‘In Her I See/All Beauties Frailty’: Mirroring Helen of Troy and Elizabeth I in Thomas Heywood’s The Iron Age and The Second Part of The Iron Age (c.1596/c.1610)

Abstract

In this article I argue that Helen of Troy in Thomas Heywood’s The Iron Age I & II can be read as a figure for Elizabeth I during her final decade. Heywood appropriates multiple sources to emphasise images of age, decay and death which connect Helen and Elizabeth by evoking concerns that were prevalent as the Queen aged. Whether we date the plays as late Elizabethan or early Jacobean, Heywood was writing at a time when people were thinking (in anticipation or retrospection) about Elizabeth’s death and the end of the Tudor line. In The Iron Age II, Heywood shows Helen lament the loss of her fabled beauty when she gazes into a mirror and sees an aged face that resembles Elizabeth’s. With her despair compounded by her guilt over the Trojan War, Helen turns to suicide and Heywood ends the entire Age pentalogy with a glance to the succession. Ultimately, in his treatment of Helen, Heywood subversively brings to centre stage images that Elizabeth (and her government) had tried to quash and opens up new forums for political commentary at London’s popular theatres.