The Phoenix as a Symbol of Succession Anxiety in Early Modern Literature

In royal (self-)representation, one recurring symbol is that of the phoenix. Symbolizing eternal life and hermaphroditism, the phoenix is connected to the theories of the body politic and the body theatrical. The phoenix was used as a symbol by both male monarchs, such as James VI & I (1566-1625), Louis XIII (1601-1643), and Louis XIV (1638-1715), and female monarchs such as Elizabeth I (1533-1603) and Christina of Sweden (1626-1689). Elizabeth I’s use of the phoenix symbol is generally understood to refer to perpetual renewal and eternity,1 whereas Christina of Sweden’s use of the phoenix symbol is interpreted as a reference to hermaphroditism and the dual-gendered body politic. Scholarship on the French kings connects the phoenix symbolism to contemporary (political) anxieties over monarchial succession. To date, no systematic study has been made of the phoenix symbol as an expression of monarchial succession anxiety in early modern English society. This is curious, since the...Show moreIn royal (self-)representation, one recurring symbol is that of the phoenix. Symbolizing eternal life and hermaphroditism, the phoenix is connected to the theories of the body politic and the body theatrical. The phoenix was used as a symbol by both male monarchs, such as James VI & I (1566-1625), Louis XIII (1601-1643), and Louis XIV (1638-1715), and female monarchs such as Elizabeth I (1533-1603) and Christina of Sweden (1626-1689). Elizabeth I’s use of the phoenix symbol is generally understood to refer to perpetual renewal and eternity,1 whereas Christina of Sweden’s use of the phoenix symbol is interpreted as a reference to hermaphroditism and the dual-gendered body politic. Scholarship on the French kings connects the phoenix symbolism to contemporary (political) anxieties over monarchial succession. To date, no systematic study has been made of the phoenix symbol as an expression of monarchial succession anxiety in early modern English society. This is curious, since the English monarchy has seen quite a number of problematic successions since the death of Henry VIII in 1547 and throughout the seventeenth century. The last decades of the reign of Elizabeth I, who died childless in 1603, is known to have caused succession anxiety. Therefore, this thesis aims to fill this gap in scholarship by performing a quantitative as well as a qualitative analysis of the occurrence of phoenix symbolism in early modern English literature and art, with an emphasis on the symbol’s use as an expression of succession anxiety. For the study of the occurrence of the phoenix symbol in early modern English literature, the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database has been used. A search on EEBO for the keyword ‘phoenix’ yielded 5810 hits in 2768 records/documents. The search results were manually sorted, excluding documents referring to the Elizabethan frigat ‘Phoenix’ and the Phoenix Theatre in Drury Lane, London. Ultimately, 2474 documents containing phoenix symbolism were identified (listed in Appendix A), of which 270 documents directly refer to either a monarch or to royal succession (listed in Appendix B). These results have been visualized in the graphs depicted throughout this thesis in order to clarify my arguments. For the qualitative analysis the most interesting and noteworthy EEBO search results have been selected for analysis. The quantitative and qualitative analyses presented in this thesis reveal that the phoenix symbol can be considered an expression of anxieties over succession. The phoenix symbol is not only used as a universal symbol of the monarchy, but also often served to specifically invoke the memory of the persona ficta and the (posthumously mythologised) reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Instead of being a general symbol of royalty, the phoenix symbol in early modern English society was often used to signify Queen Elizabeth I or her reign, which was hailed as the Golden Age as part of the rhetoric of nostalgia as well as her posthumous memorial cult. This strong connection to Elizabeth I caused the use of the phoenix symbol to soar in the first half of the seventeenth century. Ironically, this strong connection is also the main reason for the symbol’s downfall at the end of the century. Moreover, the Scientific Revolution and the demythologisation of the monarchy caused royal symbolism in general to lose its significance and its meaning by the start of the eighteenth century. The rise and fall of the phoenix symbol, spanning from the mid-sixteenth until the early eighteenth century, mirrors these socio-political developments.Show less

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The Phoenix as a Symbol of Succession Anxiety in Early Modern Literature