Staging the Settlement: S hekhar K apur and the Parliament of 1559

This article offers an assessment of S hekhar K apur's depiction of the parliamentary making of the E lizabethan settlement in his 1998 film, E lizabeth . The settlement has always been a controversial subject, as indeed have K apur's cinematic stagings of E lizabethan history. After surveying historians' accounts of the settlement, the author subjects the film's settlement sequence to a careful analysis, reading it as cinema as well as history, and argues that, despite a significant number of historical inaccuracies, the film captures much of value as a filmic representation of the past.