This performance evening is the result of a teaching experiment. I taught a third year course on Elizabethan Culture, where we looked at different aspects of the period, such as world pictures, religion, magic and science, domestic politics, colonial expansion, the court, the country and the city, literature and the theatre and representations of the monarch creating the cult of the Virgin Queen.
The Elizabethan period is often seen as the ‘Golden Age’ of English history, because England developed into a nation state under the Tudors, experiencing a period of relative peace and prosperity after the chaos of the Wars of the Roses and rising to the status of a world power after the victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588. This development is associated with the long reign of Elizabeth I from 1558 to 1603. The cult of the Virgin Queen, expressed in court ritual, poetry, song and elaborate pictures, successfully stabilized the monarch’s power and served to gloss over the more sinister aspects of the reign, like Francis Walsingham’s secret service network. The cult is still surprisingly attractive to audiences today – among many evocations of the ‘Golden Age’ just think of the recent films starring Cate Blanchett (1998 and 2007, dir. Shekhar Kapur). Students worked together in groups to prepare presentations on various aspects of Elizabethan culture for their colleagues before they faced the challenge to transform their scholarly and detailed presentations into more accessible contributions suitable for a wider audience, i.e. to ‘teach and delight’.
Our show begins in the year 1587, when Elizabeth has replaced her official intention to marry, expressed in notoriously lengthy marriage negotiations, with the cult of the Virgin Queen. She has successfully defended her power so far, but Mary Stuart, the exiled Catholic Scottish Queen with a claim to the English throne, is still alive, though held captive, to focus Catholic discontent and foster insurrection. At the same time, tension is rising between England and the Catholic marine superpower Spain ruled by King Philipp II. The Spanish are really getting fed up with English privateers stealing their colonial loot and sailing around under their very noses off the American coast. A storm is brewing…
Prof. Dr. Ina Habermann