![]() ![]() "We will show that night at the start, but it doesn't play itself out until the very end. In the screenplay for Effie, which Wise and Thompson hope to start shooting next month in Venice and Scotland, the wedding night is a key plot point. Whether on the wedding night Effie dropped her night-dress and revealed herself to be far from the physical ideal Ruskin had imagined, we will probably never know for sure, but I think it is too easy to say that he was terrified of intimacy." Thompson's husband, Greg Wise, who will produce the film and play the part of Ruskin, has been fascinated by the life of the eminent polymath since his time as an architecture student in Edinburgh: "He is a pin-up for many artists and was Gandhi's hero too. Hewison points out that, since divorce was not legal, Ruskin's claim of "incurable impotency" was the one secure way of separating from Gray. Yet all this early achievement has been boiled down to one night of sorrow in the bedroom. In 1836-37 his work The Poetry of Architecture was serialised in London's Architectural Magazine and, six years later, he anonymously published the first volume of his major work, Modern Painters. He began writing at 15 and won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry as a student. Ruskin, who was born in 1819, knew JMW Turner, Thomas Carlyle and Lewis Carroll and was responsible for much of the most innovative thinking of his day. Last year Jane Campion's film about John Keats, Bright Star, brought the same renewed attention to the Romantic poet and showcased similar contemporary beliefs about love and nature. The BBC2 drama was a parody of an incestuous "brotherhood" that saw Millais eventually marry Gray, the ex-wife of his former mentor. Last year the television series Desperate Romantics took a light-hearted look at Ruskin and the circle of artists he championed, including John Everett Millais, Leigh Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The film reflects a growing interest in the Romantic era. "The idea that he did not know what women looked like is a nonsense. "The whole pubic hair nonsense is like a great big wall preventing people understanding Ruskin," he said. "What subsequently happened was that they realised they had made a mistake so made an agreement to postpone consummation." The popular idea that the groom was shocked by the sight of his bride's pubic hair, first suggested by an earlier Ruskin biographer, Mary Lutyens, is a fallacy, believes Hewison. "The wedding night was clearly a failure," said Hewison, author of Ruskin on Venice. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |