ABSTRACT
By focusing on the religious conflict that pervades Elizabeth, this chapter argues that the early-modernism Kapur is engaging in is both a product of decades of Elizabethan scholarship and a retrospective application of modern, Western values in a setting where they do not apply. It demonstrates the depiction of Elizabeth, and indeed Elizabethan England, on the silver screen acts as “a barometer that measures our own value and place in the world.” The chapter focuses on the depiction of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in Elizabeth in order to ascertain what Shekhar Kapur is doing in re-purposing the past for his own purposes or, to analyse the early-modernism he is engaging in. It draws on Elizabeth, primarily because the film has a clear religio-political context that it is drawing on, as confirmed by Kapur himself. The only reference to Ireland in the whole film is at Elizabeth’s coronation, when the bishop crowns her “Queen of England, Ireland, and France.”
