What Was She Doing?

"Miss Erickson shows us an Elizabeth sitting in the center of a court grown fantastic in fashion and revelry, there ogling male courtiers who sported earrings, velvet hats with two-feet-long feathers, pageboy curls, curled mustaches with beards not only styled in a myriad of shapes but dyed in a myriad of colors to match their clothes: 'From Nordic blond to fiery Irish red to amber or auburn, any hue was possible, along with the startling, but undeniably trendsetting, shades of purple and orange and speckled yellow.'"

What was Queen Elizabeth doing, merely using sexuality to achieve the 'victory of royal sovereignty over male authority' as Carolly Erickson, authoress of The First Elizabeth, suggests? Did the lesser-advantaged hussies, wenches, slatterns, jades, trollops, strumpets, and otherwise loose women of the day require such 'sovereignty' to misbehave?

SEE: MARRIED TO ENGLAND - NYTimes.com review of THE FIRST ELIZABETH By Carolly Erickson. Illustrated. 447 pp. New York: Summit Books. $19.95.