In this revisionist study, Frye examines Elizabeth I's struggle for authority through the representation of her female body. She focuses on three representational crises: the London coronation of 1559, the Kenilworth entertainments of 1575, and the publication of The Faerie Queene in 1590. In ways which varied with social class and historical circumstance, London merchants, the Protestant faction, courtly artists, and artful courtiers sought to stabilize their own gendered identities by constructing the queen within the "natural" definitions of the feminine as passive and weak. Elizabeth and those closely identified with her interests countered these representations, evolving a number of strategies -- including her elaborate iconography and a mythic biography -- through which to express her political control in terms of the ownership of her body. The more authoritative her image became, the more vigorously it was contested in a process which this study examines and consciously perpetuates.