Content area
Full Text
Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. Chicago: Ü of Chicago P, 2000. ISBN 0-2265-04646. 446 pp. $40.00.
Elizabeth I: Collected Works presents the queen as a writer in a handsome edition as suitable for gift giving as for scholarship. The dust cover is stunning in burgundy and gold, with an ornamental "E" and ft medallion of her face reproduced in color from the Armada portrait. The back cover gives the full text of "When I was Fair and Young." The volume even boasts a silk ribbon as bookmark. The scrupulously edited texts are modernized, to make them accessible to more readers. New translations are provided for her Latin speeches, her French and Latin poems, her foreign language prayers, and her correspondence with European royalty. A second volume, entitled Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals, edited by Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus, is forthcoming from U of Chicago P. This second volume, designed for scholars, will present the same works in old spelling, retaining her insertions, deletions, and other revisions for autograph texts. It will also include the originals of her foreign language texts not in her own hand. The twin volumes thus provide material evidence of the current debate about the best presentation of early modem texts: Should we present the works in a form as close as possible to the original, including autograph corrections, so that we can best hear the author's own voice? Or should we present a clean text in modernized spelling and punctuation, so that we can reach a wider audience? These distinguished editors have elected to do both, a solution financially possible only for a cultural icon like Elizabeth.
Neither volume includes her translations, making the title of Collected Works somewhat misleading. And since more than 1,000 of her letters are extant, the 103 included here represent just one tenth of the whole. What the edition does contain, however, is invaluable-all of her speeches, prayers, and poems "that we have been able to locate in texts that we judge reliable" (xiv). The editors have transcribed the texts from manuscripts "very nearly contemporary with the act of composition itself," except for a few later versions that they do believe to...