Elizabeth I watches the 'Herne's Oak' sequence from The Merry Wives of Windsor at Shakespeare's Globe. She is surrounded by famous historical figures - including Shakespeare himself, in lilac at the left-hand side.
Scott's painting is one of the earliest attempts to represent the Globe, but the theatre's architecture, with its gallery and historically nonsensical 'royal box', is distinctively nineteenth century. Exhibited three years into the reign of the theatre-loving Queen Victoria, it invites the comparison between the two royal women as patrons of English drama, uniting royals past and present via Shakespeare’s most firmly ‘English’ play.