Quotes by Elizabeth Lee

“But wield it with care, lass, do not go blasting out your fury and letting all know it was you. They fear it.””

“What could he say to Elizabeth’s mother?””

“Grant believed that generous terms were essential to pacification. In Grant's eyes, the surrender was a triumph of right over wrong: proof of the moral and material superiority of the North's free-labor democratic society over the South's slave-labor autocratic one. Grant's hope, in extending clemency, was to change hearts and minds--to effect Confederate repentance and submission.In Lee's view, by contrast, the United States' victory was one of might over right, attributable to brutal force, not to skill and virtue. Although Lee rejected the option of guerrilla warfare as impractical and dishonorable, he did not admit moral defeat or counsel submission.””

“Let’s have a glance at Strong’s theory. Okay, the 2nd Earl of Essex, a former court favorite, had been the leader of the failed rebellion against the crown. In Strong’s strange-fantastic scenario, the pregnant Lady Essex, hoping to prevent the beheading of her husband following his arrest, had with great speed commissioned this sexy full-length portrait of herself and sent it to Elizabeth as a plea to spare her husband’s life. Strong made no attempt to explain why Lady Essex, who was famously despised by Elizabeth, would have thought it wise to paint herself as the Virgin Queen’s pregnant twin”

“Shakespeare’s pen was dipped in courtly scandals and his audience titteringly aware of who it was being pulled apart onstage. Nobody was safe from his satirical barbs, not Elizabeth’s hunchbacked secretary of state Robert Cecil, whose deformities were likely parodied in Richard III; not the powerful Lord Burghley, ruthlessly mocked in Hamlet as the Alzheimered Polonius; and not even the queen herself, who once snappishly complained of having been roasted in Richard II.””

“because officially there were no Jews allowed in England during Shakespeare’s prime; however, a few loopholes existed in Elizabeth’s brutal anti-Semitic laws, the most noteworthy being her personal physician, Roderigo Lopez. It’s hard to imagine a more perilous job than being the Spanish and illegally Jewish physician to a so-called Virgin Queen in a day of race-baiting theater, but in this hate-filled arena Dr. Lopez lasted an astounding thirteen years before being found guilty, on scant evidence, of having attempted to poison his royal patient.””

“Elizabethan portrait miniature. Usually oval in shape, these tiny paintings were designed to be worn on hats, doublets, or chains often as feudal badges of loyalty. Soldiers sent back miniature ambassadors of themselves to their wives or mistresses so as not to be forgotten (or God forbid cuckolded). Travelers presented them as gifts to hosts, and beauties shipped fetching miniatures of themselves to foreign lands in hopes of becoming royal brides. Elizabeth I once dispatched Hilliard to paint the Duke of Anjou”

“...both sides, in the civil war, committed mistake when they put engineer officers at the head of large armies.... -- JAMES LONGSTREET (referring to George McClellan and Robert E. Lee), Interview with the Chicago Tribune, January 29, 1871.””

“They saw themselves as champions of the Lost Cause--the creed, dominant among Southern whites, that proclaimed that the Confederate cause was righteous and would be vindicated; that Reconstruction was a travesty; and that the racial caste system must persist. [Jubal] Early and his ilk positioned Lee as the symbolic embodiment of the Lost Cause, and they worked relentlessly to immortalize him as a saintly, faultless, marble man/””

“A few critics commented that the material had been “twisted by a master artificer into the cunning semblance of a biography” and that “it is all a record of external events… not the exhibition of a human soul.” But mostly Lee’s book was celebrated, becoming the new Shakespeare biography for the twentieth century.””

“In some ways, the biographies were actually more dangerous than the forgeries, for while the forgeries were eventually discarded, the fictions lasted. Knight’s method”