The Queen, it seems, is all the rage. First it was television, on which Dame Helen Mirren made her wildly successful acting turn as Elizabeth I in the eponymous Golden Globe-winning TV film. Then it was the movies, in which Ms. Mirren played Queen Elizabeth II in film director Stephen Frears’s much buzzed about “The Queen.” Now such royal mania may extend to the opera stage, where there are signs that a longdismissed opera by Benjamin Britten about Elizabeth I,”Gloriana,” may finally be gaining wide appreciation.

Last year, the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis staged “Gloriana” with American soprano Christine Brewer in the lead role. Also in 2005, Decca released a 10-CD set, “Britten Conducts Britten,” in which “Gloriana” is conducted by Charles Mackerras, since Britten never made a studio recording of it. Now Naxos USA has just distributed two DVD versions of Britten’s three-act opera.

Based on the ornately written history “Elizabeth and Essex” by the brilliant Bloomsburyite Lytton Strachey, “Gloriana” was composed to hail the coronation of Elizabeth II and was first performed at Covent Garden during Coronation Week of 1953. It bombed abysmally, and Lord Harewood, who had suggested the subject to Britten, described its first night as “one of the great disasters of operatic history.” After having composed operas of repressed passion like “Peter Grimes” (1945) and “Billy Budd” (1951), Britten seemed a sure bet to express the intense, sarcastic, yet ultimately frustrated longings of an aged monarch for the young Essex.

Yet the stuffy, aristocratic, unmusical audience at the coronation ceremonies disliked Britten’s dark, meditative work, which betrays the influence of earlier British composers like John Dowland, as well as the neoclassical Igor Stravinsky. The 1953 London audience was reportedly dismayed at the sight of an old, balding, lonely Elizabeth in the final act, who signs the order to execute Essex, thereby perpetuating her own sterile solitude.

By contrast, today’s audiences conditioned by Helen Mirren’s salty indiscretions with Hugh Dancy, the young British actor who plays Essex in the HBO TV drama, will find much that is immediately recognizable in Britten’s setting of the story. The finest DVD available is of an English National Opera production, recorded live at the London Coliseum in 1984, the same year in which this staging visited the Metropolitan Opera, marking the New York premiere of “Gloriana.” This “Gloriana” stars the British mezzo-soprano Sarah Walker as a sly, savvy Elizabeth I and the tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson as an aptly raffish Essex. With straightforward conducting by Mark Elder and direction by Colin Graham, a longtime Britten associate, this DVD offers a lucid representation of a work that continues to win new audiences.

No such directness appears in the alternate new DVD of “Gloriana,” an all-too-trendy TV film from 2000 by the British stage director Phyllida Lloyd. A few years ago, in Ms. Lloyd’s ENO staging of Verdi’s “Requiem” — a work that requires no staging — a naked, very pregnant woman lumbered across the stage during the Agnus Dei movement. The symbolism in Ms. Lloyd’s “Gloriana” is equally cumbersome, if less pregnant with meaning; Elizabeth, performed by the veteran soprano Josephine Barstow, spends a great deal of time caged in a geometric box, and is naturally enough in a foul mood for most of the proceedings. Ms. Barstow, pushing 60, is past her best vocally, but then she was already in worn voice for the vastly better Mackerras CD version, recorded years earlier. Unforgivably, Ms. Lloyd’s staging cuts over a half-hour of Britten’s music, replacing it with cutesy backstage scenes of Ms. Barstow staring in a mirror as she puts on makeup, etc.

Still, the lighting, costumes, and wigs in Ms. Lloyd’s production are sleeker and more posh than in the earlier, more traditionally minded ENO production. And exposure to any version of this long-undervalued work is welcome; the linguistically ornate libretto by the South African-born poet and novelist William Plomer requires supertitles even for native English speakers, thanks to frequent Elizabethan tonguetwisters, such as a sung exchange that rhymes “bleedeth” with “one Lord another supersedeth.” Although written in grand opera format,”Gloriana” is essentially an intricate chamber opera subject, and — whatever the current taste for all things Elizabethan — may prove resistant to trendy approaches.

Certainly it fails in any overt way to satisfy the burgeoning “gender studies” approach to opera. Although Britten, Plomer, and Strachey were all gay, “Gloriana” inevitably confounds gender studies specialists with its indubitably heterosexual subject matter. The best new books about Britten, such as John Bridcut’s sensitive “Britten’s Children” (Faber) and Philip Brett’s “Music and Sexuality in Britten” (University of California Press), are perhaps rightly obsessed with defining the parameters of the composer’s sexuality and its influence on his works. Yet “Gloriana” — like “Peter Grimes” and “Billy Budd” — is influenced by the sea as much as it is by sexuality. Set in the age of the Armada, when Britannia ruled the waves, “Gloriana” possesses an invigorating tang of sea shanties and other marine tunes. Imbued with nature and history, it may turn out to be one of Britten’s most stage-worthy, straightforward — and not just “straight” — operas after all.