READING DANIEL DERONDA, GEORGE ELIOT'S MOST CONTROVERSIAL WORK

Hugh Dancy as Daniel Deronda - BBC 2002

I decided my more- than- 500-pages tome for this summer  would be Daniel Deronda and I successfully got through  its 675 pages + notes +  introduction slowly but enjoying every bit . Long didactic passages about Zionism included? Yes, I found them interesting if not exciting.

My first meeting with George Eliot’s last novel  was actually 10 years ago with its 2002 BBC adaptation , which soon became one of my best favourites ,  when I hadn’t even read a page from the book and only  just heard about it.

BBC drama was stunning and I found the story so original and brave  that I promised myself I would read the book sooner or later. I’ve  kept the promise though it wasn’t sooner.  You know, how is it that we usually complain? Too many books, too little time. That’s it. Now,   let’s start my musings giving some order to my thoughts , focusing on few important themes  and,  especially,   let’s introduce the book properly.

ROMANCING THE EMPIRE - THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL AND THE SLEEPING DICTIONARY

Hugh Dancy in The Sleeping Dictionary (2001)

The British Empire has its own complex history dating back to its beginning in the 16th century and with its apex and maximum expansion during the Victorian Era. I often work on colonialism, the good that it brought and the bad that it inflicted,  and the British Imperial Myth with my students reading Kipling, Conrad, Orwell, E.M. Forster among others. 

The  outcomes of the British dominance on a quarter of the world for a long period of time are still evident in nowadays world, from the widespread use of English as a second language or as a foreign language turned into a lingua franca - well, that's something due to the more recent American cultural influence too, especially after WWII -  to Britain's having a multi-ethnic population. 

What I want to discuss here though is not the real history of the Empire but 

1. the tendency to romanticize, minimizing, neutralizing the faults of that reality
2. the die-hard prejudices /cliches related to the once-subjected populations
which I recognized  in these two movies I've recently watched: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) and The Sleeping Dictionary (2001).

ELIZABETH I (2005) - DVD REVIEW

This miniseries is awesome. Helen Mirren’s performance is powerful, stunning, compelling. Supported by a stellar cast including Jeremy Irons (Earl of Leicester) , Hugh Dancy (Earl of Essex), Toby Jones (Robert Cecil) , Patrick Malahide (Sir Francis Walsingham) Simon Woods (Gilbert Gifford) , she is Elizabeth I.

The two episodes focus on one motif: “the hardest thing to govern is the heart”. So we see Queen Elizabeth Tudor in her most human feeble aspect: the search for true love, loyal relationships, friendship and tenderness. As proud as she was of her independence – she never married – and her power , she suffered for her being doomed to solitude. She was capable of sublime tenderness as well as defying acts, of falling deeply in love as well as of stately insults. Her sharp intelligence and sense of humor, her stubborness and refined education, her strength and her humanity made of her the Queen with the heart and the stomach of a king and one the most beloved sovereigns in history.

Part I deals with her troubled but close relationship with her old friend and loyal advisor, the Earl of Leicester . Their love/friendship survives her contemplating marriage with the relatively young and handsome Duke of Anjou,  a war with Spain, his secret (to the Queen) marriage to Lady Essex, his exile from court after her rage, her troubled "decision" to execute Mary Stuart. Jeremy Irons is incredibly good as Robin of Leicester.

My favourite scenes in Part I are

1. the moving farewell between the Queen and the Duke of Anjou. Mirren pronounces Elizabeth's lines from On Monsieur's Departure ( did you know the queen also wrote poetry?):

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,

I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned.
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.
Some gentler passion slide into my mind,


For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.

2. the meeting between Elizabeth and her prisoner and cousin, Mary Stuart Queen of Scotland  in which Mirren pronounces a truthful line: "We are both prisoners of our time". Though this meeting has inspired fictional works, it never took place in real life. Friederich Schiller, for instance, imagined it in his tragedy Mary Stuart (1800).

Part Two follows Elizabeth through her later years, during which she has a passionate affair with the stepson of the Earl of Leicester, the much younger Earl of Essex, whose political ambitions frequently clash with his devotion and loyalty to the monarch. Elizabeth will suffer greatly for her weaknesses to the handsome fascinating Robin of Essex.

 

This series won Emmy, Peabody and Golden Globe Awards in 2006. In the same year Helen Mirren was also THE QUEEN , Elizabeth II , and dominated the Awards scene.

 

Among the historical inaccuracies, the screenplay explicitly mentions that Gilbert Gifford (Simon Woods) attempted to murder Elizabeth I by stabbing (in the first part of Episode One Leicester saves her life on this occasion). He is then seen being tortured and interrogated, but reappears in the second part of the episode to play his real historical part in the Babington Plot. This part of the episode even includes a scene where Gifford meets the Queen and she acknowledges him as the perpretator of the failed murder seven years before. The murder attempt never happened and, if it had, would inevitably have resulted in the perpetrator's execution.

 

I watched this two-part miniseries just yesterday and I'm so glad I did it. I was completely absorbed while watching it and ... it was rather dangerous ... Can anybody guess why?

I had seen and loved the two movies starring Cate Blanchett. She was brilliant. But Helen Mirren and the entire cast of this 2005 TV production surpassed my expectations.

Have you seen ELIZABETH I? Did you like it? If you haven't and love this historical figure as much as I do, you must get this DVD and watch it. 

ELIZABETH I (2005) at imdb