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

Abstract

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 In films about Elizabeth, music plays an important and often prominent role in this process of construction. In the films and television mini-series I will discuss here, Elizabeth R (1971), Orlando (1992), and Elizabeth (1998), the music used can be categorized in one of three ways, all of which contribute to the fictional world being created: preexisting period music, preexisting non-period music, and original music composed specifically for the film. Original music is sometimes, but not always, composed in a period style. Broadly speaking, period and periodstyle music is equally diegetic and non-diegetic, while non-period scoring, whether preexisting or original, is almost always located outside of the diegesis. In considering the role of music in films set in the early modern period (which I will refer to here as “early modern film”), it is important to understand that music is one of many elements that, separate from the screenplay, are nonetheless part of the filmic “text.” While a soundtrack alone, heard without visual or other reference to the film it is intended to accompany, functions as what Richard Burt calls the “paratext”4—that is, as defined by Gerard Genette, everything associated