Gower's Boat, Richard's Barge, and the true story of the 'Confessio Amantis': text and gloss.

At the cusp of a new millennium we still entertain and reassure ourselves with the spectacle of princely patrons engaged in mutually rewarding relationships with genius poets. The Academy Award-winning Shakespeare in Love (1998) depicted not only the playwright's romantic escapades but also his successful (if inadvertent) winning of the patronage of an acerbic, penetrating Queen Elizabeth, who quite literally intervenes with--or perhaps supervenes--the authorities on his behalf. The queen is on screen for 8 of the film's 122 minutes, during which time she sees through Shakespeare's disguises ("Next time you come to Greenwich, come as yourself, and we will speak some more"), makes a de facto commission ("And tell Shakespeare something more cheerful next time, for Twelfth Night"), and hints at further patronage ("we will speak some more"). (1) At the same time the queen is obviously moved by the playwright's genius, moved so far as to attend the premiere of Romeo and Juliet at the Curtain Theatre--an unlikely if amusing venture into the playwright's own world--and to acknowledge that the play does capture "the very truth and nature of love." Though Elizabeth never relinquishes her stern regal bearing in the playwright's presence, we are meant to perceive her praise of Romeo as the only possible response to his artistic gifts; likewise we are meant to see in her attentions a necessary and "historical" condition of Shakespeare's own rise to preeminence. At the end of the film, Shakespeare's romance is over--his beloved has been dragged off to Virginia by her new husband--but his literary career, having received a royal boost, is just beginning.

This tendentious summary of Shakespeare in Love occupies the place in

the New Historicist essay traditionally given over to the anecdote,

the narration of some obscure or little-known historical episode

resurrected so as to be read against or alongside a different-but-similar

moment in a canonical text. Considerable criticism has focused on the

place of the anecdote in historicist criticism, and its relationship to