Lady Russell, Elizabeth I, and Female Political Alliances through Performance

Abstract

The entertainment at Bisham Abbey in 1592 offers a rare example of female authorship and performance in a sixteenth‐century dramatic text. Lady Elizabeth (Cooke Hoby) Russell wrote and staged this entertainment for Elizabeth I during a royal progress, and her two teenaged daughters performed speaking roles. The Bisham performance challenges assumptions about women's limitations, endorses a militant Protestant foreign policy, and revises conventions of Elizabethan progress entertainments to claim the genre as an appropriate arena for aristocratic women's political negotiations. In successful auditions to be maids of honor, the young Russell women urge the Queen to surround herself with capable female servants who can better assist her in religious and gender battles than her flawed male advisors. As they propose themselves as loyal alternatives to self‐serving male courtiers, these young performers adopt elements of the Queen's image, revealing that they claim authority to engage in court performance and promote political agendas from her example. (E.Z.K.)