Hi my name is Henry of Monmouth and I was born in Monmouth Castle (that's how I got my name) and a lot of people tell me I look like Henry of Bolingbroke (AN: if you don't know who he is get da hell out of here!). I'm not related to Harry Percy but I wish I was because he's a major fucking hottie. I'm a prince but I like to drink and steal. I'm also a rogue, and I go to Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap. I'm a goth (in case you couldn't tell) and I wear mostly black. For example today I was wearing a black doublet, hose, and boots. I was walking outside my father's castle. It was snowing and raining, yet herein will I imitate the sun, who doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world. The Percys and Owen Glendower stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.
Earlier, it was actually surprising to me that TOS Kirk became such a peak blorbo for me, because usually the peak fave I latch onto is a character I identify with more than others, but I actually relate far more to Spock than Kirk. And I do love Spock deeply, just not quite as much. I tend to have pretty distinct types and was like, "it's odd given that Kirk's not my usual type at all, and yet he's such an easy, natural peak fave for me..."
But then I had an unexpected epiphany!
J and Kh have been watching Batman because she's a huge fan, and in the course of a wide-ranging conversation set off by that, we all discovered that J has never seen Zorro and especially not the formative 90s Antonio Banderas/Catherine Zeta-Jones movies, and decided those had to jump up our film queue. But then we discovered that Kh, ardent Batman fan of many years across many iterations, had never seen or read or really even heard of the Scarlet Pimpernel. As kids, J and I had absolutely adored Percy as a character, along with Marguerite herself. We repeatedly watched the version with Anthony Andrews/Jane Seymour together, then discovered the Leslie Howard/Merle Oberon film from 1934 (our favorite), and even dutifully put ourselves through the Richard E. Grant abomination, and of course, also read the original book. And since Kh and I have bonded over our time-traveling crush on Merle Oberon before, we all decided to watch.
We had a good time and were talking about it later, and about the sheer intensity of Oberon's Marguerite, and our enjoyment of how the Grenville ball sequence highlights Marguerite's resourceful versatility as an actress joined with deep, genuine emotionality that blurs the lines between the reality and the performance. And we also loved that Howard plays Percy-as-fop so masterfully and convincingly, yet in a way where you see an absolute gulf between Percy's very Marguerite-like hyperintensity in a few very heartfelt moments, and him turning on performances of either stupidity or lightweight charm like turning a light switch on. Despite the distinct on-and-off sense of Percy's personas, we always do end up wondering what traces of the real Percy are in the performances he puts on, especially the Sir Percy Blakeney persona and the assured, commanding Scarlet Pimpernel behind the scenes. Percy and Marguerite don't navigate performance of themselves in the same ways, but J was the one to point that both of them are wildly resourceful actors to the core who also have very genuine, fiercely-held ideals and emotions that drive them and there's a certain fascinating ambiguity about both.
J and I also talked a bit about the novel, because despite uhhh profound political disagreements with it, Orczy's novel introduces an interesting element of Percy's characterization. In the book, the previous Lady Blakeney—Percy's mother—was a beautiful woman who developed severe mental problems (I think fairly early in her marriage? I don't remember the exact details). But there was some concern around Percy himself as a result, that he might turn out like her (insanity-wise, but the vibe was that any similarity of temper he had with her would be seen as a possible sign of forthcoming mental collapse). Apart from his very masculine build, he does look a lot like his mother, and he's very narratively linked to her. By the time of the novel, though, the general belief seems to be that Percy inherited an attenuated version of his mother's mental fragility that just left him kind of dim and effeminate rather than insane.
The reality, of course, is that Percy is not dim at all, but a genius master of disguise and guile. But it does seem that even as a boy, he was coming off as odd. His personality as Sir Percy Blakeney doesn't disrupt what most previously thought about him. I had the impression that he got in the habit of showing people what they already expected to see in him, but in a non-alarming way, when he was quite young—and understandably, given that he was being constantly surveilled like a bomb that might go off at any moment.
The thing that makes this most interesting, though, is that the persona is not completely fake—the fashionista thing doesn't come out of nothing, he really does love a good cravat, etc. Instead, he uses those bits of authenticity to anchor a broadly very inauthentic performance of himself that serves a very different, far more sincere agenda that almost no one sees.
As J and I were enthusiastically talking about where we see the delineations between the pure deliberate artifice and the conscious use of himself—his own inclinations and hobbies and personality traits—for a hidden agenda that's much bigger and more important, I suddenly thought "wait, this is actually not that different from how I see Kirk, though I think the type is a lot more masculine-aligned with Percy despite the link to his mother, and despite Kirk's reputation, vastly less masculine-aligned with Kirk. But this is totally a type I've liked before!" I like Kirk a lot better than Percy, his ethics and ideological perspectives are much more aligned with what I think is good and admirable, and he's just more interesting to me, but there's something of that type in Percy for sure.
And Percy's such a romantic at heart about Marguerite, with all this emphasis on Marguerite's reputation as the cleverest woman in Europe, that even that element doesn't seem terribly far from Kirk having to balance his convictions about his responsibilities with being absolutely crazy about Spock. Kirk is a lot more compelling to me for various reasons (political, his personal history, the more elaborated messiness around gender), but there's quite a bit of Percy's quiet, deeply-felt intensity buried beneath flashy theatricality that serves his own agenda in Kirk.
And when that light bulb went off, I remembered two other favorite characters who very much fit this type as well—Hal in Henry IV, Part 1 (not so much Hal-as-Henry V, though his later characterization informs the earlier version of Hal-as-schemer) and Lucrezia Borgia in The Borgias. Of all these, I think Lucrezia is actually the closest in terms of the interplay between performance/versatile resourcefulness/deliberation/seductive guile on the one side, and genuinely warm, deep feelings and vulnerability and a sense of unnatural forced isolation on the other (though not moral vision, lol).
But yeah, this isn't actually a new type for me, it's just that I'm pretty picky about that type—for them to click in this way, I need the extreme intensity of real feeling coupled with a distinctly cold edge to their deliberate, controlled presentations of themselves (esp in regard to their use of charisma and attractiveness). And it's only going to click really hard if I can believe in their intelligence and if there's a degree of compelling ambiguity around their personas and reality. And generally the character's ultimate agenda has to be at least somewhat admirable; it's the maximum contrast that really makes this kind of character for me. Guile, manipulation, deception, and seduction are cool and awesome tools for a fictional character to use, but they're far more so when the character isn't just a selfish asshole, but is driven by a genuine sense of ethics and love and justice. They just ... don't stop at much when it comes to turning moral vision into reality.
@socialshakespeare and all the Henriad readings during the pandemic heard me carrying on about it back when we were starting it and NOW ITS HERE! (I promised I'd tag you guys back in 2020....so here ya are!!)
what your favourite shakespeare play is says so much about you. for example, i serve cunt in a way so horrifying to my family and i drown out the horrors by being as queer and annoying as possible. my fave shakespeare is henry iv pt i btw
