And still more on Elizabeth I...

[fajrdrako]

At some point, I promise, I'll stop talking about this show.

After we'd watched it, Beulah asked me if I thought Elizabeth Tudor was really a virgin till her death. My answer was sensible and unhelpful; incomplete, though true: I said that historians can't answer that, it would take a psychic to read her mind because the only people who knew (Elizabeth and whoever she might have been with) weren't talking.

But that's actually a dumb answer. The question (and the implied assumptions) treat sex like an either/or black and white proposition. Sex is really a continuum anywhere from a glance across a crowded room to shared orgasm however you get there, and I don't necessarily mean mutual/simultaneous orgasm either. There are lots of ways to have sex without vaginal penetration. So I would like to think that Elizabeth and Leicester (or Essex) had lots of mutually happy sex, but that she was still being legally honest in saying she was a virgin.

Sadly, though, they're not likely to show us that in a historical miniseries, even if they have no qualms about evisceration and severed heads.

Moreover, this isn't a considered or scholarly conclusion based on historical evidence. It's based on my own sense of reality and wishful thinking.

Another retrospective thought about the show is another thought of the characters I wish we'd seen, but didn't - some of them probably omitted because they related to the first twenty years of Elizabeth's reign, which were skipped entirely. John Dee, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and his actors, Roger Ascham, the Earl of Oxford, Sir Walter Raleigh, and while I'm thinking along those lines, Francis Crawford....

Okay, I shouldn't gripe, if they're featured the stories of all those people the show would have been multiple times the length it was. (Would I mind?)

I count myself lucky I got that lovely glimpse of the young James.

The history was extraordinarily good, as far as I could see. I love the way bits of Shakespeare cropped up from time to time, like a theatrical in-joke. But they did fudge by implying that the wonderful sonnet at the end was written by Essex for Elizabeth right before his execution. I knew the poem - I memorized it years ago - it was by Chidiock Tichborne, one of the Babbington plot group. Nicely inserted, but rather jarring to see it reattributed.

I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.