#instead of conqueror/conquered which leaves becket instead feeling conflicted and possibly even guilty about how he loves henry | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

stephantom · 7 months ago

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Becket could not care less about all the women they used to get—he just misses riding fancy horses.

If he’d done this in the movie, you know there’d be jokes about O’Toole chewing the scenery. (But I get it, Henry—Becket is inscrutable and beyond reason and it would be maddening to be in love with him.)

I am reading the play Becket now (of course I am) and it’s interesting how some lines are just slightly different. In the movie we have:

LOUIS: Why does he hate you so?

BECKET: He's never forgiven me for preferring God to him.

And in the play:

LOUIS: He really hates you, doesn’t he?

BECKET: (Simply) Sire, we loved each other and I think he cannot forgive me for preferring God to him.

Sire, we loved each other!! He also says that he’s been talking to Henry since he left him, I guess meaning imagined/one-sided conversations? :[

LOUIS: I shall try to persuade him to make his peace with you. Should he agree, will you be willing to talk with him?

BECKET: Sire, ever since we stopped seeing each other, I have never ceased to talk to him.

Also of note: there were canonical threesomes:

KING: Yet I know you well enough, God knows. Ten years spent together, little Saxon! At the hunt, at the whorehouse, at war; carousing all night long the two of us; in the same girl’s bed, sometimes… and at work in the Council Chamber’s room.

And this part at the end of their last meeting, on the beach. Becket asks for a kiss goodbye and Henry denies him because he’s too distraught?? (This comes almost immediately after Henry’s “whole body is shaken by a sob” and Becket, “moved”, tries to approach him but Henry tells him to stay away because he doesn’t want pity.)

BECKET: (Gravely) Farewell, my prince. Will you give me the kiss of peace?

KING: No! I can’t bear to come near you! I can’t bear to look at you! Later! Later! When it doesn’t hurt any more!

#I could try to get into some of the stuff with gwendolen and becket’s family and all the #concepts of ethics and identity and race and nationality but it’s all so messy it makes my head hurt #and I get so distracted by the suspicion that the way becket and everyone else conceptualizes these things is super ahistorical #all this stuff about being from ‘a conquered race’ when idk if that’s how it would have been understood at all? maybe?#or was it more like just. a regime change. it was one family ruling and now it’s another—and they’re even related #it’s all just feudalism #what’s one feudal lord to another to a peasant?#and it’s driving me nuts how much the play mentions Henry’s father having been king #did not happen #there’s an apocryphal story about becket’s mother being arab too #who rescued and ran off with becket’s father when he was crusading #another pair of lovers from different cultures to compare to becket/gwendolen and becket/henry #Henry finds the story romantic (even depressingly so) and becket’s feelings on it seem. complicated? guarded anyway #then the scene ending with becket saying he WOULD love henry wholeheartedly if it were simpler. if they were the same race #instead of conqueror/conquered which leaves becket instead feeling conflicted and possibly even guilty about how he loves henry #it makes it less aesthetically appealing to him anyway #loving henry is bad aesthetically—distasteful—in a similar way that gwendolen saying she loves becket even tho she’s a captive of sorts #and that he could have stolen her away from her father’s castle if he’d wanted in any world —is distasteful to becket #…man why did I write all this here instead of just making a post about it with the relevant quotes #I was only saying that I didn’t want to get into these parts of the story lol #long post #becket #please talk to me about any of it if you have any inclination to #now I am reading essays about it online lmao #the variety of takes is very fun

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