The Secret Life of Elizabeth I

Abstract

In popular culture today, representations of Elizabeth I tend to oscillate around a central and gendered duality On the one hand, they visually reference the “Gloriana” of her most frequently reproduced portraits: the image of royal authority in the tradition of kings, splendidly and powerfully arrayed; and on the other, they supply romantic and sexual narratives that attempt to explain Elizabeth’s identity as an unmarried woman.¹ The interplay between these two perspectives in popular film versions of Elizabeth creates a fractured portrait of female authority: masculine regality in some degree of conflict with feminine emotionality. Rather than functioning, as some critics have suggested, as a “quasi-feminist heroine” or a “feminist icon,” twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations of Elizabeth increasingly present her as defined and circumscribed by her relation to men.² Perhaps this is why discussions about Elizabeth almost always include a debate on the question of her virginity—in spite of the fact that the debate will never be resolved. The myth of the Virgin Queen continues to tantalize modern imaginations, begging for an explanation of the Queen as a woman. The continuing abundance of fictional representations of the Queen and her family in literature and on film testifies to the persistent interest in the secret lives of the Tudors.³