Queen and Country: The Relation between the Monarch and the People in the Development of the English Nation. Ed. Alessandra Petrina

‘Thus the relation between the Queen and her subjects shapes contemporary and future politics’ (p. 11), writes Alessandra Petrina in her introduction to this collection of essays. She continues ’Through the act of writing, the Queen and her country communicate’ (p. 12). This book is intended to explore these two themes.
Starting life as conference papers at the University of Padua, the disparate and sometimes discursive nature of the eleven essays betrays their origin. The editor attempts to impose some unity and structure by organising the material in three sections: ‘On her own Terms’ (meaning Elizabeth’s communications with her subjects), ‘Oppositional voices’ and ‘After Elizabeth’. However the sections are unbalanced and not all the essays sit comfortably in their allotted slot. The first section contains six pieces, some of which overlap. The second offers only two essays and one of them is off-topic, simply dis cussing the tyrant in English Renaissance drama and referring to the Queen only in the last sentence. The last section contains three essays, one of which focuses on John Florio’s writings written while Elizabeth was still alive. As Valentina Bricchi readily admits, direct references to Elizabeth ‘progressively decrease in number as he [Florio] grows professionally’ under the Stuarts (p. 238).