Tag Archives: television

March 21, 2013 · 10:34 am

How SQPN Prepared Me for the BBC

As you may have heard through other social media outlets, gentle reader, I was recently on BBC News talking about the election of Pope Francis as the new head of the Catholic Church.  I had held off blogging about this until now because the video was only uploaded to YouTube yesterday, and you can see the results here.  However I also wanted to connect this blog post with SQPN’s giving campaign, since without the experience of having been a regular panelist on the “Catholic Weekend” show on that network for the past year, I doubt very much I would have been ready for this rather unique opportunity.  Moreover, I want to encourage you to consider donating to SQPN as I do, to support their many terrific programs.

A week ago I received an email from someone claiming to be at the BBC in London, which arrived via the email address for this blog.  Curiously, the message began, “Dear Christopher,” which of course is not my name.  It then went on to invite me, as a Catholic blogger, to appear on a BBC discussion panel about the new pope.  I wrote back inquiring as to whether this was some sort of joke, and also pointing out that my name was not in fact Christopher.

The response came that in fact they had been looking for a British blogger, and somehow had ended up contacting me, which is rather odd because when they sent me the link to the blog they were trying to get in touch with, the site had been taken down.  There must have been some link to one of my posts, or some such thing, for The Beeb to end up at my online door.  After explaining that I was not the party in question, but that I was indeed a Catholic and a blogger, as well as a weekly podcast guest, the young lady at the BBC commented that I would be even better for this program than the person she had been trying to locate.

After a lengthy pre-interview conversation via Skype, it was arranged that I should be at the BBC’s studios here in Washington the following morning by 10:30 am.  Fortunately by pure chance I had already made arrangements that evening to have dinner with an old friend and his wife – who just so happens to be from Buenos Aires.  It allowed me the chance to talk to two people with a more secular outlook on the world about their perceptions and thoughts regarding Pope Francis.  It was not a practice run, but  something more like airing ideas that allowed me to come down to some key talking points later.

I arrived earlier than I needed to at the BBC, and sat around for a bit waiting for things to happen.  I had been in a television studio once before in high school, to tape a local commercial about not drinking and driving during prom season – which in my case was not a problem since I did not go to my prom anyway.  However this of course was the newsroom-television studio of the legendary British Broadcasting Corporation, the largest news-gathering organization in the world, and that is somewhat quite different to anticipate.  For here, you are not so much thinking about whether you are going to embarrass your parents, but whether you are going to embarrass your country or your Church, before billions of people who watch the BBC all over the world.

Now there is nothing particularly glamorous about the newsroom of the BBC in Washington when you actually get to see it in person, which I imagine is rather what other international news organizations’ newsrooms are like as well.  There is a strange mixture of people in shirts and ties mingling about with people who look as though they have slept in a mechanic’s jumpsuit for a week.  There are tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment hanging about everywhere, big lines of duct tape running every which way all over the carpets, and people running in and out doing whatever it is they are doing.  It reminded me more of a doctor’s waiting room than the theatre.

Indeed, when they took me back to the camera room where I would be shooting, with its animated backdrop of the White House, the space felt eerily reminiscent of going to have x-rays taken.  I was hooked up with a microphone and earpiece, and told where to look, and where to sit.  Then a British voice came on in my ear from London telling me what to do, and that periodic whisper in my ear became my lifeline for the next hour or so.

Everyone was very kind and tried to put me at ease, though of course because I was in a remote studio rather than on set in London, at the time it was difficult to know for certain whether I was coming across well or not.  In our normal conversations with other people we have not only their voices, but also their facial expressions, gestures, and so on to tell us whether we are getting through to them, making them upset, or what have you.  When you are simply listening to disembodied voices, as I was, it is a bit more difficult to know whether you are doing it right.

And yet ironically enough, it was at this precise moment where my past year of experience on SQPN’s “Catholic Weekend” show came in tremendously useful.  Originally we recorded the show via Skype, just using voices, which of course makes sense since a podcast is more like a radio show than a television program.  As a result, one became more and more accustomed to listening for those audio cues and breaks to step in or to step back.  It is a skill which I still have to master, but which I am certainly getting better at with time.

Thus, even though I could not see anyone I was talking to on the BBC, I very quickly fell into the same pattern I would have recording an episode of “Catholic Weekend” – albeit not in my jammies with a cup of coffee,  sifting through the technical train wreckage and laughing at bad puns before we go on the air.  Nevertheless it turned out to be wonderful training for this, which meant that whatever I may have looked like, I felt very relaxed on camera.  It is difficult to describe but once the lights go on, YOU go on, as well.  Concerns about whether you will do well or not simply evaporate and you just do what you are there to do.

The reader – or rather, viewer – can judge for himself whether he thinks I did well or not, but I will say that my “handler” at the BBC emailed me when I returned to the office and told me I did great and that they would love to have me on again if I were willing.  It remains to be seen whether I will do so, since it is unlikely they will cover a topic of such interest to me personally again any time soon.  However I do want to say how grateful I am to them for giving me this opportunity not only to speak about my Faith and about our new Holy Father Pope Francis, but also to Father Roderick, Captain Jeff, and everyone at SQPN, for without the past year of experience in podcasting I would probably not have done nearly as decent a job as I (arguably) did.

BBC

The author looking somewhat smug in his Churchill dot necktie.

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February 21, 2012 · 12:00 pm

The Curious Appeal of “Downton Abbey”

For my regular readers who have not seen the Season Two finale of “Downton Abbey” yet, do not worry: I will not be providing any spoilers in the following blog post. Nor am I going to expound upon why I find it ridiculous, which I did at the conclusion of Season One, as you can read here.   Instead, recognizing that the show seems to have struck a chord with many people, and is being referenced in everything from Ralph Lauren’s Fall/Winter 2012 collection which just walked the runway last week, to the popularity of YouTube tribute videos such as [please forgive the vulgarity] “Sh*t the Dowager Countess Says“, I want to ask the question: why is this decidedly old-fashioned type of British melodrama attracting such a significant audience here in America?

One school of thought can best be encapsulated in a conversation I had yesterday afternoon with an elderly gentleman in my neighborhood with whom I have had a nodding acquaintance for many years.  A New Englander by birth and education, he holds an Ivy League doctorate in cultural anthropology, speaks several difficult languages fluently, and has lived all over the world.  We discussed the convoluted plot lines and numerous anachronisms of the television series, and yet both wondered aloud at the fact that two reasonably educated fellows such as ourselves were still watching the thing, for some inexplicable reason.  ”For me,” my learned if lefty friend concluded,”the truth is that ‘Downton Abbey’ is a lot like President Obama.  It’s bad, and I don’t believe it, but there’s no appealing alternative.”

While that might explain the attraction for some people, it certainly does not speak to everyone’s interest.  Since so much of popular dramatic evening television in this country at the present time is the worship of hyper-sexualized violence, “Downton Abbey” is something else entirely.  It is probably a relief for many to be able to watch a program that looks good and, while dealing with adult themes, exhibits at least some restraint in its portrayal of sex and violence, compared to other television shows which have captured the popular imagination of late.

Another possibility is the escapism of a more glamorous time, which becomes particularly engaging when economic and political times are hard.  The appeal of shows like “Pan-Am” or “Mad Men” in this country, for example, is in part due to a reflection back on when things seemed to be a bit more elegant and attractive than they are now.  It would be hard to imagine people becoming engaged in, for example, a soap opera set in the Dust Bowl during the Depression, though stranger things have happened.

However another explanation is something I raised at brunch after Sunday mass, in the company of a largish number of friends of both sexes: Could it be that “Downton Abbey” is the new “Desperate Housewives”? When the latter show premiered, I found it watchable because it was so surreal, and wicked in its send-up of soap opera clichés.  I actually enjoyed the first few episodes quite a bit, until Oprah Winfrey picked up on the show and decided to give it her imprimatur; that, in turn, made it too popular and I stopped watching it.  However it is interesting that both series share a certain kind of fantastical unbelievability rooted in realism: “Desperate Housewives” was set in contemporary American suburbia, of course, and “Downton Abbey” in Edwardian English manor life, and yet neither of their universes seems entirely plausible, no matter how much attention to detail is put in by the filmmakers.

Like “Desperate Housewives”, the female characters on “Downton Abbey” are all beautiful, highly complex women from different socio-economic classes, who often find themselves struggling to assert ideas of their own purpose in life, or to follow their dreams of forbidden romance.  There are in both series the same cartoon-like characters who are marked out as black-and-white evil, without nuance; they occasionally do a good turn for someone else, but inevitably they do not learn from their experiences, and go back to being villains.  And just like on “Desperate Housewives”, the campy-slapstick factors in “Downton Abbey” are sometimes rather high, despite the serious tones and the furrowing of brows.

That being said, I did wonder aloud in conversation with the ladies at the table whether “Downton Abbey” is what the old Hollywood movie moguls used to call a “women’s picture”.  While the term would be viewed in some quarters as a misogynistic categorization today, it really is no different from the term “chick flick”, though of course cultural morays have changed rather dramatically in the transition.  A film or a novel where the men are not really particularly complicated characters, but the women all go through very complicated storyline arcs, will naturally appeal more to women than to men, even if men can enjoy them.  Indeed, the last British television series to make a big splash on these shores, “Cranford”, was an almost stereotypical “women’s picture”, based on novels that, with apologies to Mrs. Gaskell, one might consider something like Victorian “chick lit” –  or perhaps more accurately, Victorian “granny lit”.

We shall have to wait another year or so to see what happens next with the Crawley family and their retainers.  No doubt the choice of Shirley MacLaine to play the American grandmother to Lady Mary and her sisters is specifically intended to draw in an even larger American audience, in order to see her go toe-to-toe with Dame Maggie Smith in some Dynasty-style geriatric catfighting.    However, I also have had a suspicion from Season One onward that Lady Cora and her side of the family are going to turn out to be Jewish, or at least partially Jewish, based on some things Lady Cora has mentioned in passing during the course of the series.  This would seem to be further borne out by the announcement that Ms. MacLaine’s character for “Downton Abbey” is to be named Martha Levinson.  Having this in the mix it will allow the filmmakers to explore the themes of antisemitism that in part led to the development of European fascism during the 1920′s and 30′s.

As indicated briefly above, there are many possible theories as to why “Downton Abbey” has attracted such a significant audience in this country.  They may all be valid, or none of them may be; the reader is of course free to agree or disagree with them.  However regardless of why other people watch it, or indeed my regular mockery of it on social media and in conversation with others, I must admit that I will be looking forward to seeing what comes next.

Scene from last evening’s Season Two Finale of “Downton Abbey”

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November 7, 2011 · 2:17 pm

Film Review: “Page Eight” (2011)

I had been looking forward to seeing “Page Eight”, the BBC film which garnered some good reviews earlier this summer in the British press when it premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and which aired last night on PBS’ “Masterpiece Contemporary”. With a cast of accomplished actors that includes Bill Nighy, Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Michael Gambon, and Judy Davis, and a plot that promised to pit the different branches of British intelligence against each other, the package sounded too good to resist. Unfortunately, after unwrapping all of said package’s eye-catching trappings, one is left with something so utterly muted and boring, that one wonders how one is perceived in the eyes of the giver.

The somewhat complicated plot involves a memo in which we Yanks have been doing some rather bad things, and Downing Street is seeking to cover this up as it moves toward replacing MI-5 and MI-6 with something more akin to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The film then revolves around who is doing this, and why, and efforts to either release or stifle this information. Normally this would be a recipe for something at least marginally interesting. Unfortunately, from the get-go the film never really “goes”.

As is inevitably the case in these sorts of films, there is a great deal more talking than action, which is not necessarily a bad thing when it is handled well. The “House of Cards” series, for example, involved complicated political intrigue and lots of conversation, and never dragged in the way that “Page Eight” does. The languid pacing of people standing around, speaking sotto voce about how tired they are simply makes the viewer – or at least this one, at 9pm on a Sunday – rather tired himself.

When you have a cast of the quality of that assembled for a project like this, who are capable of some extraordinary feats of acting, creating this kind of group, it is hoped, will lead to fireworks on screen. Yet most of the actors here seem to be searching about for some sort of direction as to who exactly they are supposed to be. Michael Gambon is killed off fairly early on, regrettably, while Ralph Fiennes does what he usually does post-”Schindler’s List” which is to stand about trying to seem menacing – while looking more like he is about 5 foot 8 instead of his actual 6 feet tall.

Bill Nighy was more interesting as a vampire in “Underworld” than in this film, which he has to carry as the lead. The normally-adept Judy Davis can’t seem to decide which sort of British accent she wants to emulate from scene to scene, and sometimes from line to line. There is however, a beautifully shot sequence between the two of them which begins with Davis striding down a dark, London street in a scarlet coat, to meet Nighy in a restaurant for an incredibly tense conversation. Unfortunately there is not enough of that to keep either the actors or the viewers particularly interested in what happens next.

And then there is the dialogue, which is a mixed bag at best. Sometimes, the back-and-forth about politics and espionage starts to approach the level of crackle that you would hope for in a production of this quality, but just when you think they are about to pull something interesting into the film, it seems to fall back into soap opera writing.I quite literally winced at one point, when Rachel Weisz’ character turns to Bill Nighy’s and says, “I thought I’d never learn to feel again.” I had to double-check the clicker and make sure I was not watching an episode of “EastEnders”.

One of the more unappealing aspects of the plot was the film’s use of America as a kind of moral bogeyman.. On this side of the pond of course, particularly when filming a costume drama, we are not loathe to make the British the “bad guys”, as it were, thanks to that little unpleasantness after 1776. Yet generally speaking we do not make the British our enemies in our contemporary espionage films, but rather our allies – or at the very least our colleagues.

The fact that “Page Eight” paints Americans as being immoral, or at best amoral, and their influence as a corrupting one on the British government, is nothing new, for it has cropped up in a number of British films which I have seen in recent years. Indeed, even on my beloved television series “MI-5″, as the BBC’s “Spooks” is known in America, “The Cousins”, as the Americans are referred to, are more often treated as a potential threat rather than a helpful partner. Perhaps this is because Britain’s influence in the world is not what it was, and so certain British filmmakers feel that this is the only way they have to combat what they perceive as being America’s bad influence on their own country. And perhaps because this was a film made for a British audience, rather than an American one, it would hardly be right for me, as a non-Brit, to complain about this plot device: but there it is, all the same.

The tricky part of doing an ensemble cast of highly-skilled actors in any film, it seems to me, is to make sure that they all balance each other out so that everyone gets to shine, rather than one or two eclipsing the others, or everyone going at it in a free-for-all trying to out-do one another. Unfortunately in this film, whether because of the sluggish plotline or the sometimes chuckle-worthy dialogue, this brilliant group of players seems wasted, lost in a kind of gray funk on screen from which they can never emerge. And while there may be the occasional flicker of interest or intrigue, by the end one simply does not care what happens to any of these people, which is why the piece fails.


Rachel Weisz and Bill Nighy in “Page Eight”

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September 7, 2011 · 1:46 pm

The Hero As Zero: How The Left Ruins Popular Mythology

On Labor Day this Monday, a local television station broadcast a marathon of the appallingly bad BBC series “Robin Hood”.  Neither historically accurate nor well-written, it is hard to believe that this travesty of a program managed to last three seasons on British television.  However it allows us the opportunity to consider how we are treating our mythical heroes in the culture, and whether we ought to be more circumspect in our patronage of entertainments featuring them.

It was apparent that things were going to be very bad indeed when Maid Marian appeared, with a Katy Perry haircut and makeup, wearing trousers and spending her nights fighting what in this country we would call “the man”, as a kind of female version of Zorro.  Sir Guy of Gisbourne, played by Richard Armitage – whom I genuinely like in his other work, such as “Spooks” – wears more black leather than a Hell’s Angel, and has little to do but look shiftily out of the corners of his eyes, posing no real threat to anyone.  One of the most laughable sequences involving these two characters takes place in a chapel, where they are about to be married, before Robin swoops in.   On the altar stands what is clearly a standard 19th or 20th century Protestant, brass altar cross with no corpus, like you might see in any Episcopal or Lutheran church.  And there are no reredos, statues, or any other decoration, despite this being the very Catholic 12th century in England.

The entire series is punctuated with some of the most anachronistic characterizations you can imagine. The Sheriff of Nottingham, for example, is portrayed as an incredibly camp middle-aged man, with an insatiable fondness for young men, which seems particularly surprising coming from the BBC.  One wonders why the left accuses conservatives of characterizing homosexuals in this fashion, when they are the ones making all of the films with this sort of stereotype.  Then there is a woman of indeterminate ethnic origin in Robin Hood’s band of merry “men”, who is supposedly a devout Muslim but uses a man’s name, sports a pixie haircut, and wears men’s clothes, all of which would probably get her stoned to death – not to mention that she wears eye makeup so heavy that it is hard to believe she could pass for a man whenever she goes out in public.

Worst of all is Robin himself, played by what I can only describe as someone who evokes the word “chav” rather than “chivalry”.  This is not the aristocratic Robin of Locksley, who fights the Saracens and remains loyal to King Richard in the hope of one day regaining his lands and re-establishing the rule of law and order in Britain, but rather some sort of moppet, who today would be down on Piccadilly in a dirty Burberry anorak coordinating the smashing the windows at Fortnum’s via his iPhone.  He is an air-headed, Banksy-style faux-anarchist, whose parents spared the rod and spoiled the child, creating someone with no real intelligence who spouts leftist platitudes.  Perhaps the most eye-rolling bit of dialogue this Robin Hood utters in the series is when he explains that he became disillusioned with the Crusades because he realized that the Holy Land was holy to Jews and Muslims as well.  True as that is historically, the real Robin of Locksley would have had a boot up this fellow’s backside before he had finished his sentence.

It would have been very easy to turn this blog piece into a hatchet job on how this telling of “Robin Hood” is an all-too-indicative reflection of how low Britain has fallen as a nation, at least in its own estimation.  Yet although those of us on this side of the pond do not have centuries of legendary figures upon which to draw to create popular mythology, we are not far behind the cousins in destroying our own, more modern myths.  For example, the comic book characters of Superman, Captain America, and Spiderman, among others, have all been “killed off” of late, later to be resurrected with different, flawed personalities, or in the person of completely different individuals.  And recently, the increasingly bizarre George Lucas announced that he would be releasing a new version of “Return of the Jedi” in which Darth Vader will utter a “No!” cry of regret not once, but twice in the scene where he finally kills Emperor Palpatine and saves his son.

These things matter, not because a remake or reinterpretation is by definition a bad thing, but because we use such works of mythology to inspire our children to imagine doing heroic things.  Particularly for boys, the idea of being a hero of some sort is intrinsic, even if it is abandoned later on.  So many of us when we were small were drawn to the idea of being a policeman, fireman, or doctor, because we wanted to save people and do dangerous, exciting things.  We imagined being kings, knights, or wizards fighting monsters and evil invaders, with no thought to personal socio-political considerations about the interrelationship between different cultures.  And after all, what are sports like football and so on but an organized way for boys to safely battle for their neighborhood, village, etc., just as they would have done in the Middle Ages, except with sports equipment rather than weapons.

When we water down and cheapen the message of heroism, we end up with the Robin Hood that is shown to us by the BBC. An eternal adolescent, incapable of becoming a man, he talks about saving the world, but he is really inherently selfish, and concerned with satisfying his own needs at the expense of others, just as much as if he was the shameless materialist he claims to despise.  It is truly an embarrassment to the British people that this is how their broadcasting system wants them and the world to see this figure from their mythology, but of course we ourselves ought to be careful not to be supporting entertainment that does the same thing.

If you have children who want to learn about Robin Hood, show them the stunning Technicolor version from 1938 starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Haviland, and Basil Rathbone: great actors all, and all of whom understood their roles in the legend far better than the sad display which the BBC managed to throw together.  Despite being as old a work of cinema as it is, do not dismiss it because of its age, but embrace its shamelessly traditional telling of the story, and seek out films like it.  One of the great benefits of modern technology is that you can take advantage of archival preservation and restoration to remind your children, and indeed yourself, of the virtues of our culture using the materials that inspired our grandparents, rather than the Baby Boomer travesties that tend to flood our screens and bookshelves in the present day.


Jonas Armstrong (Robin), Lucy Griffiths (Marian), Richard Armitage (Sir Guy)
in the BBC television series “Robin Hood”

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July 27, 2011 · 2:05 pm

Sprezzatura Wednesday: Lest We Forget The Ladies

You only have until this Sunday to enter my blog’s annual birthday contest, gentle reader, and already I have received a number of entries that show some of you “get” Count Castiglione’s concept of sprezzatura very well.  Yet let us continue our exploration of that concept today, taking the opportunity to consider the ladies among us.  For although a gentleman always upholds the honor of the ladies in his party, the truth is that sometimes the ladies make us laugh, as well.

In a classic episode of the well-known BBC comedy “As Time Goes By”, the character of Lionel (Geoffrey Palmer) is contacted by his ex-wife, who wants to see him and catch up, during her brief visit to London.  Lionel naturally asks his new wife Jean (Dame Judi Dench) to accompany him to the reunion, and Jean becomes very flustered when she realizes she will only have a couple of hours to get ready.  As they are awaiting his ex-wife’s arrival, Lionel and Jean discuss the fact that the latter changed outfits five times before they left the house.  And this gives Lionel cause to ask one of those eternal questions which men always find themselves asking the fairer sex: “Why is it that women always feel the need to impress other women?”

Of course, Jean is not the only female figure in British comedy to become flustered around another woman whom she feels may upstage her.  One thinks of Sue Brockman (Claire Skinner) in the more recent BBC sitcom “Outnumbered”, for example, who is always being shown up by the woman next door and her seemingly perfect life.  Penelope Keith made a career out of playing the type of woman who always tried to get one up on other women, on programs like “The Good Life” and “To The Manor Born”.  And of course British literature is full of women engaging in one-upmanship with each other, from Jane Austen to Mrs. Gaskell.

One author with whom my readers may not be familiar in this regard is E.M. Delafield, the pen name of Mrs. Edmee Dashwood.  Delafield was the eldest daughter of the Comte de la Pasture, whose family had emigrated to England after the French Revolution, and Elizabeth Bonham, from a British family long involved in colonial affairs and diplomacy.  Raised a Catholic, at one time she discerned a vocation to a very strict religious order in Belgium, where she was accepted as a postulant.  However she later left,  decided to marry Col. Arthur Dashwood, and settled down to country life in Devonshire, where her husband was the manager for the Bradfield Estate; she became a mother to two children.

Beginning in 1930, Delafield began to write a semi-autobiographical account of her experiences as a bourgeois housewife in the country, resulting in her first and probably best novel,” The Diary of a Provincial Lady”.  There would be several more novels before Delafield’s premature death in 1943.  While all are amusing, the spark and wit of the first provides a classic example of the sometimes very unsubtle battle between women to see who can do things more effortlessly and perfectly.

Delafield’s narrator, the “Provincial Lady” of the title, is almost always on the losing end to her neighbor and “frenemy”, the glamorous Lady Bowe, whom the narrator often refers to as “Lady B.” An excerpt from her diary provides a good example of how Lady B. seemingly excels at sprezzatura, while the Provincial Lady does not:

February 11th
Hear that Lady Boxe has returned from South of France and is entertaining house-party. She sends telephone message by the butler, asking me to tea to-morrow. I accept. (Why?)

February 12th
Insufferable behaviour of Lady B. Find large party…Lady B. wears an emerald-green leather coat with fur collar and cuffs. I, having walked down, have on ordinary coat and skirt…Lady B. asks me at tea how the children are, and adds, to the table at large, that I am “A Perfect Mother”. Am naturally avoided, conversationally, after this, by everybody at the tea-table. Later on, Lady B. tells us about South of France. She quotes repartees made by herself in French, and then translates them.

This is just one example of the endless, running battle between the Provincial Lady and her nemesis-neighbor.

Of course, Castiglione’s concept of sprezzatura means not only doing something well, but also doing it so well that it seems effortless. The irony that goes unperceived by Delafield’s Provincial Lady is that Lady B. is, in fact, utterly lacking in sprezzatura. She tries to put on airs and snobbery, but she makes colossal mistakes in manners, planning events, and giving back-handed compliments. She is a combination of bad faith and underachievement, rather than a paragon of accomplishment and grace, but appearances blind the Provincial Lady and others to Lady B’s shortcomings as a courtier.

In fact, Castiglione goes through a long list of women in his “Book of the Courtier” whom he expects his female readers to try to emulate as they search for that goal of sprezzatura in their way of living. Some of these ladies are powerful and famous, yes, but some are ordinary women of ordinary or reduced circumstances. Toward the end of his list, Castiglione mentions the recently-exiled Queen of Naples,

who, after the loss of her kingdom, the exile and death of her husband King Federico, and of two children, and the captivity of her first-born, the Duke of Calabria, still shows herself to be a queen, and so endures the grievous burdens of bitter poverty as to give all men proof that although her fortunes are changed, her rank is not.

I refrain from mentioning countless other ladies, and also women of low degree; like many Pisan women, who in the defense of their city against the Florentines displayed that generous daring, without any fear of death, which might have been displayed by the most unconquerable souls that have ever been on earth; wherefore some of them have been celebrated by many noble poets.

Thus, Castiglione holds feminine virtue, of showing courage in the face of difficult circumstances, and acting out of love at all times, as embodying the ideals of womanhood. These qualities give him, as a mere man, encouragement to try to do the same, but also to protect women, who very often are in need of protection. In the present, topsy-turvy world in which we live such a notion will no doubt be rejected by many.

Yet throughout the centuries it is the ladies who have shown us how to act with that sprezzatura, that effortless grace, which is a hallmark of someone making the most of their circumstances, great or reduced as they may be. Should they decide to occasionally compete with one another, it is only because all human beings are flawed, regardless of their sex. Castiglione would hold that it is their favor, and their example, which makes not only sprezzatura, but civilization itself, possible.

Illustration of Lady B. from
E.M. Delafield’s “The Diary of a Provincial Lady”

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