Head to head: did it matter that Elizabeth I was a woman?

Who can fail to be awed by the magnificent portraits of Elizabeth I: the Armada, the Ditchley, and the Rainbow, to name but a few? They surely surpass even the glorifying images of Henry VIII by Holbein, and of Charles I by Van Dyck, in their power to impress and fascinate. This not only reflects the fact that the costume of elite Renaissance women was even more flamboyant and sumptuous than that of men; Elizabeth’s portraits also draw us in with complex symbolism, requiring interpretation like texts. Meanwhile, in literary texts themselves Elizabeth generated a plethora of personae: as Thomas Dekker wrote in a court prologue of 1599, ‘some call her Pandora, some Gloriana, some Cynthia, some Delphoebe