The death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 was greeted by an outpouring of official proclamations, gossip-filled letters, tense diary entries, diplomatic dispatches, and somber sermons. English poets wrote hundreds of elegies to Elizabeth, and playwrights began bringing her onto the stage. This book uses these historical and literary sources, including a maid of honor's eyewitness account of the explosion of the Queen's corpse, to provide a detailed history of Elizabeth's final illness and death, and to show Elizabeth's subjects - peers and poets, bishops and beggars, women and men - responding to their loss by remembering and reconstructing their Queen.

The Death of Queen Elizabeth I 'Weepe with Joy': Elegies for Elizabeth 'Some strange eruption to our state': Elizabeth Southwell's Manuscript Account of the Death of Queen Elizabeth 'Under whom is figured our late Queene Elizabeth': The Queen in Jacobean Drama

CATHERINE LOOMIS is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, USA.