They fear Richard because he is a great warrior, I thought. Although Richard tried to deny it, Queen Margaret described how he slew my husband without pity. Indeed, I suppose the good have no place in this world, no place in politics. Henry VI and my husband should have been monks or shepherds, not rulers. But then what of myself? What will happen to me? I wondered this as I tossed and turned at night. I had already seen too clearly how women are treated during times of war and strife.
There is no place for tenderness in this world, I thought, no place where a woman can rest easy -- and then, for the first time in my life, I felt regarded. I felt as if I was not a woman who was a political pawn, but truly seen as a woman. Richard said, to me, Anne:
Your beauty was the cause of that effect;
Your beauty: which did haunt me in my sleep
To undertake the death of all the world,
So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom (II.2).
No one had ever called me beautiful before -- daughter, yes, wife, yes, and woman, yes, but never beautiful. Oh, I spat at him when he said it -- but he gazed at me with a fixed, hypnotic stare so I could not look away.
And then -- and this was the truly extraordinary thing. This great warrior opened his shirt to me, lay open his white throat, and begged me to kill him. He said he repented of his crimes, the crimes of war -- the crimes, I remembered, that were not specific to him, but had been committed by all soldiers during times of strife. Was he...
" James a.S. McPeek further blames Jonson for this corruption: "No one can read this dainty song to Celia without feeling that Jonson is indecorous in putting it in the mouth of such a thoroughgoing scoundrel as Volpone." Shelburne asserts that the usual view of Jonson's use of the Catullan poem is distorted by an insufficient understanding of Catullus' carmina, which comes from critics' willingness to adhere to a conventional -- yet incorrect
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