While much of the world has been gripped by the story of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, historical TV fans have been immersing themselves in some even more vicious royal drama from almost five centuries ago. BBC Four is currently rebroadcasting Elizabeth R, the landmark BBC series about the first Queen Elizabeth. Starring the unforgettable Glenda Jackson, Elizabeth R is celebrating its 50th anniversary. It defined an image of Elizabeth that is still with us today. Watching it now at a distance, its 1970s idea of the 1570s leaving its mark on the priorities and gender politics of the production, it serves as a good reminder of how every generation fits history to its own requirements.
Elizabeth R was a sequel to the 1970 series The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Both consisted of six “television plays”, each 85 minutes long and created by a different writer and director. With a few reservations – such as a daft scene in which Elizabeth nearly marries Robert Dudley, but they miss each other at church – historians were impressed. “Nonsense there was, but much less than in any novel I can think of on the period and in some supposed works of history,” wrote John Kenyon in the Observer. As for the viewing public, they loved it. The series was such a hit that, just one week after it had finished, the BBC repeated the whole thing.
The history of Tudor royalty has always been irresistible material for film and TV, because it is innately trashy. It is full of sex, violence and elaborate plotting. One reliable way to make historical drama is to dress up soap opera in period costume: then audiences feel that watching it is virtuous, even educational. No one did soap opera quite like the Tudors.
Since the earliest days of the screen, film-makers have known this and created their Elizabeths accordingly. The 1912 French film Les Amours de la Reine Élisabeth, as its title suggests, focused on her love life. It is memorable for its death scene, in which Sarah Bernhardt, as Elizabeth, spends a full two and a half minutes emoting silently in front of a strategically placed pile of cushions – before stretching out her arms and collapsing face-first into them. Audiences of the time wept, though nowadays you may be forgiven a snort of laughter as she face-plants into the upholstery.
In the 1930s and 40s, when the world moved towards war, a patriotic Elizabeth was required. Flora Robson played Elizabeth twice in Fire Over England (1937) and The Sea Hawk (1940). Robson’s earthy, witty and surprisingly vulnerable performances stole the show. Her role in The Sea Hawk was intended to persuade the United States to join the second world war. “When the ruthless ambitions of a man threaten to engulf the world, it becomes the solemn obligation of all free men to affirm that the Earth belongs not to any one man, but to all men,” Elizabeth says. She is talking about Philip of Spain, but audiences were clearly supposed to think of Adolf Hitler.
Bette Davis also played Elizabeth twice. In The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), she was rather mannered and self-conscious. Sixteen years later, though, she aced it in The Virgin Queen (1955), playing Elizabeth in a love triangle with Walter Raleigh (Richard Todd) and Bess Throckmorton (a young Joan Collins). Davis gave her 1950s fans exactly the postwar Elizabeth they wanted: an ageing woman, much sharper than everyone around her, who knows men like Raleigh would rather romance pretty young girls and is immensely disappointed in them. All About Eve, but in a ruff. It was Robson and Davis’s older, edgier Elizabeths that lodged in the imagination: not the likes of Jean Simmons in Young Bess (1953), too ingenuous and too pretty to stand out from the generic princess crowd.
When Jackson took the role on in 1971, she took all that was great about Robson and Davis’s performances – the intelligence, the wit, the core of vulnerability – and expanded the role into a lifelong journey of a woman fighting with her duty and creating her own identity. This was a new Elizabeth for the 1970s: not just wronged by men and cynical about it, but actively furious.
“I have trusted no man since I was eight,” she says, referencing her father’s execution of Catherine Howard. “First there is trust, then passion, then death.” Yet the key to Jackson’s performance, and why it still works so well today, is that it does not reduce her to a cliched “girlboss” feminist. This Virgin Queen is sexually driven – with a weakness for suitors who are nowhere near good enough for her. Elizabeth’s desire and her political judgment keep interfering with each other, as they did for her father, and as they so often do for royals. One minute, she is sharp and strategic. The next, she is raging over some unworthy man who has, entirely predictably, been a shit. This is what TV executives today would describe as “relatable”.
For many, this was Elizabeth. “Henceforward Queen Elizabeth will always be Glenda Jackson in the mind’s eye, but there are worse things than that,” wrote Kenyon. Of course, subsequent generations have continued to reinvent her. In the 1980s, it was Miranda Richardson as the hilarious, brattish Queenie in Blackadder. In the 1990s, it was Cate Blanchett, playing a far less cocksure queen in Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth. Like her Generation X and millennial audience, Blanchett’s Elizabeth finds herself in a world where all the power is already taken – and she must fight for her place.
No doubt future generations will create their own Elizabeths. History aside, she is effectively now a copyright-free franchise. Even half a century on, though, Jackson’s totemic yet intimate performance in Elizabeth R still burns bright. “You must let the queen rule you in this, not the woman,” the Earl of Sussex tells her when she is considering whom to marry. The contradictions between duty and desire still create drama for royals today.
Alex von Tunzelmann is a historian and screenwriter. Her next book is Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History
The photograph with this article was changed on 22 March 2021, to one showing Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R, instead of in her role as Elizabeth in the film Mary, Queen of Scots, also 1971.
