The Miserable Death Of Elizabeth I, The Virgin Queen | Elizabeth (Part 4...

I don't get "miserable." Sad, sure. Amazingly deliberate. Brilliant, really, like everything else this lady ever did--and brave. She died a Virgin, with a capital V. And I think her illegitimate son was Shakespeare, if not she herself.

All right, so I am to some degree (not forgetting her having those poor printers' right hands cut off--nonetheless) bending the knee and kissing the hand of Good Queen Bess. It's not just her glorious imminence I'm captivated by. It's her incredible mind--whose polyglot and polymath perfection she (and Roger Ascham and Katherine Parr) attained (trained and exercised into existence) with real musical and athletic talent, akin to genius; the pedagogic implications of which are, I think, still not realized or well understood, but are perhaps foreshadowed in Das Glasperlenspiel of Herman Hesse. Which, methinks, is never sufficiently, or quite, comprehended by (those devil) historians, who are at the mercy of their own unrefined sensibilities and uneducated tastes, in their (failed) apprehension of the intellectual and artistic culture of Elizabethans. They (historians) are, really, in their totality, like that famous committee of blindfold men describing an elephant: Some understand the Latinity and the sciences; some appreciate the piratic adventurousness; a few realize the Olympian mastery of Weelkes, Gibbon, Tallis and Byrd. Nobody gets it all together at once the way, say, that Francis Drake did. My ears are still ringing from the soirées musicales aboard the Pelican.