Si Fractus Fortis

In the evening we went to see the excellent production of “Richard III” at Stratford-upon-Avon. Something which had never struck me about the play before (or indeed about any of Shakespeare’s plays) was how Catholic it is. In fact the whole play is one extended depiction of what happens when God’s order is ignored.

Richmond, the future Henry VII, has the God-given mission to bring back order. Before the final battle he prays:

O Thou, Whose captain I account myself,
Look on my forces with a gracious eye.
Put in their hands Thy bruising irons of wrath,
That they may crush down with a heavy fall
The usurping helmets of our adversaries.
Make us Thy ministers of chastisement,
That we may praise Thee in the victory.
To Thee do I commend my watchful soul,
Ere I let fall the windows of mine eyes.
Sleeping and waking, O defend me still!

I would love to see a production which emphasises the religious aspect, rather than treat it as a quaint historical relic as most modern productions do.

It was the last episode of the BBC’s Sense and Sensibility last night, and my lasting memory of the adaption will be Hattie Morahan’s portrayal of Elinor Dashwood. For some reason even the greatest artists seem to find it easier to portray evil than good (think Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost or Dante’s terrific and terrifying Inferno). But here Elinor Dashwood came over as a woman without peer, every last nuance of her feelings reflected on her beautiful face.

My only serious quibble with the production was that it blurred the subtlety of Jane Austen’s ending by making Marianne fall in love with Colonel Brandon at the end. In the novel it’s made quite clear that she marries him as a man “for whom she has no sentiment superior to strong esteem and lively friendship”. The irony of the plot is that it is the “sensible” sister, Elinor, who has the true feelings, remains faithful to her love throughout despair and discouragement and eventually marries him in spite of the fact that he has no fortune and few prospects, while the “romantic” sister Marianne’s strongly expressed feelings vanish away like the morning mist and she marries sensibly a man with plenty of money and a fine house.

Either way, it’s the happiest of happy endings and I love Austen’s concluding sentence:

… and among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.

Yesterday we went to see the “Renaissance Siena” exhibition at the National Gallery, London.

It was a marvellous exhibition of art from a city which always to some extent saw itself as set apart from the rest of the world. I won’t write about the way in which Siena was saved from disaster many times by the intervention of the Blessed Virgin - the latest being during World War II. But I do want to mention one thing which struck me very forcibly. In the first half of the exhibition, the Sienese artists depicted the Virgin and other saints as though they believed in them and wanted to honour and glorify them by their art. Then quite suddenly there seemed to be a change of style and to me it was as if the artists were depicting the Virgin and the saints as just another set of subjects for their Art. In other words it was the Art that had become important rather than the saints. Perhaps it’s only coincidence that this was rapidly followed by the loss of the city’s independence and influence.