ELIZABETH R
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
Elizabeth I may have been the 16th Century's regal Mae West -- a sexual tease who liked to have herself surrounded by pretty boy studs. She loved playing the coquette, deliberating enticing her many suitors into believing they had a chance to do more than kiss her hand and bow. The royal vamping started early: at age 14, it was hotly rumored but never proven that she consummated an affair with Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour. (What's true is that their presumed sexless amorous play in and out of her bedroom would lead to his arrogance and death.) As her charms manifested, which included formidable intelligence (she spoke five languages) but not true physical beauty, she thrived on as well as encouraged false flattery. She selected "pets" and consorts like the Earl of Leicester (Robert Dudley, her "Sweet Robin") and the Earl of Essex (Robin's stepson) because they were unacceptable partners in marriage. She was steadfast throughout her child-bearing years her resolute position that she'd never marry -- no matter the long list of royal kings and princes who wished for marriagr circle of council, who seldom let up on the need for her to give birth to an heir. By all acceptable accounts, the queen remained a willed virgin out of survival instincts. The bastard offspring of Henry VIII and the beheaded Anne Boleyn -- scholar J.J. Scarisbrick calls the infant "the most unwelcome royal daughter in English history" -- Elizabeth became necessarily cognizant of her need to stay alive at the age of eight when her stepmother, the beloved Catherine Howard, was also sent to the chopping block. Shortly thereafter her brother Edward died prematurely and she had to outfox a conspiracy lead by her Catholic half-sister Mary Tudor's minions, who saw heresy in Elizabeth's Protestantism and mortal threat to Mary's reign and succession. Not above the self-serving, Elizabeth "converted" to Catholicism as a means by which she kept her head, though such fears never -- not even during the more secure portion of her reign -- dissipated: the murderous machinations of the Royals of Europe and her own court's hangers-on precluded the feeling of safety. Elizabeth understood that marriage and heir would not merely lessen her own position, but would increase the likelihood of successful plots against her. As Sir James Melville whispers into the queen's ear in part two of ELIZABETH R, "For now you are both king and queen, but if you are married, someone else would be king." Born out of the dread of the ax, this Elizabeth, like Claudius some fifteen centuries before, survived by the wisdom of political acrobatics.
As Elizabeth, Glenda Jackson benefits from the miniseries format and the lack of media-recorded impressions; there's no shortage of time to watch her grow from lion's cub about to be devoured by prey to lioness -- a feline whose ferocity ruled England for forty five years -- and no film or tape or voice recordings to permit petty criticism. Well, maybe this one little quibble: she's long in the tooth to attempt to play the queen as teenager -- she looks a tad ridiculous trying to, and often she resembles Washington political writer Elizabeth Drew, irregular teeth, bad epidermis and all. But the moment Jackson starts to outwit her conspirators and then dons the title with its powers of governance, any misgivings are wiped out, any comparisons to Flora Robson or Bette Davis sent straight away to the trash heap. Though Jackson's got the peremptory gestures, the roaring fearsome voice and hardy physique for Imperialism -- and her preeminent hard-edged, semi-masculine aura helps magnify the imagery (you get the chills as you watch her pull back an arrow during a game of archery) -- she's agile enough as actress to pull off the coquettish games that were so integral a part of Elizabeth I. She convinces us that her beloved Robin and all the others were kept from the royal bed chamber, feats borne out of the queen's own unnamed fears about marriage. In ELIZABETH R, she confesses to Sussex, "I can't do it. Every day, I am more and more afraid." Supposedly an actual quote from the queen: "I hate the idea of marriage for reasons that I would not divulge to a twin soul." Publicly she vacillated between anger at courtiers' proposals and humor: when informed that Spain's Philip II in marriage could visit occasionally, and then only for a brief time, she replies: "In short, the perfect husband." Historians continue their fascination with her fears: some suggest that her doctor discovered a "woman's infirmity"; Ben Jonson the playwright believed she had "a membrana on her, which made her uncapable of man," and others surmise she could have suffered from Rokitansky's syndrome -- a very shallow vaginal canal and an underdeveloped uterus. (During her own time, the London gossip be that she had a child by Robin; in Catherine de Medici's court, as shown in part three of the series "Shadow of the Sun," a dwarf Elizabeth mocks rumor of the queen with "I am too narrow for a man.") Whatever the impediments to marriage, they're all guesses, and mine is that she recognized what sex had done to her family and suffered severe trepidation over the potential consequences; her public pride of virginity acted as shield by which she could protect herself. The six teleplays comprising the series smartly avoid any license to explication de texte but as one hears Jackson's queen periodically proclaim in vainglory her state of purity, it's more than a guess that the actress is using it as her character's nucleus.
Time has not much harmed the 1971 technique used for ELIZBAETH R: using mostly video tape, there are a few jarring moments of film used for the outdoor settings (this because of technical and lighting problems not yet ironed out for tape), and perhaps the studio sets themselves are too confining and overly dark, but it would only be a few years later when Herbert Wise, who directed the second part of ELIZABETH R entitled "The Marriage Game," would helm I, CLAUDIUS and perfect the use of video, calibrating the actors to the settings in such a way that, especially with Derek Jacobi's Claudius and Sian Phillip's Livia, the characterizations would not be three dimensional but a 3D-like effect occurs: these histsoric figures jump out at you, quelling the often irksome tape process while at the same time aggrandizing it. Keith Michell as the king in THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII opened the doors to this kind of intimate TV guide to traverse the maze of history, Jackson would bring the prestige of a great actress to the emerging miniseries genre, and Jacobi would become its ultimate pilot. Some of the casting in ELIZABETH R can vex you: as Mary Tudor, Daphne Slater is mea-culping like Martha Scott crossed as Jean Harris; David Collings the traitor Anthony Babington a male Maggie Smith; Michael Williams' Duke of Alencon about as appealing as the frog Elizabeth refers to him as; Stephen Murray as Francis Walsingham emblematic stereotyping; and Robert Hardy's Earl of Leicester and Robert Ellis' Earl of Essex far removed from what most of us would see as handsome beaux to the queen. Inflecting as sharp as a serpent's toothache, Vivian Pickles comes close to juvenilizing Mary, Queen of Scots: recalling Nancy Marchand, Pickles grates and you're not altogether sure if this is intended as fair view, or if that voice is being used as a means by which the character will be denied even a trace of sympathy. Pickles goes to her death with the class of a royal, and Hugh Whitemore's script of this episode, "Horrible Conspiracies," ends on the just the right notes of horror and rue. (The same year as ELIZABETH R, Pickles would costar with Jackson in John Schlesinger's modern soaper SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY, playing a liberal, pot-smoking mother of four.)
A few regrets: the series offers up little evidence of the explosion of the arts, especially the theatre and Shakespeare, that erupted during her reign. Thus, a separate chapter of her considerable achievements and what flourished as result would have been appreciated: Elizabeth attending a Bard production, reading or commenting on or even socializing with Marlowe or Spencer. (Sirs Francis Bacon and Walter Raleigh are included -- minimally.) While there are smidgens about commerce, trade, standardization of coinage, judicial reform, ruinous monopolies, these subjects are brought in as scene introductions, leading to the more urgent and dramatic matters of petitioning for a decision about marriage and heir, consoling bruised egos, battling over or preparing conspiracies, decreeing punishments for treachery and treason. (In "Horrible Conspiracies," Elizabeth demands a new killing device for Babington, and Richard Topcliffe, the Queen's chief executioner, tells Babs: "In such matters, I have the delicacy of a practiced seducer...the sword begins here...with the privities. Castrated, ripped up...bowelled alive...quartered yet still living. So many wonders await you...") Watching the series, you get the impression that she saved her wrath against Catholics only if conspirators, but history records that she regularly persecuted Catholics and Puritans alike, and tried to wipe out gypies. The defeat of Spanish Armada -- the basic subject of part five, "The Enterprise of England" -- is maladroit and confusing, and though this part's writer John Prebble attempts to make funny the details of England's would-be naval battles, they're exasperating. All of the writers -- John Hale ("The Lion's Cub"), Rosemary Anne Sisson ("The Marriage Game"), Julian Mitchell ("Shadow in the Sun"), Whitemore, Prebble and Ian Rodger ("Sweet England's Pride") -- have refrained from the heavier colloquialism as well as the lofty prattle of the time, in order to gain a wider audience, but no line is fakespeak: this is the vernacular of the educated using language as an instrument of precision, even when applied in a manner most craftily evasive.
Celebrating its silver anniversary, ELIZABETH R also celebrates its survival against our Pentium age of media gotcha; our manic destructive trashing hasn't reduced the magnitude of Jackson's portrayal, which remains luminous -- historically just and sonorous. And she accomplishes something else that astonishes in this era of special effects: she burrows through all the powdered and rouge grotesquery of the queen's smallpox-scarred last years; she conquers the horrors of Dawn Alcock's spot-on kabuki makeup. You could get easily transfixed by it, and by Elizabeth Waller's bejeweled wigs and progressively more majestic costumes, a few of them gaudily adorned with butterfly wings. But Jackson in character stays paramount: entrenched in her vision yet never overwhelmed by it, she's not about to let us forget that she's playing -- and becomes -- the absolute Gloriana. Like Derek Jacobi's in the triumphant I, CLAUDIUS, hers is a performance as the supreme example of the balance of artistry. Both renditions are history as art and art as history. Jackson's entitled to the superlative rarely earned -- magnificent.
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