Why Elizabeth I is the perfect icon for every era
In common with 99 per cent of the population, I have frequent dreams featuring the Queen. Sometimes we are sharing a joke over a glass of sherry, or I am visiting her in hospital, and once or twice my trousers inadvertently collapse in her presence. But what makes these fantasies a little different from yours, is that my dream queen is not the reigning Elizabeth, but her forebear, the first of her name, Gloriana, resplendent in brocade, ruffs and pearls, her hair flaming red and her face chalk white.
I guess this derives from a lifetime of staring at her – both in those astonishing propaganda portraits painted during her lifetime, and in her many incarnations on screen. And what a multitude of images there are, what a variety of angles exist from which to perceive or imagine the Virgin Queen. In this respect she is surely unique. Other female monarchs are often remembered through one dominating myth: Boadicea fighting the Romans from a chariot; fat, sad Queen Anne and her tragic stillbirths; saucy young Victoria morphing into a plump, dour old widow; sexually rapacious Catherine the Great. But Elizabeth I appears in many guises, as mutable as she is enduring.
One of the most persistent and pervasive is of course her mid-reign duel with Mary, Queen of Scots, to be revisited in Josie Rourke’s film with Margot Robbie as Elizabeth and Saoirse Ronan as Mary – a version that follows Friedrich Schiller’s play of 1800 in fabricating a face-to-face confrontation at Fotheringhay. This follows much the same line taken in the Seventies by Glenda Jackson (versus Vanessa Redgrave) in a similarly focused film and by Eileen Atkins (versus Sarah Miles) in Robert Bolt’s play Vivat! Vivat Regina, as well as by Donizetti in his marvellous opera Maria Stuarda.
Yet every modern era has had other Elizabeths to offer too. In 1937, in Fire Over England, Flora Robson presented her as a stiffly gracious headmistress, worried by the Spanish Armada. Two years later, influenced by a revisionist biographical study by Lytton Strachey, Bette Davis was cast as a queen fit for a sentimental “woman’s picture”, showing her as a pitiable victim of her own passions in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex – a line also taken in another great Donizetti opera, Roberto Devereux, to be revived by Welsh National Opera in the spring.
The Seventies and Eighties went in another direction, translating Elizabeth into a camp icon, as the queer culture became transfixed with the withered old crone, in absurd bewejelled splendour, hiding her rotten teeth and parchment skin behind layers of make-up. In Derek Jarman’s fantasy Jubilee, such a figure, played by Jenny Runacre, becomes a sort of spectral presence, led by Shakespeare’s Ariel and the necromancer John Dee through a dystopian landscape of urban punk anarchy; in Sally Potter’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando, Quentin Crisp plays her in drag, but instead of milking the impersonation for laughs or grotesquerie, he infuses her with a hauntingly melancholic dignity that encapsulates the pathetic isolation of her last years. This Elizabeth is living dead, silent and impassive as her royal barge makes its way down the Thames.
At the other end of the spectrum is Miranda Richardson’s Queenie in Blackadder II. Skittish, capricious, petulant and terribly bored with court protocol, if only too ready to take advantage of her regal prerogatives, this is a great comic performance that has probably had more impact on the younger generation’s perceptions of Elizabeth I than any other.
More recent portrayals include Judi Dench’s humanising (and Oscarwinning) cameo in Shakespeare in Love, showing her as a shrewd wit with an appetite for fun, while both Helen Mirren and Cate Blanchett have emphatically suggested a woman for the modern era – smart, independent, determined, energetic, sexually aroused and ready to beat men at their own games.
What gets left out? Rarely glimpsed is Elizabeth the brilliant young humanist intellectual of her years in waiting at Hatfield, or the vicious and vulnerable paranoiac, terrified of conspiracies against her, of John Guy’s superb biography of 2016. The portraits are always single-faceted: a psychologically comprehensive picture of the woman never emerges from any of these artefacts, though Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana – a sort of pageant of her career written to honour the 1953 coronation – had a partially successful attempt. But what does the reality matter? These actors allow me to dream on. Mary Queen of Scots is out in UK cinemas now