Gloriana: Screening Elizabeth I in Shekhar Kapur's "Elizabeth" (1998)

The director's historical drama sheds important light on the human behind the icon that was the Virgin Queen.

It’s that time again: time for me to launch a new series here Omnivorous. Given how much I’ve been enjoying Starz’s Becoming Elizabeth, I thought it might be fun to take a look at some of the other pop culture representations of one of England’s most beloved and famous queens. That being the case, where better to start than with Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film Elizabeth, which helped to catapult Cate Blanchett to her well-deserved international fame. To this day, it remains one of my favorite films, and it is certainly my favorite film representation of the Virgin Queen. 

I first encountered Elizabeth around the year 2000. I’d recently read Alison Weir’s magnificent biography of the Virgin Queen (it’s one of the best out there, IMHO), and I happened to catch this movie playing on TV. From the moment that I saw Blanchett, I knew that she was Elizabeth and that, whatever liberties the film might take with the historical record, that this was likely the closest we were ever going to get to seeing her brought to life on the big screen. 

Make no mistake, though: the film is, shall we say, liberal with history. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve seen another historical drama that plays so fast and loose with the facts (and that’s saying something, considering how much I love this particular genre). Though I won’t belabor the point, I do have to single out two especially egregious flaws. First, Robert Dudley would never have betrayed Elizabeth in the way that this film says that he did; he might have grown frustrated with her and had his fair share of foibles, but he was unswervingly loyal. Second, Elizabeth would never have forced her beloved William Cecil into retirement. In fact, he stayed in her service until his death, and she actually cared for him in his final days (his son, Robert, would become a crucial part of her later reign and paved the way for her successor, James I, to take the throne).

However, I do think that, historical inaccuracies aside, Elizabeth does provide some insight into its subject (as much as such a thing is possible given the many centuries that separate the woman Elizabeth Tudor from the moment of the film’s production). To begin with, there’s Blanchett. As Elizabeth A. Ford and Deborah C. Mitchell argue in their book Royal Portraits in Hollywood: Filming the Lives of Queens, she is, quite simply, “so right–physically, intellectually, spiritually–that she seems to be channeling Elizabeth.” Indeed, in all of the years since I don’t think I’ve seen anyone inhibit the role of Elizabeth I with quite as much ease as Blanchett (though both Judi Dench and Helen Mirren come close, in Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth I, respectively). There’s something about her aquiline nose, or perhaps her generally angular features, that allows her to seamlessly blend into the role. Simply put, she is Elizabeth. 

For that matter, despite the inaccuracies taken with his character, I do have to say that Joseph Fiennes does a very good job at capturing what we know of Dudley, one of the most charming and sexually appealing men of his generation. And, though Leicester never betrayed Elizabeth in the way he is shown doing in the film, it is true that he was, like the other members of his family, hungry for power and influence. He also wasn’t averse to dalliances with Elizabeth’s ladies; in fact, he would go on to marry (after the suspicious death of his first wife) one of his queen’s own cousins, Lettice Knollys (the daughter of Elizabeth’s maternal cousin Catherine Carey). There’s little doubt that he did feel at least a bit of bitterness toward his beloved that she was so unwilling to commit to him, and it’s also very possible that, as is the case with much of the film, Kapur is drawing in elements of other betrayals Elizabeth suffered during her long life. It seems to me that there’s more than a little bit of the Essex rebellion in Dudley’s behavior (in a final twist, Essex was in fact Leicester’s stepson and the son of Elizabeth’s cousin and arch-rival Lettice). In any case, Fiennes’ Leicester captures the right mixture of beauty, avarice, and desire that were such a key part of his story.

Then there is the infamous plot that provides the narrative spine for the film, which sees Christopher Eccleston’s Duke of Norfolk planning to topple Elizabeth from her throne. To be sure, there was just such a plot, though by all accounts Norfolk was far more bumbling than his cinematic counterpart. It is also true that Elizabeth faced a number of threats almost from the day she ascended the throne, particularly from the Catholic powers of Europe, most of whom saw her as either a heretic or a bastard (and often both). Elizabeth is replete with scenes filled with sinister and scheming clerics, brooding and ruthless nobles (to say nothing of Elizabeth’s sad and ailing elder sister, Mary), and murderous monks. In one particularly notable scene, Elizabeth is nearly assassinated by the Catholic zealot John Ballard, who stalks toward her. The scene is filled with menace, with the queen isolated and alone amidst soaring and cold stone, though she is saved by the timely arrival of one of her ladies. It is a close shave, though, and a reminder to Elizabeth of how precarious her life is.

Historians will be quick to note that many of the events depicted took place later in Elizabeth’s reign rather than the beginning but, on the film’s own terms, this hardly matters. Instead, it works precisely as it’s supposed to, i.e. as a drama that brings us close to understanding what it must have felt like to live in this world, where constant plots threatened to bring down the fledgeling queen and where one’s religious affiliations had (often deadly) political consequences. 

And then, of course, there is Elizabeth’s fateful decision at the end of the film to abandon her humanity in favor of becoming an icon her beleaguered people could believe in. Though it is impossible to say just why it was that she chose to remain a virgin–or at least to present herself that way to her subjects–the film gives us a plausible explanation. She did so because allowing herself to be led by her heart rather than her head led her perilously close to absolute ruin and, realizing that it was far better to become an icon than to die young, she made the choice to become something all of the people could believe in. In one of the film’s most notable scenes she stands with her faithful adviser and spymaster Francis Walsingham, gazing at a statue of the Virgin Mary, and their conversation is what convinces her that it is time to become the Virgin Queen. 

Just as importantly, however, Elizabeth also shows us the extent to which Elizabeth had to constantly negotiate with the male forces of the world in which she lived. Though the film may not, as Samiha Matin notes, reimagine femininity as such, it does nevertheless allow us to feel for the Virgin Queen as she slowly changes herself from the carefree young woman she was at the beginning to the icy, inhuman monument she is at the end. When we watch her beautiful red hair shorn off and replaced by a wig of a darker shade and gaze at her attendants bathing her skin with her famous white makeup, we can’t help but feel a pang at what she has given up. This is not the same woman we met earlier in the film cavorting at her house at Hatfield; this is something more akin to a goddess: stern, unyielding, beautiful but absolutely unattainable. 

Elizabeth as an icon.

It’s for this reason that her repudiation of her beloved Robert’s attempts to own her carries so much symbolic weight. Responding to his blandishment that she is still his Elizabeth she responds sharply, “I am not your Elizabeth. I am no man’s Elizabeth. And if you think to rule, you are mistaken. I will have one mistress here, and no master.” But, of course, the film–and the Renaissance world of which she was a part–has no real space for a female monarch, and it’s clear, both in the film and in real life, that Elizabeth internalized the rampant misogyny of her era. This was the woman who, after all, consistently expressed her own disdain for members of her own sex, even as she announced that she had the “heart and stomach of a king.” Whatever else it might do, Elizabeth does allow us to understand why and how Elizabeth emerged out of the seething cauldron of Renaissance politics. 

For all of its liberties, then, Kapur’s Elizabeth does get us closer towards a historical truth, even if it is not one which relies on anything resembling historical accuracy. While it might  be going a bit far to call it “a triumph of art over history,” as Ford and Mitchell do, it does have to be acknowledged that Kapur plays fast and loose with what we know of the past. It is more accurate to say that the film is a triumph of art as history.

And that, I think, is its most enduring legacy.