Her majesty

Marilyn Murphy Meardon channels Queen Elizabeth I in Words

by Bill Rodriguez

IN HER OWN WORDS. Written and performed by Marilyn Murphy Meardon. The Women's History Month performances of In Her Own Words will be presented on March 3 at 7 p.m. at the Providence Public Library, 225 Washington St.; on March 4 at 7 p.m. at Newport Public Library, 300 Spring St.; and on March 16 at 7:30 p.m. at Brown University's Crystal Room, 194 Meeting St. It will also be presented on April 6 at 7 p.m. at the Cross Mills Public Library, 4417 Old Post Rd., Charlestown. The Brown University Women Writers Project archives are at http://www.wwp.brown.edu/.

The person introducing her most gracious majesty is interrupted by a commotion from the back of the Greenville Public Library meeting room. In sweeps a formidable sight, complaining about just having been annoyed by a pompous Polish ambassador -- whom she annoyed right back, in Latin. She wears a wig of tight henna curls, and chalk-white makeup with baby doll rouge spots. Pearls drip down her forehead and cascade beneath that familiar ruff collar and over her bejeweled bodice, a black velvet hoop gown billowing around her like clouds at a resurrection.

She is Elizabeth Tudor, Queen Elizabeth I to history, the last of the scrappy Tudor royals and the fiercely willed subject of In Her Own Words, a one-person performance by Marilyn Murphy Meardon. Written and compiled by Meardon, it was directed by Anne Brady.

Two years before her death at age 70, the queen addresses her audience as though we are visiting dignitaries and members of her court. And she certainly has plenty to say, as has been made evident by the on-line archives of the Brown University Women Writers Project, which is sponsoring the series of performances around the state. In March, Women's History Month, two evenings are scheduled in Providence and one in Newport.

Her words are drawn primarily from letters and speeches. Stern and proper but not stuffy, the queen regales us with accounts of intrigues and court battles as bloody as any in the field. We get to see both the compassionate woman who enacted the first "poor laws," and the severe ruler who sentenced to death for rebellion a "maddeningly handsome" young earl she had taken under her wing.

The monarch doesn't exactly let her hair down. But she does share her fears and apprehensions as well as glories from the unusually lengthy 45-year reign, 1558-1603, that a flourishing Renaissance age was named after. This is sometimes the stuff of high drama. Although the moment flashes by quickly, we get the poignant image of the 14-year-old Elizabeth weeping with her younger brother Edward as they cling to each other at the news of the death of their father, the frightful Henry VIII. The nine-year-old Edward VI was to die of tuberculosis six years later, but before the first Elizabethan was to come into her own she would have to wait out two anxious months in the Tower of London. "Much suspected of me, nothing proven can be," the teenager scratches on a window pane with a diamond ring before being absolved of suspicions.

Understandably, Elizabeth turned a jaundiced eye toward marriage, since her father, married six times, was in the habit of using the chopping block as his divorce court. When she was three, her father had her mother, Anne Boleyn, beheaded (for alleged adultery and incest, though Elizabeth discretely doesn't give details). Nevertheless, the Virgin Queen did want to marry, although affairs of state proved to be jealous competition.

We get a humorous glimpse of the situation as she describes one suitor as her "pock-marked, short-fingered frog." Still, the Duc d'Alencon, the 26-year-old son of Catherine de Medici, was the last chance for a queen who was 46, so she wept for weeks when he was killed in battle. We learn that Sir Robert Dudley, her privy counselor, knew that the queen was attracted to him, despite his being married. Her favor made him arrogant enough to disobey her direct command, accepting a profitable governor-generalship in the Netherlands. Were left to wonder with her whether the mysterious death of his wife really was a suicide, as a court eventually judged.

The most stirring moment Elizabeth relates is when she visits her troops at Tilbury in 1588, when the imminent defeat of the Spanish armada is no more than an Anglican prayer. She makes clear that she is not there for her "recreation or disport," but to face death with them. "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king," she declares to her soldiers.

Although the emotionally charged episodes come and go too rapidly to reach us deeply, Meardon certainly makes this a satisfying theatrical experience. She inhabits the monarch as vividly as she fills Kathleen McQuillan-Hoffman's dramatic gown. History has come to convincing life.