My Enemy The Queen Who Also Is An Enemy To Me

I feel as if I must be completely honest in this blog post... My Enemy The Queen is also an enemy to me. No matter how hard I tried to get into the reading, I simply could not force myself to do so. I promise you all, I did read but I can guarantee I did not pick up on any of the fine details that we are bound to discuss in class today.

What I did get out of the reading is this: There is some lady named Lettice who loves the Earl of Leicester, Robert, and Robert also loves Lettice.

Okay, so not this lettuce but I know you all thought it too.

While this would be fine and dandy under normal circumstances, its not in My Enemy The Queen, hence the title. Elizabeth also loves Robert and hence we have formed the infamous love triangle. The next 30 or so pages of the reading deal with Lettice and Robert trying to hide their feelings for one another from the Queen but eventually they end up telling one to many people and she finds out and is pissed.

To me, this seems like the stereotypical romance plot and that is perhaps why I had difficulties getting through the reading. There was one aspect, however, that kept my attention throughout and that was the portrayal of Elizabeth.

Up until this point, the historical documents and adaptations have displayed Elizabeth as being all-powerful and sassy yet in this romance, she is anything but that. She is so concerned about what this man thinks of her that it allows her emotions to get the best of her from time to time and act impulsively.

Take for instance when Elizabeth discovers that Lettice and Robert have married... She immediately banishes Robert to a tower due to her rage and fury. Granted, she could have killed him and that would have been pretty nuts but still, when I think of Elizabeth, I think of the stoic woman at the end of the film Elizabeth. I think of the woman who shows no emotion on her face and chose to only have love for her country, not because it was forced upon her.

I did not feel this when towards any other avatars we looked at this semester. Perhaps it is because I learned a great deal more about Elizabeth in high school than I did about Julius Caesar or Richard III. Whenever someone attempts to challenge a certain view you have on a person or figure, it has become second nature for us to immediately deny that challenge because we as a society do not like change or the idea of being wrong.

Who knows? Maybe its just me but that is honestly the only explanation I have as to why I did not like this reading.