 What is the author's main purpose in this text?
Only a strategic marriage to a Spaniard or a Frenchman will mollify all factions, her advisers insist, but the pickings prove dismal. After skulls are smashed, throats slit, and bosoms skewered in the name of Christ, Elizabeth decides to: a) "unsex" herself and become a symbol--the Virgin Queen, married only to England; and b) entertain dissenting opinions exclusively from those whose heads are affixed to spikes. You can't be both a queenly queen and a womanly woman, says the script (by Michael Hirst)--at least not in 1554. Probably, although the evidence suggests that Elizabeth had developed a head for stratagems earlier in life (her position had been precarious since the beheading of her mother) and came to the throne with few girlish illusions about How Things Work in a barbarous state. The tone of Elizabeth comes nearer to the nihilistic relish of Jacobeans such as John Ford and John Webster than to the more sorrowful horror of the Elizabethan dramatists Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. It's even closer to a Jacobean drama of our own age: The Godfather (1972), which it emulates by cutting back-and-forth between queen and courtiers in prayer and the roundup and slaughter of Catholics on their privies, in bed with their mistresses, and so on. Their severed heads look on, wide-eyed, as Elizabeth directs her hair to be shorn--images of her girlhood flashing by as her locks rain down--and then walks weightily to her throne, now a chalk-faced gorgon.
 to inform us of the pros and cons of each movie
 to compare the abilities of three directors  to persuade us to pay attention to the hidden meaning in the films  to compare the queenly characteristics of the three films  to inform us of the pros and cons of each movie