Orations and the Didactic Motifs of Elizabethan Progresses

Abstract

Memorializing Queen Elizabeth’s progresses and their pageantry from the middle-to-late sixteenth through the early seventeenth centuries requires that we examine how her royalty was represented in Medievalist art and prose. Ceremonial displays of Elizabeth’s aristocratic nobility included prayers, sermons, tribute tracts and ballads, sonnets, verse poems, personal letters, and brilliant speeches just to name a few of the major literary mediums. As Roy Strong wrote about in The Cult of Elizabeth, images were meant to be read, and the inscriptions placed on miniatures and portraits emphasized the significance of details in paintings. It became clear through the diverse speeches given at the Queen’s hosted lodgings at various English cities that evoking as much symbolism one could in writing and reading would endear Elizabeth’s pleasure, but it was not the only way of getting the Queen’s attention. Gift-giving was a favorite practice. As such, creative symbolism and objects of devotion needed other means of demonstration, and this had especially shown up in literary motifs and mythology. In this paper, I argue that historians must recognize the ways orations and speeches worked as publicized letters during the pageantry of Elizabeth, making her court’s progresses a means of political, social, and religious negotiations with representations of empire. These verbal acts of negotiation supplanted private relationships that predominated pre-Reformation England and made Elizabeth’s Tudor, imperial authority over church and state more visceral in uniting ceremonial practices and promoting England.