Don’t you believe the bad reviews & merciless critiques of this week’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age. I assure one and all that it is a glorious, splendid mess.

In its luridness, the film comes very close to mirroring the sensationalist and gory popular entertainments of the Elizabethan era. These were the years that gave the world The Spanish Tragedy and Kit Marlowe, a man who penned Tamburlaine braining himself against his bars and the Jew of Malta boiling to death. Decades later and John Ford, the last great playwright in the tradition, would author The Broken Heart, in which our protagonist opens his veins and bleeds out on stage. There’s a whole spectrum of red hues and coagulate gore in them years and I would argue that Golden Age functions exactly and properly along those lines.

Once one gives up cherished notions of What a Costume Drama Should Be and accepts Golden Age as something else then it’s easy enough to like. I shall be interested to see how it plays in jolly old England itself– another analogue to the film is perhaps the bounty years of Hammer Studios, a style seemingly still cherished on the distant island.