The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffick of our stage."

Colin Firth on playing a character like Wessex:

"It'd be really hard convincing you that he's a great guy. I would only say that it would never enter his head to be a nice person but one also has to understand that it's a class thing. I'll never forget [reading Edith Wharton's] The Buccaneers which is about American girls in late 19th century going to look for titled husbands in England. The thing they were advised by the English governess is don't go near anyone who's charming or amusing because the real powerful aristocrat doesn't need to be, has no need to charm anybody. He's going to have what he wants anyway. So it helped me when I played Mr. D'Arcy. That was very much one of the clues to as to why he didn't actually try. Wessex is compounded by inane stupidity, he is not an imaginative mom. But also he's operating in a much, much more brutal and competitive world than many periods of English history. The little we know of Shakespeare is that he wrangled money out of somebody. Francis Bacon was prosecuted for bribery. Everyone was maneuvering for position and I suppose you would just be cast by the wayside completely if you didn't."

From Pamela's Entertainment Site