England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy - Tapa dura

The authors of this work have handled most of the disparate mass of information with skill. (American Historical Review)

... the pictures wonderfully illustrate her incarnations. England's Elizabeth dazzles. (The Independent magazine)

Their book is an excellent example of a distinctly modern (indeed post modern) genre of biographical writing Dobson and Watson are balanced and incisive Jonathan Bate (The Sunday Telegraph)

England's Elizabeth is a scholarly, wide-ranging, lively and often witty book that will be read long after this quatercentenary year, which has provided its occasion, has passed. (Anne Barton, Guardian Unlimited)

a compelling book, energetically and often wittily written, and drawing on a wide range of media (History Today)

The presentation's most revealing movements range well beyond the field of Renaissance studies, endowing the book with an unusually broad appeal. (Sixteenth-Century Journal)

No monarch is more glamorous or more controversial than Elizabeth I. The stories by which successive generations have sought to extol, explain, or excoriate Elizabeth supply a rich index to the cultural history of English nationalism - whether they represent her as Anne Boleyn's suffering orphan or as the implacable nemesis of Mary, Queen of Scots, as learned stateswoman or as frustrated lover, persecuted princess or triumphant warrior queen. This book examines the many afterlives the Virgin Queen has lived in drama, poetry, fiction, painting, propaganda, and the cinema over the four centuries since her death, from the aspiringly epic to the frankly kitsch. Exploring the Elizabeths of Shakespeare and Spenser, of Sophia Lee and Sir Walter Scott, of Bette Davis and of Glenda Jackson, of Shakespeare in Love and Blackadder II, this is a lively, lavishly-illustrated investigation of England's perennial fascination with a queen who is still engaged in a posthumous progress through the collective pysche of her country.