Queen Elizabeth

This chapter examines the 1912 feature film Queen Elizabeth as a reflection of Sarah Bernhardt's roles in the late nineteenth century and her insistence that these could remain relevant to audiences in the twentieth century. In histories of the cinema, Queen Elizabeth is a film consistently referred to as an example of “filmed theater.” The chapter considers the cinematic practices that Queen Elizabeth reveals and how the film draws upon the long and rich history of Queen Elizabeth's appearance in the theater, the visual arts, and the popular presses. It argues that Queen Elizabeth was an intelligent and creative response to the theatrical possibilities of the cinema and to the tastes and fashions of Bernhardt's day. It also discusses how Bernhardt brings to film the same practices and processes that Paul Delaroche had earlier brought to history painting. Finally, it shows how Queen Elizabeth establishes a link between Elizabeth and William Shakespeare, thus presenting itself as film that animates history.

The Popular Picturesque: Landscape in Boucicault's Irish Plays

The inspiration for Dion Boucicault's first Irish subject, The Colleen Bawn, in a set of pictur esque views of Ireland after the artist W. H. Bartlett is well documented, and Bartlett's iconography of wild scenery, moonlight, round towers, and ruined abbeys features strongly throughout the Irish plays. Although Bartlett's compositions were widely known in the nineteenth century, there has been little consideration of how they may have informed the audience's understanding of the plays. Rather, they are regarded as a set of clichéd, stereotyped images, which the playwright subverted through a process of ironic distancing and repurposing. In this article Patricia Smyth argues that, on the contrary, Boucicault made use of the mythical and supernatural associations of picturesque Ireland in order to convey a particular narrative of Irish history. Patricia Smyth is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. She has published articles and book chapters on French and British nineteenth-century art, visual culture and theatre. She is co-editor of Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film, co-edited with Jim Davis a special issue dedicated to theatrical iconography (2012), and is currently completing a book on Paul Delaroche and theatre.

The Tudors Viewed by French Romantic Artists

This chapter singles out two features of the cult of British historical themes in French Romantic painting, and focuses on the most prominent of the artists who cultivated such scenes involving Tudors and Stuarts: Paul Delaroche. It argues that the pronounced nineteenth-century French interest in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history was a form of displacement, so that Delaroche's painting of the execution of Lady Jane Grey (1834), for example, opened up for the French viewer a space in which to negotiate memories of the Terror within the relative comfort of a more distant and foreign historical moment.