Word: walsingham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That's pretty much the way it goes with this movie. It's a faux epic - swell costumes, historically authentic settings, a certain amount of bustle and skulking, but very little dramatically gripping activity. One has hopes, occasionally, for Geoffrey Rush's Walsingham, Elizabeth's supremely adept spymaster (and a historical character one would like to know more about), but he remains a shadowy figure. One would like, as well, to see Samantha Morton's Mary as a tragic, if misguided, figure. But she manages no more than a certain noble smugness when, at last, her head is placed...
Tellingly, the most consistently exciting character in the film is not Elizabeth herself but her shadowy advisor Sir Francis Walsingham, played with relish and cold blood by the virtuosic Geoffrey Rush. Other politicos surrounding the Queen, like unrecognizable Christopher Eccleston as the traitorous Duke of Norfolk and Santa Claus-lookalike Richard Attenborough as earnest advisor Sir William Cecil, reveal their allegiances too broadly to become truly fearful or fascinating. By contrast, Rush's lurking performance leaves everything to the imagination: Walsingham whispers sweet Machiavellian nothings in the ear of the Queen between sessions slitting the throats of the boys...
...rejects a literal interpretation of the creation and Adam and Eve in Genesis. He has also vexed low-church hard-liners with his increasing friendliness toward Catholicism. As bishop, Carey has taken Anglo-Catholics in his diocese on a pilgrimage to a shrine to the Virgin Mary at Walsingham. In 1985 he declared that Evangelicals and Roman Catholics, though longtime adversaries, now "stand firm together for a historic faith against the insidious bloodletting which extreme liberalism perpetrates on the body Christian." Arthur Leggatt, the general secretary of the Anglo-Catholic Church Union, said last week, "We welcome his orthodox stand...
...Marlowe, so this one goes, was not killed in that famous tavern brawl; he simply went into hiding and as an outlaw wrote the plays since credited to Shakespeare. Proof of this theory, Hoffman figured, might well be found in the tomb of Marlowe's benefactor Sir Thomas Walsingham, who was laid to rest some three centuries ago in the parish church at Chislehurst, Kent...
...Sleuth Hoffman says no. He believes that Marlowe was the "secret lover" of Courtier Sir Thomas Walsingham (WalsingHam, suggests Hoffman, is the "Mr. W. H." to whom Shakespeare's sonnets are dedicated). Fearing that his boy friend would be burned at the stake for heresy, Walsingham faked up a murder. Only a stooge was buried at Deptford. Marlowe lived on secretly for many years, wrote all the plays of "Shakespeare." In fact, he began to write under Shakespeare's name almost immediately. Venus and Adonis, registered anonymously six weeks before Marlowe's murder, was published four months...