Philippa Gregory The Queen's Fool Analysis

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The story of The Queen’s Fool by Philippa Gregory vividly brought to life the ideas, characters, and fears of the 1550s that resulted from the fierce rivalry between King Henry III’s daughters, Elizabeth and Mary Tudor. It followed both women through the eyes of the psychic “holy fool”, Hannah “Green”, as they battled over the English throne. The aging, unappealing Mary Tudor was nearly the exact reverse of her youthful and lively younger sister. While Mary sought to stomp out all Protestants and return England to Catholicism, Elizabeth only wanted to end the mass murder her sister brought upon their country. The characters and environment that Gregory illustrated was strikingly parallel to that of 16th century London; especially when it came …show more content…
One in particular claimed that the Earth itself was the center of the “universe” while the sun and all the planets revolved around it. Scholar John Dee introduced this concept to Hannah “Green” after he noticed her inspecting “a beautiful strange brass instrument” set in his window (Gregory 140). Mr. Dee describes the instrument as a representation of how the “heavens” (or planets) were created and set in motion by God to revolve around Earth. This motion, as said by Dee, was started by the outermost ring of the globe called the primum mobile. The device that he referred to was known as an armillary sphere, inspired by Ptolemy’s geocentric (or earth-centered) view of the universe (Rogers 15). It was common belief during the 16th century that the primum mobile itself was “the physical origin of life, motion, and time” and “[determined] the natural operation of the universe” (“Primum Mobile” 3). In addition to astronomy, Gregory referred to medical and health-related knowledge of that time; this particularly included the belief in “water humors”. Some time after Hannah’s future husband, Daniel Carpenter, flees England to study “the art of surgery and pharmacopeia” in Venice. These studies, according to Daniel, include the “flow of the humors around the body… from the rise and fall of the tides to the beat of the heart” (Gregory 255). Medical schools around this time still taught ideas created by doctors and physicians hundreds of years prior to the 16 century. These ideas included the belief that the body’s health was entirely dependent on the four “humors” - blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm - that were said to bring about illness if not kept in balance (Ball 1). This relates to Elizabeth’s previously mentioned diagnosis of “watery humors”, which according to medical knowledge of the time, was

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