Although the influence of Queen Elizabeth I on the literature of the period that bears her name has been much discussed, her own status as an author has been less recognized. Critics have traced her role as subject of or inspiration for such works as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590-1596), William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1600), and some Petrarchan sonnets but have generally considered her as the author of only a few mediocre poems and translations. A full sense of Elizabeth's literary role in the Elizabethan period, however, must include not just the works by men who shaped and were shaped by her image but also the speeches and letters that she carefully crafted with great rhetorical skill and, in some cases, revised for publication. In a period when the oration and the epistle were highly valued literary genres, her command of those forms--through which she established...