What a desolation! Pert nipples and four seasons more.

Katharine Hepburn’s monologue from The Lion In Winter

Fine drama for the Christmas season

I first watched The Lion In Winter when I was a young boy. It could even have been in the cinema—I can’t remember where, however. A trip to the flicks was always in for one of the evenings when the family went somewhere visiting for a few days. It was a means to relieve our host of boisterous children for a short while. Depending on the movie, the boisterousness could be quelled upon our return, or augmented.

The Lion In Winter is one of those factual history dramas about which one needs to be selective as to its veracity. Henry II of England, played by Peter O’Toole, lived, as near as makes no difference, nine hundred years ago. His wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, played by Katharine Hepburn, also lived, as near as makes no difference, nine hundred years ago. You’d expect the dialogue to somehow reflect that, but the script is peppered with modern turns of phrase (in the excerpt, Hepburn talks of sticking pins, a reference to religious systems that would not be discovered by westerners like her for 500 years), and the language is not even Shakespearean in its presentation (a mere four hundred years ago). If it had been spoken authentically, no one in modern society would have understood it: they spoke 12th-century Old French and Occitan, one of the languages (including Latin) that French eventually supplanted as the language of the kingdom of France.

The time of the action in the film, which was a great success when released in 1968, after having been a huge failure on the New York stage, is Christmas in the year 1183. The action itself turns around Henry’s attempts to regulate his succession, and it devolves into a whirlwind of jealousy and recrimination, between husband and wife, between parents and sons, and among the sons.

Hepburn has a monologue, and it is one worthy of quotation in today’s world, as apropos as it was … in eleven eighty-three. It goes by the title What a desolation! Near its end, the three sons gather in the queen’s boudoir and start to bicker, with weapons, even. John complains that Richard has a knife.

Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It’s 1183 and we’re barbarians. How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war, not history’s forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing—WE are the killers, WE BREED wars. We carry it like syphilis inside: dead bodies rotting field and stream, because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can’t we love one another just a little? That’s how peace begins.

We have so much to love each other for, we have such possibilities.

Also playing, in order of appearance: John Castle, Nigel Terry, Anthony Hopkins. And, perhaps, the love of God.