Twinkle, twinkle, little bat

Sooo, the critics seem to pretty much unanimously HATE Elizabeth - The Golden Age (not 'realistic', historically inaccurate, blah blah blah), but look here upon this picture


and on this:


It's Cate Blanchett wearing a whole storehouse of amazing costumes!! YES, ridiculously OTT self-fashioning is what Elizabeth was all about. After all, when you ban Catholicism's image-heavy sensuality you gotta give your people something in return. Oh, and Richard Schickel (TIME Magazine), you complain:

"As the computerized Armada heave into sight, Elizabeth, dolled up in Joan of Arc drag [a slightly unfortunate comparison, since the English burnt her; and what's wrong with drag?] — shining armor, waving a big sword — takes it into her head [the silly girl] to rally her troops, drawn up on the shore, impotently waiting for the naval engagement to begin. She is given a noble rallying speech to sing out — her St. Crispin's Day moment — but, putting this as gently as possible, Nicholson and Hirst are not exactly the Bard of Avon [how I HATE that epithet and, frankly, who IS?], and Kapur is not exactly Laurence Olivier when it comes to staging this emptily rhetorical, entirely fictional moment."

Erm, might this be the famous speech to the troops at Tilbury? Written, of course, by Elizabeth, not Shakespeare (unless you are a fan of the theory that she was the author of WS's complete works). Granted, there is some debate about when exactly this speech was given and we have to rely on some courtier's memory who put it all down in a letter (to lazy to look up his name) and yes, maybe it's all just a big pile of Tudor propaganda and the whole speech is in fact apocryphal and maybe the screenwriters messed around with the words (I haven't seen the film yet, so I can't say), but gee, who cares if it's "entirely fictional"?  It's such a pivotal moment in British cultural history, Elizabeth-as-Amazon and all of that, how could you possibly not put that in your movie?! Screw history, give me the mythic version!


So, baby: shhhh, just you shut your mouth.


(The subject line of this entry is the Blackadder II version of that, again, obscenely well-known speech which contains the often quoted, often parodied "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king." It's the Queen's Two Bodies, y'know?)

Wow, lj is such a good place to rant and nitpick...!