The Death of Elizabeth I Elizabeth 1, the Death of Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Funeral Practices Published file. Updated metadata proofed swapped the desc and figDescs to be correct. added two figures and image citations. Added date, pubPlace, and publisher tags to sources Added Shakespeare’s Life and Times database to Best sources. Fixed mistakes Created File Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Funeral Procession of Queen Elizabeth. The hand drawn image depicts a horse with velvet trappings led by two attendants, followed by the Sergeant of the Vestry, the Children of the Chapel Royal, and others. Drawing possibly by William Camden. Courtesy British Library. CC-BY.4.0.

On the 24th of March 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died after ruling England for 44 years. After several months of decline and eventual refusal to eat or speak, she died at Richmond Palace after a few days in a coma. She was 69 years old and, against the odds, had managed to rule England as a single female monarch for many decades. Her death affected the entire nation, the balance of power in Europe, but also the theater: Shakespeare and his company changed patrons from the Lord Chamberlain to the new King, and they changed the topics for new plays written after 1603.

The Funeral

The Queen’s funeral occurred about five weeks later, commencing on April 28th. It featured an enormous amount of pageantry, with more than 1,000 mourners walking behind the carriage transporting her body, which was sealed in a coffin. Many more thousands of citizens lined the streets.

Chronicler John Stowe records that her mourners raised such a general sighing, groaning and weeping as the like hath not been seen or known in the memory of man. Extensive drawings were made of the occasion, the some of the first ever of an English royal funeral. The drawing below shows some of the members of the procession, including Children of the Chapel Royal, who were some of the boy players whom Hamlet complains about as the aery of children (2.2.39) in Shakespeare’s play.

The depiction of the procession offers valuable insight into Elizabethan funeral practices. The mourners depicted include both noblemen and commoners, as well as the clothes they wore, the arms carried by the men, and the trappings of the horses. It also shows Elizabeth’s effigy (a waxen image of the monarch) atop a chariot drawn by four horses and accompanied by barons with heraldic flags.

Her wooden coffin was covered in purple velvet, carried on a chariot drawn by four grey horses with black drapery. A carved effigy in colored wood was placed atop the coffin, while her actual body was encased in lead inside.

A chariot drawn by four horses, carrying the coffin covered in purple velvet. Funeral Procession of Queen Elizabeth. The canopy is carried by six knights, with Gentlemen Pensioners (the Queen’s ceremonial bodyguard). c. 1603. Drawing possibly by William Camden. Courtesy British Library Add. 35324. CC-BY.4.0.
Shakespeare and the Queen

According to Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s plays were admired by Elizabeth. He wrote in a dedicatory poem in the First Folio (1623): Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were To see thee in our waters yet appear And make those flights upon the banks of Thames That so did take Eliza and our James. (On Shakespeare, lines 71–74) Scholars have no direct record of what Elizabeth I thought of Shakespeare’s plays, but the frequency of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men performing at court supports Jonson’s opinion. During the last ten years of Elizabeth’s reign, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were clearly the company most favored by the court, performing at court 32 times, compared to 37 performances by all other companies combined.

Key Print Sources Doran, Susan. Queen Elizabeth I. New York UP, 2003. Woodward, Jennifer. The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625. Boydell Press, 1997.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. The Death of Elizabeth I. Shakespeare’s Life and Times.Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/maturity/elizabeth.html. Accessed 19 Feb. 2023. Collinson, Patrick. Elizabeth I (1533–1603). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 5 Jan. 2012, DOI doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/8636. Elizabeth I. Westminster Abbey, https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/royals/elizabeth-i. Accessed 19 Feb. 2023.
Image Sources Funeral Procession of Queen Elizabeth. 1603. The British Library. Shelfmark Add. 35324. https://www.imagesonline.bl.uk/asset/11780/. A Horse Trapped with Velvet, led by Two Attendants; the Sergeant of the Vestry and Children of the Chapel Royal. n.d. MS. The British Library.