But the greatest Elizabeth I may well be Cate Blanchett, who became an international star with her 1998 portrayal in Shekhar Kapur’s “Elizabeth.” Now she’s back on the throne in the second installment of Kapur’s potential trilogy, “Elizabeth: the Golden Age,” playing the monarch at middle age, in full command of her intellect, wit and subtle ability to manipulate her courtiers—if not in full control of her heart.
That the story of a queen dead for 400 years still captivates our imagination might be surprising—until you realize that here in the Colonies, we’re just coming to grips with the possibility of the first woman president. “Elizabeth really is the first woman to rule a country without a king in the modern world,” says Susan Ronald, author of “The Pirate Queen.” Highly educated and clever, she ruled over the expansion of England from a fragile, insolvent kingdom to an international power on the brink of empire.
Thanks to recent feminist history, “There has been a lot of study of the problems she faced and how she ruled surrounded by men,” says Oxford scholar Susan Doran, whose books on Elizabeth include “Monarchy and Matrimony.” The courtships of the maiden Queen by European princes were deftly turned into diplomatic tools—though the popularity of her story isn’t due just to romance and politics. There’s plenty of violence and intrigue—Elizabeth survived more than 20 assassination attempts—and the ongoing fascination with one of the most dysfunctional families in history. Her father beheaded her mum, Anne Boleyn, when Elizabeth was 3; at the age of 9, she witnessed her stepmother, Katherine Howard, dragged screaming by the hair down a palace corridor to her own death on the chopping block. And for fashionistas, there’s the enduring appeal of the costumes in the drama: all those ruffs, opulent detachable sleeves, the pads (called, hilariously, bumrolles). And all that bling—encrustations of gold, filigrees of silver, pearls the size of gumballs.
In “Elizabeth: the Golden Age,” the focus is definitely on the spectacle, though much of it is based on fact. On the eve of the Spanish Armada, the queen, on horseback and in armor, rallies her troops with the stirring words: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England, too.” And Elizabeth did indeed agonize over the fate of her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, refusing her advisers’ counsel to execute her rival until Mary’s treachery in a plot to seize the throne made her beheading inevitable.
But history doesn’t bear out a romance with Sir Walter Raleigh—played in the film by Clive Owen with a little too much swash to his buckle—though he was a favorite at court and Elizabeth was a notorious flirt. Nor do historians believe he tossed his cloak over a puddle at her feet, let alone defeated the Spanish Armada almost single-handedly, as he does here. And when Blanchett surveys her navy’s victory from a windswept clifttop, wearing a rippling white gown and bare feet, she looks as if she just wandered in from a scene in “Lord of the Rings.”
But the really juicy question about Elizabeth is always about sex. Was the Virgin Queen really a virgin? In Kapur’s first “Elizabeth,” she and nobleman Robert Dudley (Joseph Fiennes) made love behind gauzy bed curtains. During Elizabeth’s reign, rumors of a real affair with Dudley abounded but not from sources in a position to know the truth. “I think she was a sexual creature,” says Doran, “but if we’re talking intercourse, the likelihood is extremely remote. She couldn’t afford the scandal.” But historians do agree that Dudley was the love of her life. When she died in 1603, courtiers found his last letter to her in the jewel box next to her bed.
Scholars continue to mine new details about Elizabeth’s life. Antonia Fraser, whose landmark book on Marie Antoinette inspired Sofia Coppola’s film, is working on a biography of Elizabeth I, to be published in 2010. “I regard Queen Elizabeth I as The Great Subject and I’ve wanted to do it for 40 years, since I wrote ‘Mary Queen of Scots’,” she said in an e-mail. “Now I’ve actually got around to it, it’s even better than I thought. Politics, murder, sex—and an incomparable woman!” Elizabeth was a drama queen: the facts of her life are so tantalizing, you wonder why a moviemaker would bother to make anything up.
