A Brush with Royalty

Breakfast with Peter. Tea with Elizabeth.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of mass media is how easily stories are now shared. With the flip of a page or the click of a mouse, intimate portraits of centuries-old monarchs are accessible to even the proletarian masses. As a girl, I was always entranced by the grandiose tales of kings and queens and love and war. Who could not be roused with such stories of sacrifice, of love, of betrayal—of legend? There is a trend in history to deconstruct these legendary icons and paint them as ordinary people in extraordinary situations. But with Peter and Elizabeth, however, we only see that they are in fact Great.

Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie
Progress update: Page 216 / 855. In a true test of endurance, I have managed to plod through a full ¼ of the mammoth tome. Actually, it is unfair to attribute it to endurance because Peter the Great is surprisingly readable and guess what—enjoyable. Peter, infallibly curious, daring and hot-tempered, is the type of guy that you might actually want to spend 800+ pages reading about. The book is painstaking researched (at least I hope it is, I don’t want to spend my summer reading a bunch of lies) and well written.

Elizabeth (Kapur, 1998)
History is sacrificed for drama, and this is a good thing—for drama, I mean, certainly not for history. The myriad of historical accuracies is secondary in this finely acted historical drama because its actors utterly convince you that everything happened just as it does in the film. For all I know, hot Elizabethan men walked about in chest baring shirts. Geoffrey Rush, Christopher Eccleston, and Joseph Fiennes make the most of their juiced up roles, and a multitude of actors I adore turn up in smaller roles—Fanny Ardant, Emily Mortimer, Daniel Craig, Vincent Cassel, Kelly MacDonald….But Elizabeth the queen is to England as Cate Blanchett is to Elizabeth the movie—it is only with Blanchett’s glorious performance as the Virgin Queen that the film has any power. It might as well be Cate the Great. B+