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.

Comments

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes, I like the way "Elizabeth" handled it too - the idea of the Virgin Mary being replaced by the Virgin Queen was brilliant and may well have been, in a psychological sense, historically true. What a boost for the English Protestant identity - Henry VIII could never have pulled it off, but Elizabeth could.

I agree with you about Tudors and sex, too. Given that (at least according to this show) both Essex and Leicester married when (and because) their high-born girlfriends became pregnant, it wasn't a particularly chaste court. And as the show hints, there was a degree of fooling around among the men, too.

Not only did Elizabeth see the horror-show that Mary's marriage turned out to be, she had the even worse horror-show of her parents' marriage to think of, which had ended with her mother's death. Then there'd the alternate horror-show of Mary's marriage to Darnley... She had very good reason not to offer any man the control over her that he would get by marrying her. And the social/political implications were bad enough already.

I thought this show was very restrained with it came to the Duc d'Anjou, who, as far as I could see, wasn't even wearing his death's-dead buttons. Are we supposed to believe, in this version, that no one even told Elizabeth about Anjou's eccentricities, let alone the more scurrilous gossip? I don't believe that Elizabeth herself, or the English court, would be naive about any proposed marriage.

[dargie.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I always suspected that the folks who wanted the Anjou marriage to take place might've been less than forthcoming with Elizabeth, hoping, perhaps that he'd have the sense to tone down the peculiarities long enough to get married, and of course once that's accomplished... Except, given who her father was, I don't see her sitting still for a rotten marriage, though presumably she was still young enough that her advisors might not have recognized that.

I've got a copy of this series lying around somewhere. Perhaps I'll pop it in this week and check it out. Thanks for the rec.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Though I don't have the historical references to back me up, I've always thought that Anjou was clever, and in many ways the best of his messed-up family - imaginative, creative, articulate, and tolerant. Perhaps the marriage would not have been the disaster it at first appears, who knows?

Do let me know what you think of the series, when you see it.

Are you able to watch it without thinking of Lymond from time to time?

[dargie.livejournal.com]

It would not be difficult to be a bright spot in that family, though I don't know nearly enough about them.

I shall certainly let you know what I think. meanwhile, I saw the first ep of "Elizabeth I" on Masterpiece Theatre last night, and wasn't awfully impressed. There was no energy to it, and the young man who played Dudley was more a beefy jock than... well, my idea of what Dudley should've been. There was a scene in which Elizabeth puts Norfolk firmly in his place by listing her prodigious accomplishments (by any standards, but doubly remarkable in a young woman) and it occurred to me that had Robert not been at least at a point where he could hold his own with her in many of these areas, she might well have tired of him early on. Physical attraction, particularly if it's satisfied, doesn't last.

Though I must admit that Joe Fiennes was a spectacularly attractive RD. Yum.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

It would not be difficult to be a bright spot in that family

Well, true enough. A bunch of sociopaths. Mary Queen of Scots was well out of it. I wonder why that generation turned out so strange? Was it because of Catherine de Medicis? Francis II and Henri II seemed stable enough.

I saw the first ep of "Elizabeth I" on Masterpiece Theatre last night

Is that another show about Elizabeth I? Who plays her? More to the point, is it showing in Canada? I must research this.

There was no energy to it

What a pity. If ever a woman - or an age - had energy, that was it. In spades!


Joe Fiennes was a spectacularly attractive RD. Yum.

Oh, really? Sounds promising! Though I confess, though I mad over Ralph Fiennes, Joe Fiennes has yet to impress me. Maybe this will be it.

[dargie.livejournal.com]

Okay I made a mistake on the title. It's The Virgin Queen" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0481459/) (fairly apropos to this discussion, neh?) and the title role is played by a woman named "Anne-Marie Duff who is remarkably Elizabethan. Kevin McKidd plays Norfolk, and he does manage to inject some energy into the proceedings, but mostly it's a lackluster cast, IMO, which has nothing much to do except move from room to room, plotting. This does not make for compelling TV. Tom Hardy is Leicester.

Joe-as-Leicester is from "Elizabeth." If you didn't care for him there, or in "Shakespeare in Love" it's possible you're immune. I do find that big fans of his brother are left cold by Joe.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't remember Joe Fiennes in Elizabeth very well. I remember that I liked him - but obviously he didn't make quite the impression he might have. Yeah, I'm a Ralph fan, so that bears out your theory, but they're very different types.

[dargie.livejournal.com]

I also meant to say that as I was watching, it occurred to me that another reason for her very public assumption of the mantle of "Virgin Queen" was because her ministers never tired of trying to assure the succession by marrying her off to some old fart, or young pervert. *g* Some of them loathed having a queen on the throne instead of a king, and wanted her subject to a royal husband. To stand up in front of her people and declare that she would live and die a virgin for the sake of her kingdom, would have put up a more effective roadblock to the marriage crap than virtually anything else. But my sense of "virgin" is still more one of woman-not-subject-to-any-man than of intact. It seems to dovetail nicely with the idea of kingdom-not-subject-to-any-foreign-power.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's a very good analogy - virginity as representational authority over the self. It has the added political virtue of being a religious virtue as well - not necessarily as image of Mary (as in Elizabeth, that's another issue) but as those strong martyred saints, many of whom had brutish pagan husbands. The 'virgin' image works for Elizabeth on all levels, and plays up female strengths.

Though marriage might have brought her the advantage of having an heir, from her point of view there was nothing particularly wrong with James of Scotland, and she would have seen the various childbirth problems of her sister Mary. Not to mention the many women who miscarried, or died in childbirth, or had other monumental problems Elizabeth was better off without.

Another problem was that any man with the power and rank to marry her also had the power and rank to fight her for the position to rule.

Altogether, I think Elizabeth was incredibly clever in the way she handled her position, with commoners, nobles and council alike.

But I'd like to think she found some happiness with Leicester. I liked the way the Helen Mirren series handled it, where the relationship evolved into a trust friendship.

[dargie.livejournal.com]

It would've been a nightmare to give up her autonomy and put England under the thumb of a foreign ruler and then not be able to produce an heir. Even her own mother produced only one living female child. Admittedly Henry didn't give her a lot of opportunity, but still.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes. All in all, the dangers of being single (and childless) were far less than the dangers of any alternative - not just to Elizabeth herself, but for England. I think the resistance to a husband of lesser birth than her own became a rather useful excuse: there were no Englishmen of her rank, and no one really wanted a foreigner. Meanwhile she was able to build a mystique that worked for her.