Gloriana's Rule derives its title and contents from a specific event, an international conference organised by the Institute of English Studies (Universidade do Porto) in June 2003 to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of Elizabeth I. But this inception does not entail that the volume's rational and goals can be described as celebratory. Rather than embodying a panegyric, the present collection aims to contribute the ongoing interrogation of the myth of Gloriana, considered in its central representations as much as in some of the more peripheral forms ( in politics, language, and social practices) that have helped define the enduring cultural perception of an "Elizabethan golden age".