August 2, 2007
Elizabeth I Returns III Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:05 AM EST I am glad Mr. Gordon shares my enthusiasm for Elizabeth: The Golden Age. I also enjoyed Mrs. Brown, though I agree that it’s not exactly “the stuff of which apotheoses are made.” That said, neither is Warm Springs, the HBO film about FDR, featuring Kenneth Branagh. But that has more to do with the biographical moment the filmmakers chose to portray than the qualities and achievements of their subject. A tiny quibble with Mr. Gordon’s post—“As far as I know,” he writes, “G&S never referred directly to Queen Victoria. No fools they.” In one of my favorite moments in The Pirates of Penzance, Gilbert and Sullivan actually do mention Queen Victoria, and to great comic effect. It’s toward the end of the play, when those dastardly pirates are, at last, apprehended. The sergeant tells the Pirate King, “We charge you to surrender, in the name of Queen Victoria!” Much to the audience’s surprise, the King replies, “We yield at once, most humbly; for, with all our faults, we love our Queen.” “Yes, yes,” the police echo. “With all their faults, they love their Queen.” I imagine the authors of this pithy scene did, too.
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