Elizabeth
I, eds. Janel Mueller & Leah S. Marcus.
Elizabeth I: Autograph
Compositions
and Foreign Language Originals.
Chicago University
Press, 2003.
ix,174pp, 7 halftones.
Hardback ISBN
0226504700.
Publisher's
recommended price $45.00
Recently
the University
of Chicago Press published Elizabeth I: Collected Works to
considerable
critical acclaim. Collected Works brought together for the
first
time in one volume the speeches, poems, prayers, and selected letters
of
Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), all in modernized spelling and
punctuation.
With
this new
volume, Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus give specialists full access
to
key originals of the Queen's texts presented in Collected Works.
The originals selected for inclusion here are compositions that survive
in Elizabeth's own handwriting, in English and in foreign languages, as
well as her foreign language compositions preserved by other hands or
in
printed editions. Presented in transcriptions that reproduce the
spelling
and punctuation of their sixteenth-century sources, these texts convey
both the expressive and otherwise significant features of Elizabeth's
writing.
Through the transcriptions of texts in her own hand, readers can track
the Queen's language and compositional style - her choices of
vocabulary
and phrasing; her vagaries of capitalization, spelling, and
punctuation;
her often heavy revisions and redraftings; and her insertions of
postscripts
and second thoughts. And the texts in foreign languages will allow
readers
to prepare their own English translations from these original
sources.
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