Review of The Image of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Spain, edited by Eduardo Olid Guerrero & Esther Fernández

As a student, I happened across Bichitr’s early seventeenth-century painting of the Mughal emperor Jahangir receiving a Sufi shaikh.

Various important men stand by in a line, being kept waiting as the shah reclines on a cushion prioritizing Islamic over worldly matters. Next in the queue after the Ottoman Sultan is a bearded, tetchy-looking male who, albeit surrounded by Persian inscriptions praising Allah, seemed hauntingly familiar to my occidental eyes. This, it took me slightly too long to realize, is James VI and I: Bichitr has reproduced John de Critz’s portrait of the king, collage-style, in the setting of the Indian court, transforming Great Britain’s sovereign in the process into an unwanted hanger-on.

Among the uses of this collection of essays (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019) is a similar kind of cross-cultural defamiliarization, a new perspective on an early-modern figure who in the anglophone West might be instantly recognizable. Representations of Elizabeth I are so familiar a subject in scholarly circles as to be almost hackneyed, hence the distinct note of weariness already evident in Horace Walpole’s statement, “a vast ruff, a vaster fardingale, and a bushel…