Thanks! I haven't seen the Other Boleyn Girl either; I just get too bent out of shape by the way the distort history not to mention ths horrid casting. HELLO, Henry was a redhead!
One of my biggest gripes with historical movies is how they warp everything to modern sensibilities. They were not like US in culture and customs and viewing them that way does both them and history a vast disservice.
What you do architecturally, I do with historical figures but it's different in that for you, the structures are still there, at least somewhat. For those of us who portray and costume these characters, we have no 'primary' research. All we have are letters, documents and the books that people have researched and written about them.
I don't blame you one bit for not liking HenryVIII or Elizbeth. They both did nasty things to the Scots and Eliz.'s reign did sinply wretched things to the Irish. It was such a xenophobic and insular national culture; horrid to our modern sensibilities.
I could go on and on about this; I have pretty strong opinions and feel that portraying these characters is a responsibility to do it honestly and still entertain. This could be a thesis, you know. *g*
But one quick story; when I was playing Elizabeth at the Earl of Southampton's Faire, a Member of Parliament came to visit the faire and he wanted to talk to be about E., not interact with me *being* E. So I made him bow to me and kiss my hand; I was not about to break character. A little part of my brain was going, "eep" but the rest of it was "Hell-yeah!"
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Re: ::steps on soapbox::
Date: 2011-01-03 04:30 pm (UTC)One of my biggest gripes with historical movies is how they warp everything to modern sensibilities. They were not like US in culture and customs and viewing them that way does both them and history a vast disservice.
What you do architecturally, I do with historical figures but it's different in that for you, the structures are still there, at least somewhat. For those of us who portray and costume these characters, we have no 'primary' research. All we have are letters, documents and the books that people have researched and written about them.
I don't blame you one bit for not liking HenryVIII or Elizbeth. They both did nasty things to the Scots and Eliz.'s reign did sinply wretched things to the Irish. It was such a xenophobic and insular national culture; horrid to our modern sensibilities.
I could go on and on about this; I have pretty strong opinions and feel that portraying these characters is a responsibility to do it honestly and still entertain. This could be a thesis, you know. *g*
But one quick story; when I was playing Elizabeth at the Earl of Southampton's Faire, a Member of Parliament came to visit the faire and he wanted to talk to be about E., not interact with me *being* E. So I made him bow to me and kiss my hand; I was not about to break character. A little part of my brain was going, "eep" but the rest of it was "Hell-yeah!"