"To the Queen" (or"To The Queen by the players") is a short 18 line poem praisingQueen Elizabeth I attributed toWilliam Shakespeare. It was included in 2007 byJonathan Bate in his complete Shakespeare edition for theRoyal Shakespeare Company.[1]
The poem, described by Bate as having been written on "the back of an envelope", was probably composed as anepilogue for a performance of a play in the presence of the queen. Bate believes it was created to be read afterAs You Like It was given at court onShrove Tuesday in February 1599. American scholars William Ringler and Steven May discovered the poem in 1972 in the notebook of a man called Henry Stanford, who is known to have worked in the household of theLord Chamberlain.[citation needed] Other scholars have since contested the attribution to Shakespeare.
The complete poem goes as follows:
As the dial hand tells o'er
The same hours it had before,
Still beginning in the ending,
Circular account still lending,
So, most mighty Queen we pray,
Like the dial day by day
You may lead the seasons on,
Making new when old are gone,
That the babe which now is young
And hath yet no use of tongue
Many a Shrovetide here may bow
To that empress I do now,
That the children of these lords,
Sitting at your council boards,
May be grave and aged seen
Of her that was their fathers' queen.
Once I wish this wish again,
Heaven subscribe it with "Amen".[2]
The attribution was first made—tentatively—to Shakespeare by Ringler and May, and was accepted in 2005 byJames S. Shapiro, who suggested that it might have been written as an epilogue for a court performance ofA Midsummer Night's Dream. He argued that the metre corresponded to Oberon's closing lines and the known published epilogue, spoken by Puck. Juliet Dusinberre later argued that it was more likely to have been used forAs You Like It, because it linked with themes in the play. She also suggested that it referred to a sundial inRichmond Palace, where she thinks the play may have been performed.[3] Bate accepted this view and stated that he was "99% certain" that it was by Shakespeare.[citation needed]
However, other scholars disagree. In 2009 Michael Hattaway argued that poem is more likely to be byBen Jonson, stating that,
Thetrochaic tetrameters used by Jonson, for example, in the songs fromLord Haddington's wedding masque, performed at court on Shrove Tuesday in 1608, and the satyr songs in his 1611Masque of Oberon are very close in style to the dial poem and have roughly the same proportion of feminine endings.[4]
He says that Shakespeare andThomas Dekker are also possible authors. Helen Hackett argued in 2011 that Dekker was the most likely author,
Dekker emerges as the strongest contender, for reasons including his recurrent preoccupation with dials and temporal cycles, his extensive composition of royal panegyric, the strong similarities between the Dial Hand poem and the epilogue to hisOld Fortunatus (also performed at court in 1599), and a verbal echo of the Dial Hand poem in hisWhore of Babylon (1605).[3]
Hackett states that, unlike Shakespeare, Dekker regularly wrote complimentary verse about Elizabeth and suggests that the poem was intended to be spoken at the end of his playThe Shoemaker's Holiday.
