The death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 was greeted by an outpouring of
official proclamations, gossip-filled letters, tense diary entries,
diplomatic dispatches, and somber sermons. English poets wrote hundreds
of elegies to Elizabeth, and playwrights began bringing her onto the
stage. This book uses these historical and literary sources, including a
maid of honor's eyewitness account of the explosion of the Queen's
corpse, to provide a detailed history of Elizabeth's final illness and
death, and to show Elizabeth's subjects - peers and poets, bishops and
beggars, women and men - responding to their loss by remembering and
reconstructing their Queen.