1. A few points: First, while 1564 was before the St. Bartholomew's day massacre, it was nonetheless the height of the Elizabethan settlement of religion, the period in which (Calvinist, even Huguenot-inflected) Protestantism was being actively -- and, as it would turn out, permanently -- written into English law. While Ronsard may not have been actively involved in religious polemics in the 1560s he was certainly aware of the direction in which Elizabeth was taking England.
2. Second, I take Quilligan's point about royalism, and annex it to my own: my own point is that "royalism" is neither the same thing as absolutism nor always the same. Behn's royalism is not Cavendish's (even though both wrote in the later seventeenth century) and Valois royalism is not Elizabethan. That said, I agree with Quilligan's further-elaborated point that the vision of royal power the Valois/Tudor regents shared -- or negotiated in dialogue with one another -- was particular to the 1560s and, indeed, to decade-specific discourses about women's rule.
3. Finally, my point about Ronsard's contributions to the dialogue was not to deny flat out that he was a mouthpiece for the state, but rather to highlight the fact that even mouthpieces -- sometimes, even especially mouthpieces -- work with a variety of agendas.
| Go to this issue's index. |