The Names’ Two Bodies: Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I, and the Politics of Correspondence

Summary

No body escapes naming. The body bears the name; the name bespeaks the body, and, as signifier and signified meet, the subject stands poised at their intersection, like a butterfly on a pin. Yet, while these terms may appear to amalgamate, they are never equal in their relative value as indices of early modern cultural legitimacy. Though the name may appear passive, an “addon” to the more material body, their relative value is clear. While no body escapes naming, the name regularly “escapes” the body, exceeding and extenuating it through an array of performatively produced forms that echo their material counterpart and, in some instances, come into competition with it. This essay explores the relative value of names and bodies in early modern culture, beginning with a brief look at Shakespearean meditations on the subject, then turning to the so-called “secret correspondence” between Elizabeth I and James VI, while the latter's mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was under house arrest on English soil. In that context, I will argue that James's aspirations to the English throne turn on the name's capacity to extenuate the prerogatives of the material (and, in this case, maternal) body. To borrow a line from Romeo, “by a name” these rhetorical forms are brought into being, underscoring that specialized sign's role in the making (and unmaking) of the early modern subject in general and the early modern sovereign in particular.

Shakespeare shows us this constitutive capacity throughout the canon, providing a dramaturgical framework for a broader cultural preoccupation. When Juliet asks, “What's in a name?”, she articulates an early modern conundrum in which, rather than wielding the name at will, the subject appears subject to the sign. The lovers’ ill-fated attempt to “doff “ their names in order to escape the filial constraints that would keep them apart underscores the tragic tenacity of words like “Montague” and “Capulet.” Yet, Shakespeare reminds us, the power of the name cuts both ways, engendering possibilities as readily as limitations. In Henry IV Part 2, for example, Falstaff claims to subdue his opponent on the battlefield by declaring: “I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any word but my name” (4.3.18–20).