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The scandal of Elizabeth: Valerie Krips on history and meaning in Kapur's two Elizabeths.

Article Excerpt
In the decades since the Second World War, history has taken body blows from the deconstruction of its narratives, its contingent historical consciousness, discourses, empiricism and claims to objectivity. By the end of the twentieth century history was thought by some to have been overtaken by memory, from which it had slowly parted company--the result of social and cultural change. The end of history as we knew it seemed to be at hand. However, it hung on in schools and universities, albeit by its fingernails, and to some extent in museums which, by the last decades of the twentieth century, were increasingly coy about their status as treasure houses of the past, relegating many of their objects to storage facilities. Oddly, though, even as it had disappeared in traditional arenas, history seemed to be popping up everywhere--in films, on television, in historical scenarios in museums, and through the efforts of various trusts and foundations anxious to conserve any historical trace.

The historical scenarios on television, film, and in museums became increasingly punctilious, not to say nitpicking, about verisimilitude as the century neared its end. This determination to show the past, not merely 'as it actually was' in terms of narrative but in exquisite material detail, betrayed a desire to 'experience' the past and history that the public, it seemed, shared. Reconstructions and re-enactments sprang up on every hand, or so it sometimes seemed. From obsolete mining villages 'restored' so that we could go down mines, and meet miners, to country houses with fires burning in grates, we wanted to look at the past as it was, and we wanted to do it now. We came to expect long discussions of the 'historical accuracy' of what was paraded before us: we became connoisseurs of representations of the past to the extent that we fell about with laughter when it was satirised in shows like Black Adderor...

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