By Mary Christian
Published in SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, 2026.
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Abstract

This article examines depictions of Elizabeth I in two Irish-authored plays from the early twentieth century, Lady Gregory’s The Canavansand Shaw’s The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Both dramatists had, in earlier plays, used women as symbols to dramatize the plight of colonized Ireland and the struggle for independence. Their portrayals of Elizabeth, showing her as person, myth, and English icon, offered a more indirect commentary on Irish-English relations. Both plays borrowed from a variety of images of the Queen circulated in Ireland and England from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, ranging from grotesque monster to fairy queen. The dramatists use humor and irony to hold these worshipful and demonizing images at arm’s length, suggesting that Elizabeth’s symbolic personae are tools that can be used by shrewd communicators not only to buttress English authority, but also to subvert it.