The Use of Early Modern Music in Film Scoring for Elizabeth I

In The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations, Barbara Hodgdon writes of Elizabeth I that she “is and has been a construction—certainly one whose time has come round again but nonetheless one who had to wait for a critical practice that could re-produce her.” ¹ This argument is true for much of the English Renaissance itself: that it is a construction of the past, recreated time and again by theatrical, textual, performative, and other practices that both reify and create what it is we “know” of the era. What Hodgdon calls a “fantasy” ² in terms of correlating the actual to the perceived is what Umberto Eco describes as the “fictional world” of the novel, stage, and film: not one that is created out of whole cloth, but one that is “parasitic on the real world. A fictional possible world is one in which everything is similar to our so-called real world, except for the variations explicitly introduced by the text.” ³