deconstruct her “beauty” in a way which could amplify her power and “protect the Queen from accusations from promiscuity which might have been levelled against her if people confused her smallpox scars with those of the great pox, syphilis, which was seen as the product of sexual immorality”.
Whitelock’s narrative weaves a magical spell around even insignificant details as “Toothache”, “Amorous Potions” and “Secret SonIJ” Whitelock quotes Elizabeth’s famous speech delivered after the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) which enables a reader to understand the significance of Elizabeth’s iconisation as the source of the national imaginary: “Although I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, I have the heart and stomach of a King, and a King of England too — and take foul scorn that Parma... or any other Prince of Europe to invade the borders of my realm”. By 1588, the Colony of Virginia had been established, thereby laying the foundation of an empire. She had an uncanny knack of countering a damaging gossip or rumour through her commitment to duty, “I am too much burdened with cares to turn my attention to marriage, for love is usually the offspring of leisure, and as I am so beset by duties, I have not been able to think of love. As therefore, nothing has yet urged me to marry, I have not been able to mediate on this man or that man.”
Needless to say, the narrative of Whitelock’s text resonates with the beauty of tone and tenor embedded in the timbre and texture of katha.
The reviewer is Professor of English, Panjab University