CINEMA: A New Elizabethan Age

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Feb 23 1999 (IPS) - Karl Marx declared that “History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy; the second as farce.” Judging by the U.S. Academy Awards for 1998, the reign of Queen Elizabeth is both a tragedy and a farce – and is worthy of being repeated in modern-day cinema.

Two films about the days of Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603), the last of the Tudor monarchs, are out now, and both have garnered a huge share of the nominations for an “Oscar” at the Academy Awards ceremony next month.

‘Shakespeare in Love’, a romantic comedy distributed by Miramax, has 13 nominations while ‘Elizabeth’, a horrific rendition of Elizabeth’s early years distributed by Working Title, has seven. Both have been nominated for best picture of 1998.

Oddly, the two films boast many other parallels besides their Academy prestige and era. Both Queen Elizabeths – Cate Blanchett, the Australian star of ‘Elizabeth’, and Britain’s Judi Dench, who has a supporting role as the queen in ‘Shakespeare in Love’ – are also nominated for awards. Both films also feature the actors Geoffrey Rush (in ominous and comic modes) and the doe-eyed newcomer Joseph Fiennes.

Unfortunately, both films are bizarre and have enough anachronisms – often intentional misreadings of history – as to seem half-baked. Of the two, the amiable ‘Shakespeare’ is more at home combining modern winking with Elizabethan trappings, but both films are patchy at best.

‘Shakespeare’, directed by John Madden and written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, at least has fun with its premise: William Shakespeare (a less-than-credible Fiennes) has writers’ block as he tries to compose his new extravaganza, ‘Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter’.

He tries everything from psychiatry to dalliances with actresses, but only a love affair with the wealthy Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow), who dons mens’ clothing to act on the all-male Elizabethan stage, frees his muse.

The romantic comedy is pretty feeble but the script is outstanding. Fiennes and Paltrow, although attractive, are both a little wan for roles that require them to appear lusty and creative but ‘Shakespeare’ is full of sly jokes about the Elizabethan and modern theatre.

Rush, who plays Shakespeare’s quasi-agent, gets off some good lines about the theatre crowd, including his withering appraisal of Shakespeare’s importance to his production: “Oh, he’s just the writer.”

Ben Affleck nearly steals the show as Ned Alleyne, one of the more arrogant thespians of Shakespeare’s company while Rupert Everett plays a wry, doomed Christopher Marlowe – whose words, unlike Shakespeare’s, are on everyone’s lips.

The boisterous high spirits of ‘Shakespeare’ are complemented by Dench’s turn as a Queen Elizabeth who shrewdly judges all the court around her, acidly correcting Paltrow’s Viola about the reason why plays are performed by saying, “They are performed for me.”

By contrast, Cate Blanchett’s title character in ‘Elizabeth’ – who also gets Fiennes as a lover – has few diversions in her life. Director Shekhar Kapur depicts a dark England filled with plots as the Catholic Church tries to hold on to power following the death of Elizabeth’s half-sister, Queen Mary. Elizabeth, however, manages to restore England’s independence from the Pope with the assistance of her shadowy advisor, Francis Walsingham (Rush, again).

Just as Tom Stoppard contributed some good inside jokes about Elizabethan theatre to ‘Shakespeare’, so does Michael Hirst include all the major figures of Elizabeth’s rise in the 1540s and 1550s – Mary Geise, Lord Burleigh, Walsingham, even the Pope (played by John Gielgud) – in an intricate, betrayal-strewn plot.

Yet Kapur, who drew the wrath of Indian rebel-turned-politician Phoolan Devi for alleged inaccuracies in his film of her life, ‘Bandit Queen’, also muddles the chronology of Elizabeth’s life, turning the story into a one-sided account of Elizabeth’s reformist struggle against a demonised Catholicism.

Worse, Kapur plainly borrows from Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Godfather’ films to suggest how Elizabeth – like that cycle’s Michael Corleone – is corrupted and dehumanised by the killings and manouevres that Walsingham and others carry out in her name.

In one ludicrous moment, the standard ‘Godfather’ juxtaposition of religious ceremony and multiple murder is duplicated in the depiction of the defeat of Elizabeth’s enemies – a scene which only seems anachronistic and false.

Indeed, the casual viewer who watches both ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Elizabeth’ may wonder how Blanchett’s prematurely haggard queen becomes the wry, tired monarch played by Dench. It must seem awfully confusing when tragedy and farce play on separate cinema screens at the same time.