1. Thomas Drant. Two Sermons Preached (London 1570), K2r.
2. Leah S.Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 97. Perhaps there is even a sly nod to the contrast between this nostalgic vision and the reality of the present when Portia says to Nerissa, “If I live to be as old as Sybilla, I will die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtain’d by the manner of my father’s will” (I.ii.106–8). As my student Francine Koenig pointed out to me, this allusion to a chaste but ancient Sybil reflects the reality of Queen Elizabeth’s image in the 1590s: in her 60s and unmarried, she was an aging Virgin Queen.
3. Linda Shenk, Learned Queen: The Image of Elizabeth I in Politics and Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
4. John Hayward, The Beginning of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1636).
5. Quoted in Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch, Elizabeth I and Her Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 642.