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Sarah Bernhardt’s Queen Elizabeth (Henri Desfontaines and Louis Mercanton, 1911) was an international popular success, released in the US as a headline attraction for the Famous Players company founded by Charles Frohman and Adolph Zukor in order to distribute the film. It drew other theatrical stars to the cinema and helped to inaugurate the longer playing narrative film, furthering a new category of spectacle in cinema itself. Yet scholars and historians have long denounced Queen Elizabeth as anachronistic and stagey, material proof of its star’s inability to engage with film. Examining specific scenes and shots, this chapter will show that the film’s appropriation of a rich history of the stage, painting and literature challenges us to think of early cinema in new and provocative ways. The aim is not to uncover a lost masterpiece, but to demonstrate that only today, at a point at which we can discuss intermediality, transnational art forms and feminism as related undertakings, is it possible to explore Bernhardt’s “moving” Tudor Queen.

This chapter explains how Southwell was able to do his pastoral duty and update the martyr imagery that was being spread in order to gain support for the Catholic cause. It studies his two last known written works which were created while he was still free, and shows that his talent for affective English rhetoric was used to emphasise the pathos and inhumanity of the events surrounding the dethroning of Mary, Queen of Scots. The chapter also studies Southwell's criticisms and political comments during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, which were skilfully disguised under the light lyrics of his poetry.

This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The chapters in this volume reflect current and future directions in research on the Elizabethan progresses. In differing ways, they reflect upon the progresses, entertainments, and pageants of Queen Elizabeth I as negotiations in power and meaning — a ceremonial dance in and through which hosts (civic and private), subjects, Queen, and Privy Counsellors compete to represent and advance their interests. The book is interdisciplinary, including work in history, literary history, drama and performance, art history, and antiquarian studies. It is divided into four broad, overlapping sections: patterns, themes, and contexts of the Elizabethan progresses; civic and academic receptions; private receptions; and the ‘afterlife’ of the Elizabethan progresses, as they were reinvented by subsequent generations.

Elizabeth I anticipated the enmeshment between celebrity culture and political power that characterizes the modern diva. This chapter explores the ways that the body of the queen and its theatricalization intersect with the body of the modern film star, focusing on Flora Robson, Bette Davis and Cate Blanchett in their highly diverse enactments of this early modern monarch. Highlighting the double-voicing at play in cinema’s historical reimagination of Elizabeth I, it considers the political contexts in which she becomes culturally significant again (1930s national sovereignty, 1940s war eff01i, 1990s spin-doctoring). If the queen’s two bodies bring together her physical being and her symbolic mandate, the mediality of her material embodiment becomes foregrounded. Addressing the conflict between private person and public persona particular to female sovereignty, each of these film divas differently embodies the historical queen as a figure of twentieth century celebrity culture.

This chapter offers some purchase on the scope and nature of the otherwise sprawling, unwieldy phenomenon of Elizabethan progresses. Drawing on extant records in regional archives, it shows that the Elizabethan progresses afforded a unique opportunity for cities and towns to petition the Queen for grants, licences, charters, and privileges. Topics discussed include preparations for a progress; the role of hosts; the Queen's agenda and its limitations; and patterns of Elizabethan progresses.

This chapter examines in detail the ritual of gift-giving — an essential component of a royal visit — by which hosts sought to entangle the Queen within a relationship of mutual obligations. Despite their objections to the expense and disruption caused by the sometimes lengthy and chaotic summer progresses, Privy Counsellors could exploit these journeys into the regions in order to further their own policies and interests. Topics discussed include patterns of giving and receiving; the material gift; and whether prodigality was the norm for the Queen's hosts.

This chapter considers Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester's use of portraiture and maps, displayed in his picture gallery as part of the 1575 Kenilworth festivities, to promote visually his desire to advance his interests — personal, political, and religious. It begins with an overview of the Earl's collection of paintings at Kenilworth and goes on to a reading of its central quartet of portraits in the context of the entertainments occasioned by Elizabeth's 1575 visit. It then considers the fate of Leicester's picture collection at Kenilworth after 1575, as well as its influence on subsequent Elizabethan progress entertainments, including those staged at Woodstock and Ditchley by Sir Henry Lee.

This chapter examines Elizabeth's progresses to the English universities — Cambridge in 1564; Oxford in 1566 and 1592 — in order to identify the political advice proffered in the plays, orations, and debates performed before the Queen. It considers how the programme of entertainments was arranged, and what these royal visits and performances have to reveal about the relationship between the universities and the monarch, and the functions of her progress visits.

This chapter presents an account of the 1578 progress through East Anglia based, in part, on the correspondences of William Cecil, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and Francis Walsingham among others. It addresses the politics — and, in particular, the religious factor in the politics — of the 1578 progress.

As towns and provinces fell away, the Council of State recruited troops from France, from Germany, and from England, where Elizabeth I named the earl of Leicester as governor in the Low Countries, in keeping with the Treaty of Nonsuch (August 1585). Some contingents never came; those that did could not blunt Parma's advance. Meanwhile, the Lords States of Holland husbanded their resources for needs of the Union of Utrecht: garrisons at the “gateways” to Holland were paid regularly, those in Brussels were not. When Nijmegen went over to Spain, breaching the line of the Waal, funds were found to hold the line of the Rhine. This strategy did not counter Parma's, but it worked as well; at key points in Gelderland and Overijssel, the forward frontier was secured. As a protected island of peace in a sea of war, Holland would prosper as never before.

This chapter presents a context for the dramatic appropriation and revaluation of cosmetic signifiers by examining the religious, political and social opposition to cosmetics as well as some of the recipes, which provide a unique history of the materials and technology of beauty. Polemicists argued that face paints, lip colours, wigs, perfumes and other accessories which serve to alter or enhance the external body destroyed divine workmanship. Women of all social backgrounds wore cosmetics in the early modern period. Prostitutes were particularly notorious for their painted faces. Queen Elizabeth I, before Princess Diana, was the most gazed-upon monarch in English history. She did not begin to paint her face until she was established on the throne. It was her youthful appearance that she tried so desperately to maintain, curiously using fabric to puff out her cheeks. The Queen's painted face haunts many dramatic representations of face painting and painted ladies.

This chapter goes back to the 1570s, where civic theatre in the provinces was transformed for, and by, Elizabethan progresses. The shows produced by provincial towns and cities for Elizabeth I in those years differed in crucial ways from those that they presented to her forebears. Norwich and Bristol, not trusting to their own playwrights or to local theatrical resources, imported outsiders to write their shows, imported courtly forms of entertainment to replace civic drama, and privileged the monarch's agenda as if it were more important than their own. The result was a militarization of provincial civic pageantry and theatre in accordance with the Elizabethan project of building, and defending, a strong Protestant nation.

This chapter examines the Queen's visit to Cowdray in 1591. It looks at the imaginative, yet surprisingly bold, strategies of the 1591 entertainment, in terms of a contest over representations of Catholicism and of loyalty that had characterized Lord Montague's relationship with the Elizabethan government from the earliest years of the reign. It was a contest in which neither side had any interest in provoking the other too far. However, as the entertainment acknowledged, the final power of representation lay with the Queen.

This chapter examines the Bisham entertainment of 1592 in the context of Elizabeth, Lady Russell's lifelong programme of self-promotion, which took in funeral inscriptions, Latin verse, and the commissioning of funerary monuments. In so doing, it not only sheds new light on the 1592 entertainment at Bisham, but also posits the concept of ‘devisership’ as a new category of early modern women's cultural production.