Peotry

Thanks to our LGBTQIA+ History Month display at work (and presumably my Faculty Board Chair, who is an eighteenth centuryist), I have encountered Aphra Behn's 'To the Fair Clorinda', which I hadn't previously come across.

To the Fair Clorinda, who made love to me, imagin'd more than Woman

Fair lovely Maid, or if that Title be
Too weak, too Feminine for Nobler thee,
Permit a Name that more Approaches Truth:
And let me call thee, Lovely Charming Youth.
This last will justifie my soft complainte,
While that may serve to lessen my constraint;
And without Blushes I the Youth persue,
When so much beauteous Woman is in view
Against thy Charms we struggle but in vain
With thy deluding Form thou giv’st us pain,
While the bright Nymph betrays us to the Swain.
In pity to our Sex sure thou wer’t sent,
That we might Love, and yet be Innocent:
For sure no Crime with thee we can commit;
Or if we shou’d – thy Form excuses it.
For who, that gathers fairest Flowers believes
A Snake lies hid beneath the Fragrant Leaves.

Thou beauteous Wonder of a different kind,
Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis join’d;
When e’er the Manly part of thee, wou’d plead
Thou tempts us with the Image of the Maid,
While we the noblest Passions do extend
The Love to Hermes, Aphrodite the Friend.

I'm sure that the_comfortable_courtesan was well aware of this poem (even if Behn's dates are too early for it to have actually referred to her, unless one or other of them had access to a time machine*), but I thought I'd post it here are others may not have been...

*if anyone wants to write Comfortable Courtesan/Aphra Behn time travel fic I would love to read it!

Watching: All Is True

You can say one thing for Kenneth Branagh, and that's that he makes very beautiful films. I thought that about his otherwise rather pointless Murder on the Orient Express, which had lots of gorgeous snowy landscapes and long vistas and one stunning scene clearly inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, and his latest film, All Is True, is similarly chock-full of lovingly-filmed (or possibly lovingly-CGIed) landscapes, beautiful old buildings and lots and lots of foliage; it really is a delight to look at.

The gorgeous visuals go a long way to make up for what is otherwise really quite a slight film about an ageing Shakespeare returning to Stratford-upon-Avon after the Globe Theatre burnt down in 1613, becoming reacquainted with the family he had neglected for so long and finally mourning the death of his son Hamnet in 1596. There are some great performances - Judi Dench predictably wonderful as Anne Hathaway, Kathryn Wilder excellent as Shakespeare's bitter, resentful elder daughter Judith (a Judith Shakespeare who I thought owed at least as much to Virginia Woolf's Judith Shakespeare of the generation before as she did to Shakespeare's historical daughter), and Ian McKellan putting in a stunning cameo as the Earl of Southampton, tarnished golden curls framing an ageing face and giving a hint of the beauty of the young man who was immortalised in Shakespeare's sonnets - but Ben Elton's script seems to be trying so hard not to slip into being Upstart Crow by mistake that it's sometimes a bit po-faced, and the best moments are when Shakespeare is allowed to use his own words instead (the moment where Shakespeare recites Sonnet 29 to Southampton, who mirrors it back to him with subtly changed emphasis, was probably the high point of the film, as well as obviously being a shipper's delight).

It's not dreadful, and was an enjoyable enough way to pass a couple of hours on a February evening, but this was the seventh biopic we've seen so far in 2019: The Year of Biopics and was definitely the least good.

Next week, in a shocking twist of events, we get to see a film that isn't a biopic! (If Beale Street Could Talk.)