Queen Di
"That is our power--our people, and to so order things that they, under sway of just and kingly law, may make and trade all the free goods of the earth. We do not make war, but hides." Act II-Scene 2
"Now, you are delicate and keen, kind as Rosalind, the Cleopatra who neither withers nor grows stale, like Beatrice, wise, and Portia, bold. Your flesh brings light, your heart a warmth to the dampening soul and your words, reason. You are Queen in all your ways and Captain of our courage." Act II-Scene 3
I am an unlikely anglophile. As an American of Irish-Catholic descent I should shun all things English. I don't because, like Edmund Burke, an Irishman born of a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, I recognize that "the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen...They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and English principles." England is the source not only of the constitutional and representative principles that govern modern democracy, but also of modernity itself--the industrial revolution, the scientific method and the habits of free thought and expression required for its pursuit, the ambition for personal and social betterment. I love England. I love what it represents, what Churchill called "the broad, sunlit uplands." Love of, a perhaps imaginary, England is the genesis of Queen Di. When Princess Diana died, suddenly and shockingly in 1997 at just 36, I was deeply moved. I followed subsequent events in London in much the same way, and with much the same sentiment, as in 1963 when John F. Kennedy, the American president of Irish-Catholic descent who revered English ways and English speech, was taken from us at the zenith of his charm and power. Diana's death tapped into the same fonts of longing and ambition. She had served not one purpose in her life, but many. To each English man and woman, she was a different Diana, a Diana both molded and reflected in the daily lives of millions. Queen Di is a full-length play in two Acts, written in heightened speech, for 17 characters. Look for King Charles's speech on thought ("What is 'thought' but another name for certain actions of the flesh? And is not the movement of the flesh but the fruit of thoughts, yet thoughts themselves conceived in a bony womb and moved by flesh?"), Lady Audrey's speech on man and nature ("We are alike to nature in all things, now base, now noble. Even in our ashes we return to dumb nature, our wise and silent twin."), Juno's screed on "the dogs of war" and Diana's speech on religious belief ("I do not propose to die for Christ, but to live for him"). Click on link below to read the first scene of Queen Di.