A tale as old as time about... pity and self-sacrifice?

The Beauty and the Beast, as we all know, is the story of a beautiful woman who learns to love an ugly beast, only to discover that he, too, was beautiful all along. Or wait... is it?

Previously, my knowledge of the original story of The Beauty and the Beast came from the fairy-tale series of Illustrated Classics, which were usually pretty accurate, though they sometimes softened the edges of the adapted tales. The Beauty and the Beast edition was, in the Swedish translation I read as a child, called Lena and the Lion. As the Beast was depicted as a lion, and I was a cat-loving kid not too fussed about inter-species relationships, I was dissatisfied with him turning into a prince in the end - wasn't a dashing lion a much better bet than just another run-of-the-mill fairy-tale prince? Some of that childish disappointment with the prince ending, I admit, still lingers. I can see the rationale of the Beast turning into a man - but did it have to be a prince?

From the Illustrated Classic, I learned of some elements of the classic story which didn't make it to the animated Disney film, such as Beauty actually being the daughter of a ruined merchant, the merchant getting into trouble because he picked a rose from the Beast's garden, Beauty's jealous sisters etc. But the story still seemed very much like a romance. Lena, ultimately, loved her lion.

As I set out to finally read the original The Beauty and the Beast, written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740, I was therefore shocked to discover how unromantic the central relationship was. The condition for the Beast's curse to be broken is not that a girl should love him (and he her in return) as in the Disney film, but that she should agree to marry him. As Mr Gradgrind would tell you, those are two very different things. Beauty (which is actually a nickname, not a proper name - you can see why adaptations have simplified matters and called her Belle=beauty in the original French) never falls in love with the Beast in the original version. In fact, she loves the prince he will become, who visits her in her dreams, all along, and doesn't twig that her dream lover and the Beast are one and the same. She finally agrees to marry the Beast because she pities him, feels under an obligation to him and appreciates his good nature. When she asks her dream prince whether this is the right step to take and he enthusiastically encourages her, she is most seriously peeved.

Another change compared to modern adaptations of the tale, which maybe bothers me more than many others, is that part of the Beast's curse is to appear not only ugly but stupid. In the course of their acquaintance, he only puts the same questions to Beauty each evening (how her day has been etc.), never showing any wit or superior understanding. It's not a question, then, of Beauty being beguiled by his personality. Like, one suspects, many other girls of her day, Beauty is faced with the prospect of marrying a suitor she doesn't care for because he is kind, and he is rich.

The Villeneuve version of The Beauty and the Beast is a good read in many ways. There are pretty details about the Enchanted Castle (where Beauty and Beast are served by genii in disguise - the cursed servants appear to be a Disney invention), and it's intriguing to see how the prince's gambit of visiting Beauty in her dreams threatens to work against himself as he becomes his own rival. The later part of the story should be of interest to fantasy aficionados, as it contains a great deal of intricate fairy lore. Far from being cursed because he needed to be taught a lesson, the hapless prince got into trouble because he turned down a vindictive fairy who wanted to marry him. A good fairy then tries to help him as best she can, though she can't break the curse directly. The good fairy/bad fairy set-up makes sense of the role of the Enchantress in the Disney films, who always seemed somewhat of a split personality. Anyway, there's a lot of back story involving these fairies and others and rules they have to follow, not all of which come into play in the story. What we see, in a word, is some "world building". Beauty turns out to be the daughter of a king and yet another fairy, and it's all very complicated. Though all this isn't really necessary for the central plot, the fairy shenanigans in themselves are interesting enough.

Nevertheless, the Beauty/Beast relationship being so very different from what I was used to gave me a nasty jolt. How could Lena and the Lion get its source material so very wrong? The answer is that it didn't, but that the source material was not really Villeneuve's tale but a simplified adaption of it written by another 18th-century lady, Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont. This is much closer to the story most of us are familiar with. Beauty does care for the Beast in the end, and there is no muddying of the waters with dream visions. The bad fairy and good fairy appear, but their motives aren't gone into, and the whole back story of Beauty being a princess with fairy blood is dropped. Nevertheless, shadows of the problems with the original (problems to me, at least) remain. The Beast is allowed to show plain common sense, but his wit is still hampered by the curse. The moral is that neither beauty nor wit makes for a happy marriage, but a good heart. That's all very well, but how happy would Beauty and Beast's marriage have been in the long run if he hadn't turned back into a prince?

I'll have to admit it: for my money, the animated Disney film - and the story it tells, which has then inspired other adaptations - is better than its source material. Though I'm still not a fan of the live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, I can better understand now why it leaned so heavily on the animated version instead of taking a fresh look at the original tales. The re-focusing of the Beauty/Beast relationship from marriage of convenience to love match brings its own problems, but they are much more fun to explore. Modern Beasts (in the Disney films and in Once Upon A Time) are allowed to be interesting and far from foolish, but this development has its own price: the more personality the Beast has, the less inclined he is to mollycoddle Belle or to fall in love with her at first sight just because she's beautiful. We seem to have come full circle, from the dumb sweetie Beast of the original to Beasts who are intelligent but not noticeably sweet-natured (though there is ultimately Good In Them). Both parties have to adapt for the romance to work.

Villeneuve and Beaumont may point out that while you can question the wisdom of telling girls they will be happy with someone they consider ugly and stupid as long as he has a good heart, it is a no less dangerous message to claim that you can transform a beastly man with the strength of your love. I think they'd be particularly horrified, presupposing that they somehow gained non-18th-century knowledge of the Brothers Grimm tales, by the Once Upon A Time crossover. But to me, a spot of Grimm is exactly what this fairy tale needs.

Harriet Walter rules again

I'm almost prepared for another bout of Whovian nerdery (about Classic Who this time), but not quite. So more costume drama it is. HBO Nordic obliged me by releasing three Philippa Gregory-based miniseries -  The White Queen, The White Princess and The Spanish Princess - during my vacation, so I was spoilt for choice. Now, I've already watched The White Queen and had recently read The White Princess, so I started in the wrong chronological order with The Spanish Princess, based on the two Gregory novels The Constant Princess and The King's Curse.

It was intriguing to watch this miniseries with The White Princess fresh in my mind, as it also takes place in Henry VII's reign, but a couple of years later, when his eldest son Arthur is old enough (only just) to marry. What also added context was that I've actually read The Constant Princess, although it was a few years ago now. I haven't read The King's Curse, but I've encountered its protagonist, Margaret Pole, making trouble in her old age in Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy. It's interesting to see how it all started and to get an idea of why the Poles kept plotting so tenaciously during Henry VIII's reign. The main character of the series, though, remains the titular Spanish Princess, Catherine of Aragon.

From what I can remember, there are quite a few changes compared to The Constant Princess. In the novel, Gregory wrote up the marriage between Catherine and Arthur as an unexpected romance: Arthur was Catherine's great love, not his younger brother Henry. In the series, by contrast, Catherine and Arthur manage to reach warmth and understanding in their relationship before he dies after only a few months of marriage, but they're not head over heels, and once Arthur is gone Catherine falls for Henry pretty badly. This seems to make a little more sense than her cool appraisal of him in the novel, as Catherine and Henry went on to be happily married - until they weren't. (Though some time must have passed before she started setting her sights on Henry in real life - he was just a kid when his brother died.) It also makes Gregory's take on the consummation of Catherine's first marriage more plausible. According to Gregory, Arthur and Catherine did consummate their marriage, but Catherine chose to stubbornly deny it. Only if she hadn't actually slept with Henry's brother could she hope to get a dispensation from the Pope to marry Henry, and because she saw it as her destiny to become Queen of England, she decided to lie.

Besides the shift of romantic focus, another change from the book is that a lot more is made of the hostility of Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII's mother and Princes Arthur's and Henry's grandma, towards Catherine. Once again, the "formidable old boot" role is played by Harriet Walter, and brilliantly too. What is really strange is that this time, for once in my life, I actually found myself rooting for Margaret. What I never quite realised when reading the novel was how insulting to Arthur Catherine's (here false) claim of being a virgin was. Previously, I've always thought: "well, he was just a boy and under a lot of pressure, surely it was no great shame if the short-lived marriage remained white". Arthur had just turned fifteen when he married Catherine. In Tudor times, though, royals were expected to be ready for all aspects of marriage at that age. Margaret herself, married off at twelve (which was obscenely early even for the times), would certainly not have bought the "oh, but he was far too young" argument.

Walter's Margaret is depicted as the villain of the piece for wanting to keep Catherine and Henry apart, but I couldn't help thinking that she had a very good point. Leaving ecclesiastical law aside, a girl prepared to besmirch her dead husband's name in order to marry his brother does not feel like such a great addition to the family. There's nothing particularly commendable in Catherine's wish to become Queen, and though the romantic motive added in the series made her case a bit more appealing - well, we all know how it ended, don't we? She would probably have been better off going back to Spain while there was still time, and knowing this, it's hard to cheer when she finally gets her man.

Added subplots about Catherine's (I'm pretty sure fictitious) lady's maids feel mostly like padding, though as a way of getting a Moor element into the plot (Catherine being the daughter of Queen Isabella of Spain), it's way better than the Princess talking now and again to a Wise Moor Medic, which I believe was what happened in the novel. Here, Catherine's senior lady's maid, Lina, is from a Moor family (converted), and in love with one of the escorting soldiers, Oviedo, who is also a Moor (not converted). I did like Oviedo's realisation that his and his lady's interests don't necessarily align with Princess Catherine's, which finally leads him to start working for Margaret. Regrettably, she double-crosses him, which means in the end we have the goodies vs the baddies again with no interesting mix-up between the camps.

All in all, the series is entertaining enough. Charlotte Hope (who played Myranda - the chit who's even more villain-loving than me - in Game of Thrones) in the title role is convincing as a waif-like beauty with nerves and determination of steel. It was fun to see how uxorious Henry VII comes across here: in the novel, he quite fancied the notion of marrying Catherine himself once he became a widower, while in the series he only countenances the idea as it's a dying request from his beloved wife Lizzie (who for complicated reasons really doesn't want Catherine to get hitched to her second son). He claims that his dead wife was the love of his life, though in The White Princess the novel, he was smitten with the Scottish wife of a pretender to his throne a good fair while. It makes me curious how they manage this plot thread in the adaptation, which I'm nevertheless not quite ready to watch yet. Even I can get enough Tudor drama in one go.