Hackett, Helen; (2024) Hermits and their meanings: performing retirement at the Elizabethan court. In: Starza Smith, Daniel and Wilkinson, Hazel, (eds.) Liber amicorum H. R. Woudhuysen: a bibliographical tribute. (pp. 81-102). Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK.

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Abstract

The British Library holds two manuscripts associated with Sir Henry Lee, Elizabeth I’s champion at her Accession Day tilts. One, containing parts of Sidney’s Old Arcadia, has a vellum wrapper inscribed ‘delivered to my lord cumberland’. The other, known as the Ditchley Manuscript, contains devices for tournaments and other court entertainments. Henry Woudhuysen has suggested that the wrapper of the Arcadia manuscript may have originally belonged to the Ditchley Manuscript, and relates to Lee’s handover of his role as Queen’s champion to George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland. This essay will set these manuscript materials in the context of the court literature of retirement that was promulgated in the early 1590s by both Lee and William Cecil, Lord Burghley, in entertainments identifying them with hermits and old knights. It will demonstrate that such retirement pageants, while plangently extolling the contemplative life, were also strongly concerned with succession. In practice neither Lee nor Burghley withdrew from public life; indeed, Lee, born in the same year as Elizabeth I, would outlive her by nearly a decade and serve her successor. The essay reveals the political subtext to mythologizations of retirement in the context of the late Elizabethan succession crisis.

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