So, new territory, in many regards. So this month's idea was to look at fictional depictions of historical figures. So when presented with these three options, the vote went to, uh, Queen Elizabeth I. I'm surprised, too. "Have a care with my name, you will wear it out." Certainly one of the more iconic historical monarchs and probably the most famous of all female monarchs in Western history, she is also more likely to pop up in narrative fiction. She led England into an unprecedented period of wealth and stability, something, something, golden age, yada yada, but when we're fictionalizing someone who was famously the "Virgin Queen," most of that fictionalizing will center around one thing. Come on, we know she's f*cking someone. Who was she reeeally shtipping? You know because it had to be SOMEONE, right? Was it this guy? Or maybe this guy? Or maybe him [stutters] ...why not. If it's a female historical figure that's probably going to be the common thread. Anyway, like George Washington, Queenie has a ton of media to plow through. Some more historical, some... not. So I'm going to focus on more recent versions, starting with the more biopic-y side that are trying to be more historically accurate, and then moving towards the more squirrely. This should be interesting. Actual human who actually existed, Queen Elizabeth I. Elizabeth I should never have been queen. Well, scratch that, it's more like she had to blow through a whole host of royals who were in line ahead of her before she was able to become queen. King Henry VIII had a big obsession with producing a male heir - you know, more than usual - which led to him blowing through six wives in order to get his precious male heir, who... died at the age of 15, leaving him with his two half-sisters to duke it out over the throne. Elizabeth was declared a bastard when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed for alleged adultery. But then some years later both she and her older half-sister Mary were restored to the line of succession after King Henry mellowed a bit. So after Henry VIII died, Elizabeth was in line behind her brother Edward, her sister Mary, and one random protestant cousin whom the young dying Edward declared his successor on his deathbed because she was protestant and Mary was catholic, and she made it about nine days before being executed. Hey, Game of Thrones was inspired by something! After Bloody Mary died of what was proooooobably ovarian cancer without an heir, Elizabeth became Queen at the age of 25. England then flourished under her absolute monarchy and the Tudor dynasty ended. And she was also a patron of Shakespeare, so she's generally remembered pretty favorably. You know, by the English, anyway. Flash forward to the era of film and television. Elizabeth's portrayals are generally sympathetic, but that also depends on what part of her life we are focusing on or how we feel about Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had executed for an alleged coup against her. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there were more dramas about Mary than about Elizabeth but more recently the focus and sympathy has shifted back Elizabeth-wards. Anyway, so, "Virgin Queen." Really now? There's always been speculation on who, if anyone, Queen Elizabeth was doing her royal duty with while she was on the throne, included but not limited to: Sir Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, whom she would later have executed for treason, the Duke of Anjou, Thomas Heneage, Christopher Hatton, even Sir Walter Raleigh. That was the fixation back in the day. It's still more or less the fixation now with her portrayals. And it varies in some curious ways. And the thing is we'll never really know one way or the other. So I wasn't originally intending to include biopics but I think that's a good place to start since inevitably they're going to stretch the truth or make things up outright. In 1998 we have our most well-known Elizabeth biopic titled... "Elizabeth," which made Cate Blanchett famous and ushered in a new era of Elizabeth being in everything. The film starts during the reign of Queen Mary I, aka Bloody Mary, and, yep, she were real big on the whole protestant-burning thing, hence the name. Elizabeth puts more focus on this and how evil and ugly Mary is than the movie's closest comparison, a 2006 miniseries produced for the BBC called the Virgin Queen. Elizabeth is much more... cartoonish. "She was born a bastard! She will never rule England!" In Both Elizabeth and the Virgin Queen the big love interest is Sir Robert Dudley. He's just like this charming rando in Elizabeth who's always like, "Hey, my first three buttons are undone." There's also a scene where Dudley and Liz do it while like five of her ladies-in-waiting just watch. Dudley's got a big part in the Virgin Queen, too. "Ride with me, Bess. Ride with me like we used to." More like Sir Robert STUDly. See, I told you I'd find a way to work Tom Hardy into anything. Or Transformers. The theme/thesis for both seems to be about who Elizabeth will marry, solution being that she'll marry England. "I am married to England." Which is, you know, what she said IRL, only in the Virgin Queen she actually stays a virgin, unlike in Elizabeth. "It is England I married, my lords. It shall be sufficient for me when I die, that a marble headstone declares that this queen, having lived for such and such a time, lived and died a virgin." Her other option in Elizabeth is the Duke of Anjou. "I am Anjou!" [laughter] He has an outrageous French accent. He was rumored back in the day to be a transvestite so yeah that element is there and it is played for humor. "What?" Oh and also it's the reason she's like 'nope'. Her other big accomplishment in this movie is the settlement of the church of England, which she manages because Bess and Geoffrey Rush are big fat cheaters and locked the opposition in the basement. In fairness at least they got stuff done back then. Maybe we should try that. In Elizabeth there's this bombshell that Robert is already married like halfway through the movie. "He's already married!" You know, she didn't... know. In the Virgin Queen she knew because everyone knew because he is an earl. "I trust your wife is well." Elizabeth had a sequel called Elizabeth: the Golden Age. The movie seems to be about two barely-related things: Mary Queen of Scots and the Spanish Armada, and Elizabeth cat fighting with one of her hand maidens over Sir Walter Raleigh. Once again it starts with "who's she gonna marry?" and whose love interest-ish this time but romance novel pirate king Sir Walter Raleigh. "Very stimulating." Raleigh is an abject stud with ridiculous scruff and there's a certain "do boys still think I'm hot?"-ness... theme. In the Virgin Queen it's implied that Mary Queen of Scots may have been framed in the plot to kill Elizabeth, whereas in the Golden Age she's definitely guilty. You know a free spirit, but guilty. In both, Elizabeth is deeply conflicted about the execution, but in the Golden Age she's like collapsing in the hallway while the most ethereal beheading in history goes down. This singular event sends the Spanish Armada after England. Yeah, it was a little more complex than that, whatever. Elizabeth shows up to the battle wearing man armor and gives an Aragorn speech on horseback. "While we stand together, no invader shall pass!" "And it is not this day," Um...? "When this day of battle is ended, we meet again in heaven." [Lindsay laughing] Um, really? You know, [stutters] that kind of happened, and the Virgin Queen has this scene, too, but it's a lot less... silly, you know since she's actually dressed like she'd have dressed, and not like she just got a new set of fancy armor from Jaime Lannister. Historical figures Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake appear to have been conflated in the Golden Age. Raleigh wasn't even at the battle against the Spanish Armada. But the beat where he marries one of Elizabeth's ladies in waiting without Elizabeth's permission, that actually did happen, and it really did piss Elizabeth off, and she did send them both to the tower. Yeah. But in the end it's okay because she's a nice queen and babies are cute. All in all, the Virgin Queen doesn't look as good because it didn't have the budget, but it's more real. It's more believable and therefore more satisfying, though it definitely also has its moments of silly. [overlapping screaming] Both films add a lot of drama, making the relationship between Dudley and Elizabeth a lot more tempestuous than it prooooobably was because she did consider him a favorite until he died, and the big reason they never married was because a bunch of nobles just put their collective feet down. See, Elizabeth wasn't dead-set on never marrying from day one. She kind of teased marriage throughout her entire reign to put nerves at ease. There aren't a whole lot of depictions of a very young Elizabeth, because there aren't a whole lot of narratives focusing on Henry VIII. Showtime's sensationalist dramatization of the life of a sexy svelte Henry VIII, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Although ages are condensed, Elizabeth is aged up and Mary is aged down, so they're much closer in age than they were IRL. The SCANDAL and INTRIGUE of "The Tudors" is centered around Henry and his wives, and Elizabeth is a toddler for all but the last season so she's barely in it except as lip service. "As God is my witness, I shall never marry." said the eight-year-old. She also DGAF when her dad dies, but I cannot say I blame her. Dame Judi Dench plays Elizabeth for roughly eight minutes in Shakespeare in Love, and won an Academy Award for it. Although this movie did win a ridiculous, inexplicable amount of academy awards that year, her performance is easily the most memorable thing about this entire movie. The Dench at her Denchiest. "Your majesty-" "Speak up, girl, I know who I am." Also, hello again, Joseph Fiennes. I bet you miss late 90s Elizabethan period pieces. Yes, William Shakespeare likely did have numerous interactions with Elizabeth, as Elizabeth was a big patron of the arts and of theatre in particular. The queen's involvement comes as basically the arbiter of a bet. "Can a play show us the very truth and nature of love?" Going with Romeo and Juliet might not be it, but okay. And again, she's barely in it until the very end when she comes in as Queen Ex Machina, saves the day, and tells everyone how the movie's gonna end. "There was a wager, I remember, as to whether a play could show the very truth and nature of love. I think you lost it today." But even the queen can't unmarry unhappily married Gwyneth Paltrow. "Those whom God has joined in marriage not even I can put asunder." Didn't Henry VIII start the church of England so he could divorce willy-nilly? "I think you'll find it was orange, Lord Melchett." "Grey is more usual, ma'am." "Who's queen?" In the British comedy Blackadder, Queenie [falsetto] has a crush on every boy! "I've got such a crush on him." She's portrayed as an airhead and an awful person who abuses her power. "The bad news is that actually there are simply hundreds of catholics who desperately want their heads nicked off." But pretty much everyone in the show is either an awful person or a moron, so... "Do I look absolutely divine and regal and yet and at the same time, very pretty and rather accessible?" Raleigh's in here, too. And yeah, she's got a crush on him, too. And on Blackadder. And on this guy. Basically everybody but Stephen Fry. Though in Blackadder she either has a crush on every boy or executes people willy-nilly. "And if you haven't brought me any presents I'm going to have you executed!" or both. And that's the joke. "Is this a worthy topic from one so clearly in the bloom of youth, to one who would desire it still?" Based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, Orlando is a story about a young British nobleman who not only stops aging and lives all the way into modern times, but also undergoes a sex change along the way, mysteriously turning into a woman. In the original novel it was more ethereal and arbitrary so in the film they decided that it should be more concrete, so Queen Elizabeth herself bestows long life upon Orlando. "Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old." She is barely in this movie but apparently has immortality-granting powers. Another interesting decision, this Elizabeth was played by a dude, Quenton Crisp, which might be one of the many comments on the nature of the fluidity of gender by the filmmaker, but it also might be a reference to the fact that many people, both in elizabethan times and afterwards, thought that she was a secret man, which... no. Pretty sure someone would have noticed Elizabeth had been a boy, what with Henry VIII blowing through six wives to get one. "Queen Elizabeth I!" A surprise to no one, she's in Doctor Who, too. She first appears as an older Elizabeth in season three. She's coming to the Globe to
see Shakespeare's lost play, "Love's Labour's Won," which... probably was a thing and probably is actually lost. When she marches in it turns out that she's already met Doctor Who. You know, time travel, things don't always happen in order. And he has done a bad, it seems. "Off with his head!" "What?" What did he do? Is someone a woman scorned? We don't see her again until the 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor. Here she is much younger and apparently in love with the Doctor. They have apparently had a courtship. The Doctor proposes to her to see if she's secretly an evil shape-shifting alien, and when she says yes, he's like 'aha!' "Ah, gotcha!" "My love?" "One, the real Elizabeth would never have accepted my marriage proposal." No, Doctor, it turns out that the Queen of England would actually do that. Eventually the Zygon does try to impersonate Elizabeth but Elizabeth kills it and assumes its role in order to control the remainder of the Zygon fleet. And then the Doctor insults
the real Elizabeth some more. "It's not just the smell, or the unconvincing hair, or the atrocious teeth, or the eyes, just a bit too close together, or the breath that could stun a horse!" What a catch. This doesn't faze her and she does make the Doctor marry her, after which he immediately abandons her, thus I guess solidifying why she hates him so much in that earlier episode. "My sworn enemy!" "Wha?" So I guess that's why she never married. "A comedy, by whom?" "By anonymous, your majesty." Anonymous is probably Roland Emmerich's dumbest movie, and this is the guy who brought us 2012. The basic conceit of Anonymous is Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare. This guy did, the handsome and noble and blonde earl of Oxford Edward de Vere. Why didn't Shakespeare write Shakespeare, you ask? Because Shakespeare was a poor, and poors can't art. "In my world one does not write plays, Johnson." What does this have to do with Elizabeth? Weeeeeell... de Vere wrote anonymously because poetry was beneath him. "Poetry." Earls don't poetry. But it ends up being this big conspiracy cover-up because, um... Oxford and Queen Elizabeth I were lovers and had a secret child together, who was raised as the earl of Southampton. But then, twist! Turns out de Vere is ALSO one of Elizabeth's apparent shitsquillion bastards she's got running around the court. "Nor could he have predicted that you would commit incest." To paraphrase from the Brows Held High episode on Anonymous -- you should watch it -- Queen Elizabeth has so many bastard children that she lost track of them, then by sheer coincidence had an affair with one and got re-inbred pregnant, producing a super-inbred double-bastard who is also a possible Tudor heir. "You could have been a king, Edward. And your son after you." Elizabeth doesn't seem to know that de Vere is her bio son, despite the fact that he eventually does. She also doesn't seem like batty and boy-crazy and weird like Queenie, yet she'll just bang whoever. "I love him!" Someone tell Roland Emmerich that bastard children are kind of harder for women to keep on the DL. Man, it sure is weird that the queen keeps disappearing for these nine month intervals, huh? This Elizabeth is not much with the priorities, "I can do what I want." and is later duped into thinking that the Earl of Essex and the Ultra Bastard Southampton are trying to organize a coup against her when really it's an oopsie daisy misunderstanding orchestrated by the real bad guys. But upon finding out that the Earl of Southampton is his son, OG bastard dad-brother de Vere begs for his life, so Elizabeth just exiles Southampton or something in exchange for de Vere's name never being on his works for... some reason. "None of your poems or your plays will ever carry your name." And this isn't just some weird shit that Roland dreamed up. Shakespeare truthers actually believe this. Anonymous! Choosing which versions of Elizabeth to cover in this episode was a bit of a stacked deck because there are so, so many out there, and what constitutes fictionalized varies really based on who you ask. Many versions try to straddle this line between dramatic and historically accurate, but they're probably going to choose drama over accuracy. Others, not so much. And I think maybe they think they are? Why does this exist? So with that in mind, it is funny that the further you get from a historical event, the more okay it is to appropriate someone's life for your fictional narrative. "There was a wager, I remember, as to whether a play could show the very truth and nature of love. I think you lost it today." Or your dumbass conspiracy theory. "None." That said, in a way, I think that makes looking at people who actually existed kind of more interesting than fictional characters. So that's it for this one. If you want to help me decide on themes for new episodes you can do so on Patreon, and you can also support the show here. If you want to find out updates on upcoming shows on other projects, I am on Twitter, which is here. Thank you for watching, and next month we have a very special episode by popular demand. Um... Yeah, it will be fun.
