sarah eve kelly

Is it too late to write a review of a movie that was released six years ago? Fair enough, then: I’ll write a review of a review.

Everyone who’s opened a sixth-grade history textbook knows that Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth is bullshit from beginning to end. And I say that not because it’s wrong per se, but because the story they concocted to replace what actually happened between 1554 and 1564 is so ridiculous. Truth may not be stranger than fiction, but it sure makes a better movie.

But the worst that reviewers seem to be able to come up with is that it’s “confusing” as a film. Even those who give it a bad review take what is warped into the film as writ from the point of view of English history. The particular bone I have to pick, however, is with Roger Ebert, who gave it 3.5 stars in the Chigaco Sun-Times.

The man should know better!

All right, so perhaps most people don’t know that the title of 1st Baron Burghley was most emphatically not a consolation prize for William Cecil’s forced retirement (he continued to serve her for twenty-eight years following his promotion to the peerage, to his death at age 78), although positing that the scene was “truly touching” is almost beyond belief. And maybe he didn’t know that Francis Walsingham was almost unknown to Elizabeth before he witnessed the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in 1572 as England’s ambassador to that country, and that if he ever truly did win her confidence, it wasn’t until after that point, thirteen years after she was crowned (he was approximately her age and far more a babe in the woods than she was).

But here’s how Ebert chooses to close off the review:

At the end of the film, Elizabeth announces, “I have become a virgin.” And so she remained, ruling over and in some sense creating the England that gave us Shakespeare. Think what a play he might have written about her, if commoners had been allowed to create characters out of reigning monarchs. No doubt he retired in sheer frustration.

Hem. For one thing, there is a common misconception that Elizabeth was some sort of patron of the arts, when in truth she was far more the friend of the bureaucrat than of the playwright. You may or may not know that James I (1603-1625) saw more plays at Court during the first year of his reign than Elizabeth saw in the last thirty of hers. Which brings me to my second point: half of Shakespeare’s career - and the most glorious part of it - took place after Elizabeth died. He himself did not die until 1616 , and here’s a list of what he managed to accomplish after 1603:

Hamlet

Troilus & Cressida

Alls Well That Ends Well

Measure for Measure

Othello

King Lear

Macbeth

Antony and Clepatra

Coriolanus

Timon of Athens

Pericles Prince of Tyre

Cymbeline

The Winter’s Tale

The Tempest

Henry VIII

The Two Noble Kinsmen

Cardenio

So “[retiring] in sheer frustration” wasn’t really in the cards.

This just makes me crazy. When I was in undergraduate school, I used to write these lovely flowing pieces of prose, only to have them returned by my professors with blood-red marker underlining passage after passage and scrawling the same word over and over: “SOURCE?” If a twenty-year-old pipsqueak who doesn’t know her arse from her elbow and really isn’t hurting anyone is subject to such punishment, why not Roger Ebert? Do a Google search! Getting basic facts isn’t rocket surgery, after all.

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