----- Original Message ----- From: "Howard Posner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Lute Net" <lute@cs.dartmouth.edu> Sent: Monday, April 24, 2006 11:42 PM Subject: [LUTE] Re: HBO Movie Elizabeth I, P.S.
>I checked the Internet Movie Database and didn't find anything about > >> But then Walsingham et al. persisted in setting up a sting to entrap >> Mary and force Elizabeth to execute her, which made it seem like >> Elizabeth was not in control of her own council. > > I have no trouble believing this one. Elizabeth waffled back and forth > over what to do about Mary for years, and made it pretty clear that she > didn't want to get her own hands dirty. Didn't she claim that Mary was > executed without her knowledge, even after she signed the death warrant? > > H > Well, according to Stefan Zweig, ( see "Mary Stuart") Elizabeth was a real politician and a very ambiguous person, so she perfectly knew what she was doing, when she signed, but she feigned not to notice it. She acted, and later on sentenced to death Davidson, the member of the Star Chamber who had been required to bring her the document. Walsingham was "very properly" ( Zweig writes) ill, and Davidson substituted him. Zweig talks of a sting set up by Walsingham and writes Mary's life as a novel, maybe outdated today, for a historian, but a very fascinating reading. Carolly Erickson ( see "Elizabeth") doesn't talk about the plot, but depicts Elizabeth as conscious of what she was doing. Donatella http://web.tiscali.it/awebd > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html >
