page_title: Cultural depictions of Lady Jane Grey
section_title: Pre-19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Cultural depictions of Lady Jane Grey / Pre-19th century
caption_attribution_description: This image is a JPEG version of the original PNG image at File: Lady Jane Grey after Robert Smirke.png. Generally, this JPEG version should be used when displaying the file from Commons, in order to reduce the file size of thumbnail images. However, any edits to the image should be based on the original PNG version in order to prevent generation loss, and both versions should be updated. Do not make edits based on this version. &#160;See here for more information. Lady Jane Grey, 1537-53. Engraving by H.K. Bourne after R. Smirke, RA. 15.3 x 11.5cm (6 x 4 1/2"). National Portrait Gallery (RN25864). National Portrait Gallery: NPG D11270 While Commons policy accepts the use of this media, one or more third parties have made copyright claims against Wikimedia Commons in relation to the work from which this is sourced or a purely mechanical reproduction thereof. This may be due to recognition of the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, allowing works to be eligible for protection through skill and labour, and not purely by originality as is the case in the United States (where this website is hosted). These claims may or may not be valid in all jurisdictions. As such, use of this image in the jurisdiction of the claimant or other countries may be regarded as copyright infringement. Please see Commons:When to use the PD-Art tag for more information.See User:Dcoetzee/NPG legal threat for original threat and National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Foundation copyright dispute for more information. This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing.
context_page_description: Lady Jane Grey, 16th-century claimant to the English throne, has left an abiding impression in English literature and romance. The limited amount of material from which to construct a source-based biography of her has not stopped authors of all ages filling the gaps with the fruits of their imagination.
context_section_description: In Elizabethan ballads, Jane's story is a tale of innocence betrayed.  In one ballad Lady Jane, in denouncing her executioner Queen Mary I, declares "For Popery I hate as death / and Christ my saviour love."  Jane is now not only an innocent but a martyr to the Protestant cause, and appears as such in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. On no certain evidence, she was also idealised in another way by Roger Ascham as noble and scholarly. But the greatest Elizabethan tribute to her came in Thomas Chaloner's Elegy, published in 1579.  Here she is peerless in her learning and beauty, comparable only with Socrates for her courage and quiet resignation in the face of death.  He even suggests that she was pregnant at the time of her execution, an assertion that appears nowhere else, presumably to make Mary, the great villain of the piece, appear all the more heartless.
  From martyrology and poetry, Jane finally made it on to the stage in the early Jacobean period in Sir Thomas Wyatt by John Webster and Thomas Dekker, where she takes on the role of a tragic lover. The play was probably largely based on an earlier lost play called Lady Jane. This theme was taken up later in the century by John Banks, a Restoration playwright, in his Innocent Usurper: or, the Death of Lady Jane Grey.  Here Jane is only persuaded to accept the crown after her husband, Lord Guilford Dudley, threatens to commit suicide if she does not. First printed after the Glorious Revolution, there is also a strong anti-Roman Catholic dimension to Banks's play, which presumably appealed to the audiences of the day.
  More plays and poems followed in the 18th century, when a small Janeite industry began to take shape.  In the early Hanoverian period she takes on the role of political heroine as well as martyr, scholar and tragic lover, putting down her Plato and taking up the crown only to save English Protestantism. The 1715 she-tragedy entitled Lady Jane Grey: A Tragedy in Five Acts, by Nicholas Rowe, emphasizes the pathos of Jane's fate. 
  Jane's growing reputation was not just a popular phenomenon.  Gilbert Burnet, Whig historian and self-publicist, described Jane, with considerable exaggeration, as 'the wonder of the age' in his History of the Reformation, a phrase subsequently taken up by Oliver Goldsmith his History of England, published in 1771.  Even the sober David Hume was seduced by the tragedy of Jane and Dudley.
caption: Depiction of Lady Jane Grey being asked to take the throne, as imagined in the Romantic era. Engraving after Robert Smirke
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