Elizabeth I..

[fajrdrako]

Today, thanks to my wonderful friend Sheila, I saw the recent HBO miniseries, Elizabeth I with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth Tudor and Jeremy Irons as Leicester - two of my favourite actors. Beulah, Tasia, Lyn and I went to Sheila's place for a potluck supper and a good dose of cinematic Tudor history.

And what an enjoyable show it was. As is usual with movies, it focussed fairly narrowly on Elizabeth's relationships with Robert Dudley (Earl of Leicester) and Robert Devereux (Earl of Essex), with a side of the Duc d'Anjou and Mary, Queen of Scots. I thoght they went gently with d'Anjou, whom they could have played up as outrageous, and were fairly unkind to Mary, Queen of Scots. The best thing about the show was how clear it made the relationships, not just the rather ambiguous romances betweent he men and the famously-virgin queen, but the relationships between Leicester and Essex and their families, and the Walsingham family and Burghley, including their relative ages.

My favourite cameo was of Ewen Bremner as James of Scotland - I thought he had the young James pegged. Other favourite characters of her time sometimes zipped by so fast I hardly noticed them - Sir Francis Drake, for example - and it picked up her story too late for Sir Philip Sydney, even in the unlikely even they might have featured him. The likes of William Shakespare, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir Walter Raleigh didn't get mentioned, but to my surprise we saw a fair amount of the effete Henry Wriosthley, Earl of Southampton, as a confederate of Essex. Was he really? Not to mention a fairly sinister Franics Bacon. What was that about him loving Essex? I should have counted the number of times someone, often but not always Elizabeth, referred to Essex as a 'pretty boy'. Well, I suppose, historically speaking, that's a fair assessment of him.

I won a bet. Sheila and Tasia were sure Mary, Queen of Scots had been in the Tower of London. I bet them ten cents she never had been. I knew she'd never been that far south. I won a whole twenty cents! History champion, that's me.

Loved it. I want more television like this.