"As liuing now, equald theyr vertues then": early modern allusions, Boudicca, and the failure of monologic historiographies.

Schechter, Laura

Introduction

While Elizabeth I rarely encouraged explicit comparisons between herself and martial women of the literary or historical past, (1) brief allusions to and more extended treatments of leaders such as Boudicca are relatively common in popular early modern historiographical texts with encomiastic and nationalist passions. Indeed, as Julia M. Walker notes, "To represent Elizabeth as a woman warrior while she was alive was a delicate proposition" (Elizabeth 40). Certainly, Elizabeth's own self-presentation did not regularly suggest martial impulsivity or ferocity so much as divine protection and favour in times of turmoil. As early as her letters to Queen Mary I in the 1550s, Princess Elizabeth presented herself as accountable to God first and foremost ("Princess Elizabeth" 41). A sense of closeness to and favour from God was strengthened in a speech given the day before her coronation, as she compared herself to Daniel, spared by God because of loyalty and faith ("Richard Mulcaster's Account" 55).

Elizabeth also was obviously comfortable presenting herself as both virginal and as a mother to her nation. Court advancement was often predicated on young men maintaining courtly love relationships that followed the patterns of Petrarchan romances--hopeless suitors promising service to Elizabeth, the beautiful, but untouchable and prevaricating mistress. Official visual representations of the queen include George Gower's series of Siena "sieve" portraits (circa 1579), which portray Elizabeth as Tuccia, the Vestal virgin who, as a testament to her virginity, carried water in a sieve without spilling a drop. In her first speech to Parliament, as she addressed petitions that she marry, the queen stressed that, while she would find it acceptable to live and die a virgin, she was also already married to the nation ("Parliament" 58-59), and she returned to this familial relationship in a 1563 speech, claiming that her subjects would never enjoy a more devoted mother than her ("Queen Elizabeth's Answer" 72). Thomas Bentley similarly praises Elizabeth in the opening Epistle for Monument of Matrones (1582), describing her as the "naturall mother and noble nurse" who watches over the Church of England, and James Aske continues this presentation of the queen as mother to England in his 1588 poem Elizabetha Triumphans, as he describes the queen's laws as both breast milk and a crib (12).

When Elizabeth was connected to martial women during her lifetime, other associative values were usually stressed: Diana, goddess of the hunt, was often used in court literature, but authors would link Elizabeth to her chastity and beauty rather than any explicitly violent tendencies--The Faerie Queene's virginal huntress Belphoebe, for example (Spenser 1590 and 1596). (2) Instead, Elizabeth's self-presentations and sanctioned courtly representations stressed Petrarchan beauty, chastity, personal faith, divine favour, princely virtues, and, occasionally, maternal devotion to the nation (see also Berry; Walker, Elizabeth). Despite the queen's apparent distaste for monarchical representations that might suggest violence in her kingdom or unnatural female qualities in her person, early modern authors did regularly connect Elizabeth to martial figures from mythology, history, and the Bible, particularly after her death as the queen's leadership during the Spanish Armada became mythologized in and of itself. Martial valour was, of course, only one of several monarchical traits that were taken up by writers producing nationalist texts that placed Elizabeth's reign within larger Brittonic histories.

Indeed, when given the chance to praise the queen, early modern authors frequently relied on a well-established set of allusions aimed at lauding various combinations of the queen's chastity, beauty, intelligence, militancy, fortitude, peaceful disposition, and generosity. The allusions are perhaps only intended to serve as brief references, as signals for whichever of Elizabeth's qualities the author will praise in more detail in the larger work. At the same time, even as authors celebrate the queen, often furthering a sense of national identity in the process, their use of the literary device may in fact reveal more than superficial laudation.

The women referenced were praised for their possession of individual traits that were thought to be perfected and to reside in whole in Elizabeth. In addition to Boudicca, figures from mythology, classical literature, and the Bible--Diana, Cynthia, Pallas Athena, Astraea, Hippolyta, Penthesilea, Deborah, Judith, and Esther for example--are all commonly used in encomiastic and nationalist texts, while Elizabeth is also connected (although less frequently) to figures such as Zenobia, Semiramis, Artemisia, and Camilla. In the preliminary pages of Elizabetha Triumphans, which celebrates the nation's victory over the Spanish Armada, Aske connects Elizabeth to Pallas Athena in order to highlight the leader's intelligence, bravery, and sense of justice, and he references Zenobia to suggest Elizabeth's fame and successful female rule in adversity. Aske alludes to Voada (or Boudicca) to indicate the queen's bravery when besieged by enemies and, similarly, to Penthesilea, who valiantly died fighting for Troy, the city upon which early modern foundational mythologies of England rested (23). Beginning with the iconography used in her 1559 coronation entry into London, Elizabeth was linked to Deborah when authors and artists strove to highlight the queen's sense of justice, leadership, and intelligence (Berry 86), while memorial inscriptions describe the queen as Judith for "'Spaines Holifernes'" (for victory over the Spanish Armada and Philip ii, in other words), as Deborah and Esther for, respectively, fame and sacrifice for her people, and as "'an Amazon'" in battle (Walker, Elizabeth 43). (3)

While these allusions arguably serve to highlight Elizabeth's sexual purity, female leadership, and personal resolve, among other things, the references to the various women also move the English queen away from any immediately intelligible narrative of an uncomplicated, ethnically pure British past to which she and the nation can be attached. I suggest that while nationalist historiographers make use of allusions as part of their efforts to create an authoritative, monologic English history and sense of stable, honourable national origins, the allusions themselves may disable this nationalist function by suggesting a multiplicity of origins, a panoply of literary, cultural, and experiential standpoints that do not align neatly.

Allusions to various other mythological, Biblical, and historical figures could be fruitfully explored, but my focus here will be on allusions to and larger literary treatments of Boudicca, because of similarities in the mythologized narratives for her and Elizabeth. Themes of national defence and cultural integrity align Boudicca's campaign against the Romans with Elizabeth's resistance against the Spanish at Tilbury, for example, and the Tudors' own preference was to trace their historical lineage to Brute and Trojan origins, highlighting a Brittonic heritage (MacDougall 7).

Julie Crawford goes so far as to declare Boudicca "the ultimate English female worthy" in the catalogue tradition, and "the most appropriate and deployable allegorical representation of Queen Elizabeth" (359), yet Jodi Mikalachki contends that early modern authors "rarely invoked" the Brittonic queen in representations of Elizabeth and that Boudicca did not gain popularity in England as a symbol of national resistance and endurance "until well over a century after Elizabeth's death" (117). However, the queen is connected explicitly to Boudicca in minor texts such as Aske's Elizabetha Triumphans and more well-known ones such as John Fletcher's Bonduca (circa 1612). Edmund Spenser also includes allusions to the Britons' leader in The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596), and he has a slightly lengthier depiction of the figure in The Ruines of Time (1591), a long poem on the fall of Verulam, a Roman stronghold that was attacked by Boudicca's forces. The two women are also aligned clearly (if less explicitly, perhaps) in several key historiographies and catalogues published during Elizabeth's lifetime and in the decades following her death. Thomas Heywood's Exemplary Lives (1640), for example, devotes a chapter to Boudicca (Bunduca in his account), and he presents each of the eight women chronicled as providing an honourable trait that is perfected in Elizabeth, the ninth woman to be profiled. Bunduca's "masculine spirit" is developed in the leader (Exemplary 68, 185), according to Heywood, who sees the Tudor queen as a culmination of sorts, a body possessing and unifying all previously distinct virtues possessed by the individual women.

Beginning in earnest in the decades following the Spanish Armada, Boudicca's military campaign against the Romans in 60/1 CE was often feted as confirmation of a proud Brittonic heritage and of resistance to foreign incursion, as in Heywood's description of

a gallant British Lasse, [whose army ...] in one battaile (if report be true,) Full fourscore thousand valiant Romans slew. (Troia 423)

In Elizabetha Triumphans Aske notes that the Brittonic leader, "once Englands happie Queene," who "Pursued her foes with horror of the day," perished alongside her daughter "with constant courage" (23). As Aske recounts Elizabeth's presence at Tilbury, he explicitly connects the two women, alluding to Boudicca (Voada in his account) and suggesting that "Voada once Englands happie Queene" and her warlike daughter "Are now reuiu'd, their vertues liue" in Elizabeth, "now Englands happie Queene" (23). A similarly positive account of Boudicca's acts can be found in Ester Sowernam's 1617 text, Ester hath hang'dHaman, in which she describes the Briton as "the valiant Boadicea, that defended the liberty of her Countrey, against the strength of the Romans, when they were at the greatest, and made them feele that a woman could conquer them who had conquered almost all the men of the then known world" (19). These references to Boudicca's battles against the Romans are of special importance when considering that Elizabethan and Jacobean writers and historians actively shaped a sense of nation that included the threat of and opposition to international Catholic encroachment. (4)

The early Brittonic resistance against the Roman conquest is notorious for its violence (spurred on as it was by Boudicca's daughters reportedly being raped by Roman soldiers). Despite the ultimate failures of her campaign, the heavily mythologized leader becomes an important symbol for, at different times, national integrity, honourable origins, maternal devotion, and military leadership but also for unnatural or monstrous female rule. Samantha Frenee-Hutchins argues that Boudicca's historical positioning as "druidess, prophetess, and goddess" in her struggle against Roman occupation connected to Elizabeth's place as religious leader standing strong against Catholic incursion, yet Frenee-Hutchins also posits that "the darker [pagan] side to Boudicca's religious activities" and the violence of her response to the Romans likely made the Briton a less useful model for encomium than the Virgin Mary, whose iconography was imported into Elizabethan representations from the 1570s (145). The queen certainly took care to craft and encourage the circulation of a multitude of personae and iconographies, many of which were nostalgically strengthened after her death. Indeed, Aske's Elizabetha Triumphans, which makes use of multiple allusions to celebrate the queen's victory against the Spanish Armada, invokes a nationalist historiography that is developed in several Jacobean texts, including Heywood's Exemplary Lives and Fletcher's Bonduca, both of which look backward to make authoritative connections between past and present.

Although Heywood's and Fletcher's treatments of Boudicca are extended beyond the allusion, I suggest that they follow other authors' allusions to the Brittonic leader as they laud aspects of Elizabeth's leadership and suggest a long tradition of defence against foreign incursion. Fletcher's play in particular fits into a larger preoccupation with and perception of Jacobean internationalism, including James I's support for Prince Henry's Spanish Match in the 1610s. I argue that while literary treatments such as Exemplary Lives and Bonduca do at times support Mikalachki's contention that early modern historians and writers attempt to displace concerns about native Brittonic savagery on specific female leaders (4, 11, 13), Fletcher's play also suggests a Jacobean inability to recover or possess an original national purity.

Female misrule can certainly be noticed in the play, and the text has several misogynistic descriptions of Bonduca's and her daughters' participation in military efforts. However, the drama just as frequently engages in conversations about the permeability of British borders. Apprehensions about the inevitable Romanization of British culture and fractures already noticeable among British tribes in the play likely speak to negative reactions concerning James's conciliatory gestures to Catholic Spain and his attempts to officially unite Scotland with England and Wales, while Bonduca's efforts to keep Roman influence and political control at bay allow a nostalgic look backward to Elizabeth's leadership during the Spanish Armada. These points will be discussed in greater detail, but I first argue that allusions to Boudicca do in fact hold a special place in historiographical attempts to construct comprehensible, singular national myths for the Elizabethan and Jacobean populations. As well, the early modern failure to identify and develop a comprehensive narrative for a national origin free of corruption by other cultures actually speaks to problems of origin associated with the historiographical allusion itself.

The Allusion and National Histories

To showcase this multiplicity of and uncertainty about origins, I will analyze allusions to the mythologized leader Boudicca within the context of lengthier descriptions of the woman. These more extensive representations treat the same anxieties and negative possibilities inherent in the allusions, but the allusions themselves actually hold a unique place in understandings of Elizabethan nation building. The very nature of the allusion as a literary device may hinder its efficacy in early modern authors' nationalist projects. As the authors attempt to foster national identity by looking to Elizabeth's mythologized Brittonic origins, the allusions always fail to produce an original source for the figure with whom Elizabeth is conflated, just as they fail to produce meaningful, material proof of an initial British cultural purity upon which national identity can be based.

The allusion as a form of intertextuality encourages the reader to look backward for recognition, to make meaningful connections between past and present. Mikhail Bakhtin stresses the specificity of social context in language production and usage, and he focuses on the importance of the "utterance," which is always produced in response to other utterances. Julia Kristeva later defines the utterance as "an operation, a motion that links, and even more so, constitutes what might be called the arguments of the operation, which, in the study of a written text, are either words or word sequences (sentences, paragraphs) as sememes" (37). The multiple voices and uniformly valid interests--the dialogism, polyphony, hybridization, and heteroglossia--present in a text always interrupt and throw into question any attempt at an authoritarian, monologic explanation for culture or art, although more monologic iterations of state authority will attempt to quell those dialogic critiques (Bakhtin 6-7). While historiographers might attempt to construct authoritative, monologic narratives of the nation's development, allusions encourage polyphonic reading experiences in which the text, author, and reader all change and "join a process of continual production" and meaning is altered with each textual experience (Allen 34). Intertextuality can thus mark a language usage that works against monologic readings--that opens up a multiplicity of meanings, origins, and relationships--while still placing texts within larger social contexts.

Texts can never be interpreted as wholly separate from others, of course, and are, as Kristeva suggests, "mosaic[s] of quotations" (66), (5) but allusions allow for more immediate proof of past works and events than a slightly spectral sense of cultural "influence" or historical "interest" might. Allusions need not point to a simple, single source text: indeed, critics have misunderstood Kristeva's work on intertextuality if they focus simply on source study rather than on the implications of the text as "a dialogue among several writings" (65). Allusions do suggest the possibility and continuation of origins, however, and they encourage historicization by drawing links between earlier and present cultures, by implying some sort of commonality between the hypotext and the hypertext, to use Gerard Genette's terms. These textual connections occur, even if the hypertext can sustain meaning on its own without the reader being forced to reference the past text, or hypotext. (6) While allusions place texts within "a network of textual relations" (Allen 1), they also allow the reader to consider works as "space[s] in which a potentially vast number of relations coalesce" (12). Each allusion can suggest a multiplicity of origins or sources, thus drawing the reader away from any one history, meaning, or certain interpretation, even as nationalist historiographers make use of the literary device to direct the reader to certain reference points.

Allusions to Boudicca simultaneously signal multiple, often conflicting stories about the leader, for the figure is essentially a fragmentary, palimpsestic intertext referenced in several other works, no one past text more important or more closely linked to an original source than any another. The allusions reference texts with various production and circulation dates, and they operate in relation to the woman's presence in multiple genres--poetry, drama, historiography, catalogue--yet the allusions can never produce anything other than a vague, nostalgic sense of Elizabeth's role in nation building (a vague sense that can just as quickly backfire and remind readers of damaging connections between Elizabeth and dangerously unconventional, martial women of the mythologized past). (7)

While Mikalachki contends that Boudicca's crudeness, her failures, and her notoriously brutal military campaign would make her an entirely unsuitable model for Elizabeth's own self-presentation--essentially her "native origins [... and] her savage femininity [... providing] the negative complement to Elizabeth's chaste embodiment of national security" (129)--I suggest that allusions to Boudicca may also fail for reasons that have yet to be fully explored. I do not propose that

the two figures were lacking in representational similarities, however (similarities that encouraged early modern historiographers to include the allusions in the first place).

Indeed, early modern texts include conflations of the land with Boudicca, just as they do with Elizabeth (Mikalachki 116-17), and both women were known for their rousing speeches, "especially," as Mikalachki notes, "with regard to inspiring nationalist sentiment and inciting their people against foreign invaders" (116). Standing on a map of England in Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger's Ditchley portrait (circa 1592)--thus presented both as the nation and as its sovereign, and linked clearly to English imperial expansion in Gower's Armada portrait (circa 1588) in the king's crown placed directly above the globe upon which the queen's hand rests-- Elizabethan and Boudiccan representation both "[suggest] not simply [a] championship of the island, but [a] virtual identity with it" (Mikalachki 117), echoes of which can be heard in textual accounts and creative representations of the Brittonic leader's speeches to her people.

In Heywood's summary of the Iceni leader's life, for example, Bunduca offers a series of contrasts between Brittonic fortitude and Roman weakness or daintiness (Exemplary 75-77), much of which can also be found in Bonduca's opening speech in Fletcher's play (1.1.1-11). Indeed, Bunduca claims that the Britons' lack of supplies and food over the years has made the forces resilient and able to make do with the materials needed for basic survival: "any roote or stocke serves them for food: water will quench their thirst, and every tree is to them a Roofe, or Canopy" (Heywood, Exemplary 75). The Romans, on the other hand, will revolt or their army collapse into weakness without personal luxuries like "bread or ground Corne, Wine, and Oyle.... [T]he Romans must have their warme bathes, their catamites, their dainty fare, and their bodyes suppled with oyle" (Exemplary 76). The resilience and national spirit of Bunduca's troops make them hardy, however, and they can survive with few physical comforts.

In her speech at Tilbury Elizabeth similarly concedes that her troops have yet to be paid for their service, that they ought to receive "rewards and crowns" in recognition of their "forwardness" in defending their nation, but she turns their lack of remuneration into proof of their loyalty and evidence that the English deserve to defeat the Armada ("Armada" 326). In Elizabeth's speech, bravery and national survival are thus the overwhelming priorities, not personal gain, individual security, or comfort. The queen presents a version of the English nation that is unified against the foreign threat, that seems to not have divisions of gender, religion, ethnicity, or class, for example (see Greenfeld 3), and that shares a vision for future (Protestant) national survival and amelioration, a vision based on a shared origin and history.

Just as Elizabeth "take[s] foul scorn" at any foreign leader who "should dare to invade the borders of [her] realm" ("Armada" 326), Bunduca derides anyone (Romans included) who would submit to Nero, arguing that those who have continued to live under "their Lady and Mistresse, Madame Nero, (for who can thinke him to be a man?) deserve to continue slaves still" (Heywood, Exemplary Lives 76). While Bunduca pledges that she would prefer "to dye bravely" rather than "spend [her] days under a Donitia, or Neronia, (fitter names for him than any of the masculine gender)" (Exemplary Lives 77, 76-77), Elizabeth makes a claim for the loyalty of her English subjects, maintaining that she "would not desire to live to distrust [her] faithful and loving people," thus placing her troops as devoted to both her and the Protestant religion that she presents as unifying the nation under attack by Catholic interests ("Armada" 326). Despite the obvious representational similarities, however, I suggest that the historical reference points to Boudicca fail because they disperse even as they look back to past texts. The texts (and the literary treatments of the tribal queen and the nation itself) are too diverse, the origins too uncertain for any stable narrative of genesis and continuation to succeed, too diffuse to feasibly connect Elizabeth to a comprehensible narrative of an original cultural purity.

Boudicca and Tilbury

In popular representations Boudicca and her forces stand outside of any Roman civilizing efforts, adamantly resistant to incursion but also to integration. This insistent connection to purity can be linked to Elizabeth's own defiant stance in her Tilbury speech (and in representations of her role in the victory), for she conflates England's defence with sexual, religious, and ethnic inviolability. Indeed, as she claims to "take foul scorn that Parma or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of [her] realm" ("Armada" 326), the English queen reiterates distance from Catholic Parma and other European antagonists while also signaling the impermeability of her own corporeal "borders." That she leads a distinct nation and possesses kingly sovereignty over it is suggested in her declaration that "[she has] the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too" ("Armada" 326). Gower also highlights Elizabeth's physical integrity in his sanctioned Armada portrait, her chaste life figured in the large bow and pearl that hang over her abdomen, and he connects the queen's virginity to the Protestant English resistance and the Catholic Spanish incursion.

In the portrait, Elizabeth foregrounds depictions of the Spanish Armada on the viewer's left and the English forces on the right (the connections between sin on the left and justice on the right of obvious relevance to the nations' positioning). While the portrait can of course only depict her physical body, her sexual purity depicted in the bow and pearl becomes an aspect of the kingly authority implied in the painting and, as Susan Frye suggests, is a confirmation of national security remaining unbreached ("Chastity" 356). The king's crown, sitting over the globe upon which her hand rests, further suggests Elizabeth's possession of the body politic, its traits of monarchical justice and might allowing her power in and over the world. The Armada portrait did much to build up the English victory in the minds of citizens, also supporting the already existent conflation of chastity and national inviolability (Montrose 145; also Strong 98-99, 136; Frye, "Chastity" 356). This same commitment to purity and national protection can be seen in the popular print Truth Presents the Queen with a Lance by Thomas Cecil (1622).

In Cecil's print, Elizabeth carries a sword and shield and she sits atop a white horse. She is young, and she has crushed the seven-headed beast from the Book of Revelations, a feat that clearly suggests the queen's victory over Spain, for the beast is regularly connected to Catholic Rome in Protestant eschatological thought. Furthermore, the queen receives the lance with her right hand, another visual cue that Elizabeth's defence of the nation is inextricably connected to justice and rectitude. The discarded armour of her conquered foes lies on the ground, and the naval forces in the background, positioned below Elizabeth as she stands on a cliff in the foreground, echo Gower's presentation of the Spanish ships in the Armada portrait, simultaneously reinforcing Elizabeth's victory over Spain, since she is clearly far above the invaders and impossible to reach. Cecil's print, readily available to the public as an object of mass production, likely contributes to Elizabethan nostalgia at a time when James had turned his interests to a Spanish Match for Prince Charles (Walker, "Bones" 252-53).

Importantly, these post-Armada visual media make significant connections among national security, sexual and cultural purity, and the queen as an object of praise, connections that are also made in Heywood's catalogue Exemplary Lives, to some extent in Fletcher's Bonduca, and most certainly in Elizabeth's own Armada speech. Like the allusion as a literary device, Cecil's print and Heywood's and Fletcher's texts all look backward to make authoritative connections between past and present; indeed, the authors use militant women in order to both laud aspects of Elizabeth's leadership and to suggest a long tradition of defence against foreign incursion.

Frye points out that the Armada speech and descriptions of the queen at Tilbury have developed in the English mind over centuries, although no reliable descriptions of either the speech or the queen's (possibly armoured) costume have been found (at least no versions that were produced immediately after the event) ("The Myth" 96). Indeed, the English sense of the queen at Tilbury is likely an amalgamation of many literary and visual depictions. That being said, the various descriptions of Elizabeth and her Armada troops are still important (if not necessarily historically accurate), for they do much to explain how she has been presented and how representations of her have influenced depictions of other martial women over time.

In Elizabetha Triumphans, written almost immediately after the Spanish Armada, Aske describes Elizabeth's presence at Tilbury, and he makes use of multiple allusions in his encomiastic historiography. The author first dedicates his pamphlet to Julius Caesar in the hopes that Caesar--the great architect of civilization, nation building, and expansion--can defend the writing "from the biting lawes of snatching carpers" The queen's presence is then directly connected to Troy and Penthesilea, for Aske describes her as "nought vnlike the Amazonian Queene, / ... beating downe amaine the bloodie Greekes, / Thereby to grapple with Achillis stout" (23). As she leaves the camp, Elizabeth is viewed as "most Dido-like" (25), the Queen of Carthage drawing a third connection to Aeneas and the culture that--by legend, at least--developed out of the ruins of Troy and prefigured the English nation. The text, essentially a religious commentary that offers a lambasting history of meddling popes and the violence instigated by Catholics, praises Elizabeth as an agent of God's will who directs the faithful, beleaguered Protestants. The Spanish Armada is then placed within a lengthy history of papal interference in England and Catholic attempts to destabilize the nation, and the queen's Trojan origins are clearly linked to Aske's sense of a strong English Protestant resistance to European Catholic incursion.

Elizabeth is conflated with militant women at several points in the pamphlet, and these links would seem at least superficially to function as praise for the English queen's attempts to guard and build the nation and to continue Elizabeth's stated "[resolve] in the midst and heat of the battle to live and die amongst" her loyal subjects (Elizabeth, "Armada" 326). These allusions may just as often work against the fostering of conventional nation building, however. The leader's martial, insistently chaste body at Tilbury draws attention to itself as "nought vnlike the Amazonian Queene" Penthesilea's (Aske 23), but it also causes Aske to only nominally position her within the narrative of a stalwart English Protestant opposition to European Catholic forces. The text certainly praises the queen, but Aske, in his introductory materials, describes her activities at Tilbury--"all [her] deedes," in fact--as being guided by "Pallas hand." Indeed, he promises Elizabeth, "Zenobia-like thy Fame will neuer cease," and in the body of the poem he describes the queen as "Bellona-like renown'd" (18), as "nought vnlike the Amazonian Queene" Penthesilea (23), as continuing to display the virtues once possessed by Voada (Boudicca) and her daughter Vodice (23), (8) and as "most Dido-like" when she departs the camp (25).

The allusions highlight Elizabeth's bravery and determination as she inspires her troops, but they also place her within an alternate, multicultural history of women. These leaders do not fit neatly into traditional understandings of nation or political succession, nor do they enable any singular narrative of origin, any one connection to the past. Instead, she and the nation she protects are connected to several origins, all female and all linked to multiple (sometimes conflicting, always compendious) representations. In short, the depictions of Elizabeth as sexually, spiritually, and nationally pure are called into question once she is conflated with Boudicca's military failure and the romanization of Brittonic tribes. More generally, the use of multiple allusions in nationalist historiographies and encomia creates a cumulative effect that actually moves the queen away from comprehensible origins, and that opens English textual and geographical boundaries to a host of influences and interpretive possibilities.

Elizabeth may claim in her Armada speech that her borders, both physical and geographical, remain unbroken (326), and historiographers may continue to support these claims in nationalist texts, but post-Armada allusions and more extensive treatments of Boudicca actually suggest a larger cultural anxiety, a fear that English origins rest not in ethnic purity and valour but in submission and miscegenation through a series of military losses. Boudicca, like the passionate defence of English origins that she signals in early modern nationalist texts (and like the allusion as a literary device), is nothing more than "a tissue of quotations" (Barthes, "Death" 149). Elizabethan allusions to Boudicca have no original whole: instead, they--like English national identity--point to multiple sources, some of them less civilized than others; they are accretive, plastic, and compendious. Indeed, the historiographical impulse to create or strengthen a totalizing, seamless narrative of national origins and continuation is disabled by the multiplicity of source materials and textual functions to which Boudicca is attached.

National Origins, English and Unruly

The island of Britain's overarching regional cultures are now identified as English, Scottish, and Welsh, but Britain's earliest society was, at least in theory, more unified. It is this sense of an identifiable, comprehensible national origin that early modern nationalist and encomiastic texts seek to further. Traditional mythologies about the island--Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (circa 1136), for example--maintain that Brutus and his followers landed on the island of Albion and that he then, after skirmishes with the original inhabitants, settled the land, naming it Britain and his settlers Britons. According to popular belief, Brutus split the island into three kingdoms--England, Scotland, and Wales--and after his death his three sons each ruled one. This system continued until the Scottish king died, at which point all three kingdoms came under the rule of the English king. The Britons certainly spread throughout the island (particularly south of the Firth of Forth and across to the western coast), and they created a distinct language and culture, but they were weakened by a series of historically verifiable invasions by other groups-- Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, and Normans--each of which left substantial effects on the Britons' culture and, as conceptions of nationhood developed over centuries, their sense of self.

Geoffrey's imaginative history of the island does track some of the earliest of these changes; while unreliable as a historically accurate narrative, it was a valuable tool in minimizing tensions among Britons, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans, and it greatly furthered the circulation of Welsh Arthurian legends in England. Frenee-Hutchins sees an attempt on Geoffrey's part to weave English culture into more honourable Roman origins (9); certainly, the text later became a "useful prop" for Tudor and Stuart justifications for political legitimacy through rightful inheritance, as these monarchs could gain knowledge about and claim closer ties to original Brittonic inhabitants of the island (MacDougall 7). (9) English monarchs were not alone in looking backward for recognition, however. Indeed, Philip Schwyzer and Arthur B. Ferguson both examine a larger English desire to shape a national identity with clear connections to past Brittonic tribal groups.

The sixteenth century certainly saw a burgeoning sense of nationhood develop in England, and Liah Greenfeld argues that this conception of "nation" was entirely new and that it established the modern understanding of the word (6). Nationalism fosters (and is fostered by) a belief that the individual has a place within a larger social group, a group that shares a history and a teleological drive toward narratives of improvement. While Schwyzer cautions against imbuing excessive amounts of nationalist interest in the early modern English culture (Literature 1), instead suggesting that nationalism in England may have often been limited to small groups of people with relatively large amounts of privilege and access to political resources (Literature 8-9), he does argue that to develop a sense of national spirit a nation must absorb ancient practices, tastes, dialects, and languages; the nation must recognize "that 'they' were 'us,'" that their practices shaped ours (Literature 2).

The common history claimed by a social group might be nothing more than "Myths of origin" (MacDougall 1), but these myths can nonetheless anchor a group, allowing them to place their culture temporally and geographically. As Ferguson suggests, "Without being able to go back confidently to origins, without finding a vanishing point for their historical perspective, [the English] felt a sense of intellectual insecurity" (101). While they may not have been completely satisfied with national mythologies that they reasonably suspected to be fictional, "the English still needed a beginning," and they were willing to continue looking to older texts in order to secure some sense of historical foundation (101).

"Myths of origin" (MacDougall 1) can imbue a social group with historical relevance, connecting them to legendary events and leaders, and they can establish the rationales for shared ideologies and worldviews that connect members of a social group in the present, thus "[urging] connections between past and present, between members of a group, and between people and state" (McEachern 5). This social group thus becomes a "people," and, as Greenfeld suggests, the "people" can be "seen as the bearer of sovereignty, the central object of loyalty, and the basis of collective solidarity" (3). This understanding of nation as a people essentially erases important social distinctions--"status, class, locality, and in some cases even ethnicity"--or treats them as only minor differences in what is otherwise a "fundamentally homogenous" community (3). While this overarching concept of nation is likely never possible (and would have been particularly impossible in early modern England, given its sharp economically-based social divisions), the concept is nonetheless manipulated and made use of when convenient for or helpful to the larger political goals of historiography.

A nation shares a familiar understanding of future direction, and the people identify and nurture a common identity, even if these visions and characteristics exist only in theory. The nation becomes special, its history and its conception of the future setting it apart from other nations, and, as Greenfeld maintains, all members of the nation can rightfully claim "its superior, elite quality" (7). Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was a "nation ... profoundly preoccupied with its own historicity" (McEachern 33), even if its use of history involved the silent absorption of multiple cultures' traits and languages and even if its imagined past focused on Trojan and Brittonic roots (rarely acknowledging what were considered to be the nation's cruder Anglo-Saxon origins).

In short, I suggest that the form of the early modern English nation hangs in a delicate balance, relying variously on conceptions of cultural or ethnic commonality (a composite of originally distinct peoples who share a Trojan and Brittonic heritage that is somehow set apart from other nations), ethnic differentiation and superiority through conquest (a series of invading cultures each establishing new social codes), and understandings of "the principle of political self-determination. It holds no particular form, but its form is, nonetheless, particular," as Claire McEachern posits (12). The relative strength of these differing conceptions of nation quickly falls apart, however, if national origins are feared to be monstrously female and predicated on a civilizing miscegenation following an initial military defeat by the Romans, as in the histories of Boudicca's leadership or, perhaps worse, if--as in the case of Boudicca as well--origins can never be recovered in any kind of pure form.

Boudicca

As Frenee-Hutchins explains, Tacitus' and Dio Cassius' descriptions of Boudicca's resistance had all but disappeared after the Roman Empire's collapse; purely by luck, scholars uncovered key works by Tacitus in the 1300s and 1400s, immediately copying them for posterity and giving the texts even better circulation as the printing press became a reality (7). Boudicca was actually reintroduced into the English historical mindset in 1534, when Polydore Vergil included her in English History. (10) Although few details about her life are known definitively, a mythologized biography for the leader was well established by early modern authors working from Tacitus and Dio, her resistance to the Romans often romanticized in accounts of her leadership.

The heavily mythologized first-century woman was, according to historical accounts, the widow of Prasutagus, an Iceni tribal leader who left control of his territories with his wife while his daughters were minors. Boudicca's husband died hoping that Nero would grant them the freedom to control their own territories, but the Roman emperor instead took more than his lawful share of the bequeathed land and riches, and he oversaw a massive level of violence carried out by Roman forces. According to multiple sources, including Heywood's account, Boudicca was publically whipped and her daughters raped by Roman soldiers, leaving the woman "full of most just grief and wrath, and all the tempestuous passions which embased nobility, or violated nature can suggest" (Exemplary 72-73; see also Tacitus 14.31). Consider, too, the rape and flogging as symbolic of the injuries committed against the Britons as a whole, the injuries to the nation becoming more poignant because they are inscribed on female bodies. In response to the multiple Roman aggressions, Boudicca raised an army of Britons.

The armed response of Boudicca and her troops is notorious for its violence (and its brutality was met with harsh retribution from the Romans after the unsuccessful rebellion was quelled), yet the Briton remains a strong English symbol of nationalism and bravery in the face of international antagonism. Indeed, according to textual accounts (which are not always completely or even remotely reliable), when her forces took control of Verulam and realized that the local residents had co-operated with the Romans and had willingly allowed themselves to be a part of the empire, the Britons laying siege had no mercy, destroying Briton and Roman alike "Where sword and fire ... devoured what rape and robber had left" (Heywood, Exemplary 82-83). Heywood describes Boudicca (or Bunduca) and her troops as scourges for the dishonourable, as meting out punishments to the Romans and the Britons who would go against the continued vitality of the Brittonic nation.

Their attacks on the Roman strongholds (and towns supportive of the occupiers) are described in terms that are unequivocally savage and excessively violent. Heywood claims to not criticize the carnage left by Bunduca and her forces, despite the fact that "the wild uplandish crew of her irregular troopes, spared nothinge, quicke or dead: thirst of revenge in her, and rapine in them, banisht all humanity" (Exemplary 82). Indeed, Heywood follows Dio (62.94-5) in summarizing the Britons' actions: the forces captured the women of Verulam, "stript them naked, then cut of [sic] their paps or dugges, and stitcht them to their mouthes, to make them seeme feeding, and after put their bodyes upon stakes" (Exemplary 83). The army similarly tortured the men of the town, disemboweling them, impaling them with fiery spears, or scalding them to death with boiling oil or water (Heywood, Exemplary 83). (11)

While his only admitted point of contention with the Britons' behaviour seems to be that in pursuing their violent retributions they lost time and allowed the Roman forces to plan a response to the attacks (Exemplary 82), Heywood's descriptions would seem to support Mikalachki's contention that in early modern texts the Britons are generally (if sometimes anxiously) characterized as savage and ultimately benefiting from Roman influence, even as authors simultaneously deflect their anxieties about Brittonic barbarity by focusing on the misrule and violence of early queens (12-13). Although Heywood first claims that Bunduca's defeat was the workings of "adverse fate" (Exemplary 68), phrasing that limits the leader's culpability, he later refers to the army as "misgoverned" (Exemplary 83). This second description highlights Bunduca's inexperience as a military leader, it may or may not point to her sex as a root cause for her army's ultimate failure, (12) and it creates questionable ties to Elizabeth, the woman who is celebrated as possessing Bunduca's "masculine spirit" and all other positive virtues profiled in the catalogue (68, 185).

Heywood's text is at least nominally a celebration of the queen and the historical, literary, and mythological women who share her attributes, but Fletcher's work Bonduca is far more ambivalent in its presentation of military leadership and in its questionable celebration of a residual Brittonic cultural purity that can be found (or not) in the Jacobean English population. The play is certainly misogynistic at points, (13) and it does focus on Bonduca's weakness as a female military leader. Just as importantly, Fletcher's work reflects larger cultural anxieties about England's relationship to Catholic Spain and the possibility of the official union of England, Scotland, and Wales under James.

Indeed, gender and gender subversion become decoys that allow Fletcher to distinguish (in an act of simplistic nostalgia) Elizabethan policies from Jacobean, simultaneously engaging in conversations about the permeability of British borders. In his presentation of Bonduca and her multiple attempts to secure her nation's survival and its cultural integrity, Fletcher looks back to Elizabeth's feted defiance of the Spanish forces during the Armada, but he also suggests that the Britons' general, Caratach, has valorized the Roman military system and codes of honour to such a degree that he can no longer adequately defend the Britons in the face of foreign incursion. If the experienced Brittonic military leader functions as a loose representation of James, Caratach's actions and values open up a critique both of James's interest in improving relations with Spain, including his support for the Spanish Match during the 1610s, and his attempts to officially unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland. This unification would ideally create shared legal, governmental, monarchical, and religious systems in the regions, possibilities that made many in England and Scotland apprehensive.

Indeed, international borders are not the only ones under attack in the drama, as several internal divisions among the Britons become quite apparent. Fletcher's play actually works against the traditional understanding of nation as a people united by common origins and teleological narratives of nation building, for several members of the Britons' army, Bonduca included, demonstrate that the Britons are indeed savages who face internal strife as often as they encounter the threat of foreign cultural contamination. Perhaps worse, the play suggests that the Britons are indistinguishable from their invaders and that Roman occupation will not lead to the improvement of the nation.

Bonduca tracks the history of the Iceni leader during her brief rise and fall as a military force, and Fletcher repeatedly connects Bonduca's sex to the mismanagement of her army and her nation's eventual collapse, a move that makes it easy to assume that gender will be the primary (perhaps the only) problematic in the play. However, issues related to cultural purity and national integrity loom just as large in the work. The opening scene certainly conflates military defeat with femininity or effeminacy, and it highlights misogynistic reactions to a woman leading an army. The action begins as Bonduca's forces celebrate their recent victories over the Romans, and Bonduca immediately gives pejorative descriptions of the Roman soldiers as coddled and feminized, scoffing,

   BONDUCA. Their mothers got 'em sleeping, pleasure nurs't 'em,
     Their bodies sweat with sweet oils, loves allurements,
     Not lustie Arms. Dare they send these to seek us,
     These Romane Girls? (1.1.8-11)

The Romans' effeminate activities have led to an internalization of delicacy, for, according to the victorious Bonduca, "Their bodies" actually excrete refined "sweet oils" (1.1.9). Sweat, a mark of physical exertion and the proof of prowess, becomes a signal in Bonduca's mind for weakness, for the Romans' inability to succeed in foreign surroundings and for a lack of comportment. Bonduca highlights the uniqueness of her victory, marveling, "a woman, / A woman beat 'em, Nennius; a weak woman, / A woman beat these Romanes" (1.1.15-17): the word "woman" (repeated four times over three lines) reminds the reader of Bonduca's sex and the culturally constructed gender conventions that she often ignores as a military leader. The Britons' general, Caratach, (14) quickly undercuts her achievement and scolds her for boasting, retorting, "So it seems. / A man would shame to talk so" (1.1.17-18). In minimizing the Iceni queen's victory, Caratach privileges a misogynistic construction of women as haughty and chatty, and his remark draws attention to Bonduca's lack of familiarity with etiquette following success in a military confrontation.

Caratach reminds her that while the Romans fled this particular battle, the Britons have done likewise in previous encounters (1.1.91-3). He insists that all three military leaders--Bonduca, Nennius, and he--have joined their soldiers in avoiding confrontations in the past, their forces retreating more timorously than "a virgin [running] from the high sett ravisher" (1.1.87). Dismissing the possibility of cultural difference as it pertains to cowardice, the general implies that the Britons are not actually distinct from their invaders, a condition that would work in Caratach's favour, because he frequently identifies with a larger fraternal code of military honour and more often than not believes that the Romans make use of that code. Caratach's comment also immediately calls into question the sense of national integrity and distinction upon which so many early modern historiographies rely, however, suggesting instead that Britons and Romans are equally capable of cowardice and that both are susceptible to defeat.

Not surprisingly, Caratach frequently isolates the women's sex as he censures them for behaving dishonourably, and as he lambastes Bonduca for her weak leadership following the Britons' eventual defeat, actions that certainly support a reading of the play as primarily a critique of gender and female misrule. While some critics have followed Mikalachki to varying degrees and argued that the play sets up a gendered dynamic that hinges on notions of femininity as irrational, emotional, adulterated, and constantly under attack, simultaneously relying on representations of masculinity as strategic, logical, honourable, and unified, Bonduca just as frequently challenges these gendered conventions and places male characters in morally or logically compromised positions. (15)

Indeed, the Roman and the Brittonic men are frequently divided, and the internal quarrels lead the reader or viewer away from a simplistic understanding of nation as originally whole or unified. The Romans often break rank and needlessly question or impudently disobey the orders of their superiors, while Caratach, the seasoned military general so fixated on appropriate action and adequate displays of honour, frequently criticizes the equally experienced military commander Nennius. Furthermore, Fletcher implicitly critiques Caratach's admiration of Roman behaviour far more than he explicitly praises the general's attachment to the Britons or the survival of their nation. Gendered leadership cannot simply or solely be the play's main concern.

The play may indeed treat Bonduca as possessing a kind of savage national identity that will be subdued by the experienced military leader Caratach and the Roman invaders, but she is hardly the only character in the play to resort to excessive violence, nor is she the only one to fail to strategize effectively. Furthermore, Roman men are just as likely as the Brittonic women to be duplicitous, querulous, and emotional (all traits that are normally attributed to female weakness). To focus on the violence of Bonduca and her troops during the uprising is also to neglect or to sidestep the Roman violence that precipitated the revolt and the dishonourable conduct of several Romans in the course of the play. This point raises the possibility that while Bonduca and her troops may be conquered, Brittonic identity will not be supplanted with anything better. Caratach blindly attaches himself to an understanding of Roman honour that simply does not exist, for the behaviour of the invaders often is indistinguishable from that of the apparently savage Britons.

Furthermore, when Caratach, who in Mikalachki's reading would likely represent a "tradition of native masculine civility" (13), asserts his authority and forces an action (usually defying his leader, Bonduca, in the process), he often pursues a course that leads to the detriment of the Britons, thus "fail[ing] at the job he accuses Bonduca of being incapable of doing" (Crawford 374). When Bonduca orders her troops to hang the captured Judas and his four comrades, for example (a course of action supported by Nennius, incidentally), Caratach later insists that they be freed (Fletcher 2.3.1-2, 40-50). Not only does he force Bonduca's daughters and Nennius to release the men, he orders the Roman unit to eat the Britons' victuals, for he is convinced that a military code of honour would dictate such behaviour (2.3.51-52, 93-95). Caratach's mistake here is tragic in its proportions, for the name "Judas" immediately signals the Roman's propensity for dishonesty and betrayal, as does Fletcher's description of him as red-bearded (2.3.126), while his small company of Roman soldiers creates a clear reference to the four who carried out Jesus's crucifixion (Boling 400).

Fletcher essentially places Caratach in the position of defying his queen in order to feed, celebrate with, and ultimately free figures whom the audience would recognize as being Christ's murderers (400), and, by giving away substantial amounts of the Britons' dwindling food supplies, he actually limits his own army's future efficacy. The audience can be certain that Judas will not suddenly disavow his past perfidies and begin to practise the (likely fictional) Roman system of honour to which Caratach so enthusiastically subscribes. In fact, Judas and his friends go on to kill the person who means the most to Caratach: they will set a deadly trap for a starving Hengo, luring him into an open space by leaving food and then attacking him with arrows when he accepts the bait, all of this while the boy is under Caratach's supervision (Fletcher 5.3.99-159). Hengo's death is mourned in the text as the final confirmation of the Britons' defeat and the loss of Brittonic integrity; the event could, of course, also reference the unexpected 1612 death of Prince Henry, long touted as the future of English national spirit and survival. (16) The bond between the aging military leader Caratach and his young nephew Hengo is one of the central and most well-developed relationships in the play. The possibility that Hengo's death alludes to that of Henry thus clarifies connections between Caratach's failure to protect the embodiment of national hopes and English perceptions that James's interest in internationalism might come at the expense of domestic safety.

In many ways, the most interesting and most developed antagonism in the play is not between the Britons and the Romans, but one that pits Caratach against his fellow Britons, Bonduca, her daughters, and Nennius. Nennius, out of place historically, as he led revolts against Julius Caesar more than a century before Boudicca's rebellion (and Caratacus' resistance a decade prior to Boudicca's), stands with Bonduca in Fletcher's play as the spirit of Brittonic identity and resistance. He is a military figure who always supports Bonduca's decisions, and he follows her final directive that all remaining leaders commit suicide after their failure to fend off the Roman forces, even taking the traditionally heroic measure of falling on his sword (4.4.80-81). Indeed, while Bonduca's monstrously female nature is noted by Brittonic and Roman leaders alike, particularly once the Britons suffer a series of defeats and she orders a mass suicide rather than submit to Roman rule, Nennius's determination to die rather than allow the Britons' fortress to fall into Roman hands is not criticized in the text: he is viewed as "Neither female nor hysterical" for his decision to follow Bonduca's orders in battle and later to commit suicide (Boling 396).

Bonduca's awareness of foreign rule and cultural miscegenation as very real certainties compel the leader to commit suicide and to ensure that her family and closest advisors follow suit before she takes her poison. The Britons' mass suicide, conducted as a horrified group of Romans looks on and the Roman general Swetonius pleads with the queen to reconsider her decision (Fletcher 4.4.85-153), putatively ensures their cultural purity in death, but this purity has been disputed throughout the play, as Romans and Britons have often behaved in ways that are identical. Brittonic purity will almost immediately be called into question once more, for Caratach will soon surrender to the Roman forces that he admired so greatly throughout the play. Importantly, the Romans are hardly unified themselves, for their forces are introduced as working in co-operation with other invaders and as fostering connections to other nations that would also be threats to the Britons.

Indeed, Bonduca's first reference to the Romans includes her haughty dismissal of the force's "big-bon'd Germans, on whose Pikes / The honour of their actions sit in triumph" (1.1.13-14), while the Roman Petillius refers to his general's "new wine, new come over" from the continent, perhaps from France since other supplies likely arrive from the same region (1.2.47, 163-64). The Roman Judas decries his troops' rations of "French Beans, where the fruits / Are ripen'd like the people, in old tubs" (1.2.79-80), and Swetonius promises Petillius that better food will soon be shipped from a port within one or two days' distance, ordering him to placate the starving troops "a day or two: provision / Waits but the winde to reach us" (1.2.163-64). Food that close at hand would have to sail from France, as a shipment could not begin in Italy and reach Britain in one or two days. Cultural miscegenation is inevitable in this play, and this determinative position is reinforced in several instances by characters also drawing attention to internal divisions within their own nations.

The overall anxiety about this lack of purity and unification is actually made worse by slippage in the play implying that the Britons may have never had their elusive austere origins, that the Romans may be eerily similar to them in temperament and capacity for dishonourable behaviour, and that military defeat and Roman occupation will not actually lead the nation toward improvement. The Brittonic and Roman interactions, both within and between camps, essentially make impossible any standard narrative of a masculinized, honourable, culturally pure Roman force civilizing the feminized, savage, compromised Britons. Any nationalistic effort to retain or claim an original whole that survives past the Roman occupation is futile, for this cultural integrity never existed nor was it replaced by any simplistically unified and civilizing presence. Indeed, Bonduca's place in the play draws attention to just how fictional theories of nation can be, to the ways in which "nation" is heavily constructed as sharing a common history and teleological movement for the future, and to the ways in which fictions of nationhood can attempt to erase important social markers--gender, economic status, and ethnic distinctions, for example (see Greenfeld 3).

Both Bonduca and Caratach focus on the Roman incursion as an irreparable harm to the Britons' identity, but this initial presentation of Brittonic integrity and resistance will soon be tested. Caratach discusses the Roman threat as if it is relatively new; the danger to the Britons' national identity is thus presented as graver and more immediate. Similarly, the military leader's vow to die before mixing his "stock" with a Roman "graft" (Fletcher 1.1.172)--to only "be alli'd" if he is "in ashes" (1.1.174)--implies that the Britons have not yet had substantial cultural, personal, or sexual interaction with the fairly recent invaders, that the nations each retain a kind of purity. In reality, however, research suggests strongly that the Romans and the Britons had been affecting each other for decades prior to the Roman invasion of the island in 43 CE (Aldhouse-Green 1-2), and the Romans certainly made an initial reconnaissance of the island under Julius Caesar's leadership in 150 BCE. In fact, Boudicca's husband, Prasutagus, likely possessed Roman citizenship, a point that can perhaps be supported by looking to the leader's decision to leave a political will, which left his territory to his daughters and to Nero as co-heirs, for a written will was hardly a Brittonic convention (70). If Prasutagus did have Roman citizenship, then Boudicca as his wife also did (70), a possibility that further complicates the mythology of cultural purity and resistance that has been built up for the Britons and for Boudicca in particular.

Caratach's resistance to the Roman invasion (and the cultural integration that one assumes would follow) is actually fairly suspect, and the general's enthusiasm for Roman military codes and soldiers dampens his initial claim that the Britons "grapple" against the Romans "for the ground [they] live on, / The Libertie [they] hold as dear as life" (Fletcher 1.1.159, 159-60), as well as his vow to die before allowing a Roman "to graft himself into [his Brittonic] stock" (1.1.172). Similarly, Caratach's ability to act in the interests of Brittonic sovereignty is doubtful, given the general's commitment to a (likely imaginary) larger fraternity among male soldiers; his insistent aid for a thieving Judas (2.3.51-52, 93-95); his extensive mourning for the Roman Penyus, whom he apostrophizes as "Thou hallowed relique, thou rich diamond / Cut with thine own dust; thou for whose wide fame / The world appears too narrow" (5.1.56-59); and his ultimate surrender to the Romans on the condition that Hengo receive a proper burial (5.3.184-88).

Caratach's claim that he will "[yield] then, / Not to [the Romans'] blowes, but [their] brave curtesies" (5.3.187-88), that he will join the Romans not because his army was weaker but because he admires the Romans' chivalric codes, indicates that even in defeat Caratach retains an unrealistic understanding of the Romans' integrity, both cultural and moral. Bonduca may on her deathbed advise Swetonius to "Place in [his] Romane flesh a Britain soul" (4.4.152) if he wants to achieve success, but the only surviving Brittonic leader, Caratach, actually seems to disdain much of his Brittonic culture. He will likely "graft himself into" (1.1.172) what he admires about Roman roots as he admits defeat to the foreign forces, disavowing all that he viewed as savage and unsuccessful in the Britons' way of life and moving away from the insistent independence and dedication to integrity that characterized Bonduca's campaign.

Caratach's frequent blindness to the Roman threat and his apparent inability to prioritize the needs of the Britons could allow for a critique of James's international relations and his attempts during the first decade of his English reign to officially unite Scotland with England and Wales (see also Crawford 357-58). While John Kerrigan argues that "[a] play about ancient Britain could not exist for post-1603 audiences ... in a purely English perspective" (123), I would respond that for an English audience it could indeed present Britain as England under attack from nations that were perceived as essentially different. Bonduca's defiance in the face of Roman invasion would then be viewed as a (relatively simplistic) nostalgia for the English national resistance epitomized by Elizabeth at Tilbury, a reaction to Jacobean anxiety about English purity in the face of a proposed union of states (see also Crawford 357-58). (17)

Of crucial importance to anti-unionists was the argument that the English and Scottish were too different to amalgamate. Critics from both states resisted the (ultimately successful) call for reciprocal naturalization of subjects born after James began his English reign, and the English were particularly concerned about the absorption of Scots into England should the king successfully create a unified state (Russell 2). Indeed, many English feared that if "mutual naturalization" were to occur the whole concept of English citizenship as unique would be worthless (2). Not surprisingly, James looked to Brute and Arthurian legend as he and other unionists argued for the relevance and importance of a politically and culturally unified Britain and as they attempted to build a national identity that connected clearly to the past (Schwyzer, "Jacobean" 34). As Schwyzer suggests, the historical basis or validity of Geoffrey's work was not the crucial question for unionists; instead, the pertinent issue was if the Jacobean English and Scottish could build a new British identity by looking to a shared Brittonic past, by connecting to a culture that was for all intents and purposes irretrievable ("Jacobean" 34).

Although a slightly late addition to the debates on unionist efforts, Bonduca reveals the uncertainties produced by this call for cultural amalgamation and the simultaneous monarchical push to look backward for a shared national origin. I would argue that an English anxiety about outsiders and the dissolution of English national integrity can easily be seen in Bonduca's efforts and Caratach's failure to halt the Romanization of Brittonic culture. Bonduca draws attention to sex difference within the nation, undoubtedly, but her speeches and interactions with others also reference other social divisions that make the myth of original unity untenable. The Britons' army breaks rank frequently, and different tribes have been fighting for regional distinctions prior to the danger of Roman settlement erupting. Indeed, Caratach alludes to regional, political, and class-based disputes, admitting in the first act that the Britons' confrontation with the Romans is much more than a quarrel over

some pettie Isle, Or [a disagreement] with our neighbours ... for our Landmarks,

The taking in of some rebellious Lord,

Or making a head against Commotions. (Fletcher 1.1.154-57)

The Britons are in fact a fractured, divisive force resisting an equally divisive, multinational army, the Britons led by a woman who by the early modern period had no clear historical referent, who immediately signaled multiple genres, rhetorical uses, and literary treatments.

Conclusion

The twinned impulses to foster a national identity and to reach for one's origins both rely on a sense of certainty, of stable narratives, but authoritative texts with clear historical referents rarely exist for early modern England. Similarly, the allusion can usefully place a work within a larger system of texts and socio-historical conversations--within "a network of textual relations," to use Graham Allen's term (1)--but in opening up the possibility of an uncertainty, palimpsest, and multiplicity of source texts, the allusion is put into conflict with the more monologic narratives and explanations of society and history that state authority would prefer to create (see Bakhtin 6-7). I argue that allusions to and larger literary treatments of Boudicca in the early modern period frequently attempt to cultivate a comprehensible national "[myth] of origin" (MacDougall 1) for the English, one that stresses cultural and sexual purity, as well as a history of resistance to incursion.

A problem arises, however, in that the martial leader is represented in a broad array of texts, genres, and periods, with many competing motivations and uses--so many, in fact, that she can never truly be connected to any original narrative, nor can she effectively be harnessed to enable the creation of a stable account of origins for the English state or its authors. Instead, Boudicca marks the reality of two irreconcilable impulses for the early modern English nation: she is placed in texts that would attempt authoritative histories and clean connections to a past (uncorrupted) culture, often in order to develop a teleological narrative of future nation building, and she signals the impossibility of these efforts to make uncomplicated links between past and present, instead suggesting a multiplicity of origins and the permeability of borders. Indeed, narratives about Boudicca are likely to suggest the continued presence of several nations (following the Britons' multiple military failures), as well as the larger Brittonic inability to fend off cultural influence over centuries of sharing the island with others. These implications then complicate otherwise reasonable connections between the Iceni leader and Elizabeth in texts that apparently praise the latter's ability to maintain her borders, both physical and national, and to withstand assault from foreign aggressors.

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(1) With few exceptions, for example, sanctioned visual representations produced in Elizabeth I's lifetime did not explicitly depict her as martial: the queen wears a jeweled crescent moon in her hair in images such as Isaac Oliver's Rainbow portrait (circa 1600 to 1602), the ornament recalling Amazon women's shields and Diana's affiliation with the crescent moon, as well as the peaceful moon goddess Cynthia; and she wears a brooch decorated with an Amazon woman and mermaids in the unattributed Darnley portrait (1575). Thomas Cecil's 1622 engraving Truth Presents the Queen with a Lance is a positive representation of a martial Elizabeth produced after her death, and while John Fletcher's Bonduca (circa 1612) is often misogynistic it employs representations of the first-century tribal and military leader Boudicca, in order to further a nostalgic understanding of Elizabeth's resistance to Spanish incursion. This nostalgia develops simultaneously with a larger cultural anxiety about James I's friendlier relations with Catholic leaders.

(2) Certainly, Edmund Spenser received a lifetime pension for The Faerie Queene, which also includes a lengthy treatment of Britomart, the Knight of Chastity and an implicit representation of Elizabeth. Britomart battles the evil Amazon queen, Radigund, in order to affirm traditionally gendered social structures and to provide an appropriate model for female rule. I suggest that Britomart's interests in marriage, political dynasty, and the future well-being of her Brittonic people actually create a site of critique for the unmarried, childless Elizabeth's refusal to name a political successor in the 1590s. Indeed, Britomart, Elizabeth's fictional ancestor and alter ego, may in part reveal moments of Spenser's wishful thinking as she vanquishes Radigund, the tyrannical Amazon who insists on gender inversion in her territory by emasculating her male captives.

(3) Other examples of relevant allusions can be found in Thomas Heywood's Exemplary Lives (1640) and Troia Britanica (1614). Allegorical and other creative representations of the queen (as any number of literary, historical, or mythological figures) open up even more literary works and political performances for study. Such texts include various courtly entertainments held throughout her reign (see Berry 83-110), George Chapman's The Shadow of Night (1594), John Lyly's Endymion (1591), Sir Walter Raleigh's Ocean to Cynthia (1592), William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (circa 1594), and Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596).

(4) Notable early modern publications with references to Boudicca include Polydore Vergil's English History (circa 1512-13; published 1534), Hector Boece's Chronicles of Scotland (1531), Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), William Camden's Brittania (1610 in English), Fletcher's Bonduca, Heywood's Exemplary Lives, and John Milton's The History of Britain (1670). The authors generally follow some combination of the earliest historiographical work on the leader-- Tacitus' Annals and Dio Cassius' Roman History--although some historians follow their source material more closely than others. Tacitus focuses on the personalized attacks against the Iceni leader and her children in his presentation of her impetus to go to war, while Dio removes all mention of the Romans raping Boudicca's daughters. He instead focuses on the Iceni leader as a figure who inspires dread in the feminized Roman forces.

(5) Julia Kristeva also sees the text as a "permutation of texts" (36), while Roland Barthes refers to it as "a tissue of quotations" ("Death" 149) and the reader as "a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost" (s/z 10).

(6) One might be reminded, too, of Mikhail Bakhtin's argument about what type of material is "essential" in Fyodor Dostoevsky's work (29). Bakhtin maintains that in the author's novels, "the essential" must be capable of "simultaneous coexistence" in time: "That which has meaning only as 'earlier' or 'later,' which is sufficient only unto its own moment, which is valid only as past, or as future, or as present in relation to past or future, is for him nonessential and is not incorporated into his world" (29). For Dostoevsky's characters, then, the past is only recalled if it continues to be part of their current worldview, if the past is "that which is still experienced by them as the present" (29).

(7) In a study on dramatic representations of Boudicca, for example, Wendy C. Nielsen has suggested that portrayals of the Brittonic leader are often disappointing for audiences, because the figure is asked to do too many, often contradictory, things for various dramas, giving the audiences little to hold onto in terms of familiarity: Boudicca has been a character "resisting empire (the Romans) and embodying British expansionism"; while some plays stress the figure's role as a stoic mother defending her children, others focus on her unusual status as a military leader; her actions are either criticized excessively or not enough (595). In short, Nielsen maintains that "Boadicea does not really work as a national icon because she evokes too many contentions for British audiences" (595).

(8) Importantly, James Aske describes Elizabeth as not speaking directly to her troops at Tilbury; rather, she discusses conditions with her sergeant-major and tasks him with delivering her speech (23-24). As Jodi Mikalachki notes, this depiction of Elizabeth as silent in public does not entirely fit with her larger history of oratory (128), but it does distance her from Boudicca's publicly anti-feminine behaviour even as Aske alludes to the Briton to create a sense of anti-Roman Catholic nationalism. Mikalachki focuses her analysis on the distinct depictions of femininity produced by Aske's text--the queen's private direction at Tilbury "protect[ing] her chaste persona from public military engagement, both active and rhetorical" while Boudicca's larger mythology emphasizes the Briton's "savage incontinence in her bellicose rhetoric" (128, 129)--but Aske's text can also inform a larger understanding of faulty allusions and the failure to ascertain any single historical trajectory for national development over time.

(9) Indeed, several Tudor monarchs would tie their political validity to Arthurian lineage. When Henry VII succeeded in 1485, having united the Houses of Lancaster and York to create the House of Tudor, he was popularly viewed as initiating an age of unification and political renewal. That he named his first son Arthur and had his christening at Winchester, an important site for Arthurian nostalgia, was no accident, according to Hugh A. MacDougall (15-16). Henry VIII undertook the project of repairing and improving Arthur's Round Table housed at Winchester (Heninger 378), while James vi was regarded by Arthurians as a particularly important future ruler of England because he could claim Brutus's lineage through both his maternal and paternal families (MacDougall 20-21).

(10) Mikalachki contends that Vergil's treatment of Boudicca was not without problems, for the historiographer had to attune to both "the legitimate patriotism" and the barbarity signaled by Boudicca's resistance to Roman rule (119). Vergil's solution was to present two different historical figures, "Voadicia," whom he described as bravely defending her nation, and "Bonduica," who carried out all the bloody attacks on Roman strongholds (119).

(11) Heywood's account is also generally in line with Tacitus' Annals, as the latter posits that, in the attacks, Boudicca's army "did not take captives, or sell them, or indulge in any other wartime trafficking; rather, they hastily resorted to slaughter, the gallows, burning, and crucifixion, accepting that they would face punishment, but meanwhile taking revenge for it ahead of time" (14.33).

(12) Boudicca's sex was often the focus of historiographical summaries of the unsuccessful Brittonic revolt, so Heywood would hardly be alone in implying connections among female rule, violent excess, and military failure, but the connections in this particular text would be puzzling, given that the text as a whole aims to praise Elizabeth's positive qualities (Exemplary 185) and argue for women's equality to men by finding occasional examples of women who "exceed their usual stations in life" (Exemplary 2).

(13) Bonduca's misogyny is hardly unique when compared to other works in Fletcher's corpus, including his collaborative works with Francis Beaumont. The gendered response to rape in Bonduca becomes one of the key vehicles for expressing misogyny, for few men show any real regard or sympathy for the sexual assaults of Bonduca's daughters, and the young women's participation in capturing Roman soldiers is often dismissed. In her sensitive reading of the play's different conceptions of war for men and women, Alison Calder demonstrates that Fletcher's focus on the Roman sexual threat for Bonduca and her offspring highlights the gendered treatments of war in the play and shows how women are blocked from participation in traditional military activity (211). Indeed, sexual assault casts a pall over the play: Bonduca's daughters have already experienced it prior to the drama's unfolding, and they reference their rapes when they pray before participating in war and before committing suicide (Fletcher 3.1.27-36, 4.4.110-12), just as they sexualize their language when they capture and plan to torture Roman soldiers (3.5.26-30, 41).

(14) Caratach is presented as Bonduca's cousin in this play, although historically Caratacus was an unrelated leader who instigated a separate rebellion in the decade prior to Boudicca's 60/61 CE revolt.

(15) Calder, Sandra Clarke, Goran Stanivukovic, and Carolyn D. Williams have each contributed readings of gender that rely on the former conception of the play, while Ronald J. Boling, Julie Crawford, and Andrew Hickman have individually offered productive responses to this type of analysis.

(16) The play's first production date continues to be uncertain. William W. Appleton dates Bonduca as likely first performed between 1609 and 1611, although he is willing to suppose that the play premiered as late as 1613 or 1614 (55), while Hickman cautiously suggests a first staging between 1611 and 1614 (143), and Stanivukovic places the text's production between 1609 and 1614 (41). Given the propagandistic early modern connections made between Prince Henry and the future of Protestantism in England, Hengo's valiant death may very well serve as loose allegory for Henry's death in 1612, a suggestion also made by Appleton (56) and Hickman (143).

(17) Certainly Elizabeth became a useful representational tool for James's critics and those opposed to aspects of his reign, because the king so frequently distinguished his rule from hers (Crawford 360; see also Ziegler 35). One should not too eagerly or markedly distinguish James's early reign from the final years of Elizabeth's, however, despite the rhetorical efficacy and power of such a position. Indeed, she and James shared similar policies on many issues, including international relations.

Laura Schechter completed her doctorate at the University of Alberta, and she continues to teach in the Department of English and Film Studies. Her interests include early modern women's writing and history, poetry, court culture, and travel and exploration literature. She has been published in Renaissance and Reformation and the edited anthology Narratives of Citizenship.