Warning: Mixing Gregory's Chronicle and Doctor Who can be hazardous to your brain
After reading two articles referencing aforementioned chronicle and finishing the first series of Doctor Who, my new mental image of Edward IV is Captain Jack.
In a mad sort of way, it works. Both are very good in wartime but somewhat problematic in peacetime, both are incredibly charming and will sleep with anything that moves, and both are generally cleverer than they are given credit for being, although if Jack dies of a heart attack after overeating himself into a stupor, it would be truly awful.
ETA 2:10 AM: The articles used segments of the chronicle to posit that Edward IV may have been bisexual. I'd accept it as a possibility, though not based on those particular segments, which may well have been using 'love' in a nonsexual way. Who knows? Subtext, how I love thee.
On a more general note, Edward IV gets no love at all. He truly doesn't. Henry VI becomes a saint, Richard III becomes the Antichrist, and everyone sort of forgets about Edward. Even Shakespeare turns him into a buffoon. Henry VI, you can at least sympathise with in spite of his incompetence. Edward IV is a means to an end. He's barely got a personality outside of...well...wanting to sleep with anything that moves. And Heywood more or less follows that template except with a larger crush on Jane Shore.
I suppose there's Thomas More the cheering squad, but Edward dies a few pages in so he's beside the point. And there's the really bad porn romance novels that I prefer not to think about. And while I admit that half of the reason I love Sharon Penman's The Sunne in Splendour is Edward, who is beautifully real and so very fallible (despite what his younger brother may think), I don't know if other people feel the same way.
I wonder why more people don't write about him. He's fascinating in his inconsistency and wasted potential. One theory I read was that sixteenth-century writers were afraid of drawing unintentional parallels with Henry VIII, which I could see on so many levels. Especially that whole secret marriage bit. And the getting fat. They even look alike in later portraits. And one didn't want to make Henry angry. Or either of his daughters, for that matter.
ETA 2:10 PM: It also occurred to me that one cannot have Richard without Edward. Not really. It is Edward's reign that shapes him (the reason he's so prominent for the first three-quarters of Penman's novel). Of course, Edward's reign gets very short shrift in Shakespeare, for obvious reasons. When you've set up an adversarial relationship between Marguerite of Anjou and a preternaturally aged Richard of Gloucester, that sort of thing is bound to happen.
Anyway, all of this is in an effort to avoid writing that introduction to my dissertation outline that justifies its existence. I have a page of semi-incoherent ramblings about appropriation of women as characters that is only partly related to the cultural framework of queenship but has far more to do with the twisting of those frameworks to fit the needs of propaganda...which is the right idea, but not in any way that makes sense.
On a completely unrelated note, I did notice this in the film, but it is rather staggering how good Joaquin Phoenix sounds when he sings Johnny Cash.
ETA 2:10 AM: More thoughts added under the cut.
In a mad sort of way, it works. Both are very good in wartime but somewhat problematic in peacetime, both are incredibly charming and will sleep with anything that moves, and both are generally cleverer than they are given credit for being, although if Jack dies of a heart attack after overeating himself into a stupor, it would be truly awful.
ETA 2:10 AM: The articles used segments of the chronicle to posit that Edward IV may have been bisexual. I'd accept it as a possibility, though not based on those particular segments, which may well have been using 'love' in a nonsexual way. Who knows? Subtext, how I love thee.
On a more general note, Edward IV gets no love at all. He truly doesn't. Henry VI becomes a saint, Richard III becomes the Antichrist, and everyone sort of forgets about Edward. Even Shakespeare turns him into a buffoon. Henry VI, you can at least sympathise with in spite of his incompetence. Edward IV is a means to an end. He's barely got a personality outside of...well...wanting to sleep with anything that moves. And Heywood more or less follows that template except with a larger crush on Jane Shore.
I suppose there's Thomas More the cheering squad, but Edward dies a few pages in so he's beside the point. And there's the really bad porn romance novels that I prefer not to think about. And while I admit that half of the reason I love Sharon Penman's The Sunne in Splendour is Edward, who is beautifully real and so very fallible (despite what his younger brother may think), I don't know if other people feel the same way.
I wonder why more people don't write about him. He's fascinating in his inconsistency and wasted potential. One theory I read was that sixteenth-century writers were afraid of drawing unintentional parallels with Henry VIII, which I could see on so many levels. Especially that whole secret marriage bit. And the getting fat. They even look alike in later portraits. And one didn't want to make Henry angry. Or either of his daughters, for that matter.
ETA 2:10 PM: It also occurred to me that one cannot have Richard without Edward. Not really. It is Edward's reign that shapes him (the reason he's so prominent for the first three-quarters of Penman's novel). Of course, Edward's reign gets very short shrift in Shakespeare, for obvious reasons. When you've set up an adversarial relationship between Marguerite of Anjou and a preternaturally aged Richard of Gloucester, that sort of thing is bound to happen.
Anyway, all of this is in an effort to avoid writing that introduction to my dissertation outline that justifies its existence. I have a page of semi-incoherent ramblings about appropriation of women as characters that is only partly related to the cultural framework of queenship but has far more to do with the twisting of those frameworks to fit the needs of propaganda...which is the right idea, but not in any way that makes sense.
On a completely unrelated note, I did notice this in the film, but it is rather staggering how good Joaquin Phoenix sounds when he sings Johnny Cash.
ETA 2:10 AM: More thoughts added under the cut.