Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Adrian Streete
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Mark Thornton Burnett and
Adrian Streete 2011
Individual chapters © Contributors 2011
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First published 2011 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Preface xii
Mark Thornton Burnett
v
vi Contents
Index 203
List of Figures
vii
Acknowledgements
viii
Notes on the Contributors
ix
x Notes on the Contributors
Over the last one hundred years, many of the events and personalities of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been brought, via a variety
of visual mediums, before home, cinema, exhibition, festival and the-
atrical audiences. These representations are not only important because
they are reproduced in large numbers, but because they are the main
sources of information about how the early modern period is interpreted
and reinterpreted in the popular consciousness. Concentrating on all
types of filmic and performative examples, and posing questions about
the constructedness of images of the Renaissance and the circulation of
dominant visual signatures, a series of workshops and symposia between
2007 and 2009 at Queen’s University, Belfast, investigated the corpus of
hybrid realizations of the years between 1500 and 1660.
The project, ‘Filming and Performing Renaissance History’, was gen-
erously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Cru-
cial to our project was a series of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural
encounters. Firstly, the events placed in dialogue commentators on, for
example, theatrical performance, heritage cinema, television and stud-
ies of Renaissance literature and society. Secondly, the project integrated
a trajectory of British representations with their non-British equiva-
lents. The involvement of practice-based teams and individuals was a
third vital dimension. The fourth interdisciplinary component, involv-
ing curators, heritage officers and museum studies specialists, focused
upon the means whereby the Renaissance is communicated in museum
installations, in exhibition practice and in re-enactment ‘experiences’.
Accessing the Renaissance in this fashion generated a genuine sense
of the modalities of historical representation, of what the Renaissance
‘means’ and of how its meanings have been negotiated in modernity.
We had three meetings. ‘Players and Personalities’ was devoted to
assessing the significance of the ways in which all types of early modern
historical figures and groupings, celebrated and quotidian, emerge into
representational visibility. ‘Representing Conflict, Crisis and Nation’
explored how the myriad contests of 1500–1660 have been imagina-
tively reproduced. ‘Temporalities and Materialities’ assessed the extent
to which temporal boundaries and material objects continue to be
reconstructed.
xii
Preface xiii
1
2 Introduction: Documenting the Renaissance
Think whether we do not take religion into our own hands and
twist it like wax into shapes quite opposed to a rule so unbend-
ing and direct. Has that ever been seen more clearly than in France
today? Some approach it from this side, some from the other; some
make it black, others make it white: all are alike in using religion for
their violent and ambitious schemes, so like each other in manag-
ing their affairs with excess and injustice, that they make you doubt
whether they really do hold different opinions over a matter on
which depends the way we conduct and regulate our lives.7
remember which side, only last year, was mouthing the affirmative,
making it the buttress of their faction, and what side was mouthing
the negative, making their buttress out of that. Then listen from what
4 Introduction: Documenting the Renaissance
quarter comes voices defending which side now, and judge whether
they are rattling their swords less for this side than they did for the
other! We burn people at the stake for saying that Truth must bow to
our necessities: and, in France, how much worse is what we do than
what we say!8
evade the present. And if it’s always and only the present that makes
the past speak, it speaks always and only to – and about – ourselves.
It follows that the first duty of a creditable presentist criticism must
be to acknowledge that the questions we ask of any literary text will
inevitably be shaped by our own concerns, even when these include
what we call ‘the past’.14
6 Introduction: Documenting the Renaissance
to those ‘historical silences’ that film can give voice to and, in so doing,
bears witness to its capacity to alter our conception of a past that we
thought we knew.
The second section, ‘Crisis and Conflict’, opens with a chapter by
Jerome de Groot that takes as its subject the civil war, one of the most
seminal events in British history but also an event that, as de Groot
points out, has had a fairly charmed life in popular appropriations. If the
civil war is remembered in popular culture today, then it is most often
through various societies dedicated to the re-enactment of civil war bat-
tles, many of which unhelpfully gloss over the ideological divisions of
the period they are representing. Indeed, de Groot suggests that the rea-
son for the civil war’s relative lack of visibility in popular film and TV
is because of its ideological complexity. Conversely, what there is, like
Winstanley (dir. Kevin Brownlow, 1975), To Kill a King (dir. Mike Barker,
2003) and The Devil’s Whore (dir. Marc Munden, 2008), tends to be char-
acterized by its ideological seriousness and refusal to turn the period
into pastiche or an exercise in nostalgia. The radical lineage of the civil
war may not have been exploited as fully as other aspects of the period’s
history, but its potential for film-makers and audiences alike to reflect
on Britain’s alternative political history is clear. Likewise, James Sharpe’s
chapter on the legacy of Renaissance witchcraft, as mediated through
twentieth-century film, asks us to encounter the often radical alterity
of the past, and its refusal to conform to the expectations and ideo-
logical presuppositions of modernity. Some films, as Sharpe notes, like
Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922), are closely grounded in a plausi-
ble historical understanding of Renaissance magic. Others, like Michael
Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968), owe more to Hammer horror than to
the historical archive. But, as Sharpe also shows, Reeves took his film
seriously enough to make a range of claims for its historical accuracy,
however problematic these claims might be. In fact, almost in spite of
itself, the film touches proleptically upon a range of recent preoccupa-
tions of modern historians of witchcraft, such as the local support for
Matthew Hopkins’ activities, the social upheaval against which he car-
ried out his work, and the problematic fact that so many witches were
women. As Sharpe concludes, the possibility for future film-makers to
tackle the historical reality of Renaissance witchcraft successfully will
perhaps best be realized in a more micro approach similar to Vigne’s The
Return of Martin Guerre.
Martin Procházka’s chapter turns our focus onto a Czech film, The
Emperor’s Baker and the Golem, directed by Martin Frič and released
in 1952. Frič took as his subject the reign of the Habsburg Emperor
12 Introduction: Documenting the Renaissance
Rudolf II (1576–1612) and his search for the mythical ‘golem’. Through-
out the film, as Procházka notes, realism is frequently subverted, and
the aesthetic games it plays with mimesis can be read as a challenge
to the ruling ideology of socialist realism favoured by the communist
authorities. The fact that the film-makers chose a particularly con-
flicted period in Bohemian and European history in which to set their
film offers us another interesting illustration of the ways in which the
political upheavals of the Renaissance are used time and again to doc-
ument and address the political iniquities of the present. The Emperor’s
Baker and the Golem contrasts scenes dealing with the aristocracy with
more demotic representations of lower-class existence. Similarly, Kate
Chedgzoy’s chapter examines the interactions between high and low
representations of the Renaissance. However, by contrast, her focus is
on the ways in which the period is packaged for and consumed by chil-
dren in both the popular Horrid Histories series and in school workshops
centred on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In common with a range of chap-
ters collected here, Chedgzoy notes that, in both of her examples, the
predominant mode of mediating the past is through monarch or exem-
plary figures like Shakespeare. When people of lower class do appear in
the Horrid Histories series, for example, then it is most often as objects
of ridicule or mockery. Chedgzoy also observes the prevalence of vio-
lence and the frequent marginalization of women in representations of
Renaissance history aimed at children. So, while it is undoubtedly the
case that children can prove to be discerning consumers of Renaissance
history, Chedgzoy reminds us that it is necessary for adults and chil-
dren alike to reflect carefully on the ideologies underpinning the most
popular of those histories.
The final section in the book is devoted to ‘Temporalities and
Materialities’. It begins with Christie Carson’s authoritative reconsid-
eration of the current cultural, theatrical and ideological status of
Shakespeare’s Globe theatre on London’s Southbank. As the Globe
project developed, and as theatrical professionals, academics and audi-
ences alike worked in collaboration within the new theatrical space, it
soon became clear that the sceptical reception provoked by the theatre
in its early years would have to be rethought. In particular, the com-
munality of the theatrical space and its sheer difference from modern
theatrical structures enabled, as Carson argues, a direct challenge to
modern conceptions of individualism and ‘class-based ideas about cul-
ture in general and Shakespeare in particular’ (p. 129). Indeed, given
that it is a reconstruction of a Renaissance theatre, Carson suggests that
the Globe’s most valuable legacy may well turn out to be its ability to
Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete 13
Notes
1. Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European
Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 391; Tony Bennett,
The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York:
Routledge, 1995), p. 42.
2. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, eds, The Oxford English Dictionary, 20 vols
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), IV, p. 916.
Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete 15
A glossy publicity still for the second series of Showtime’s The Tudors
pictures Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) earnestly in conversation
with Pope Paul III (Peter O’Toole). The teasing fantasy of a-meeting-that-
never-happened speaks to a niche audience capable of understanding –
and taking pleasure from – The Tudors’ edgy and playful approach to
the historical record. Staged solely for advertising purposes (Henry and
the Pope never meet in the series itself), the photograph purposefully
courts controversy, provoking assessments such as David Starkey’s that
The Tudors is ‘terrible history with no point’.1 Other historians have sin-
gled out the fact that, in addition to the fictive encounter, the pope
in the picture is, of course, the wrong pope (it was Pope Clement VII,
not Pope Paul III, who refused the divorce and excommunicated Henry).
This ‘error’ – along with many of The Tudors’ signature telescopings, tem-
poral switchings, accelerations and substitutions – has been seized on as
either a bizarre anomaly (‘Quite why the Pope has to be the wrong one
is a mystery,’ reflects John Guy) or a genuine mistake indicative of poor
research.2 The confusion among the critics is revealing of the gap that
currently exists between traditional scholarship and a relatively new
mode of television programming, one which often has historical and
literary adaptation at its heart.3 Rather than anomaly or mistake, the
image described above is indicative of some of the ways in which The
Tudors functions to encourage a process now recognized as characteris-
tic of quality television – a ‘complex seeing’.4 The process works in part
through intertextuality: because it is O’Toole who plays the Pope, the
character is associated with world-weariness, dissoluteness and corrup-
tion, qualities that remind viewers of Home Box Office’s rival figure, the
mafia don, Tony Soprano, and reflect an insouciant reading of faith. By
16
Ramona Wray 17
the same token, Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ elegantly febrile looks – and his
reputation for playing enigmatic and disturbed roles – creates an impres-
sion of a moody, sensitive and self-destructive Henry.5 The privileging of
two star personalities ensures that the break with Rome – and viewers’
comprehension of the significance of the Reformation – takes on appro-
priately seismic proportions. In addition, O’Toole and Rhys Meyers are
linked at a celebrity level by their Irish ‘hellraiser’ reputations and at a
theatrical level by the recollection of O’Toole’s famous performance as
Henry II: the pairing in this case draws on early modern iconography
to lend another layer to contemporary understandings of the con-
flict between England and the papacy as a familial separation between
father and son. Thus, the portrayal, while deftly maximizing O’Toole’s
charismatic performance – and usefully foregrounding the consistently
oppositional nature of the forces of Rome – successfully translates the
metaphorical complexities of Renaissance ideologies. More broadly, the
self-conscious fakery of the meeting – the important element of play –
draws our attention to the artifice of the cinematic frame, spotlighting
The Tudors’ foregrounding of interpretation and its concomitant reading
of history as inherently unstable. Refuting any easy sense of the ‘truth’,
and insisting on the place of violence in processes of historiography, The
Tudors illustrates, in exciting and compelling ways, the important role
of television in a new making of the past.
Produced by a transnational organization for a multinational audi-
ence and winner of prestigious EMMY awards, The Tudors is exemplary
of a current aesthetics of television. Television, over the last ten to fifteen
years, has undergone a fundamental shift. Mark Jancovich and James
Lyons argue that, in response to declining network audiences and the
growth of satellite and cable channels, contemporary TV has witnessed
the emergence of ‘ “must see” television’ shows, such as The Sopranos,
The West Wing and Madmen, that are not simply part of ‘a habitual flow
of television programming but . . . “essential viewing” . . . distinguished
by the compulsive . . . practices of dedicated audiences who organize
their schedules’ to facilitate the viewing event.6 The Tudors’ re-creation
of the life of Henry VIII constitutes just such ‘event television’ – a tele-
vision project characterized by a feature-film quality (the series is shot
entirely in HDCAM), a budget of tens of millions and a stellar, interna-
tional cast. Perhaps most distinctive is The Tudors’ epic scale: series one
(ten hour-long episodes) opens in 1509, the year of ascension; series
two (also ten hour-long episodes) concludes in 1536, on the day of
the execution of Anne Boleyn. Series three (eight hour-long episodes)
opens with Henry’s wedding to Jane Seymour, while the fourth series
18 The Network King
(ten hour-long episodes) ends with Henry’s death in 1547. With thirty-
eight hours of television devoted to exactly that many years of history,
The Tudors constitutes an extraordinarily detailed take on the reign and
an unprecedentedly ambitious attempt to televise history. In between
the monarch’s ascension, marriages and death, viewers are introduced
to all the major personalities of the period. Foreign and domestic affairs
are generously referenced, while broader European contexts are kept to
the fore, with the Reformation a key structuring component of the nar-
rative. Renaissance history has simply not been dramatized on this scale
before.
The reach and ambition of The Tudors are intimately connected to
contemporary notions of audience. Against a backdrop of declining
audiences, ‘ “must see” television’ is designed to appeal to ‘the most valu-
able audiences: affluent viewers that advertisers are prepared to pay the
highest rates to address’.7 In its compulsiveness, then, such television
is designed to attract not so much a volume audience as ‘highly edu-
cated consumers who value the literary qualities of these programmes’;
indeed, because of this movement towards and embrace of a so-called
‘niche audience’, television has been able to acquire and boast a ‘greater
cultural legitimacy’.8 Exploring further the meeting place between ‘qual-
ity television’ and the reshaping of history, this chapter argues that
historical reconstruction and bodily discourse come together in The
Tudors in a television phenomenon which reads both – that is, body
and history – as text. In particular, I will suggest, series three and four
are striking in the extent to which they prioritize the body of the
monarch as a cipher for the shifting polarities of politics and nation.
One effect of this dialogic method is a powerful sense of the Renais-
sance as a dystopian juncture, the political complexions and gendered
implications of which have a modern purchase. Perhaps, paradoxically,
the uncomfortable and unsettling version of Henry that emerges has
much in common with the historical controversy that continues to be
waged around his person and reign.9
the character going from young idealistic king to the old tyrant’.15 Thus,
The Tudors sets out to understand a life cycle – and to do so it must
highlight an alternative beginning. Unlike most appropriations of his-
tory, which, as Julie Sanders has demonstrated, rely ‘upon the reader’s
awareness . . . of [the] life and the mythology surrounding it’, The Tudors
asks an audience to abandon preconception.16 A central summarizing
voiceover – ‘You think you know the story but you only know how it
ends: to get to the heart of the story you have to go back to the begin-
ning’ – establishes the principles. In this sequence, the torrent of visuals
pauses first on the familiar contours of the Holbein portrait, then, sec-
onds afterwards, on a seated Jonathan Rhys Meyers as monarch. The two
polarities at either end of a spectrum are highlighted, and in such a way
as to stress Holbein as the destination point and Rhys Meyers as the jour-
ney towards that end. The process is literalized, for, in the last episode of
the final season, we see Henry sitting for Holbein who is completing the
iconic painting. At one level, underscored is the way in which, through
an aging process, the Henrician protagonist becomes the subject and
object of representational tradition. At another level, the scene exposes
the disjunction between the sitter (whom the audience apprehends)
and the work (which is revealed as seeing in a different fashion). The
body of the monarch emerges as a point of negotiation between mate-
rial form, artistic interpretation, Tudor iconography and postmodern
reputation.
The instance is exemplary of the way in which, in this adaptation, cos-
tume functions less as a manifestation of historical reconstruction than
as a visual aid to direct interpretation and to facilitate audience response.
As in the climax to Elizabeth (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 1998), where the young
sovereign turns herself into the Virgin Queen, Henry grows incremen-
tally into the costuming associated with his monarchical counterpart.
Across all of the episodes, Henry’s costume – in a slowly paced and piece-
by-piece development – modifies in relation to alterations to his bodily
contours. The protagonist is represented as going grey, acquiring wrin-
kles and putting on weight: he assumes proportions that, if they do not
make him the facsimile of popular tradition, certainly suggest that he is
more materially substantial. Crucial is the addition of layers of padding,
with Henry gradually assuming darker hues and fur-lined outfits that
correspond to a less upbeat and affirming outlook. Joan Bergin, costume
designer for the series, describes ‘an extraordinary journey . . . unrivalled
in film or TV . . . it begins with a concept of [Henry] as a kind of a
rock star of his time . . . through to the state he is at the end . . . which
is . . . sour, decaying, disillusioned and disappointed.’17 Costume in this
Ramona Wray 21
formulation, then, expresses not only the effects of growing old but also
a physical and psychological interconnection.
Discharging a parallel purpose, and also in part filling in for Henry’s
obesity, is the attention given to the ulcerated leg. Henry is represented
as receiving the wound after a joust goes awry in the first series; as
the costuming becomes more excessive, so is the inflamed and pustule-
marked limb of the monarch increasingly prioritized until, by the third
series, we are treated to frequent scenes of painful suffering and the
shocked reactions of the assembled courtiers. This is far from the excited
and exciting display of the stripped male body that characterized earlier
episodes. If, previously, the twin tropes of sex and sport undergirded
the erotic energy of The Tudors’ visuals, this is summoned later only in
order to be inverted, with the emphasis falling instead on debilitation
and crisis. The body that is laid out here is not for sexual admiration or
activity but for medical comment and intervention. It is notable that,
in the third series, the first occasion on which we witness Henry naked
is when he is being examined by his doctors. Even if it gestures back-
wards to the aesthetics of what has gone before, then, the scene reveals
an ironic treatment of some of the series’ governing representational
strategies.
But it is with the treatment of Henry’s impotence that The Tudors ques-
tions most forcefully the protagonist’s status as an object of sexual desire
and a sexually desiring subject. The first hint of a lack of function is
given when the king states, in series three, ‘It’ll take a good sport to
make me amorous again’, the comment suggesting difficulties concern-
ing arousal. In this context, it makes logistical sense that we see Henry as
a stud horse struggling with the kingly duty to be reproductive. Scenes
between Henry and Anne of Cleves (Joss Stone) are revealing here, for
the dominant tone is one of awkwardness, and underlined is a sense of
mutual disgust. In particular, the wedding night episode is dominated
by the motif of the failing phallus, characterized, as it is, by the camera
focusing on Henry launching himself at Anne of Cleves, losing his erec-
tion, masturbating and finally admitting defeat. In the disaster of the
encounter, both parties are implicated: Anne of Cleves frets afterwards,
‘If I cannot please the king, will he kill me?’ And, as the detailing of the
‘smell’ of Henry attests, central is the diseased ‘leg’, which, itself oper-
ating metonymically as a signifier of phallic incapacity, underwrites the
series’ concern with a bodily predicament.
The series links its concentration on bodies decayed and decay-
ing with what is constructed as the period’s dangerous medievalism:
in describing those who attend on him as ‘quacks and charlatans’,
22 The Network King
II
high spirits . . . [and an inability to] give . . . Henry the son he desires.’22
Via this canvassing of options, women’s roles are rendered solidly and
the audience participates at a level of pronounced critical attentiveness.
Perhaps more arresting than the multifaceted representation of char-
acter are the consistencies inherent in the portrayals of females.
Aristocratic women, for example, are invariably discovered as oppos-
ing the tyrannical Henry in minor or discrete ways: in Jane Seymour’s
(Annabelle Wallace) smile at Robert Aske (Gerard McSorley), the leader
of the Pilgrimage of Grace, or in Brandon’s wife begging him to ‘show
mercy’ to the rebels and their families, a purchase on limited resistance
is encoded. Cast in a semi-interrogative mould, these women typify the
representational strategies of ‘quality television’ which, in Jackie Byars
and Eileen R. Meehan’s formulation, tends to eschew a ‘systemic chal-
lenge’ to social-patriarchal structures and to endorse, instead, ‘generally
personal’ resolutions.23 (Thus, Jane Seymour is seen as unable to deter
Henry from persecuting Catholic dissenters, but she does manage to per-
suade him to bring her stepdaughter, Mary [Sarah Bolger], to court.)
The exception to the rule, of course, is Elizabeth (Claire MacCauley),
as when Mary explains her father’s jubilation at Edward’s birth: ‘A boy
is more important.’ Elizabeth’s response – ‘I don’t think so’ – indicates
that, at the age of six, the princess is already contesting primogeniture.24
Moreover, as this forward-looking moment makes clear, elaborated in
miniature is the recognizable amalgam of types of male and female
familiar from later manifestations of the queen as well as a clearly
defined ‘systemic challenge’; here, The Tudors trades upon the virtues
of a narrative futurity.
The fact that Mary is discovered as attending Jane Seymour at the
birth is indicative of affirming relations between the series’ various
stepmother figures. For Peter Krämer, the regularity of television pro-
gramming produces a cornucopia of intertextual allusions, in part as
a way of ensuring that the viewing of some shows is judged essential;
in the representation of women in The Tudors, we see such allusions
working in concerted thematic deployments.25 A wedding gift – a cru-
cifix once owned by Katherine of Aragon (Maria Doyle Kennedy) –
is illicitly passed to Jane Seymour upon her marriage; later, the new
queen is seen wearing the religious symbol as an adornment while tend-
ing to the poor and tacitly supporting the rebellious cause. As well as
granting to Jane Seymour saintliness, the visual detail of the crucifix
makes her a type of Katherine of Aragon in manner and persuasion: she
emerges as a metaphorical inheritrix and cipher for gendered continuity.
Such an idea is brought home in the scene where, the court paralysed
26 The Network King
with fear, Jane Seymour goes into labour with the crucifix clutched in
her hands, to be told by Mary, ‘Katherine is here with us . . . and will
help you.’ The reminder of the object’s passage through royal genera-
tions and across the series itself keeps Katherine of Aragon in viewers’
minds (she is recalled as a ghostly entity) and emphasizes the fact that
bonds between women occupy a powerful niche. Where male bonds
are shattered, female areas of association endure, even in the cases of
women who have never met. Underscored is a notion of female empa-
thy that is placed in opposition to male competition via a procedure
that encourages us to seize upon, and read, subliminal connections.
The circulation of the crucifix is an example of the ways in which the
series’ mise-en-scène keeps past wives at the forefront of an audience’s
imagination: even after they have been beheaded or abandoned, women
are still, in important senses, players. Hence, Anne Boleyn (Natalie
Dormer) appears in the title frame for the third series despite the fact
that she is long gone, the suggestion being that she is still at large,
either in the conjurations of the other characters or in manifestations
of Henry’s cynicism, lack of trust and disappointment. Henry is repre-
sented as haunted by his behaviour in relation to his wives. In the final
episode of the fourth series, a metaphorical visitation takes on a literal
incarnation when the previous spouses return as ‘angels of death’, their
similar costuming pointing up a shared history and mutual agenda.
Each is allowed the opportunity to confront the monarch before his
solitary death (the scene takes the finale of Shakespeare’s Richard III as
its cue), offering the comeback that drama requires but history disal-
lows.26 Yet, in view of the fact that the wives have always inhabited the
series’ psychic frame, the episode is neither unexpected nor fantastical:
Henry’s haunting has been prepared for and emerges from a narrative
and episodic continuum.
If spectral encounters are a point of intersection, then so, too, are
deathly experiences. Most obviously, Henry is affected by the death of
Jane Seymour, which is envisioned as in large part producing the mani-
acally possessed Henry of The Tudors’ latter storyline. Staging strategies
point up Henry’s grief, as in a ruthless cut that moves from his plea that
Jane should not die (‘Please don’t leave me. You are the milk of human
kindness, the light in my dark world’) straight to the formal ‘laying out’
of the queenly body. Here, a crane-shot of Henry and the corpse alone
in a vast architectural space underscores a stark sense of isolation and
desolation. The language of the passage associates Henry with a nexus
of infantilization, vulnerability and enlightenment, while subsequent
episodes are notably marked by an upgrade in his paranoia: ‘I trust
Ramona Wray 27
a later sequence that moves between an act of reading and the scene
of Cromwell’s imprisonment. Cromwell’s letter supporting the king’s
case for the annulment of his marriage (written while Cromwell is
under death sentence) is delivered in a voiceover that merges the minis-
ter’s now desperate tones with the honeyed voice of Catherine Howard
(Tamzin Merchant), who is shot naked in bed with her royal lover. The
juxtaposition not only makes a mockery of legal function, but, more
importantly, suggests that a key historical text is a worthless – and truth-
less – document compiled under duress. Tom Betteridge argues that The
Tudors ‘looks back, nostalgically, to a time when the space of history
was clear and transparent’, but, in fact, the series performs a contrary
manoeuvre: it suggests that there never was such a time.30 Even as it
is being written, history is being mystified; even as it is taking place,
history is being represented and falsified.
Consistent with the cynicism of these episodes is The Tudors’ repre-
sentation of power as a corrosive force. In The Tudors, representatives of
instituted authority are imagined as mirror images of the larger move-
ments to which they subscribe, with personalities such as Cromwell,
Cranmer (Hans Matheson), Bishop Fisher (Bosco Hogan) and More
(Jeremy Northam) consistently identified with the discrete agendas and
perspectives of the Reformation. Political comment is not direct; rather,
it is mediated through oblique reflections on the relative integrity –
or not – of politicians and their attendant conduct. A struggle obtains
between all the forces invoked, but none can be labelled as belong-
ing to unambiguously good or evil categories. Rather, power expresses
itself as a pervasively corrupting influence. For example, characterizing
Cromwell’s arrival in the place of the corrupt Wolsey (Sam Neill) is an
emphasis on renewal and integrity. Yet, by the third series, he is discov-
ered as accepting bribes from landowners agitating to win his and the
king’s approval; the observation – that the practice allows the minister
to assume his place as ‘the richest man in England’ – exactly rephrases
an earlier assessment of Wolsey, which suggests that the possession of
dominion circles back upon itself. Corruption is more widely written
still. A narrative procession of venal popes and cardinals marks Rome
out as a particularly compromised space, but The Tudors is at pains to
suggest that all the faiths represented invite mutually invidious com-
parisons. English archbishops function no less powerfully than their
Catholic counterparts to point up the symbiotic relation shared between
political machination and religious protestation: there is a sense of insti-
tutional and social malaise which invites viewers to court contemporary
parallels.
Ramona Wray 29
This is not to suggest that, in The Tudors, there are no ‘true’ believ-
ers; however, as the instance of Cardinal Pole demonstrates (he intends
to restore Catholicism by force), belief is invariably imagined as giving
way to a fanaticism with affinities to some forms of modern terrorism.
Pockets of resistance are distributed across Europe; covert operations are
continually on the move; and members of Henry’s court are subject to
the techniques of guerrilla warfare. Yet, thanks to an assembly of graph-
ically corporeal episodes, it is impossible to forget that, whatever kind
of terrorism this might be, it is always matched by state operations.
Or, to put the point in another way, The Tudors places on display the
problem of defining terrorism when state policy and extremist political
activity intersect. The contemporary – and international – resonances
and debates that are ventilated as a result are striking in and of them-
selves; they also demonstrate how the series sustains television drama’s
capacity for ‘leaving open, through a densely layered textual composi-
tion without closure, the possibility of metaphorical readings’.31 Hence,
judicial procedures are seen to be wholly inadequate, while torture is
portrayed as widespread and visually explicit. The filming of violence is
a case in point, and it is noticeable that, over the course of the whole
series, each execution is granted a particular imprint, guarding against
viewer complacency. In the first series, More’s traumatic isolation on
the executor’s platform is expressed in a shot of the crowd from his own
point of view; the dynamic is reversed in the treatment of the execu-
tion of Katherine Howard in the fourth series, for here the spectators,
positioned below the victim, look up to the event in collective horror.
Differences obtain, too, at the level of sound, pace, editing and diegesis.
Because these scenes and others like them reveal, as Michael Hirst states,
an ‘individual visual style’ and a ‘particular meaning’, an audience is
never allowed to relax into a sense of representational predictability.32
The tyrannical expressions of the series’ protagonist retain their edge,
and in such a way that viewers are kept sensitized to the permutations
and continuing relevancies of the state apparatus. The current age, pre-
occupied, as it is, with debating the ethics of government, the uses of
torture and the causality of war, has precipitated us into looking at the
early modern with much less innocent eyes.
A sense of just how much our collective perceptions of the state
have changed is encapsulated in the costuming for one of series four’s
final spectacles – the siege of Boulogne. In a breathtakingly cinematic
sequence which draws heavily on Akira Kurosawa, Henry rides into bat-
tle wearing Laurence Olivier’s original tabard from Henry V (1944). The
moment of intertextuality self-consciously points up a representational
30 The Network King
Notes
1. Maeve Kennedy, ‘BBC ought to be ashamed of its Tudor drama series, says
Starkey’, The Guardian, 17 October 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/
2008/oct/17/bbc-television/print (accessed 14 May 2010).
2. Bruce Fletcher, ‘Why “The Tudors” is hilarious bunk’, Telegraph, 1 August
2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/3557583/Why-The-
Tudors-is-hilarious (accessed 14 May 2010).
3. Alison Weir summarizes this gap when she describes The Tudors as ‘crack-
ing good drama, but as a historian, my hair’s standing on end’. See Sheila
Marikar, ‘ “Tudors”: History Stripped Down, Sexed Up’, ABC News, 29 March
2008, http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=4545935 (accessed 14 May 2010).
4. Robin Nelson, State of Play: Contemporary ‘High-End’ TV Drama (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 184.
5. For a full discussion of the casting, see Ramona Wray, ‘Henry’s Desperate
Housewives: The Tudors, the Politics of Historiography, and the Beautiful
Body of Jonathan Rhys Meyers’, in Greg Colón Semenza, ed., The English
Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2010), pp. 25–42.
6. Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, ‘Introduction’, in Mark Jancovich and
James Lyons, eds, Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry, and Fans
(London: BFI, 2003), pp. 2–3.
7. Jancovich and Lyons, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.
8. Jancovich and Lyons, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. For a discussion of aesthetics and
quality in television, see Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, ‘Introduction: Debat-
ing Quality’, in Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, eds, Contemporary American
Television and Beyond (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 1–11.
9. For a discussion of Henry and the historians, see Peter Marshall, ‘Henry VIII
and the Modern Historians: The Making of a Twentieth-Century Reputation’,
in Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley and John N. King, eds, Henry VIII and
His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), pp. 246–66.
10. Jancovich and Lyons, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. On this subject, see also Nelson,
State of Play, pp. 56–60.
11. Andrew Hough, ‘BBC period show, The Tudors, is “historically inaccurate”,
leading historian says’, Telegraph, 10 August 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.
uk/culture/tvandradio/6005582/BBC-period-show-The-Tudors (accessed 14
May 2010).
Ramona Wray 31
In the short span of three years between 1996 and 1998, Spanish
theatre spectators were offered four different dramatizations of William
Shakespeare, the writer and the man.1 These four plays are Chema
Cardeña’s La Estancia/The Chamber, Manuel Molins’ Shakespeare (La
Mujer Silenciada)/Shakespeare (The Silenced Woman), J. C. Somoza’s Miguel
Will and Jaime Salom’s El Otro William/The Other William.2 The comedy
Miguel Will brought together Shakespeare and Cervantes, an idea used
ten years later in the film Miguel y William/Miguel and William, directed
and co-written by Inés París and released in 2007.3
Apart from coinciding in time, these Spanish biographical fictions
have in common an iconoclastic attitude towards the historical Renais-
sance playwright. In this chapter, I shall discuss how these texts break
the received image of Shakespeare: they do so through comedy, farce or
comedic treatment, and appropriate a famous historical figure in order
to address specific social and artistic issues in contemporary Spanish
culture. I introduce each work in turn.
Cardeña’s La Estancia/The Chamber (1996) shows Shakespeare and
Marlowe as room-mates in a strange relationship of political intrigue
and love over a period of five months before 30 May 1593 (the day
of Marlowe’s death). Shakespeare has managed to sneak into Marlowe’s
secret chamber because he wants the renowned author of Tamburlaine
to teach him how to become a great poet, while Marlowe, a spy working
for Sir Francis Walsingham (responsible for Elizabeth I’s secret service),
utilizes him as his double. Shakespeare betrays Marlowe and reports his
secret residence, but he is overreached by Marlowe, and the ‘dead man
in Deptford’ is Shakespeare. Feeling himself indebted to his room-mate
and former lover, Marlowe swears that he will write the greatest works
ever and will use Shakespeare’s name.
33
34 Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama and Film
in March 1999, after the theatre productions had been performed.9 Sig-
nificantly, París’ film of 2007 shows many elements in common with
Madden’s Oscar-nominated filmic fantasy.
Biographical fantasies on the Spanish stage are not a new phe-
nomenon. In fact, significant examples date as far back as the
mid-nineteenth century.10 From 1828 to 1848, there were success-
ful productions of Ventura de la Vega’s Spanish version of Alexandre
Duval’s romantic comedy of jealousy, Shakespeare Amoureaux.11 In 1853,
Enrique Zumel produced a less notorious biographical play, Guillermo
Shakespeare, based on Clemence Robert’s French novel, ‘a Hugoesque
fantasy that casts Shakespeare as the virtuous and handsome brother’ of
the villainous protagonist.12
An originally Spanish dramatization is Un Drama Nuevo/A New Play
written by Manuel Tamayo y Baus in 1867.13 One of the most signif-
icant tragedies in nineteenth-century Spanish drama, the play shows
Shakespeare as playwright and director in his maturity; the star of his
company, Yorick, is involved in an intrigue of jealousy, adulterous love
and artistic rivalry. Tamayo y Baus depicts Shakespeare as an ‘avun-
cular counsellor, desperately trying to avert the potential tragedy of
illicit love, but gradually losing his grip on the situation till, in an
act of hot-blooded revenge, he murders the play’s villain Walton’.14
Despite this murder, the devoutly Christian Tamayo projects an image
of Shakespeare as ‘full of nobility in his soul, dignity, and moral author-
ity’ in the conflicts besetting the players of his company, and therefore
as a figure of respectability in consonance with the assumed virtues of
a canonical literary figure. By contrast, the more recent productions
practise different kinds of desacralization.15
Biographical legitimization
One feature in all the recent iconoclastic fantasies that deserves our
attention is the fact that their authors justify and seek to legitimize their
alternatives to the received biography. As if anticipating criticism against
their debunking of an established cultural authority, they profess hav-
ing studied biographies of Shakespeare and of alternative candidates.
For instance, Antonio Mauro, producer of the film Miguel and William,
stated that they ‘did a lot of research during the screenwriting, and there
is very strong evidence that Shakespeare was well-versed in Cervantes’
work’.16 Some authors resort to prefaces or notes in theatre programmes
to explain why they offer an alternative biographical theory, based not
on their own imagining but on scholarly accounts, which they leave
Jesús Tronch Pérez 37
sister, because Shakespeare stole another lover from her: she wrote the
sonnets to the fair youth and dedicated some to a dark lady, but in
revenge published them under the name of her brother.22
Shakespeare’s adventures in Spain in the film Miguel and William take
place in 1590, in the middle of the so-called ‘lost’ years between 1585
and 1592, and this is made clear in the initial titles.23 As the producers
argue, ‘our story is something of a fiction based on facts, but it certainly
could have happened.’24
In Miguel Will, Somoza provides an explanation for the fact that
Cardenio was not included in the First Folio and later published as writ-
ten by Shakespeare and Fletcher: Shakespeare was dissatisfied with the
play because it was a failure; James I ordered that the foolish knight Don
Quixote be removed; Fletcher anticipated Shakespeare in the manuscript
revision; and Shakespeare ordered Heminge and Condell, the Bard’s
fellow actors and editors, never to regard Cardenio as his play.
Yet scrutiny reveals that some of the plays are not historically accurate.
For instance, Salom places his action after Love’s Labour’s Lost had been
written, probably in 1594 and 1595, overlooking the fact that William
Shakespeare had his narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of
Lucrece published in 1593 and 1594 respectively.25
Another legitimizing element is the physical presentation of the
character of Shakespeare. In keeping with the action set in 1612, the
production of Miguel Will has the English playwright in the estab-
lished likeness of a middle-aged man, with moustache and beard and
a high-domed bald forehead, derived from Droeshout’s engraving, the
frontispiece to the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays published
in 1623, and from the Chandos portrait, dated around 1610, when
Shakespeare was forty-four years old. Even The Chamber, set in 1593,
characterizes a twenty-nine-year-old Shakespeare by his more mature
features. In contrast, the young Shakespeare in The Other William wears
a van Dyck or General Custer-like moustache and goatee, and his equiv-
alent in the film wears a trimmed moustache and beard around the chin,
together with lush, long hair.
was a common man who turned mad because he dreamed of the charac-
ters in the chivalric fiction he was reading, so would the Don Quixote in
Cardenio be a man who, having seen many plays, becomes mad and
believes himself to be the author of the plays attributed to William
Shakespeare. The delirious Shakespeare names his new character Miguel
Will and decides that he will perform the part himself.
The fifth scene stages the première of Cardenio, including the recorded
voices of the spectators. The ‘inner’ play shows a performance of the
story of Cardenio interrupted by a character who asks John Rice (play-
ing Luscinda) to help him in a trick to make his deranged neighbour
Miguel Will go back to his home town. Miguel Will (wearing a bar-
ber’s basin) and Sancho arrive and sit down to watch the play. Luscinda
appears and speaks to Miguel Will, asking him to journey to Stratford-
upon-Avon, kill the usurper of his fame, ‘William Shakespeare’, and
never to write again, to which Miguel Will agrees. A short time into the
play, Shakespeare (playing Miguel Will) faints in earnest, but the per-
formance of Cardenio continues as Burbage takes up the role of Miguel
Will. In the last scene, back in Stratford, Fletcher and Burbage talk about
the play’s fiasco, although the latter acknowledges that spectators even-
tually both laughed at Miguel Will’s madness and listened to him in
earnest.36 A recovered Shakespeare learns from Fletcher that the King
expects Cardenio to be performed at court and recommends removing
the gentleman-fool character. Shakespeare agrees, but Fletcher hands
him an already revised manuscript. Shakespeare then throws this into
the fire, exhorts Burbage and Heminge to burn anything related to
Cardenio in case they ever decide to publish a compilation of his works,
and decides to abandon his profession. Left on his own, Shakespeare
receives a visit from Cervantes who tries to reassure the former by
prophesying that they will both be regarded as the greatest authors
in all literature, to which the Bard replies angrily, ‘I don’t fucking
care!’
Instead of the expected positive image of a successful and famous
playwright, Somoza depicts Shakespeare as a bitter, insecure, disillu-
sioned artist in the wane of his creative powers. Here, the renowned
Shakespeare even despises worldly fame. Shakespeare’s is a story of fail-
ure that, interestingly, occurs not only in the mental decline of aging
but also when the mediocre upstart Fletcher begins to win royal favour.
By showing his strained relationship with John Fletcher, Miguel Will
ultimately endorses the idea of Shakespeare as the individual author,
struggling alone with his own creativity and finding collaboration as an
alternative form of writing of little interest.
42 Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama and Film
Appropriating Shakespeare
antagonistic attitude towards the duke reinforces the clash between the
aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and the resolution of the conflict in
favour of the middle-class characters (notably, the merchant replaces the
duke as social authority) conforms to the then emergent and now dom-
inant ideology that has removed privileges of birth, facilitates upward
social mobility and rewards individual virtues with economic success.
Another significant feature is the connection between Shakespeare
and homosexuality in all of the productions except Miguel Will.
The issue is not uncommon in Anglo-American fictionalizations:
for instance, in the TV mini-series, Shakespeare and the Earl of
Southampton appear as homosexual lovers. In contrast to Shakespeare
in Love, which mutes or even evades homoerotic possibility and shows
an unequivocally heterosexual Shakespeare, the film Miguel and William
includes an episode in which the homosexual inquisidor is deceived
(the Bard appears as a male prostitute). In The Other William, Salom
drops the hint that the ‘actor’ Shakespeare not only goes after girls but
also boys – ‘según malas lenguas’ or ‘as gossip has it’.45 In The Silenced
Woman, Shakespeare falls in love with his sister’s second love, the young
addressee of the Sonnets.46
More notably than in the other productions, The Chamber unashame-
dly constructs Marlowe and Shakespeare as lovers. From the start,
Cardeña alludes to Marlowe’s homosexuality, and later the author of
Edward II suggests that the poor actor, Shakespeare, labours under the
mistaken belief that his problems would disappear after a sexual tryst
with his theatrical rival.47 Both characters are shown embracing each
other, Marlowe fondling Shakespeare and finally bedding the Stratford
actor.
In their respective ways, these plays appropriate the prestige surround-
ing Shakespeare with a view to vindicating homosexuality or equal
rights for homosexuals in Spain, of particular relevance at the beginning
of the century: a pro-same-sex movement achieved a change in Spanish
law in 2006 and resulted in the legitimizing of same-sex marriages.
Many, if not all, of the features I have described will not have
been new to those familiar with biographical fictions such as Anthony
Burgess’ Nothing Like the Sun (1964) or Edward Bond’s Bingo (1973), but
whereas in the Anglo-American world the most typical treatment is the
preservation of ‘traditional cultural authority’, these five Spanish fiction-
alizations are significantly irreverent, are removed from bardolatry and
three of them are anti-Stratfordian.48
The late twentieth-century interest in the biographical Shakespeare
coincided with a surge of Shakespearean productions in Spain, which
Jesús Tronch Pérez 45
Notes
1. Research for the publication of this essay was funded by the Research Project
FFI2008-01969/FILO, ‘Shakespeare’s presence in Spain in the framework of
his reception in the rest of Europe’, financed by the Ministerio de Ciencia
e Innovación. I am grateful to Mark Thornton Burnett for his invitation to
participate in the ‘Players and Personalities’ symposium of the ‘Filming and
Performing Renaissance History’ project.
2. A production of Arden Producciones S. L., Chema Cardeña’s La Estancia
was directed by M. McCallion and premiered at Centre Cultural in Alcoi
(València) on 25 May 1996, later performed at the Sala Rialto, València, from
46 Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama and Film
15 June 1997, and elsewhere. I have consulted both the video recording
at the archive of the Centre de Documentació de Teatres de la Generalitat
Valenciana and Chema Cardeña, La Estancia/La Puta Enamorada/El Idota de
Versalles (València: Universitat de València, 2000), pp. 27–96. The play was
awarded the Best Text Prize by the Valencian Theatre Critics in 1996.
Manuel Molins’ play, Shakespeare (La Mujer Silenciada), was directed
by Xavier Berraondo and performed by Carme Belloch at the Teatres de
la Generalitat Valenciana (premiered on 15 October 1996) and the Sala
Palmireno, in València, between 1996 and 1997. I have consulted both
the video recording at the above-mentioned archive and the text printed
in Manuel Molins, Shakespeare (La Mujer Silenciada) (Hondarrubia: Hiru,
2000).
A co-production of the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico and Focus,
J. C. Somoza’s Miguel Will was directed by Dennis Rafter, and premiered at the
Teatro Municipal in Almagro on 17 July 1997, and also performed at Teatro
de la Comedia in Madrid in November of the same year. I have consulted
J. C. Somoza, Miguel Will (Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores y Editores,
1999), and a video recording provided by the Centro de Documentación
Teatral del Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escéncia y la Música in Madrid,
which presents minor variations in the script that do not affect my
analysis.
A production of Marquite S. L., Jaime Salom’s El Otro William was directed
by Manuel Galiana, and premiered at the Teatro del Centro de la Villa in
Madrid on 23 January 1998. I have consulted Jaime Salom, El Otro William:
Un Hombre en la Puerta (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1998), pp. 17–89.
There is a reprint (Madrid: Fundación Autor, 1998) and an English transla-
tion in Jaime Salom, Three Comedies: ‘Behind the Scenes in Eden’, ‘Rigamaroles’,
‘The Other William’ (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2004).
3. Miguel y William (dir. Inés París, 2006) is available on DVD.
4. See Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1970), pp. 620–7, for attributions of Shakespeare’s works (or part of them)
to women – to Ann Whateley, to Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare’s wife) and
even to Elizabeth I.
5. The Marlowe theory was initiated by W. G. Ziegler’s novel, It was Marlowe:
A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries (1895), and popularized by Calvin
Hoffman’s The Murder of the Man Who Was ‘Shakespeare’ (London: Max
Parrish, 1955). Gilbert Slater’s Seven Shakespeares (London: C. Palmer, 1931)
included Marlowe (‘returned from the dead in 1594 as Shakespeare’) in the
secret fantastic-seven committee that wrote Shakespeare’s works, together
with Sir Francis Bacon, the Earls of Oxford, Derby, Rutland, Sir Walter Ralegh
and the Countess of Pembroke (see Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, pp. 595
and 621–4).
The Derby theory was first suggested by James Greenstreet in a series
of articles in 1891 and 1892, supported by Robert Fraser’s The Silent
Shakespeare (1915) and notoriously publicized by the French scholar Abel
Lefranc in a number of publications since 1919, culminating in his two-
volume A la Découverte de Shakespeare (Paris: Albin Michel, 1945–50). See
Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, p. 614.
Jesús Tronch Pérez 47
6. For a more detailed summary and a critical commentary, see Keith Gregor
and Encarna Vidal Rodríguez, ‘The “Other” William and the Question of
Authority in Spanish Stage Depictions of Shakespeare’, SEDERI, Spanish and
Portugese Society for English Renaissance Studies, 12 (2002), pp. 237–46.
7. In ‘A Meeting in Valladolid’, a short story in his collection The Devil’s Mode
(London: Hutchinson, 1989), Anthony Burgess had Shakespeare encounter-
ing Cervantes in this Spanish city, which at the time was the seat of the
Spanish court.
8. Inarco Celenio [Leandro Fernández de Moratín], Hamlet (Madrid: Oficina de
Villalpando, 1798). For this and other Spanish biographies, see Blanca López
Román, ‘Biografías españolas de Shakespeare’, in José Manuel González
Fernández de Sevilla, ed., Shakespeare en España: Crítica, Traducciones y
Representaciones (Alicante: Pórtico, 1993), pp. 137–57.
9. Directed by Peter Wood, written by John Mortimer and with Tom Curry as
Shakespeare, the six-episode series was produced by Associated Television
and Radiotelevisione Italiana, and was shown in the United Kingdom on
ATV in 1978.
10. Eduardo Juliá Martínez, Shakespeare en España: Traducciones, Imitaciones e
Influencia de las Obras de Shakespeare en la Literatura Española (Madrid:
Tipografía de la Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1918); Alfonso Par,
Shakespeare en la Literatura Española, 2 vols (Madrid and Barcelona: Librería
General de Victoriano Balmes/Biblioteca Balmes, 1935), and Representaciones
Shakespearianas en España, 2 vols (Madrid and Barcelona: Biblioteca Balmes,
1936 and 1940); J. A. Zabalbeascoa, ‘Shakespeare, personaje de ficción’, Héroe
y Antihéroe en la Literatura Inglesa: Actas del V Congreso de AEDEAN (Madrid:
Alhambra, 1983), pp. 391–401; and Keith Gregor, ‘Shakespeare as Character
on the Spanish Stage: A Metaphysics of Bardic Presence’, in A. L. Pujante and
T. Hoenselaars, eds, Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (Newark and
London: University of Delaware Press, 2003), pp. 43–53.
11. See Par, Representaciones, I, pp. 74–226. In Barcelona, the French original was
performed in 1810 (Par, Representaciones, I, p. 88), and an Italian version in
1866 by Ernesto Rossi’s company (Par, Representaciones, II, p. 75). Duval’s
comedy is anthologized, in English translation, in Maurice J. O’Sullivan,
Jr, ed., Shakespeare’s Other Lives: Fictional Depictions of the Bard (Jefferson
and London: McFarland, 1997), and recently studied by Paul Franssen,
‘Shakespeare in Love, 1804; or Conquering the Continent with William’, in
Shakespeare, Les Français, Les France, Cahiers Charles V, 45 (2008), pp. 211–30.
12. Par, Representaciones, I, pp. 194–8. Enrique Zumel, Guillermo Shakespeare:
Drama en Cuatro Actos Precedido de un Prólogo, y en Verso, Original de
D. Enrique Zumel (Granada: Impr. y Librería José María Zamora, 1853);
Gregor, ‘Shakespeare as Character’, p. 46.
13. Par, Representaciones, II, p. 22. The text is preserved in manuscript at
the Biblioteca Nacional (MSS/14294/3), and in print (Madrid: Imp. de
J. Rodríguez, 1867). William Dean Howell’s adaptation (with titles A New
Play and Yorick’s Love) was performed in the US in 1878 and (also in
London) in the 1880s. A film version was made by Spanish director Juan
de Orduña (1946). Gregor (‘Shakespeare as Character’, pp. 52–3) also points
out versions in France, Germany and Italy. Neither Duval, Zumel nor
48 Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama and Film
Salom . . . has found himself out of the audience’s favour for a long while and
disoriented on the stage for almost two decades’). See Armiño, ‘Cultura bufa
para Shakespeare’.
40. Somoza, ‘Una nota’, p. 10; Sara Borondo, ‘José Carlos Somoza, un autor vivo
en un Festival de Teatro Clásico’, La Tribuna, 18 July 1997, p. 14.
41. Somoza, ‘Una nota’, p. 10. Interestingly, one of the earliest comparisons
between Shakespeare and Cervantes can be traced to a writer of a similar
name, José Somoza, who in 1832 translated fragments from Henry IV and
wrote a commentary on the coincidence of two contemporary geniuses con-
trasting the behaviour of men of honour and rogues (see Angel-Luis Pujante
and Laura Campillo, Shakespeare en España: Textos 1764–1916 (Murcia:
Ediciones de la Universidad de Murcia, 2007), p. 87).
42. See also Angel-Luis Pujante, ‘Shakespeare or/and . . . ? The Spanish Coun-
terpart in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, in Boika Sokolova and Evgenia
Pancheva, eds, Renaissance Refractions: Essays in Honour of Alexander
Shurbanov (Sofia: St Kliment Ohridski University Press, 2001), pp. 157–69.
43. Somoza, Miguel Will, pp. 5–8.
44. See, for instance, his exemplary novel, La Española Inglesa/The English Spanish
Woman.
45. Salom, El Otro, p. 39.
46. Molins, Shakespeare, p. 46–7.
47. Cardeña, La Estancia, p. 37.
48. Lanier, Modern, p. 116.
49. Javier Vallejo, ‘El imperio del Bardo’, El País, 25 February 2006,
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/arte/imperio/Bardo/elpbabart/20060225
elpbabart_14/Tes (accessed 10 January 2010).
50. Gregor, ‘Shakespeare as Character’, p. 51.
51. Rafael Portillo and Manuel J. Gómez-Lara, ‘Shakespeare in the New Spain;
or, What You Will’, in Michael Hattaway, B. Sokolova and D. Roper, eds,
Shakespeare in the New Europe (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994),
p. 220.
3
The Touch of Man on Woman:
Dramatizing Identity in The Return
of Martin Guerre
John O’Brien
How do bodies stand before the law? How does the law deal with their
subjectivity, materiality and opacity? In particular, what gender and sub-
ject differentiation is applied to bodily distinctions? These are some of
the urgent questions raised by one of the most famous – indeed notori-
ous – of Renaissance lawsuits, the Martin Guerre case. In 1548, Martin
Guerre, a peasant from Artigat, a village in the south-west of France near
the Pyrenees, left his wife and son and disappeared. Eight years later, a
man claiming to be Martin turned up in Artigat and was accepted as
such by Bertrande de Rols, Martin’s wife. The stranger was an imposter,
Arnaud du Tilh, and after three years he was put on trial for imposture
(among other charges) and executed in September 1560.1 This historical
incident attracted wide and long-lived attention throughout the early
modern period and is an exemplary instance of the ways in which the
selfhood and identity of particular groups and individuals emerge into
representational visibility.
One of the most extensive accounts of the case is by Estienne Pasquier,
contained in his major work Les Recherches de la France.2 This account,
in turn, is indebted to the much larger legal study composed by Jean de
Coras, one of the judges at the trial at the Toulouse law courts where
the case was heard.3 Yet in crucial ways, Pasquier’s version differs from
his source’s. The context he delineates is that of perplexity, where the
law is becalmed. The text abounds in the markers of dilemma: ‘in this
perplexity’, ‘while the judges were in this predicament’, ‘in this conflict’
(each stage in the proceedings is characterized by a difficulty in know-
ing how to proceed).4 The problematic nature of the case, moreover,
relates directly to questions of identity and subjectivity. Arnaud’s return
is characterized by a discussion of the tokens which ‘prove’ who he is –
50
John O’Brien 51
the intimacies and private details such as what passed between Martin
and Bertrande on their wedding night or the clothes that he left in a
chest. This is information which only the true husband could provide,
we are told, and because Arnaud knows all these details, he is ‘recog-
nized’ as Martin Guerre. He is admitted into the village community and,
more especially, into Bertrande’s bed. Recognition is thus constituted by
tokens; identity depends on material signs; the self is known through
display.5 These patterns of recognition, identity and display are then
repeated during Arnaud’s trial, at which stage they change from tokens
into evidence (whether they also constitute proof is one of the points at
issue). The privacies (‘privautez’) rehearsed during the scene of Arnaud’s
arrival in Artigat now become the ‘particularities’ (‘particularitez’) – the
concrete details, the specifics – that are produced by Arnaud in sup-
port of his claim to be Martin Guerre. These details are now expanded
to include not only what passed between husband and wife on their
wedding night but who brought them the caudle (‘chaudeau’), then
Martin’s impotence, and the old wise woman who had released him
from it, together with the times, places and persons involved. More-
over, Pasquier adds, these specifics (the term is twice repeated, framing
the account of the trial) ‘were subsequently found to be true according
to the report of Martin Guerre’.6 Even when the real Martin Guerre turns
up in court, Arnaud still maintains his (false) identity and, indeed, when
locked away in a separate room from Martin, is able to provide informa-
tion about his reception of the sacrament of confirmation that matches
word for word the testimony provided by Martin himself.
In these circumstances, small wonder that the judges are in a
quandary and presumption comes to be considered as valid evidence.
‘Presumption’ was one of the most complex and unsatisfactory depart-
ments of early modern legal theory and practice.7 The term ‘presump-
tion’ occurs twice in Pasquier’s account, and is used in the technical legal
sense of ‘a reasonable conjecture concerning something doubtful, drawn
from arguments and appearances, which by the force of circumstances
can be accepted as a proof . . . It is never in itself an absolute proof, as
it only presumes something is true.’8 Such presumption is divided into
two parts: presumption of law (iuris), where there are legal precedents
and similarities on which to draw; and presumption of the judge or man
(iudicis or hominis), where the law is silent and the judge must form his
own judgment. The first occurrence of ‘presumption’ in Pasquier is in
the plural and signifies the factors that militate in Arnaud’s favour: the
physical defects that mark his body, as they did Martin’s, and Arnaud’s
resemblance to Martin’s sisters.9 But it is the second occurrence which is
52 The Touch of Man on Woman
Not for the first time in this case, the judges are emotionally swayed by
words; earlier, the words were those of Arnaud who gains the sympathy
of the judges; now – contradictorily – they are Martin’s.11 In the absence
of legal precedents, the case rests on the acumen of the judges; yet the
presumption here is based simply on the implicit assumption that this
is how husbands naturally behave towards miscreant wives. Such a pre-
sumption, never fully stated, is tenuous to say the least and might even
be said to fall within the least acceptable type of presumption, the temer-
arious, which cannot be taken as valid proof.12 It is a solution to the
legal predicament, but hardly a satisfactory end to the trial. Pasquier
almost concedes as much in a telling statement: ‘Notwithstanding, by
a final judgement of September 1560, he [Arnaud] was declared con-
victed of the charge against him.’13 Notwithstanding the evidence which
is ambiguous; notwithstanding the emotional impact which sways the
judges in the absence of more substantial proof; notwithstanding the
conduct of the trial which is hardly an outstanding instance of judicial
prudentia and effectively evacuates the recognition of Martin as the real
husband of proper meaning. Pasquier will soon give proof of his own
objections to these proceedings.
One person is present throughout this drama but silent in a way none
of the men are: Bertrande de Rols. In most of the published sixteenth-
century accounts, she features little and the motivation behind the
charge she brings against Arnaud is unclear – the written accounts seem
uncertain whether it was indeed fully her own initiative or prompted
by Pierre Guerre, for example.14 Henri Estienne’s short account men-
tions that Arnaud wished to take possession of another man’s wife; Le
Sueur speaks of Arnaud wishing ‘to have enjoyment of Guerre’s wife and
goods’; both refer to her in terms of possession and property, thus effec-
tively depriving Bertrande of any personal identity, which is equated
with the non-identity of a chattel.15 Without commenting directly on
John O’Brien 53
this aspect, Pasquier feels strongly that justice has not been done in this
trial and adds a coda which is without parallel in any other accounts,
either contemporaneous or later:
I would want to ask whether this Martin Guerre, who was so bit-
terly angry with his wife, did not deserve as heavy a punishment
as Arnaud Tillier [du Tilh], for having been the cause of the wrong-
doing by his absence . . . For a man should not be allowed to leave
his wife, especially for so long, and at the end of it all get off scot-
free by indulging in anger in front of his judges. It seems to me that
that is just a travesty of justice . . . If Martin Guerre had been con-
demned to death because, as the real husband, he had without due
cause deserted his wife for ten whole years – an absence that was the
main reason behind this imposture – I believe that our descendants
would have praised that verdict as most venerable. At any rate, I am
sure women would have welcomed it.16
Figure 3.1 Bertrande gives evidence to the judges in Artigat in The Return of
Martin Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1982).
Courtesy of Photofest.
Figure 3.2 Arnaud and Coras in the court at Toulouse in The Return of Martin
Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1982).
Courtesy of Photofest.
ARNAUD (agitated): Yes. And he has just used this information against
me!
CORAS (calmly): Yet when he came in, you said to him: ‘I don’t know
you.’
ARNAUD (sits down, faces forward; close-up): Yes, it’s true. I knew him
in the war. He told me about his wife, his son, his house. And then
one day on the road I met two men who took me for him. They cried,
‘Hello, Martin!’ That gave me the idea. I said to myself: Why not take
his place? I learnt all I could wherever I could. I knew that Martin
didn’t want to come back.
CORAS (taking off his hat): But tell me, for my sake, so that I can
understand clearly, before the return of this bogus husband, did you
have a great desire for a man?
[Bertrande nods].
58 The Touch of Man on Woman
Figure 3.3 The final meeting between Bertrande and Coras in The Return of
Martin Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1982).
Courtesy of Photofest.
John O’Brien 59
of the film, male knowledge seeks Bertrande in her place, a place outside
legal regulation and representation. Similarly, Bertrande’s comparative
volubility in the earlier scene with Coras is counterbalanced by her reti-
cence in the later scene. In the first scene, her speech covers the silence
of her complicity: she hides the knowledge she has. In the second scene
her silence is brought to words by the knowledge Coras has or intuits.
And this later episode is pure orality: it is what falls outside the scene of
writing, it is what is absent from written discourse but without which
the record cannot make sense and is destined to remain incomplete and
enigmatic. What completes the story is the question of female desire;
this is what structures the Arnaud–Bertrande relationship but is missing
from the account of the imposture given up to this point in the film.
The materiality of desire is linked to the specificity of a female body and
a body that survives when Arnaud’s body disappears (he is hanged and
his body burnt to ashes). That female bodily desire is indeed the first
element mentioned by Coras before he questions Bertrande about her
emotional bond with Arnaud and the plot to which it then gave rise.
It is, moreover, only at the point when Coras mentions the love bond
between them that Bertrande decides to speak. Yet notice how the film
portrays her admission of desire. It does not, by any means, license free
female expression. It tries to maintain historical plausibility not only
by her posture and demeanour, but also by the hierarchical authority
of Coras, ordering her to fetch him water, and by the patriarchal dis-
course of his opening remarks to her: ‘Bertrande, your audacity has been
very great and your fear of God very small. The court long hesitated
before declaring you innocent. First of all, you have been only too will-
ing to receive this stranger into your bed. Then when I questioned you
the first time, you ought to have confessed everything to me. At once.’
There is thus a deliberate tension between Bertrande’s admission and
the constricting social and legal framework in which it is made. While
acknowledging the constraints on female speech in the sixteenth cen-
tury and thus respecting historical verisimilitude, the film nonetheless
attempts to show the fleeting presence of the oral, female subject who
is not part of the literate elite (unlike Renaissance female writers), how
her emotional and sexual identity is constructed and played out, and
how her story emerges from amid the interstices of the trial. An elegant
trick played by the film is to create the expectation that its climax will
coincide with Arnaud’s confession, as in the contemporary sixteenth-
century accounts; the truth of imposture will be revealed in the place
dedicated to truth-seeking, the court of law. Yet the truth of female
desire is not revealed there, but somewhere outside of the official sphere,
60 The Touch of Man on Woman
Notes
1. The standard work on this incident is Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of
Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). For reactions
to her work, see Robert Finlay, ‘The Refashioning of Martin Guerre’, American
Historical Review, 93(3) (1988), pp. 553–71 and her rejoinder, ‘On the Lame’,
American Historical Review, 93(3) (1988), pp. 572–603.
2. Estienne Pasquier, Les Recherches de la France in Oeuvres d’Estienne Pasquier,
2 vols (Amsterdam: Compaignie des Libraires Associez), I, cols. 654–8 (bk 6,
ch. 36). The Recherches began to be published in 1560. All translations from
this work are my own.
3. Jean de Coras, Arrest memorable du Parlement de Toulouse (A Memorable Verdict
of the High Court of Toulouse) (Paris: Gabriel Buon, 1579). The first edition
of this work appeared in 1560 and a second, revised edition in 1565. All
translations from this work are my own.
4. Pasquier, Recherches, I, col. 656.
5. On problems of recognition and the tokens that support it, see the classic
study by Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1988).
John O’Brien 63
on May day when they met, Colonell Blunt divided them into two
parts, and the one was as Roundheads, and the other as Cavaliers,
who did both of them act their parts exceeding well, and many
people, men and women, young and old, were present to see the
same.
The Roundheads they carried on it with care and love, temperance
and order, and as much gravity as might be, every one party care-
full in his action, which was so well performed, that it was much
commended.
But the Cavaliers they minded drinking and roaring, and disorder,
and would bee still playing with the women, and compasse them in,
and quarrel, and were exceedingly disorderly.
And these had several skirmishes one with the other, and took
divers prisoners one from the other, and gave content to the
Countrey people, and satisfied them as well as if they had gone a
65
66 ‘Welcome to Babylon’
The Doctor here points out the central ethical problematic issue asso-
ciated with re-enactment – the celebration of destruction and warfare
(‘just twentieth-century men playing a particularly nasty game’, he calls
it later).7 His comment about theatricality also seeks to undermine the
account of re-enactment that suggests it is merely performance. There
is something actively authentic about the war games, he suggests, and
this is seen in the behaviour of the villagers who become aggressive and
bloodthirsty. Re-enactment is not something to be taken lightly, sug-
gests the Doctor: it is not a game, but the reassertion of violence and the
reinscription of historical trauma. He also places his finger on a repre-
sentational nexus. What are the virtues and the values of memorializing
such a bloody and fracturing event? Hutchinson dismisses the Doctor’s
concerns with an argument that is resonant both for its address to the
ownership of history through the re-representation of a past which may
be traumatic – Why shouldn’t we celebrate and own what happened? –
and which also demonstrates the ethical dissimulation involved in re-
enactment and in performance of the past more generally: as it is
something that actually happened, there can surely be no harm in
replaying it. As the programme demonstrates, however, there can be.
The ‘war games’ send Hutchinson mad, and attract malign forces that
attempt to harness their chaotic energies. The re-enactment is creating,
through fear and anger, great psychic energy which is feeding the devel-
opment of the Malus, an alien creature engineered as a weapon. The
energy is creating a schism in time which allows movement between
68 ‘Welcome to Babylon’
1643 and the present. The Malus creates visual projections of Cavalier
and Parliamentary soldiers throughout the programme to effect its
ends, and also sends the local squire mad. In the final battle, a ‘real’
man performing as a Royalist soldier fights three psychically projected
Roundheads, ending in his death. The lunatic villain, Hutchinson, plans
that the re-enactment will be real, insofar as the village will once again
be destroyed. This will effect a change in history. The villagers’ perfor-
mance begins to convert into the real thing. Hutchinson plans to use the
traditional Queen of the May celebration to provoke the time rupture
he seeks – knowingly or not acting the Royalist patrician upholding
the traditions of popular country culture to sustain further his dubi-
ous legitimacy. Whilst the programme does not attempt to read the civil
war in any way other than to suggest its horror and chaos, there are
echoes and resonances in its representation and articulation of pastness
that demonstrate the popular manifestation of the civil wars in pastoral
Englishness, patrician loathing of disorder, and a fundamental fractur-
ing conflict at the heart of the nation. The episode demonstrates the
various ways in which the revolutionary period lives in the contem-
porary historical imagination, not least through its articulation in the
present through re-enactment and war gaming.
What The Awakening and the Blunt event show is that popular appre-
ciation of the civil conflicts of the mid-seventeenth century has often
been concerned with the re-enactment and performance of particular
events rather than fictional narratives. They show how this engagement
has regularly been at the level of performance, and through a kind of
theatrical event which is outside of the mainstream performance loci
although controlled by a central authority. Evidently remembering a
war period necessitates a reinscribing of the conflict itself and either
an attempt at drawing its subversive sting or a gesture towards demon-
strating how the act of memory itself can engender new conflict and
chaos. The representational strategies deployed by those who would
remember the wars in popular conflict have to navigate between these
poles, understanding the innate bloodiness of the events whilst simi-
larly appreciating their compelling political and ideological valency. It
is this balancing act which means that most representation of the wars,
whilst addressing particular stereotypes, retains vibrancy and a signif-
icant, defining ambiguity that much other historical programming or
costume drama lacks. The Awakening’s 1984 presentation of a corrupt
patrician Royalist villain visiting horror from the past/future onto his
innocent countrymen through the deployment and enactment of an
idealized but politically suspect ‘heritage’ event is resonant and recalls
Jerome de Groot 69
The heritage films, too, work as pastiches, each period of the national
past reduced through a process of reiteration to an effortlessly repro-
ducible, and attractively consumable, connotative style. The films
turn away from modernity toward a traditional conservative pastoral
Englishness; they turn away, too, from the hi-tech, special-effects
dominated aesthetics of mainstream popular cinema.9
Film
Television
Blackadder, whilst presenting a satirical and slapstick view of the past and
presuming a particular type of historical imagination, rarely attempts to
explain or conceptualize pastness, rather locating foolishness, rapacious
greed and idiocy as transhistorical. The Cavalier Years episode was not
particularly interested in developing an engaged sense of the 1640s
and therefore reached for the most convenient stereotypes for brevity’s
72 ‘Welcome to Babylon’
sake. The fact that these stereotypes – behavioural and visual – are
so strong despite the lack of popular cultural representation of this
period is meaningful, and implies that the binaries of the war (both
Roundhead/Cavalier but also often Cromwell/Charles) have permeated
popular culture, yet are not somehow articulated within it.
Apart from The Moonraker, a semi-fictionalized account of Charles II’s
escape from Worcester in 1651, the action of the wars has been mainly
ignored by film and television until Witchfinder General and Cromwell.
The gravitas with which this latter film approaches the subject sug-
gests that the period demanded to be treated seriously. The film makes
a relatively compelling, wordy account of the advance to war and the
events twinned effectively by the binary dynamic between Charles and
Cromwell. In the performances of Richard Harris and Alec Guinness,
the film also delivers a heavyweight account of the war. A key early
exchange figures the conflict as being for common rights and liberties:
The film devotes much time to parliamentary debate; the road to war
is narrated through a series of discursive symmetrical scenes alternating
between Parliament and the King’s Council chamber. Charles is given
ample time to make his case and Guinness imbues him with stiff dignity
and class.13 Yet the film presents Cromwell as the advocate for political
rights and parliamentary liberties: ‘I am persuaded, Your Majesty, that
England must move forward to a more enlightened form of government,
based upon a true representation of a free people. Such an institution is
known as democracy, sir,’ he argues in the Council chamber.14 The last-
ing demotic significance of the conflict is regularly inferred by accounts
of Cromwell’s interest in personal political liberty. In the 2003 film, To
Kill a King, after the execution of Charles, Tim Roth’s Cromwell shouts
to the watching crowd: ‘With this you are subjects no more but citizens,
free men. You do not have to kneel to any other man. You are your own
masters commanding your own fate.’15 This sense of the conflict engen-
dering individuated rights and signifying a shift from subjecthood to
citizenship is still a strong part of the mythos of the conflict and of
Cromwell himself.16
Jerome de Groot 73
The film follows the corrupt career of Matthew Hopkins, played with
cold pitiless brilliance by Vincent Price. It is part of the continuum of
British horror, bearing comparison to Hammer, but also to bleak films
such as The Wicker Man (dir. Robin Hardy, 1973) and Straw Dogs (dir.
Sam Peckinpah, 1971).19 However, the film also echoes the Western.
Hopkins spends a lot of time riding around, portrayed in wide shots
into the foreground through the English countryside, and there is a
horse chase. Furthermore, the film considers what happens in a law-
less, pioneer land with no justice and little authority. Hopkins himself
argues that the law has become something the individual institutes –
‘It’s justice. It’s my justice’ – but also that it is God’s work.20 He takes
depositions, condemns and then summarily executes his victims. The
narrative dramatizes a journey of vengeance, and the descent into mad-
ness of good people in a situation that is undermining their sense of
selfhood. There are scenes of torture, rape and physical interrogation –
the violence and horror and chaos associated with the period. Hopkins is
an expression of evil, rather than that of any particular side – his victims
74 ‘Welcome to Babylon’
are witches and popish priests, but the hero is a Cromwellian soldier.
The film demonstrates that it is possible to make a dynamic, impressive
thriller about the seventeenth century, and that there is something par-
ticularly bleak and lawless in the period that might be mobilized for the
purposes of a horror narrative. There is still little attempt to engage with
the broader issues, and the grimness of the times is expressed through
violence suffered on a domestic, personal level. The wars and the social
confusion they engendered are visited upon the people and expressed
on the bodies of the subjects. Witchfinder General is the gory popular
cultural other of Cromwell’s high-minded address to the realities of what
happened, but both demonstrate that the 1640s and 1650s engender
complex and problematic representation on film.
Kevin Brownlow’s Winstanley has been cited by documentary and
docu-drama film-makers as a key work in developing a model of authen-
ticity for the form. Brownlow himself argued in 1997 that ‘We made
the film to see if it is possible to make an absolutely authentic historical
film.’21 He links this authenticity explicitly with the political investment
of the film’s representation of the radical past:
JOHN LILBURNE: Shall honest John Lilburne not speak the truth
about this king that tells us God gave him his throne? I tell you he
is a tyrant that will not let his parliament sit. Charles Stuart has no
divine right. For writing this I am whipped. My liberty is his to take,
but not to give. I am free-born John Lilburne.
Jerome de Groot 77
SEXBY: Words?
JOHN LILBURNE: Read.
78 ‘Welcome to Babylon’
ELIZABETH LILBURNE: You hold his life in your hands. Both sides
will call it treason.
Lilburne here is unique, above the binary of sides, striving only for the
light of truth and freedom although keen to use force to impose right
(surely an echo of contemporary military intervention?). On that note,
the series’ presentation of a just war for liberty clearly suggests that
the right to raise arms against a tyrannous king (and Lord Protector)
may lead to genocide but also allows for essential freedoms. It comes as
something of a shock that the central premise of the war is presented as
the struggle for liberty against an implacable religious other. These res-
onances are in the background of the series, and some of the problems
of tone relate to a lack of moral clarity on the issues of armed resistance
and politicized combat. There has been much scholarly debate regard-
ing the appropriate response to extremist poetry of the war period, and
at times The Devil’s Whore explicitly displays the vocabulary of religious
violence without shirking its responsibility to authenticity.36 The scenes
in Ireland, particularly, do not turn from accusing the soldiers of geno-
cide and pillage. This serious consideration of the violence of the state
becomes subsumed into a more inchoate representation of the mul-
titudinous sects and organizations. The series’ celebration of religious
and political radicalism – its presentation of the Family of Love and the
Digger communities, for instance – loses its sting as it becomes a mere
performance of difference rather than a possible new way of living. How-
ever, it does allow for debate relating to the correct way to live and the
responsibility of the state to govern personal identity.
The second episode includes a discussion in prison between
Rainsborough, Cromwell (Dominic West) and Lilburne about the purg-
ing of Parliament to reform it. Lilburne repeatedly asks the question,
Jerome de Groot 79
the radical thinker, it was never a mainstream release, and has only
recently been accessible on DVD. The manifestation of such extreme
ideas in The Devil’s Whore, then, demonstrates a new interest in the rad-
ical and complex ideas of the time – and a concern with investigating, in
particular, details of the new expressions of personal and political liberty
that those two figures were most concerned with. This in itself reflects
the revisionist and restitutive historiography of the past few decades.
In this context, The Devil’s Whore, and its foregrounding of Lilburne,
is, however incoherent, an important moment in the history of history
on television and the manifestation of radicalism in British popular cul-
ture. The war years demand a complexity of response, simply to present
the political machinations and the actual events, but The Devil’s Whore
demonstrates a new move to looking beyond the narrative actuality
and attempting to consider the conceptual shifts and innovations that
occurred during the 1640s.
The wars of the 1640s contain within them such contradiction that
their visual representation in the later twentieth century has been com-
plex and uncertain. It is a period that is so familiar that it can easily
be satirized and mocked; one that lends itself to clear and easy binary
representation at the same time that it invokes moral, political, cultural
and religious confusion; one that might allow television to investigate
deep and significant issues relating to the modern nation but, at the
same time, opens up the possibility of death, witch-hunting and dis-
ease; a conceptually challenging period which nonetheless has clearly
demarcated battle lines; a place we might begin to trace a radical lineage
from; the cradle of parliamentary democracy and the beginning of a very
British tyranny and autocracy; a time in which the public was writ upon
the domestic and personal (as in the family epic, By The Sword Divided),
and individual conscience was created, but where big political concepts
were discussed by men who, as in Cromwell, thought nothing of them-
selves but sought the greater good. In short, the 1640s are rich and
challenging and provoking; they refuse to allow film-makers to relax,
and as a consequence the work that they have inspired is thoroughly
restless and uneasy.
Notes
1. The 20th. Weeke. Perfect Occurences of Parliament And Chief Collections of Letters
from the Armie (London: printed for Andrew Coe, 9–16 May 1645), sig. V1r
(Thomason E: 260 (37), Friday 9 May 1645). I owe this reference to Rachel
Willie.
2. Perfect Occurences, sig. V1r .
Jerome de Groot 81
83
84 Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials
academic historians over the last fifteen years or so, which means that
we simply know a lot more about the subject than previously.4 Con-
versely, there is an abiding public interest in witchcraft. And, thirdly,
witchcraft seems to offer a means of dividing an early modern them
from a modern, or even postmodern, us. To the general public, witch-
hunting constitutes a metaphor for the ignorance, bigotry and barbarity
of past ages: it is easy, therefore, to see the belief in witchcraft as
something evil and stupid which progress has allowed us to leave
behind.
The aim of this chapter is to present a preliminary discussion of the
representation of early modern witchcraft through film. There are, of
course, numerous films that touch on this subject, but we shall concen-
trate on three that have the advantage of being widely separated in their
date of production, their quality and intent.5
The first, and by far the most complex, is Häxan, also known as The
Witch in History, released in 1922. Before 1914 the Danish film indus-
try was one of the most vibrant in Europe, and Häxan was directed by a
major contributor to that vibrancy, Benjamin Christensen (1879–1959).6
Christensen’s story is a long and complex one which unfortunately can-
not be rehearsed here. Suffice to say that after a number of career false
starts, he became involved in the movie industry, and in 1913 directed
a very successful movie, The Mysterious X, which made his reputation.
But, on his own account, he wanted to make a more ambitious film than
the generality of the Danish movies of the period, and, apparently after
coming across a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum in Germany in 1914, he
became obsessed with the history of witchcraft, acquired a trunk full of
books on the subject, and began to work up a film around it. No Danish
company was willing to support Christensen’s enterprise, but in 1919
he signed a contract with Svensk Filmindustri after a Swedish producer,
Charles Magnussen, took up the challenge. Filming began early in 1921,
and was completed by October. The film eventually achieved a budget
of between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 kroner, earning it the distinction
of being the most expensive silent film made in Scandinavia. There was
an extensive cast, and Christensen’s vision depended on very advanced
special effects and hence the equipment to create them. Although the
film was made by a Swedish company, the cast and crew were for the
most part Danish, with Christensen himself appearing (he was an actor
as well as a director) as the devil. Häxan opened in Stockholm on 17
September 1922, and at Copenhagen on 7 November of that year, with
Christensen prefacing this latter performance with a lecture on the film’s
sources.7
James Sharpe 85
uncomfortably with the rest of the film, but it does raise the question of
how society had really progressed since the Middle Ages, and which of
our practices, particularly towards the mentally ill, will look odd to our
descendants. Thus the simplistic notion that witch-hunting can be used
as a symbol of a bigoted and barbarous past is neatly challenged. The
film also suggests that, in the Scandinavia of the early 1920s, the sort of
old woman who would have been regarded as a witch in former times
was being cared for by ‘pious trusts and old people’s homes’.
Häxan had a considerable impact in its early showings. Christensen,
however, encountered massive censorship problems, not least in the US,
where public distribution of the film proved impossible. As well as the
graphic depiction of the sabbath, there is considerable nudity in the
film, there is one sequence where two old women bewitch a household
by urinating into bowls outside the dwelling house and then throwing
the contents over the front door, in the possessed convent sequence a
possessed nun spits on a statuette of the infant Jesus, and the theme
of torture is pervasive. Perhaps the overall effect is, as a recent study
has put it, that the film ‘unflinchingly presents the squalor, cruelty and
superstition of the Middle Ages’. But there is more than that in Häxan.
As the same commentator points out, ‘this sometimes surreal gem was
ahead of its time in its technical achievements and its treatment of the
macabre.’8 Its semi-documentary approach leaves audiences with a clear
idea of what people thought witchcraft was about, from Karna making
potions to the excesses of the sabbath, and it suggests how these ideas
were fitted into some sort of continuum. And its depiction of how a
household, and by implication a community, could be torn apart by a
chain of witch accusations retains a real power even ninety years after
the film was conceived.
The second film under consideration, Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag), first
released in 1943, is a very different piece of work.9 Firstly, it is the work
of a more substantial director, again a Dane, Carl Theodor Dreyer, prob-
ably best known for his The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).10 Secondly,
it is based on a play that was itself founded on a real historical per-
sonage, Anna (or Anne) Pedersdotter, living at Bergen in Norway, the
widow of the Danish Lutheran theologian, Absalon Pedersen Beyer.11
She was accused and acquitted of witchcraft in 1575, the year follow-
ing her husband’s death, but tried again for witchcraft and executed
in 1590. The initial accusations were, apparently, the by-product of the
stresses caused by the Reformation in the town: conservatives resented
the reforming efforts of Absalon and his fellow Lutheran clerics, and,
since the reforming clergy had powerful patrons, directed accusations
James Sharpe 87
cinematic mode and ‘reading’ the outcome of that process are different
from the equivalent activities in authoring books.
But I think there should be some concern for authenticity, however
aware one must be of the differing agendas of the academic historian
and the movie-maker, especially the latter’s concern for telling a simple
story and making a profit. The historian concerned with this issue ben-
efits from reading into adaptation theory, a branch of film theory that
is concerned with the representation of novels and other literary works
in film.30 Much as the historian is concerned with how far a film is his-
torically accurate, so a central concern of adaptation theory is an issue
signalled in the introduction to this book, ‘fidelity’. Most film theorists
seem to regard fidelity to an original novel as being of secondary impor-
tance – film is a creative medium which can, it is argued, legitimately
adopt a new take on a work of literature and refashion its content.31
This position may offer little succour to the historian concerned with
the historical accuracy of a movie, but the debate around this issue does
serve to open up a more informed framework for discussion.32
Authenticity can of course be conjured up by props and costumes,
and film can be very good at that.33 Yet an obvious constraint here is
finance: the quality of this aspect of ‘accuracy’ was very much enhanced
by Christensen’s decision to go way over budget with Häxan, while the
costumes and many other aspects of Witchfinder General were almost
compromised by Michael Reeves having to work on a shoestring.34 But
as well as props, there is the issue of the ‘feel’ of the period. Again, let us
turn to Natalie Zemon Davis:
There are tremendous problems here: why should the past resemble the
present? How sure can we be about the values of a period? But what is
clear is that any film on the theme of witchcraft owes it to its audience to
try to create a context that addresses, as fully as possible, and preferably
without resort to cliché, the historical period in which the film’s story
is set.
Given this, it seems to me, and again with no great claims to orig-
inality, that the theme of witchcraft, possibly like all historical topics,
94 Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials
Notes
1. Hence, Robert A. Rosenstone has commented, ‘Surely I am not the only
one to wonder if those we teach or the population at large really know
or care about history, the kind of history that we do. Or to wonder if our
James Sharpe 95
history – scholarly, scientific, measured – fulfils the need for that larger His-
tory, that web of connections to the past that holds a culture together,
that tells us not only where we have been but also suggests where we are
going.’ See his Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to our Idea of History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 23.
2. For a statement of my views on this issue, see James Sharpe, ‘History from
Below’, in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1991), pp. 28–36.
3. The first twenty years or so of this activity is synthesized admirably by
one of its leading exponents, Keith Wrightson, in English Society 1580–1680
(London: Hutchinson, 1982).
4. There has been so much excellent work published on the topic that selecting
representative titles is almost invidious, but some idea of the quality and
diversity of these publications can be gained from: Stuart Clark, Thinking
with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996); Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and
Cultural Contexts of European Witchcraft (London: Harper Collins, 1996); and
Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2004).
5. For a broader discussion, see James Sharpe, ‘Film (Cinema)’, in Richard M.
Golden, ed., Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, 4 vols (Santa
Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006), II, pp. 369–72.
6. This is confirmed by Ron Mottram, The Danish Cinema Before Dreyer
(Metuchen, NJ, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1988); see also Ebbe Neegaard,
The Story of Danish Film (Copenhagen: The Danish Institute, 1963).
7. The making and subsequent fortunes of Häxan are described in Jack
Stevenson, Witchcraft through the Ages: The Story of ‘Häxan’, the World’s
Strangest Film, and the Man who Made It (Godalming: FAB Press, 2006). As
the title suggests, this book also supplies useful biographical material on
Benjamin Christensen.
8. Kevin J. Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: Films about Medieval Europe (Jefferson
and London: McFarland, 1999), p. 227.
9. It is worth pointing out, however, that a print of the supposedly lost Häxan
was discovered in storage in Stockholm in 1940, which led to its being re-
released in Denmark in the following year. Possibly Dreyer, who we know
had admired Christensen’s film on its first showing, saw it again and had
his interest in witchcraft themes roused by the experience. See Stevenson,
Witchcraft through the Ages, p. 97; Claude Perrin, Carl Theodore Dreyer (Paris:
Editions Seghers, 1969), pp. 123–5.
10. Perhaps the fullest discussion of Dreyer’s work is David Bordwell, The Films
of Carl Theodore Dreyer (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 1981), which has a detailed discussion of Day of Wrath at
pp. 117–43; see also Perrin, Carl Theodore Dreyer, and the interview with
Dreyer published in Andrew Sarris, Interviews with Film Directors (New York:
Avon Books, 1970), pp. 140–64.
11. The play was also adapted into an opera in 1971 by the Norwegian composer
and conductor, Edvard Fliflet Braein, and had served as the basis of an ear-
lier opera, La Fiamma, dating from 1934, by the Italian composer Ottorino
Respighi.
96 Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials
12. On Peddersdotter, see the entry by Brian P. Levack in Golden, ed., Encyclope-
dia of Witchcraft, III, pp. 887–8; for witch trials in Norway more generally,
see Gunnar W. Knutsen, ‘Norwegian Witchcraft Trials: A Reassessment’,
Continuity and Change, 18 (2003), pp. 185–200.
13. This attracted hostile reactions from its Danish audience and a number of
reviewers when it was first screened: see Bordwell, Films of Carl Theodore
Dreyer, p. 140.
14. The evidence here is, however, equivocal. Post-war, Dreyer himself denied
that he intended the film to draw any parallels with the Nazi occupation,
while his leaving Denmark for Sweden in 1943 has been attributed to his
desire to try his fortunes there after the lukewarm audience reaction in
Denmark to Day of Wrath rather than to any hostile reaction to the film
from the occupying German authorities: see Bordwell, Films of Carl Theodore
Dreyer, p. 193; Två Människor, ‘Two People’, in Tytti Soila, ed., The Cinema
of Scandinavia (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 82–3.
15. The making and fortunes of Witchfinder General figure prominently in the
biography of its director: see Benjamin Halligan, Michael Reeves (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2003). The film is discussed in a num-
ber of other works, notably those on British horror films, for example,
Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 144–51.
16. For a recent analysis of this episode, see Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders:
A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (London: John Murray, 2005); for
an earlier statement of the significance of the East Anglian witch-hunts,
see James Sharpe, ‘The Devil in East Anglia: The Matthew Hopkins Trials
Reconsidered’, in Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts, eds,
Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 237–56.
17. Ronald Bassett, Witchfinder General (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1966; London:
Pan Books, 1968).
18. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and
Comparative Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970).
19. Gaskill, Witchfinders, pp. 138–43.
20. As is noted in Halligan, Michael Reeves, pp. 135–7.
21. Halligan, Michael Reeves, pp. 195–202; John Trevelyan, What the Censor Saw
(London: Michael Joseph, 1973), pp. 162–3. For a review deploring the vio-
lence in Witchfinder General, see Alan Bennett, ‘Views’, The Listener, 23 May
1968, pp. 657–8.
22. John Stearne, The Confirmation and Discovery of Witch-craft (London, 1648;
Wing S5365).
23. On the filming of this scene, from which Gillian Aldam, the stuntwoman
playing Clarke, was lucky to emerge with only minor burns, see Halligan,
Michael Reeves, pp. 140–1.
24. Lakeland’s fate is described in The Laws Against Witches, and Coniuration
(London, 1645; Wing L694aA), pp. 7–8.
25. Gaskill, Witchfinders, p. 3.
26. There is an extensive, and growing, literature on the presentation of his-
tory in film: for a useful introduction, which spells out most of the relevant
tensions and difficulties, see Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the
James Sharpe 97
Movies: Studying History on Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
There are a number of journals in this field, of which perhaps the best estab-
lished is Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television, while
the entry of the theme of film and history into the academic mainstream is
symbolized by the regular inclusion of film reviews in The American Historical
Review.
27. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘ “Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead”: Film
and the Challenge of Authenticity’, The Yale Review, 86 (1986–7), p. 470.
28. Problems around historical accuracy and film figure prominently in Mark
C. Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (London: Cassell,
1996).
29. A comprehensive, if perhaps somewhat uncritical, introduction to the vari-
ous pathways to the past currently available is provided by Jerome de Groot,
Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture
(London and New York: Routledge, 2009). See also the various essays in
David Cannadine, ed., History and the Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).
30. There is a sizeable literature on adaptation, which, among other things,
demonstrates a variety of attitudes to the subject. I benefitted particularly
from reading Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From ‘Gone
with the Wind’ to ‘The Passion of Christ’ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 2007); Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York
and London: Routledge, 2006); Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film
Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); James Naremore, ed.,
Film Adaptation (London: Athlone Press, 2000); Robert Stam and Alessandra
Raengo, eds, Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of
Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); and Robert Stam and Alessandra
Raengo, eds, A Companion to Literature and Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
Most authors working in this field acknowledge the importance of a sem-
inal pioneering work: George Bluestone, Novels into Film (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1957).
31. See, for example, Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adapta-
tion’, in Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation, pp. 54–76.
32. See, for example, Dudley Andrew, ‘Adapting Cinema to History: A Revolu-
tion in the Making’, in Stam and Raengo, eds, A Companion, pp. 189–204,
which recreates the context of the making of Jean Renoir’s 1939 movie, La
Marseillaise.
33. Indeed, one feels that for many movie-makers historical authenticity is a
matter of getting the props rather than the facts right: hence, Peter Lamont,
the designer for the movie Titanic (dir. James Cameron, 1997), commented
that the film displayed ‘a Titanic as close as possible to the real thing, down
to the exact shade of green in the leather chairs in the smoking lounge’:
see Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies, p. 103. It is interesting
to compare this with Kamilla Elliott’s observation, in relation to the adapta-
tion of literary works into film, that ‘quite inconsistently, while adaptations
pursue a hyperfidelity to nineteenth-century material culture, they reject
and correct Victorian psychology, ethics and politics. When filmmakers set
modern politically correct views against historically correct backdrops, the
effect is to authorize these modern ideologies as historically authentic.’ See
Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 177.
98 Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials
34. Halligan, Michael Reeves, p. 140, reveals that the four hundred extras assem-
bled for the climactic witch-burning scene at Framlingham were costumed in
grain sacks purchased from a local farmer which were dyed red, blue, green
and yellow and worn over ‘discreet clothing’.
35. Davis, ‘ “Any Resemblance” ’, p. 475.
36. James Sharpe, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of
Football, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England (London: Profile Books,
1999).
37. The film, discussed by John O’Brien in this book, was directed by Daniel
Vigne and released in 1982. As Hughes-Warrington, Going to the Movies,
points out, this film benefitted massively from the input of the distin-
guished historian of early modern France, Natalie Zemon Davis, who acted
as historical advisor during its production (p. 18).
6
The Golem, or the Communist
‘What You Will’
Martin Procházka
99
100 The Golem, or the Communist ‘What You Will’
show diplomatic intrigue and reveal the corruption and theft of the
Emperor’s courtiers, which is contrasted with the misery of starving
people queuing for bread before dawn.
The aging and sickly Emperor is tormented by toothache and con-
vinced that the finding of the golem may solve the crisis, which he
perceives as the dissolution of his own identity and authority.7 This
is more or less based on historical facts: since the early years of his
reign Rudolph had suffered from severe depression (termed ‘melan-
choly’ by his contemporaries) and later was also seriously afflicted with
syphilis (which drove him to attempt suicide). In 1606, the Habsburgs
decided that he should be substituted on the imperial throne by his
brother, Matthias (1557–1619), and in 1608 the empire was partitioned
between the two monarchs. In 1611, Rudolph was forced to abdicate,
and the Kingdom of Bohemia was torn apart by the conflicts between
Catholics and Protestants, which had not been quelled by the previously
issued Maiestas Rudolphus (1609), an imperial edict instituting religious
tolerance.
Rudolph’s manic moods are represented in the film as frequently
repeating spectacular bursts of rage during which the monarch smashes
vases handed to him by his servants. He shouts, ‘We want the golem,
we need the golem, we must have the golem!’, adding, ‘We cannot trust
anyone but ourselves.’8 However, soon it becomes clear that Rudolph’s
self-identification poses a real problem. Watching his image in the mir-
ror, he does not recognize himself, and is convinced of his identity only
after comparing two mirror-images of his face. Rudolph’s ‘virtual’ iden-
tity is not confirmed by art either: he knows that his latest portrait was
painted when he was fifteen years younger and becomes acutely aware
of his bodily deterioration: ‘At night, when everything is silent, we can
distinctly hear the sclerosis in our arteries.’
In these circumstances, the identification of Rudolph’s empirical and
symbolic bodies can hardly increase his royal authority.9 On the con-
trary, it subverts not only the political power of monarchy but also the
intellectual and spiritual power of art. Although Rudolph is a passion-
ate art collector, he cannot tell the difference between the original and
the copy.10 Or, to be more precise, he interprets this difference as that
between the true copy and the simulacrum, which, according to Gilles
Deleuze, is not primarily the matter of resemblance or representation,
but the question of power, subversion and the ‘twilight of idols’.11 In
the imperial gallery, there are twelve copies of the Mona Lisa: ‘If we knew
which of them was original,’ says Rudolph, ‘we would sell the others as
originals and keep only the authentic one. But what if the original were
Martin Procházka 101
a fake? Therefore we keep all the paintings whether fake or not. One can
never tell.’
Together with the authority of the original, mimesis is subverted, and
with it also the doctrine of realism. Rudolph mentions the latter term in
connection with his planned erotic adventure with a miller’s daughter,
whose drawing is shown to him by a court artist. To justify his design,
he says that ‘life requires life size’ and adds ‘Realism’, making a gesture
resembling that of the cross. Although this scene undermines the rul-
ing ideology of socialist realism, it has also an opposite aim: to identify
the crisis of imperial authority with a general decay of bourgeois val-
ues manifested in the deliberate blurring of the distinctions between
aesthetic object and object of sexual desire and also between art and
kitsch.12
Instead of exploring the subversive potential of simulacra, the film
shows imperial politics and economy suffering from the confusion of
simulacra with true copies. Having commented on the forged copies of
the Mona Lisa, Rudolph comes to deal with the matters of state: ‘Tell us
only what is not necessary to decide’, he asks his chamberlain Lang.13
‘What is necessary is unnecessary’, he adds. This statement disrupts
diplomatic negotiations with the Emperor’s brother Matthias and leads
to a conspiracy hatched by Rudolph’s principal courtiers with the aim of
dethroning him and offering the crown to his brother. Expressed here,
too, is Rudolph’s refusal to solve the grave economic situation of the
country afflicted with famine and the bankruptcy of the court. Instead
of opening imperial granaries, Rudolph buys another fake Mona Lisa.
In spite of these catastrophic consequences, Rudolph’s nonsensical
remarks articulate the logic of arbitrariness ruling the representation
of history in the film.14 When the court alchemist Alessandro Scotta
invents a floor polish instead of the elixir of youth, the event first leads
to a series of gags marking a farcical inversion of hierarchies: courtiers
(and even the Emperor) slip and fall when trying to walk over the pol-
ished floor.15 Much later, the golem, symbolizing the destructive energy
of matter, is efficiently stopped by the same polish on which he slips
and falls down.
The same logic of arbitrariness rules the story of the golem. The golem
is discovered hiding on the Gallows Hill only when the Emperor stabs
the bottom of his alchemist instead of a little dog (whose blood was
necessary for the magic invocation). Later on, a device for reviving
the golem, called the ‘shem’, is found by chance by a drunken Gen-
eral Russworm, but shortly after it is swallowed by the same little dog
intended as a scapegoat in the Emperor’s magic experiment.16 However,
102 The Golem, or the Communist ‘What You Will’
this story full of unexpected comical reversals soon grows serious. In the
second part of the film, the fight for the ‘shem’ resembles the nuclear
armament race, and Russworm is finally incinerated by the flames blaz-
ing from the golem’s eyeholes. To quote Deleuze, this series of gags
establishes a specific art of humour marked by the ‘co-extensiveness of
sense with nonsense’, the art of ‘surfaces and doubles . . . and the always
displaced aleatory point’, represented in this case by the ‘shem’.17
This quality of humour is also evident in the story of the Emperor
and his double, the baker Matthew (Matěj) who becomes Rudolph’s
substitute. The two characters are linked by a process of parodic inver-
sion, which generates the carnival scenes of the second part of the film.
Matthew, who decides to distribute the Emperor’s ‘especially well-baked
rolls’ to the starving populace, is arrested and thrown into a dungeon.
By sheer accident he gets to the imperial bathroom through a sewer and
hides in the foamy bath prepared for Rudolph. When discovered by the
barbers, he is taken for the Emperor, and his younger look is ascribed to
the effect of the elixir of life, which the monarch had drunk in order to
prepare himself for a love adventure with the maiden of the mill. When
meeting Rudolph, stupefied by the power of the ‘elixir’, a concoction of
rum, brandy and morphine, Matthew breaks a large looking-glass and
successfully poses as the Emperor’s mirror image. Since he responds to
Rudolph’s questions, the Emperor takes Matthew for his authentic self.
When Rudolph learns from Matthew that he is thirty-five years old, he
feels himself ready for the erotic adventure, and Matthew, taken for the
rejuvenated Rudolph, can start ruling instead of him. As a simulacrum,
Matthew ‘harbours a positive power which denies the original and the
copy, the model and the reproduction’ (original emphasis).18 Seeing the
copies of the Mona Lisa, now numbering thirteen, Matthew remarks:
‘Leave them here so that people might see how awful it was if all women
were the same.’ As Deleuze puts it, ‘no model can resist the vertigo of
simulacrum’.19
This becomes evident over lunch when the astronomer Tycho Brahe
demonstrates the movements of planets represented by goblets of wine,
one of which, originally meant for the Emperor, contains poison.20
When the courtiers conspiring against Rudolph are urged by Matthew
to drink, they pretend to sip wine and then run away confusedly. The
chaos of the court gives way to carnival scenes of popular revolt led by
Matthew who casts away his imperial disguise.
When Rudolph returns from his failed erotic adventure he asks
Matthew to rule the empire instead of him so that he might bet-
ter collect art and pursue alchemy. Matthew refuses Rudolph’s offer,
Martin Procházka 103
However, the film shows that the ‘latent content’ of the eternal return
is much more important. To cite Deleuze again:
The secret of the eternal return is that it does not express an order
opposed to chaos . . . On the contrary, it is nothing other but chaos
itself, or the power affirming chaos . . . Between the eternal return and
the simulacrum, there is such a profound link that the one cannot be
understood except through the other . . . Klossowski is right to say of
the eternal return that it is a ‘simulacrum of a doctrine’.24
propaganda piece.28 Yet, at the same time, it must be said that the film
has kept its dominant position in Czech as well as international popu-
lar culture for more than half a century. It had great success in France in
the wake of Fanfan la Tulipe (dir. Christian-Jaque, 1952) and Scaramouche
(dir. George Sidney, 1952), won an award at the 1952 international film
festival in Edinburgh and in the US in 1955. What may attract view-
ers in the present time of new media is the affinity of the golem with
various monsters of contemporary popular culture, including Pokémon
and Astaroth in video games, or the zombie-like victim of the neo-Nazi
haunting the Hellblazer comic series. However, the movie is valued even
by more conservative audiences as a well-made spectacle (‘a big bud-
get . . . costume drama’) and as ‘a rambling comedy about an eccentric
Emperor who switches places with a baker’.29 Perhaps the humour of
the film is more powerful than its spectacular or ideological features: as
one blogger points out, it ‘comes from the dialogue’ and is efficient even
if mediated by ‘French subtitles’.30
Notes
1. In Prague, the film received its premiere on 28 December 1951. See Ondřej
Suchý, Werichův Golem a Golemův Werich/Werich’s Golem and Golem’s Werich
(Prague: Euromedia-Ikar, 2005), p. 162.
According to contemporary sources, the production costs reached
30 million Czech crowns (US$600,000). Compared with the US$1.6 million
budget of a contemporary Hollywood movie, the MGM musical comedy
Royal Wedding (dir. Stanley Doran, 1951), the cost was certainly not exor-
bitant but still the highest in the post-Second World War Czechoslovak
film industry. On contemporary criticism of the film’s costs, see Suchý,
Werichův Golem, p. 104, quoting a letter of the Czechoslovak Commu-
nist Party Secretary for Culture and Propaganda, Gustav Bareš (1910–79),
to the first communist president of Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald
(1896–1953), attacking the film as an expensive and ‘dubious Yankee
comedy’ whose production had deferred the making of ‘a patriotic film
about our western frontier’. On the exchange rates of the Czechoslovak
crown after the communist takeover in February 1948, see Miroslav Tuček,
‘Měnová reforma v mezinárodním kontextu’ (‘Currency Reform in Inter-
national Context’), Centrum pro ekonomiku a politiku, 28 February 2005,
http://www.cepin.cz/cze/prednaska.php?ID=457.
In the US, the film was distributed in 1954 with the title The Emperor and
the Golem.
2. A contemporary columnist complained that people coming to the box office
of one of the biggest cinemas in Prague were frustrated to find huge crowds
queuing for tickets for the next week (Suchý, Werichův Golem, p. 156).
3. Golem: Romantická revue o jedenácti obrazech/Golem: Romantic Extravaganza in
Eleven Scenes. The play provided the basis for a script to a film which Werich
and Voskovec planned to make at the A-B Studio in Prague. However, the
106 The Golem, or the Communist ‘What You Will’
owner of the studio, Miloš Havel (1899–1968), the uncle of the playwright
and president Václav Havel, decided to invite a well-known French direc-
tor, Julien Duvivier (1896–1967), to produce the film. Duvivier turned down
Werich and Voskovec’s script because of its humorous treatment of the golem
legend and instead wrote a new scenario full of ‘violence and horror’ for the
French film star, Harry Baur (1880–1943), who took the role of the Emperor.
According to Werich, ‘several scenes’ in Duvivier’s film ‘had been stolen from
our script’ (Suchý, Werichův Golem, p. 51).
4. Originally, the movie was directed by Jiří Krejčík, a young, talented, but
demanding and ethically minded film-maker. Werich met him in 1949 at the
premiere of his third film, a psychological drama entitled Svědomí/Conscience.
However, after some months it became clear that the two artists were unable
to cooperate, mainly because of Werich’s workload and his bohemian way of
life. Not only communist apparatchiks, but also some artists, especially the
film’s director of photography Jan Stallich (1907–73), found Krejčík responsi-
ble for the delays and growing expenses associated with the film. Stallich had
even volunteered to direct the movie before the new director, Frič, signed his
contract. See Suchý, Werichův Golem, p. 109 onwards.
5. Two of these contemporary historical films – one about a Czech religious
reformer (Jan Hus) and another about the chief Hussite general (Jan Žižka) –
were made by Otokar Vávra in 1954 and 1955, respectively.
In contrast to this, the Emperor in the film’s precursor, the Golem play of
1931, is described much more sympathetically as an ‘old romantic, charm-
ingly neglecting the destiny of his lands, exhilarated with science which
he transmutes into poetry to the general chagrin of all positive scholars’
(Jan Werich and Jiří Voskovec, untitled prefatory note to Golem, in Hry
Osvobozeného divadla [Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1954–58], 4 vols,
II, p. 91). According to the authors’ comments, the main purpose of the
extravaganza was to display ‘all charms of exciting stage action’ in order to
‘cover up our efforts to produce a comical effect by the web of suspense, mys-
tery and picturesque adventure’ and, above all, to ‘show our love of comedy
and hatred of intellectualism’ (Werich and Voskovec, quoted in Josef Träger,
‘Od poetismu k politické satiře’ (‘From “Poetism” to Political Satire’), in Hry
Osvobozeného divadla, II, p. 416). All quotations from the Golem play and
prefatory texts are translated by the author of this chapter.
The film Psohlavci/The Folk of the Dog-Head Arms was also made (in 1955)
by Martin Frič, but backed by the Culture and Propaganda Office of the
Communist Party (CP). Based on a popular nineteenth-century nationalistic
historical novel by Alois Jirásek (1851–1930), the movie represented a rather
insignificant local rebellion of Czech yeomen against a German aristocrat as
a symbolic expression of the national emancipation movement and a precur-
sor to the working-class struggle against international imperialism. Early in
1951, the production of Císařův pekař was almost stopped as a result of a con-
flict between the ‘party’ and ‘government’ lobbies, the former prioritizing
Psohlavci as a crucial propaganda movie. In response to the claims of the CP
Culture and Propaganda Secretary, the Minister of Culture, Václav Kopecký
(1897–1961), and the director of the State Film Company (Československý
státní film), Oldřich Macháček (1902–90), argued that Císařův pekař would be
shown on US television and thus have a much wider propagandistic impact
Martin Procházka 107
than Psohlavci. Finally, the ‘government’ lobby won, not because of its more
pragmatic arguments, but because of purges in the Communist Party appa-
ratus which concluded in 1952 with the show trial of the members of the
alleged ‘anti-government conspiracy centre’ and its head, the CP Secretary
General, Rudolf Slánský (1901–52).
6. Contrary to the film, in the 1931 play the golem is already in Rudolph’s
possession but the chief villain and schemer, the alchemist Scotta, is hid-
ing the magic formula, the ‘shem’, from the Emperor. However, Rudolph’s
love of science and initial confidence in his alchemists make him believe
that the formula is ‘no privileged feature of the Jewish Kabbalah and can be
composed in my court laboratories’ (Werich and Voskovec, Golem, p. 105).
7. Compared to this, Rudolph’s authority in the Golem play is only briefly
shaken by the conspiracy of his courtiers and the raging of the golem. In the
end, Rudolph assumes the image of a ‘popular’ monarch, leading a lantern
procession (the climax of the carnival scenes) and singing a student drink-
ing song. The carnival atmosphere is also emphasized by dating the story
to the night of 6 January 1600, undoubtedly a Shakespearean reminiscence
(at 4.1 of the Golem play, Rudolph writes a letter to Elizabeth I, warns her
against Essex and asks her to tell Shakespeare to send him ‘another of his
fine pieces’). See Werich and Voskovec, Golem, p. 107. Unlike the events in
the extravaganza, the story in the film takes place later, at a time of crisis for
the monarchy, when Rudolph was pressured into abdicating.
8. Císařův pekař a Pekařův císař (dir. Martin Frič, 1951). The film was released on
DVD in 2008. All quotations are translated by the author of this chapter.
9. In contrast, Rudolph in the Golem play is a protean, composite character
whose ‘two bodies’ can neither be identified nor even distinguished: he is ‘at
the same time a wise fool and a mad poet, a ridiculous king and a dignified
individual, a ruthless judge and an amiable fellow’ (Werich and Voskovec,
Golem, p. 94).
10. Unlike the film, the first scene of the Golem play shows Rudolph as a real
connoisseur able to recognize a ‘base counterfeit’ recommended to him as a
masterpiece by his chamberlain, Lang (Werich and Voskovec, Golem, p. 100).
As Voskovec had indicated (Suchý, Werichův Golem, p. 41), the opening
scene was based on a nineteenth-century historical painting by Václav Brožík
(1851–1901) showing Rudolph II in the company of his two astronomers,
Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), who represent
the powers of the Emperor’s reason and poetic intuition.
11. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’, The Logic of Sense,
ed. Constantin V. Bounda, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 262: ‘The problem no longer has to
do with the distinction Essence-Appearance or Model-Copy. This distinc-
tion operates completely within the world of representation. Rather, it has
to do with undertaking the subversion of this world – “the twilight of the
idols” ’.
12. The joke might have been aimed at the film’s chief opponent, the Commu-
nist Party Culture and Propaganda Secretary, Bareš.
13. Philipp Lang of Langenfels came from a Jewish family from Prague. After
his early conversion to Christianity, he became a choirboy in the orches-
tra of Ferdinand, the Archduke of Tyrolia (1529–95). He married a maid
108 The Golem, or the Communist ‘What You Will’
112
Kate Chedgzoy 113
approach to filming and performing the past, and of course are strongly
resistant to the overtly didactic. The distinction I am drawing here is
complicated, however, by the fact that film, TV and theatrical perfor-
mances for children often presume a mixed-age audience, whether in a
theatre to which children will be escorted by parents or teachers, or in
the family living-room. This presumption leaves its mark both on the
formal choices made by the producers of the performance texts under
discussion here, and on the kinds of material selected for performance
to children and the ways in which they are adapted. For instance, while
a certain level of violence is acceptable – and, given the subject matter
of the versions of the Renaissance I am concerned with, this is prob-
ably inescapable – sexual content is generally considered much more
problematic in works produced for a young audience.
Violence is inescapably central to all the stories acted out in these
theatre performances and TV adaptations, and their creators clearly
know that violence can be very effective at engaging children’s inter-
est. Questions of how violence might best be represented to the young,
however, and the consequences of portraying it, are fraught with con-
troversy. Debates about this hotly contested issue have been anxiously
preoccupied with the nature of the child’s response to violent images
and language, but have also considered the meanings of violence in chil-
dren’s imaginative play.4 How violence is represented in these texts, how
it inflects the politics of their engagement with themes of historical con-
flict and crisis, how children respond to it and what the consequences
may be of foregrounding violence as a way of engaging children with
history are questions that will thread through this chapter.
These questions about the representation of violence and children’s
responses to it are debated internationally, but the present chapter
frames them within a specifically British context, one that is influenced
by the place of history in the national curriculum. Constituting detailed
guidance on both the content of the curriculum and ways of delivering
it, the national curriculum specifies the content and goals of education
in publicly funded schools in the UK and Northern Ireland. It is self-
consciously presented as a facet of national identity, claiming to embody
‘the learning that the nation has decided to set before its young’.5 My
case studies need to be read with an awareness of the influence of the
national curriculum over the way most children will have encountered
historical discourse in more formal settings. In addition, the Macbeth
workshops represent an approach to the use of drama in education that
is practised internationally, but is inflected in this instance not only by
its location in the UK, but by specific factors associated with the schools
Kate Chedgzoy 115
The approach that the Horrible Histories take to representing the past
is in fact remarkably congruent with that of the national curriculum.
When the Blackpool Grand Theatre hosted the Birmingham Stage Com-
pany’s touring production of The Terrible Tudors in the spring of 2008, it
tempted teachers with the promise that ‘A visit to Horrible Histories
at The Grand Theatre is bound to excite and inspire your Key Stage
2 pupils to want to know more about the Tudor or Victorian period . . . It
is a completely unique and hugely stimulating resource to enrich your
school’s delivery of the National Curriculum.’6 Just as adaptations of
Shakespeare for children have nearly always been identified as merito-
rious to the extent that they lead children on to the real thing, so the
onstage version of the Horrible Histories is touted not as an alternative
way of thinking about the past, but as a supplement to the national cur-
riculum. This is partly just a marketing strategy of course – school groups
are good business – but it also speaks to a larger anxiety about the rela-
tionship between education and entertainment that has been fostered
by British educational policy over the last couple of decades. Indeed, one
of the sample schemes of work on the Standards Site (a website of educa-
tional resources supported by the Department for Children, Schools and
Families and the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency)
asks ‘Why did Henry VIII marry six times?’ And, as I will demonstrate,
this is the key question posed about Henry in the stage and TV versions
of the Horrible Histories.
116 Horrible Shakespearean Histories
Described as ‘history with the nasty bits left in’, the Horrible Histo-
ries phenomenon began as a series of non-fiction books written by Terry
Deary and illustrated primarily by Martin Brown, with some contribu-
tions by other illustrators.7 The first books to appear were The Terrible
Tudors and The Awesome Egyptians, published in 1993, and at the cur-
rent time of writing, there are over fifty books in the series. Most of
them focus, as the two original volumes did, on a particular period in
history, but others take a thematic or geographical approach (there are,
for instance, books on witches, the Blitz, Scotland and Stratford-upon-
Avon). The vast majority of the books focus on British history, but a few
address prehistory or the pre-modern history of other countries: there
are several volumes on the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, as
well as the Angry Aztecs and Incredible Incas. Additional spin-off publica-
tions and products include interactive book forms such as sticker books,
activity books, quiz books, The Horribly Huge Press-Out-and-Build Book,
a set of Top Trumps cards and a pop-up volume about Tutankhamun.
Audiobooks read by Terry Deary have also been published. The series
as a whole has achieved global sales in excess of 20 million copies, and
books from it have been translated into thirty-one languages. This global
success has made of the Horrible Histories a transmedia phenomenon
exemplifying, in its travel across media, forms and genres, a process
described by Richard Burt in which ‘as literature and literary culture
are transposed, constructed, and framed in other rival media . . . the lines
between literature, comics, animation, film and so on are redrawn as
much as they are blurred.’8 Here, I discuss the stage production of The
Terrible Tudors (created by Birmingham Stage Company in 2006, it has
been touring ever since) and the TV adaptation produced by Lion Tele-
vision in 2009 for CBBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s channel
aimed at children aged seven and over.9
The Birmingham Stage Company’s (BSC) production of The Terrible
Tudors is unusual in that company’s body of work, and in children’s
theatre more generally, in so far as it purports to stage a narrative
account of sixteenth-century English history, rather than deriving from
a pre-existing work of historical fiction or drama. Run by actor-manager,
Neal Foster, the BSC has been the resident company at the famous Old
Rep Theatre in Birmingham since 1992. It has a strong commitment to
making high-quality popular theatre for a family audience: of thirty-one
recent productions, fifteen have been aimed at children and families,
and all of these were stage adaptations of popular books. In addition to
the Horrible Histories, which account for three of these shows, these
adaptations have drawn on classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Kate Chedgzoy 117
II
affluent, and some of the most deprived and socially excluded, wards
in the city. The children therefore came from a wide range of socio-
economic backgrounds. Taking up the whole of a school day each week
for a period of six weeks, the workshops and the production that con-
cluded them – in which the children performed for family and teachers –
were facilitated by Chris Heckels, an experienced drama teacher, Equity
member and consultant on educational drama, who had previously run
a similar series of workshops on Richard III.
The children came to the workshops from very different starting-
points in relation to Shakespeare (and indeed to live theatre generally).
One child had already taken part in a youth theatre group’s performance
of Macbeth (there is a very strong tradition of amateur theatre in the
North East of England, and there are several flourishing youth theatres
in Newcastle, associated with both amateur and professional theatre
companies); a few had been to see a live performance; most knew of
Shakespeare through various cultural refractions that enter the home or
school by electronic means. These included in-school screenings of The
Animated Tales, an awareness of mainstream and frequently televised
films such as Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998) and familiarity
with the more-or-less parodic presence of Shakespeare in popular cul-
ture. For instance, many of the children mentioned an episode of Doctor
Who screened the previous spring, ‘The Shakespeare Code’, in which the
Doctor (played by David Tennant, who has since been a much-praised
Hamlet) and his companion Martha (Freema Agyeman) turn up in 1599
where, as a plot synopsis on IMDb (Internet Movie Database) engag-
ingly puts it, ‘the world is under threat from the evil Carronites, and
only history’s most notorious playwright William Shakespeare can help
to save [it].’15
What is striking for my purposes is that this broader cultural knowl-
edge tended strongly to construct a version of Shakespeare as a historical
figure embedded in a very old-fashioned vision of Elizabethan culture,
largely detaching him from his works. This was reflected in the first ses-
sion, where the children were assigned to small groups to pool their
knowledge and ideas about Shakespeare. They were asked to write down
what they knew on large pieces of paper, which were then displayed
and used by Chris Heckels as a stimulus both to draw out the children’s
knowledge and understanding of the playwright and his time, and to
augment this with her own input. Each group was at pains to point
out that Shakespeare is dead, and though this initially struck me as a
faintly comical emphasis, it can perhaps be helpfully understood as part
of their attempt to acknowledge the pastness of the past – a stumbling
122 Horrible Shakespearean Histories
Mac beth
He’s a man
He has a wife
124 Horrible Shakespearean Histories
He’s Scottish
There’s witches in the play
Other groups agreed with this basic summary, but presented it in more
nuanced terms. There was, not surprisingly, persistent recognition of
the violence of the story, with each group mentioning murder, and one
group listing all the killings carried out or instigated by Macbeth:
III
Notes
1. The books have been published by Scholastic since 1993: see http://www5.
scholastic.co.uk/zone/book_horr-histories.htm.
2. I am very grateful to Chris Heckels, who ran the workshops, for allowing me
to observe them and sharing her materials and thoughts with me.
3. Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Andrew Higson’s chapter
in this book.
4. The Canadian Media Awareness Network maintains a comprehensive
overview of scholarship on this issue at http://www.media-awareness.ca/
english/issues/violence/index.cfm (accessed 30 December 2009). On vio-
lence in children’s play, see Penny Holland, We Don’t Play with Guns
126 Horrible Shakespearean Histories
Here: War Weapon and Superhero Play in the Early Years (Maidenhead and
Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003).
5. See http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk (accessed 30 December 2009).
6. See http://www.blackpoolgrand.co.uk/shows/1/1194/Horrible-Histories-THE-
TERRIBLE-TUDORS.htm (accessed 15 September 2008).
7. See http://www.horrible-histories.co.uk/index.tao?PageId=home (accessed
29 December 2009). Information about the publishing history of the series
is drawn from this site.
8. Richard Burt, ‘Shakespeare (’)tween Media and Markets in the 1990s and
Beyond’, in Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy,
eds, Shakespeare and Childhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), p. 220.
9. See http://www.liontv.com/London/Productions/Horrible-Histories; http://
www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc (accessed 30 December 2009). An animated version
produced by a US-based company, Mike Young Productions, ran on TV in
several countries for two seasons between 2001 and 2003.
10. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London: Methuen, 1930).
11. Terry Deary, ‘History Written by the Losers’, The Guardian, 3 October 2006,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/oct/03/buildingachildrenslibrary.
booksforchildrenandteenagers4 (accessed 29 December 2009).
12. For a still from the show illustrating this moment, see http://www.blackpool
grand.co.uk/media/6938_Tudors1.JPG (accessed 30 December 2009).
13. See, for example, Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two
Myths (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
14. See http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/giftedandtalented (accessed 30 Decem-
ber 2009).
15. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0974729/plotsummary (accessed 30 Decem-
ber 2009).
16. See http://www.ssf.uk.com.
17. Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy, eds, Shakespeare and Scotland (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005).
8
Mark Rylance, Henry V and
‘Original Practices’ at Shakespeare’s
Globe: History Refashioned
Christie Carson
127
128 Shakespeare’s Globe: History Refashioned
its allegiance to other war and action films, who the star of the show is.
Given that in both cases the director, star and king are all the same man,
this is hardly surprising. But the twenty-first-century Internet world is
a more egalitarian place than the twentieth-century Hollywood world
of star-makers and allows for an exploration of varying points of view.
The success of Shakespeare’s Globe at Bankside, London, opening as it
did just before the beginning of the new millennium, is not simply the
result of a renewed interest in history for its own sake, but a logical
progression of the radical theatrical tradition that has been attempting
to instigate a politically informed dialogue in the public domain since
the 1960s.1
Shakespeare’s Globe has been seen as a challenge to the institutional
ways of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and when it was first estab-
lished that was indeed the case. But I argue that audiences flock to the
experience offered by this reconstructed theatre as a result both of a
rebellion against the increasing atomization of the computer world and
a hunger in the real world for the participatory nature of the newly
democratized online environment. The physical discomfort of the Globe
space – its noises and smells, the rowdiness of its audience who want to
be seen and acknowledged by the performers and other audience mem-
bers – comes, I suggest, as a direct result of the increasing sense of the
significance of the individual but in an increasingly chaotic world. In
developing an environment where authority is negotiated and meaning-
making is shared, this new/old building has proved provocative. In its
opening season, this theatre forced recognition of just how passive audi-
ences had become, requiring its audience from the outset to participate
in piecing together the information presented in order to formulate an
understanding of the gap between the present and the past.2 In moving
from a focus on narrative direction in the twentieth century towards
a twenty-first-century environment, where involvement in the process
of understanding history is shared, audiences once again were given
the opportunity to embrace the possibility for debate and conflict that
Shakespeare’s plays not only allow but encourage.
Shakespeare’s Globe is a very real physical theatre created on the basis
of materialist ideas about what we can learn about history by recreating
its objects and also its working practices. This theoretical underpin-
ning was painstakingly pursued by the theatre artists who inhabited
the building, and especially by the artistic team that Mark Rylance
drew around him in Jenny Tiramani, head of design, and Claire van
Kampen, head of music. In order to understand the importance of this
production, it is essential to see its complex historical position at the
Christie Carson 129
It was all very English and low key. Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside
opened – to the press anyway – not with trumpets and drums but to
a half-full afternoon house watching a decentish production of The
Winter’s Tale directed by David Freeman. What was lacking was any
sense of occasion.7
What is useful to trace here is the way that performances in this building
have forced a re-evaluation of both scholarly practices and entertain-
ment expectations for a popular audience. Shakespeare’s Globe has
proved a provocation for actors and directors but also for reviewers,
audiences and academics. The critics at these first performances were
forced to expose both their expectations and their cultural prejudices in
fairly stark terms.
I concur with Prescott’s assessment that this theatre attracted a great
deal of critical and popular attention largely because it became a site of
contestation, a crucible of conflicting views.12 This aspect of the theatre’s
132 Shakespeare’s Globe: History Refashioned
charm was evident from the start to John Peter writing in The Sunday
Times:
The idea of ‘theatrical and cultural history in action’ is one which, at the
end of the twentieth century, meant a realigning of cultural hierarchies.
Peter states: ‘It is also a process of exploration in its early stages, and
there is quite a way to go. But one thing is already clear: we are going
to have to partly relearn the language of the theatre, its grammar of
power and exchange.’14 The collective, collaborative nature of the space
is what strikes audience members first: ‘But when you enter the new
Globe, you catch your breath with excitement and realise that its archi-
tecture reflects an essential social unity.’15 But Peter also points out the
challenge that this theatre faced from the outset: ‘The task of the new
Globe is to recreate the spirit of Shakespearian theatre: its excitement, its
vigorous, classless appeal, and its stylistic and political audacity.’ 16 The
political nature of the changes that have occurred as a result of the cul-
tural power struggle instigated by this theatre, as demonstrated through
the critical reception of the theatre’s work since 1997, is therefore the
focus of this chapter.
In 1997, to present a production of Henry V on the London stage could
not be considered anything but an attempt to engage in both the the-
atrical and the political legacies that this play now carries with it. Mark
Rylance, in discussing his choice of repertoire, admits this involvement
with the world outside the theatre. In fact, he cites it as one of the key
features of his approach as artistic director:
coincided with both the re-opening of the Globe and New Labour
returning to power. They were hopeful days.17
Rylance, like all theatre directors, was very aware of making a connec-
tion between the events of the play and the events of the lives of his
present audience. But, as he points out, this stands at the centre of
Shakespeare’s own desire to refashion history in his own time for his
own purposes. So the political climate of the moment played its part.
But there was another factor at play which so far has been largely over-
looked. The experimental approach taken by Rylance in the early years
of the theatre led to the development, with his co-collaborators Jenny
Tiramani and Claire van Kampen, of an approach to the creation of
‘original practices’ productions that fits very well with the scholarly dis-
course of practice-based research that was developing at that time. Their
research project attempted, in the ten-year period of collaboration, to
provide a pragmatic approach that placed the practical exigencies of the
theatre of the period (as well as of today) above any purely aesthetic con-
siderations or literary theories. This shift towards a social science model
of research very much reflects scholarly practice at this time.
Turning, then, to the working methods in this theatre, I would argue
that, like the audience response, the theatre artists were as influenced by
dominant scholarly approaches as they were by any ‘original practices’.
Jenny Tiramani describes her approach to design in following way:
Using primary evidence from the past always requires an act of inter-
pretation to produce a possible reconstruction from it. There is not
enough evidence to definitively produce an ‘original practices’ pro-
duction of Henry V with the amount of medieval clothing used (or
not) in 1599, or one of Romeo and Juliet with the Italian flavour used
(or not) in 1595. There are many possible early modern interpreta-
tions of the design for each play and every O.P. production we did in
the first ten years at the Globe proposed a particular interpretation of
the evidence we have.18
The opening season artfully positioned the theatre between its conflict-
ing audiences and visions of the project’s purpose. The choice to open
the theatre with The Winter’s Tale was politically astute since this play
warns of the dangers of making too hasty a judgement. Henry V, by con-
trast, invokes a battle and a great victory based on rhetoric and theatrical
style. Given the critical reception the theatre had received in the lead-
up to its opening, it is hardly surprising that Rylance was well aware
that he had a fight on his hands to gain sympathy and credibility for
his approach to the representation of the Renaissance from both the
theatrical establishment and his scholarly audience.
Rylance, in looking back, in 2007, at this production and his time at
the Globe Theatre, is philosophical but also realistic about what took
place in those first few years: ‘In mainstream British theatre, I think
the Globe does upset some hierarchical concepts. Mostly I think it
challenges how we treat audiences in modern theatre architecture and
practice.’20 As a theatre practitioner, Rylance was forced to take greater
account of his audience, and of the active part that audience can and
must play, in the making of meaning in the Globe Theatre. He con-
sciously tried to engage the audience in a dialogue that went beyond
the subject and characters of the play. The plays, he discovered, aided
that process rather than hindering it, making it clear that something
Christie Carson 135
had been missing in the presentation of the plays for some time. ‘Even-
tually, in my last years, I really came to feel that it was not just about
speaking, it was about thinking of the audience as other actors.’21 The
developing knowledge and acceptance in the audience of this practical
experiment has allowed for a collective understanding of how it might
be possible to recreate the Renaissance in a productive way. Claire van
Kampen articulates this:
Thus, in 1.2, the reference to ‘the weasel Scot’, for example, pro-
voked energetic hissing. Its eruption did not, I take it, mean that
the audience included a contingent of National Front supporters.
The hissers were themselves, in effect, playing a role. They had the
impression that this would have been the ‘Elizabethan response’ at
such a moment, and they obligingly supplied it.28
If you like your Shakespeare serious, this may not be the right pro-
duction, even if it is a fascinating insight into the dynamics of
Christie Carson 137
Alastair Macaulay in The Financial Times writes: ‘This was the jolliest
Henry V I have seen; but also the most light weight. Shakespeare’s Globe
has still to show us that it can present Shakespearean performance
of the highest level.’30 Clearly, to Macaulay, Marmion and Cordner,
Shakespeare of ‘the highest level’ must be serious and sombre.
As Prescott points out, this class-based assessment of the produc-
tions instigated another debate about cultural expectations. Susannah
Clap writing in The Observer addresses the issue of class and entertain-
ment styles head-on: ‘No production of a Shakespearean play will be
magnificent if it treats its lowlife characters as merely comic. This is
what is wrong with Richard Olivier’s spirited production of Henry V
at the new Globe.’31 She goes on to argue that: ‘These characters are
the groundlings’ representatives. Why, at a time when fine working-
class actresses such as Kathy Burke are at last getting recognition, is the
theatre so indulgent to cod cockney?’32 The idea that the presence of
the groundlings forces a new definition of theatre is supported by John
Peter who states in his review in The Sunday Times:
In fact, unless you see Richard Olivier’s production, you will not
know what popular theatre really is. The term itself is relatively new
and already quite debased. If you had described Henry V or, indeed,
any of his other plays to Shakespeare as popular theatre, he would not
have known what you were talking about. Theatre was by definition
popular.33
The fact that this first season produced a debate, first among reviewers
and then amongst scholars, about the current state of British theatre
and its class-based expectations is a testament to the significance of this
theatrical event.
Cynthia Marshall’s article, ‘Sight and Sound: Two Models of
Shakespearean Subjectivity on the British Stage’ (2000), however, finally
comes to grips with the full impact of this opening production. In this
article, Marshall acknowledges the fact that the audience has an entirely
different subjective position in the interactive environment of the Globe
Theatre than it does in the passive and, to her mind, filmic proscenium
arch stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) Festival Theatre.
Somewhat surprisingly, she points out a bias at the RSC for visual spec-
tacle which, she says, is contrasted in the Globe space by an emphasis
138 Shakespeare’s Globe: History Refashioned
Marshall points out ‘that the visual emphasis promises ownership and
mastery, while an auditory emphasis delivers a complex, playful textual-
ity’.35 By addressing the audience’s subjectivity directly, Marshall moves
to the heart of what the Globe does that is different from other theatre
spaces (Figure 8.1).
Speaking specifically of Henry V, Marshall explains how Mark Rylance
makes the audience aware that the rules of engagement were to be quite
unconventional:
Figure 8.1 Mark Rylance stars in the 1997 production of Henry V at Shakespeare’s
Globe, directed by Richard Olivier.
Courtesy of Donald Cooper/Photostage.
how have the Tate Modern and the Globe Theatre succeeded where
the Southbank Centre complex once failed? Perhaps it is because the
new energy and vitality of this area’s cultural presence is refracted
through history – not a pure and authentic distillation of ‘History’
but a re-imagination of what has been there, through time, and is
now cast for a twenty-first-century audience for the purpose of its
entertainment.43
The Globe epitomizes a host of attitudes toward history, not least the
commodification of ‘pastness’ within the economy of international
tourism. It ‘works’ as a theatre because it epitomizes one sense of
contemporary dramatic performance.44
Christie Carson 141
These expanded materialist responses take into account the vast pro-
cesses of meaning-making that go towards creating our complex, inter-
nationally interdependent and culturally constructed world; however,
they also move away from the theatre, reducing the dramatic action in
the building at any one particular performance to just one small part of
a much larger theoretical picture.
By contrast, British critics like Prescott try to acknowledge and explain
how and why the Globe raises so many cultural problems for British
audiences and reviewers, drawing attention to the differences between
North American and British cultural expectations. Prescott, in his review
of the Globe’s reception, charts the increasing disenchantment with the
space by London critics, particularly those who initially came to the
theatre with a sense of excitement. He points out how, ‘In their con-
cern with audience response, national newspaper critics are positioning
themselves as critics of reception in addition to their more obvious
function as critics of Shakespearean performance.’45 Prescott also high-
lights the connection between reviewing practices and Shakespeare
scholarship:
at the way that Edward Hall’s Propeller Theatre has set up an all-male
company that contests the Globe’s vision of ‘authenticity’:
Drawing attention to the gap between the world of the play and its audi-
ence is not a new idea in the theatre – Henry V is testament to that. But,
in contemporary British theatre, as Purcell points out, ‘What was once
an aspiration of the theatrical avant-garde has, it seems, now passed into
the mainstream’ through the work of the Globe.51 Howard Brenton, the
political playwright whose play In Extremis was performed at the Globe
Theatre in 2006, goes a step further by suggesting that ‘by understand-
ing how the Globe works, a new theatre can be imagined’, one which
‘can rediscover public optimism’.52 Therefore, I would suggest that this
Christie Carson 143
theatre has not only altered the interpretive possibilities for Shakespeare
but has changed British theatrical practices and developed a new kind
of writing for the theatre.
In a surprising way, then, Shakespeare’s Globe has come to repre-
sent a place that stands between life and art, and encourages a public
debate about the role of the individual in interpreting current visions
of history and historical events. In forcing audiences and critics to
acknowledge their current preoccupations with both the Renaissance
period and the power and position of a member of a theatre audience,
the Globe Theatre has not only acted as ‘one of the key sites for the
cultural contestation of Shakespeare’ but it has opened up a dialogue
about how it might be possible to engage with this period of history
in a new way.53 Appleyard concludes his damning 1995 article on the
future of the Globe project by saying, ‘Wanamaker’s rebuke has certainly
worked, but not, perhaps, in the way that he intended.’54 In pointing
out both the possibilities and the limitations of a project that attempts
to recreate ‘original practices’, Mark Rylance and the artistic team at the
Globe Theatre have presented a serious provocation to theatrical and
cultural norms which I think would have made Sam Wanamaker proud.
As an intervention in the long-standing debate about how it might be
possible to move closer to Shakespeare’s original stagecraft, the ‘origi-
nal practices’ project helped to challenge the connection between the
plays and literary criticism, and also notions of high art. This approach
also successfully highlighted and interrogated the extraordinary passiv-
ity of modern audiences in response to the opportunity to engage in
public debate that these plays present. As Purcell comments, moving
away from conventional theatrical forms is essential for change in the
theatre to take place:
Notes
1. See Christie Carson, ‘Democratising the Audience?’, in Christie Carson
and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds, Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 115–26.
2. For a complementary discussion of the role of the audience, see the chapter
by Kate Chedgzoy in this book.
3. Bryan Appleyard, ‘History Rebuilds Itself, This Time as Farce’, The Indepen-
dent, 9 August 1995, p. 13.
4. W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 28.
5. Paul Prescott, ‘Inheriting the Globe: The Reception of Shakespearean Space
and Audience in Contemporary Reviewing’, in Barbara Hodgdon and
W. B Worthen, eds, A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005), pp. 359–75.
6. Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 6 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June
1997, p. 724.
7. Michael Billington, The Guardian, 7 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June
1997, p. 724.
8. Spencer, p. 724.
9. Robert Butler, Independent on Sunday, 8 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June
1997, p. 725.
10. Paul Taylor, The Independent, 9 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June 1997,
p. 726.
11. Taylor, p. 726.
12. Prescott, ‘Inheriting the Globe’, p. 359.
13. John Peter, The Sunday Times, 15 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June 1997,
p. 727.
14. Peter, p. 727.
15. Peter, p. 727.
16. Peter, p. 728.
17. Mark Rylance, ‘Discoveries from the Globe Stage’, in Carson and Karim-
Cooper, eds, Shakespeare’s Globe, p. 195.
18. Jenny Tiramani, ‘Exploring Early Modern Stage and Costume Design’, in
Carson and Karim-Cooper, eds, Shakespeare’s Globe, p. 57.
19. Tiramani, ‘Exploring’, p. 58.
20. Mark Rylance, ‘Research, Materials, Craft: Principles of Performance at
Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Carson and Karim-Cooper, eds, Shakespeare’s Globe,
p. 108.
21. Rylance, ‘Research, Materials, Craft’, p. 107.
Christie Carson 145
22. Claire van Kampen, ‘Music and Aural Texture at Shakespeare’s Globe’, in
Carson and Karim-Cooper, eds, Shakespeare’s Globe, p. 88.
23. Michael Cordner, ‘Repeopling the Globe: The Opening Season at
Shakespeare’s Globe, London 1997’, Shakespeare Survey, 51 (1998), pp. 211–2.
24. Cordner, ‘Repeopling the Globe’, p. 212.
25. Cordner, ‘Repeopling the Globe’, p. 212.
26. Cordner, ‘Repeopling the Globe’, p. 212.
27. Cordner, ‘Repeopling the Globe’, p. 206.
28. Cordner, ‘Repeopling the Globe’, p. 211.
29. Patrick Marmion, Evening Standard, 9 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June
1997, p. 730.
30. Alastair Macaulay, Financial Times, 10 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June
1997, p. 730.
31. Susannah Clap, The Observer, 15 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June 1997,
p. 726.
32. Clap, p. 726.
33. Peter, p. 728.
34. Cynthia Marshall, ‘Sight and Sound: Two Models of Shakespearean Subjec-
tivity on the British Stage’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51(3) (2000), p. 354.
35. Marshall, ‘Sight and Sound’, p. 357.
36. Marshall, ‘Sight and Sound’, p. 359.
37. Rylance, ‘Research, Materials, Craft’, p. 108.
38. Rylance, ‘Research, Materials, Craft’, p. 111.
39. Rylance, ‘Research, Materials, Craft’, p. 105.
40. Marshall, ‘Sight and Sound’, p. 360.
41. Catherine Silverstone, ‘Shakespeare Live: Reproducing Shakespeare at the
“New” Globe Theatre’, Textual Practice, 19(1) (2005), p. 44.
42. Silverstone, ‘Shakespeare Live’, p. 46.
43. Susan Bennett, ‘Universal Experience: The City as Tourist Stage’, in Tracy
C. Davis, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 84.
44. Worthen, Shakespeare, p. 29.
45. Prescott, ‘Inheriting the Globe’, pp. 369–70.
46. Prescott, ‘Inheriting the Globe’, p. 371.
47. Prescott, ‘Inheriting the Globe’, p. 371.
48. Abigail Rokison, ‘Authenticity in the Twenty-First Century: Propeller and
Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson, eds,
Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2010), p. 140.
49. Stephen Purcell, Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern
Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), p. 88.
50. Purcell, Popular Shakespeare, p. 90.
51. Purcell, Popular Shakespeare, p. 164.
52. Howard Brenton, ‘Playing the Crowd’, The Guardian, 12 May 2007.
53. Prescott, ‘Inheriting the Globe’, p. 359.
54. Appleyard, ‘History Rebuilds Itself’, p. 13.
55. Purcell, Popular Shakespeare, p. 165.
9
‘There is So Much to See in Rome’:
The Cinematic Materialities
of Martin Luther’s Reformation
Conor Smyth
146
Conor Smyth 147
For Irving Pichel’s Martin Luther (1953), the posting of the Ninety-Five
Theses is, according to the opening background text, a ‘decisive moment
in human history’, but the worshippers of Luther’s parish seem hardly
to notice. The film’s representation of the moment at the Church Doors
emphasizes the act’s dramatic inadequacy: Luther (Niall MacGinnis),
cutting through the crowds awaiting the church service, unassumingly
posts the scroll. A peasant inspects the paper and dismisses it as ‘just
something in Latin’, before the doors open for Mass and crowds of
parishioners stream past the displayed document, unaware of its sig-
nificance. The film’s voice-over, reminding the viewer that the doors
148 ‘There is So Much to See in Rome’
II
III
Luther (dir. Eric Till, 2003) announced its kinship with the posting of
the Ninety-Five Theses before the film’s opening reel. The distributors
premiered the film in German territories on 30 October, evoking the
canonical status of Luther’s moment at the Church Doors. This affin-
ity with a cultural romanticism towards the historical moment of the
theses is clear in the film’s dramatization of the event itself. It elides the
varying ambivalence of the moment (which the other films register) and
endorses a positivist, deterministic temporality.
The scene opens with the camera trailing a motivated Luther (Joseph
Fiennes), scroll in hand, moving through the crowds in his march
towards the doors: there is little of Osborne’s doubt in this Luther. As
heads in the crowd turn towards the fierce monk, the score’s rising
tempo emphasizes the momentous nature of his intentions, culminat-
ing in the placing of the scroll. As it is nailed to the wood, the camera’s
view shifts to the interior of the church, where the acoustic bangs of the
hammer echo through the devotional space and suggest a perhaps more
magisterial audience. After Luther leaves, two villagers rush up to the
document and read aloud one of the theses: one of the boys removes the
paper from the door and, when his companion protests that ‘Dr Luther
156 ‘There is So Much to See in Rome’
wanted everyone to see it’, promises that ‘they will’. His remark initiates
a montage that visualizes the document’s circulation amongst diverse
social locations: peasants assimilating an insurrectionary rhetoric, the
indulgences peddler John Tetzel (Alfred Molina) being dismissed by a
hostile public and the shock of the German authorities at Luther’s trans-
gression. In this sequence, the collapse of separate temporal points into
an impression of simultaneity suggests the theses’ immediate cultural
and political effects.
The framing of Luther depends on a familiar idiom of instantaneous
change and is further characterized by a trailer-friendly hyperbole com-
mon to contemporary historical film-making. The dialogue declares
that Luther is ‘tearing the world apart’; that ‘his damn ideas have
set the world on fire’; that he was sent ‘out so boldly to change the
world’. The ending, complicit in a temporality of initiation, extends
this in an assumption of unthreatening historical progression. At the
Augsburg trial, Protestant Electors defiantly refuse Charles V’s demands
for religious compromise, and a messenger greets Luther with the tri-
umphant exclamation, ‘We did it Martin! They can’t stop us now!’
Eliding the subsequent struggles of the Reformed movement, the film
presents the Protestants’ defiance as their final achievement, and sug-
gests an ancestral alliance between the Reformers and the modern
audience.
This history, however, is qualified through an insistence on the poli-
tics of the popular. Luther’s scroll has the power to enact change only
because of its endorsement and reception by the German citizenry at
large. History is, quite literally, put into the hands of the common man
by the physical removal of the scroll from the Church Doors by the
young men, and their control over the operations of print and transla-
tion which allowed the writings to be so influential. Aligned with the
endorsement of the value of popular appeal is the film’s translation
of Luther through contemporary ideologies of personality, which, typi-
cally, privilege hallmarks of likeability and accessibility. This is registered
in the casting of Joseph Fiennes as the reformer, the actor carrying
traces of his performances in earlier cinematic imaginings of the Renais-
sance, especially his title role in Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden,
1998).17 In both films, a canonical marker of the early modern is, gen-
tly but noticeably, stripped of historical idiosyncrasies and endowed
with a charisma appealing to a multiplex public that seeks aesthetically
pleasing and intellectually unthreatening personalities.
In aid of this rehabilitation, the film jettisons any historical esoteri-
cism and rehabilitates Luther as a man of the people. While delivering
Conor Smyth 157
IV
In different ways, the films all conceive of the nailing of the scroll to the
Church Doors as being a historically transformative episode. However,
the most arresting representation of this moment is not found in the
films themselves, but rather in the promotional trailer for Luther (dir.
Eric Till, 2003). The images open immediately on Luther’s moment at
the Church Doors, caught mid-action as he nails the scroll. The diegesis
accentuates each of the three strikes of the hammer with an intensive
camera zoom, an arrested frame speed and the exaggerated sound of
hammer on nail. On the third strike, a rapid cut to the image of an
Conor Smyth 159
this context, the level of discomfort with which the films represent
the scroll myth is highly telling. The negotiated nature of the diegetic
engagement with the scroll, in its series of evasions and equivocations,
suggests an anxiety about the films’ own processes of representation and
communication.
It is not only that some aspects of historical truth escape its sub-
sequent invocations: this is taken as a truism for all acts of historical
representation. It is that the cinematic gaze itself, and its insistence on
specific qualities of perceptual accountability, may distort the kinds of
historical realities available to the viewer. The culturally alien quality
of particular aspects of the early modern experience confronts attempts
at their subsequent cinematic articulation within the format’s own set
of ideological and aesthetic prejudices. The rationalistic and literalis-
tic ideology that governs the visual experience of the modern subject,
and the modes in which he or she experiences the cinematic eye, forces
moments of disruption in the representation of subjective models which
revolve around a figurative, even combative, appreciation of the visu-
ally present. The disturbing implication is that the desire to cinematize
the early modern subject, and the Renaissance phenomenon which
it, in turn, animates, may actively compromise its own enterprise of
representation.
This important trinity of films suggests the benefits of a more theoreti-
cally sensitive appraisal of the subgenre of Reformation historical fiction
within broader studies of Renaissance film. Each offers explorations of
some of the most important questions for criticism of Renaissance film
and culture more generally: the possibilities of ethically efficacious rep-
resentations of the past, the difficulties of correlating historically alien
cultural priorities, and the potential disconnections between early mod-
ern and modern subjective presuppositions. The articulation of the early
modern, in these films at least, remains an incomplete and imperfect
project.
Notes
1. The Castle Church was originally the north-east wing of a four-winged cas-
tle. The construction was initiated by Prince Frederick the Wise in 1489. See
‘Schlosskirche Wittenberg’, http://www.schlosskirche-wittenberg.de/index_
eng.html (accessed 4 January 2010).
2. The bronze doors, inscribed with the text of the original theses, were
erected on the command of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia in 1815.
See ‘Schlosskirche Wittenberg’, http://www.schlosskirche-wittenberg.de/
index_eng.html (accessed 4 January 2010) and ‘Visit Wittenberg: Where
Conor Smyth 161
8. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Leo Braudy and
Marshall Cohen, eds, Film Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), pp. 833–4. Although psychoanalytic theories of film recep-
tion have been subject to the deconstruction and discrediting of succeeding
criticism, one does not have to accept their models, Freudian, Lacanian or
otherwise, to acknowledge that the process of subjectively perceiving and
comprehending images may involve considerable levels of ideological and
ethical conditioning.
9. While obviously we cannot collapse theories of perception and cognition
with five hundred years between them into each other, certain areas of over-
lap are suggested by the shared anxiety over the potentially hermeneutic
erroneous capacities of the human eye.
10. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, p. 76.
11. John Osborne, Luther (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), stage direction at 2.3.
12. Osborne, Luther, stage direction at 1.2.
13. Alan Carter, John Osborne (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969), p. 82.
14. Hamlet, of course, also desires ‘that this too, too solid flesh would melt/Thaw
and resolve itself into a dew!’ See Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E.
Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds, The Norton Shakespeare (New York:
Norton, 1997), 1.2.129–30.
15. Luc M. Gilleman, John Osborne, Vituperative Artist: A Reading of his Life and
Work (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 103.
16. Gilleman, John Osborne, p. 106.
17. Fiennes also starred as Robert Dudley, the love interest to Cate Blanchett’s
Elizabeth I in Elizabeth (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 1998). His Shakespearean dimen-
sion was accentuated by his playing Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice (dir.
Michael Radford, 2004).
18. ‘Hollywood Jesus Newsletter #58 – The Luther Film – How It Was Made’,
26 September 2003, http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/newsletter058.htm
(accessed 4 January 2010).
19. Two-thirds of the £30 million budget were provided by the German pro-
duction company that Clauss and his organization paired with to produce
the film. Allocated a 30 October release date and opening in two hundred
screens in the country alone (in comparison with three hundred in the US),
the film had to satisfy German expectations. In the end, this would be essen-
tial to recouping the funds initially invested: out of a worldwide box office
return of approximately £30 million, two-thirds came from German pock-
ets. Figures are taken from ‘ “Luther” Not Just For Lutherans – CBS News’, 26
August 2003, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/26/entertainment/
main570218.shtml (accessed 4 January 2010) and ‘Luther (2003): Box
Office/Business’, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0309820/business (accessed 4
January 2010).
10
The Pageant of History: Staging
the Local Past, 1905–39
Michael Dobson
163
164 The Pageant of History 1905–39
As Kelly’s account suggests, the form of the pageant was by its very
nature euphoric. The community that is any given pageant’s subject
is self-evidently alive and well at the end of the story and proudly
re-enacting iconic episodes from its own past. In the pageant, the
Shakespearean chronicle play’s juxtaposition of tragic kings against
comic people is simply transposed, to produce instead a juxtapo-
sition of potentially tragic important visiting metropolitans, often
monarchs, against mainly comic and perpetually enduring locals, both
yeomanry and gentry.11 The pageant, though, could offer something
that Shakespeare’s histories could not – even when they were staged by
H. Beerbohm Tree with immense processions designed by Parker him-
self in return for loans of stage armour for his pageants. That was, to
quote Parker’s American disciple Percy Mackaye, ‘drama of and by the
people, not merely for the people’: the site-specific reanimation of the
local past through collective amateur spectacle.12 That spectacle, with
the bulk of the audience sheltered and immobilized in a temporary
grandstand, inevitably consisted very largely of successive processions,
characteristically seen approaching across long distances. If castle ruins
166 The Pageant of History 1905–39
the People all turn towards the QUEEN and DRAKE with outstretched
arms. CRIES: ‘God Save the Queen!’ – ‘God Save Drake!’ – ‘God Save
168 The Pageant of History 1905–39
England!’ – Flags are waved. Roses are tossed on high, trumpets blare,
bells clash, and the sun quivers on the QUEEN and DRAKE.17
All the past proclaims her future: Shakespeare’s voice and Nelson’s hand,
Milton’s faith and Wordsworth’s trust in this our chosen, chainless land
Bear us witness: Come the world against her, England yet shall stand.23
Figure 10.2 The finale of the Sherborne pageant, with the cast all shouting ‘Hail!’
From Cecil P. Goodden, The Story of the Sherborne Pageant (Sherborne: Bennett, 1905).
Courtesy of Writers’ Resources, Oxford.
170 The Pageant of History 1905–39
Figure 10.3 The finale of the Greenwich Night Pageant, 1933; this photograph,
framed, was sent as a Christmas card that year by the man who commissioned
the pageant, Admiral Barry Domvile.
Courtesy of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London.
While not sharing quite this outlook – which made the Greenwich Night
Pageant, as Kevin Littlewood and Beverley Butler point out, ‘as close as
England came to fascist theatre’ – Mary Kelly similarly felt that it was
best ‘to end on a note of joy or hope’, since for her the pageant was com-
mitted to a post-Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress.24
The ultimate subject of any worthwhile pageant, she explained, was
‘the gradual growth of the human mind’, and hence the occasional
adaptability of the pageant to progressive causes, as in the case of
E. M. Forster’s liberal environmentalism, or Cicely Hamilton’s suffragette
play, A Pageant of Great Women (1910).25 That faith in improvement
and change, however, was always counterbalanced by a deeply con-
servative assertion of continuity. In practice, the implicit argument of
the English local pageant is that Pickering always has been Pickering
and always will be, forever peopled by the same townsfolk whatever
successive fancy dress costumes they may put on. Even the first, pre-
historic episode in Gilbert Hudson’s 1910 pageant, a sort of small-scale
rape of the Sabine women wordlessly enacted between ‘uplanders’ and
‘shore-dwellers’ beside a body of water which had ceased to exist long
before the town was founded, calls its location ‘Lake Pickering’.
Michael Dobson 171
Figure 10.4 The cover of the printed edition of Greenwich Night Pageant, 1933,
scripted by Arthur Bryant.
Courtesy of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London.
Mary Kelly, when not involved with pageants, devoted herself to the
rediscovery, or reinvention, of an English tradition of indigenous folk
drama, derived from the mummings and Whitsun pastorals fleetingly
mentioned by Shakespeare. Her own sense of how pageants should best
be cast was at times not just nativist but explicitly genetic. Arguing
against the custom of giving major, royal roles to local aristocrats, for
example, she suggests that ‘The best place for the County is in the rep-
resentation of its ancestors.’26 Whatever the script may suggest about
historical change, then, the performance of a historical pageant will
give the impression that the same lord of the manor has always been
172 The Pageant of History 1905–39
the lord of the manor, even if, over the centuries, he has been some-
thing of a serial fashion-victim. To this extent the Edwardian pageant
suggests that human history is comparatively incidental, and its grand
finales – in which entire casts, in the costumes of all the periods their
shows have dramatized, mingle with present-day embodiments of the
community in a riot of anachronism – only reinforce the point. History
is full of gorgeous trappings, processing harmlessly past in sequence,
but ultimately – and perhaps consolingly – it alters nothing. Corona-
tions may come and civil wars may go, but the replication of the same
local families goes on forever.
Given this sense of genetic inheritance, it is appropriate that for
Parker, Kelly and their colleagues the major pre-Tudor events not predi-
gested by Shakespeare and Scott which a pageant might need to register
were invasions. Needing an example of crowd dialogue, for instance,
Kelly immediately reflects that ‘fugitives may cry the names of their pur-
suers, “The Norsemen! The Norsemen! The Black Danes are coming!”’27
(In this respect, as in others, these pageants also resemble Rudyard
Kipling’s popular children’s book, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), in which the
spirit-master-of-ceremonies who shows two children episodes of local
history involving their nation’s ancestors is Shakespeare’s Puck him-
self.) Bryant, in the notes for a speech rallying the Women’s Institutes
of Cambridgeshire to the task of pageant-making in 1924, suggests that
they might primarily display
began not in 1588 but in 1776.30 The early Technicolor spectacular The
Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1939), admittedly,
begins in pure Parker mode, with a long procession, as Essex parades
through London after his victory at Cadiz, eager to be reunited with his
queen. But despite this public opening, the film’s Elizabeth, unlike Flora
Robson’s, is strictly an indoor person, always shown in court settings
within which the macho, outdoor Essex feels increasingly confined. She
is never granted any such antique tickertape parade as his, and ulti-
mately the film disowns Elizabeth, English history and pageantry alike.
Essex grows out of all that pomp, yearning for a sincere man-to-man
republic elsewhere, and in the end he chooses to accept execution qui-
etly and off screen rather than tolerate his subjection to an overdressed
royal mistress any longer. In Hollywood costume drama like this, it isn’t
the crowd that represents us but the juvenile leads (here Essex and the
young Penelope Rich, but not Elizabeth), who are usually as incongru-
ously ahead of their time as a Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s court.
Much the same point is made in Bette Davis’ second Tudor film, The Vir-
gin Queen (dir. Henry Koster, 1955). The film uses one canonical episode
incorporated into several of its pageant predecessors (the anecdote of
Ralegh laying down his cloak over a puddle for his queen), but its per-
spective is ultimately anti-court, on the side of a Ralegh, whose disregard
for his cloak is based not on supreme courtiership but on the contempt
for archaic frippery proper to a proto-American man of action. At the
end of the film, Ralegh, like Flynn’s Essex, leaves Elizabeth, sailing off to
found Virginia with Joan Collins.31
In the post-war period, as this Hollywood film suggests, the triumph
really belonged to American modernity rather than to English history,
and in Europe, too, approaches to the early modern past were chang-
ing. The definitive public events designed to assert a continuity with
the Renaissance were now no longer nationalistic processions but inter-
national arts festivals, often centred on the revival of Shakespeare: the
festivals at Edinburgh, Avignon, Verona, and so on, were all founded
in the 1940s and 1950s, and several of them, as Dennis Kennedy has
pointed out, were inaugurated with grand ceremonial productions of
Richard II.32 Similarly, the scholarly recovery of early modern court occa-
sions, which underwent another periodic renaissance of its own from
the 1960s onwards in the work of Stephen Orgel and others, now
concentrated less on the militant processions of Queen Elizabeth and
more on the court masques of her pacific successor, James I. In England
during the post-war ‘New Elizabethan’ period, it was the festivals of the
Renaissance rather than its triumphs that were to be revived, whether
Michael Dobson 175
as cod ‘Renaissance Fayres’ for the masses, May Day celebrations for
schoolchildren or as more arcane shows for the elite. When Princess
Elizabeth and her sailor husband Prince Philip visited Oxford in 1948,
for instance, they were entertained not with a pageant about the victo-
ries of Drake but with a pastiche of an Elizabethan court entertainment,
the rather strenuously optimistic Masque of Hope.33 The military tattoo
aspect of the historical pageant now survived mainly among specialist
clubs dedicated to re-enacting battles, such as the Sealed Knot. A few
pageants were still staged in small villages, particularly around the time
of the Festival of Britain, including one at Naphill in Buckinghamshire,
but it was hard for them to muster the sort of budgets enjoyed by Parker
in the glory days: this one was unable to afford more than Elizabeth’s
court and St George and the Dragon.34
But after the Blitz, in any case, as Woolf had already recognized in
Between the Acts, it seemed much harder for the English to go on think-
ing of history as a providential fancy dress procession that was all about
them but which they could simply sit back and savour as it passed by.
As the Empire visibly imploded, moreover, it became impossible to cel-
ebrate its inevitable long-term triumph, and in the decade that saw race
riots in Notting Hill, the days of a theatrical form that had believed that
the Tudors had permanently indemnified not just the English Chan-
nel but the English gene pool were clearly numbered. Other than for
Americans, who felt that it did not really apply to them anyway, his-
tory was no longer a pageant – except, perhaps, in the sense in which
Shakespeare had used the word all along. As Puck had put it, ‘Shall we
their fond pageant see?/Lord, what fools these mortals be!’35
Notes
1. On Kenilworth and John Gough Nichols, see especially Michael Dobson and
Nicola Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 111–5, 139–40.
2. On the influence of this revival, see Michael Dobson, ‘Shakespeare Exposed:
Outdoor Performance and Ideology, 1880–1940’, in Peter Holland, ed.,
Shakespeare, Memory and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), pp. 256–80.
3. Cecil B. Goodden, The Story of the Sherborne Pageant (Sherborne: Bennett,
1905); Louis Napoleon Parker, The Sherborne Pageant (Sherborne: Bennett,
1905).
4. Louis Napoleon Parker, The Warwick Pageant (Warwick: Evans, 1906) and The
Dover Pageant (Dover: Grigg & Son, 1908).
5. Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1918); Ayiko Yoshino, ‘The Edwardian Historical
176 The Pageant of History 1905–39
game of bowls are included . . . goes without saying’ (Punch, 21 June 1933,
p. 681).
Photographs of this event are preserved in the National Army Museum
Library in Chelsea: see NAM 1990-07-31.
23. Arthur Bryant, Book of the Pageant, Greenwich, 1933 (London: Fleetway Press,
1933), n. p.
24. Kevin Littlewood and Beverley Butler, Of Ships and Stars (London: Athlone,
1998), p. 61. Admiral Barry Domvile, who commissioned this pageant, was
interned during the war as a fascist sympathizer. On Bryant’s career and
politics during his years as a pageant-master, see Andrew Roberts, Eminent
Churchillians (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), pp. 292–4.
25. Kelly, ‘Pageants’, pp. 691–2.
26. ‘[T]hey can wear lovely clothes, and heraldry, and so on, and feel themselves
as important as the principals’ (Kelly, ‘Pageants’, p. 930).
27. Kelly, ‘Pageants’, p. 736.
28. Bryant Papers, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College,
London, file J/4.
29. Kelly, ‘Pageants’, p. 1035.
30. Goodden, Story, pp. 15–17, 27–8.
31. On these films, see Dobson and Watson, England’s Elizabeth, pp. 275–82. For
later films that represent Elizabeth I, see the chapter by Andrew Higson in
this book.
32. Dennis Kennedy, ‘Shakespeare and the Cold War’, in Angel-Luis Pujante and
Ton Hoenselaars, eds, Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2003), pp. 163–79.
33. Dobson and Watson, England’s Elizabeth, pp. 76–8, 231.
34. See http://apps.buckscc.gov.uk/modes/projects/SWOPimage/RHW50610.jpg
and http://apps.buckscc.gov.uk/modes/projects/SWOPimage/RHW50614.jpg.
On the later phases of the pageant-play, see especially Esty, Shrinking Island.
35. See A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean
E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds, The Norton Shakespeare (New
York: Norton, 1997), 3.2.114–5.
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in SEDERI, Spanish and Portugese
Society for English Renaissance Studies, 20 (2002), and I am grateful both to that
journal and to the organizers of the 2009 Sederi conference in València for
their kindness and encouragement.
11
Private Lives and Public Conflicts:
The English Renaissance on Film,
1998–2010
Andrew Higson
178
Andrew Higson 179
period. Finally, The Other Boleyn Girl (dir. Justin Chadwick, 2008) dealt
with relations between Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and her family, in the
1520s and 1530s.
There are some interesting connections and lines of influence between
these various films. To Kill a King, for instance, plays on Elizabeth in
various ways, both at the level of the film itself – mixing action and
romance genres – and in terms of marketing and promotional material:
the posters were very similar, for example, while commentators at the
time situated the film in the aftermath of the success of Elizabeth at the
cinema.2 The temporal boundaries between the mid-sixteenth century,
the mid-seventeenth century and the turn of the twenty-first century
were thus carefully blurred. The links between Elizabeth and The Other
Boleyn Girl are also instructive: Alison Owen was the producer of both
films, and both films feature feisty female protagonists who occasionally
make proto-feminist statements. We might thus read The Other Boleyn
Girl as Owen’s prequel to Elizabeth, ending as it does with a freeze frame
on Elizabeth as a child, and titles that explain her destiny.
If recent films set in this period are few and far between, there have
been rather more television productions in the 2000s, both dramas and
documentaries, that touched on the Renaissance period. On the doc-
umentary front, there were Simon Schama’s A History of Britain (BBC,
2000); several series presented by David Starkey, including The Six Wives
of Henry VIII (Channel Four, 2001), Edward and Mary – The Unknown
Tudors (ITV, 2002) and Monarchy, with the Renaissance period covered
in the second season in 2005; Michael Wood’s In Search of Shakespeare
(BBC, 2003); The Secret Life of Elizabeth I (Five, 2006); and Adam Hart-
Davies’ What the Tudors Did for Us (BBC, 2002) and What the Stuarts Did
for Us (BBC, 2003). Fictional dramatizations of the Renaissance period on
British television in the 2000s included an earlier version of The Other
Boleyn Girl (BBC, 2003), which, like the film version, was adapted from
Philippa Gregory’s historical novel; Henry VIII (ITV, 2003); Gunpowder,
Treason and Plot (BBC, 2004); Elizabeth I (Channel Four, 2005); The Vir-
gin Queen (BBC, 2006); The Tudors (BBC, 2007–09); and The Devil’s Whore
(Channel Four, 2008).3
Again there are all sorts of interplays here that blur temporal bound-
aries. If To Kill a King was seen by some contemporary commentators
as following in the wake of Elizabeth, it was also discussed in relation
to Starkey’s series on the Tudors, and Schama’s The History of Britain.4
The highly successful television period drama serial The Tudors, mean-
while, comes from the same writer as the two Elizabeth films, Michael
Hirst, while Working Title, the production company for the films, was
Andrew Higson 181
also involved in the television series. Finally, the scriptwriter for the film
version of The Other Boleyn Girl, Peter Morgan, also wrote the script for
the ITV 2002 mini-series, Henry VIII.
The critical and commercial success of Elizabeth and Shakespeare in
Love undoubtedly helped prepare the ground for some of these televi-
sion productions, and there are some clear lines of influence across the
various films and television programmes. Even so, given the success of
those two films, it might still seem surprising that there weren’t more
English-language films, as opposed to television programmes, about
England and the English in the Renaissance period. Why didn’t they
trigger a boom in the production of such historical films? After all, we
had to wait nine years for the sequel to Elizabeth. In fact, as I demon-
strate, it doesn’t really make sense to see Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love
simply as films set in the Renaissance period, since they appeal to audi-
ences in so many other ways as well. Clearly, for some audiences and for
some in the film business, such films are, above all, time-specific histor-
ical dramas. But for others, they are about many other things besides.
Different audiences will make sense of the films in different ways, and
will read them as commentaries on a variety of issues besides the history
of the English Renaissance.
Films like Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love also work as tasteful
middlebrow cinema addressed to well-educated middle-class audiences;
as costume drama in a generic sense, regardless of the period setting; as
English romantic drama, again regardless of the temporal context; as
female-centred drama; and as star vehicles. It is also short-sighted to
think that historical drama set in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries
is the only way of addressing the issues that Elizabeth and Shakespeare
in Love address, or of reaching the audiences they reached – for at one
level, these are films about the present as much as they are about the
past. They are certainly very much commodities produced at a particular
moment in the development of the contemporary media economy.
All six of the films listed above are relatively small productions, from
independent companies or one of Hollywood’s mini-majors, as opposed
to big budget films from one of the major studios. Within the film busi-
ness, they were perceived and indeed promoted as relatively serious,
intelligent, literate films, which also had an eye on the possibility of
popular success. That is, they were in part conceived as crossover films,
designed to play both in the relatively upscale, niche art-house mar-
ket and in the mainstream multiplexes; middlebrow films that blur the
boundary between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’. The fact that they are set
in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries is a side issue from this point
182 Private Lives and Public Conflicts
of view; the important thing is that they work for their intended tar-
get audiences, across two slightly different markets. And of course there
have been plenty more such films made since 1998 – they’ve just not
been set in the early modern period. Films like Elizabeth, Shakespeare in
Love and The Other Boleyn Girl thus share much with films with quite
different settings, and from a range of production contexts, such as
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (dir. Ang Lee, 2000), Amelie (dir. Jean-
Pierre Jeunet, 2001), Gosford Park, Bend It Like Beckham (dir. Gurinder
Chadha, 2002), The House of Flying Daggers (dir. Yimou Zhang, 2005),
The Queen (dir. Stephen Frears, 2006) and Miss Potter (dir. Chris Noonan,
2006), all of which also played in both art houses and multiplexes, and
all of which, in their different ways, made their mark on the UK box
office.
Shakespeare in Love was in fact one of the great crossover successes of
the 1990s. Made for a budget of £15m, modest by Hollywood standards,
it went on to take an enormous $100.3m in the US and another $100m
worldwide, including a very impressive £20.8m in the UK.5 The film
was identified from the outset as much more accessible than most such
period dramas. Thus the leading British film trade paper, Screen Interna-
tional, proclaimed, quite rightly as it turned out, that ‘the picture is a
sure-fire crowd-pleaser which should break out of the specialised market
and become a crossover hit.’6 The tabloid newspaper News of the World
agreed, applauding
a movie that will have you shaking with laughter. For the stuffy old
period drama has been dusted off and polished until it sparkles in
Shakespeare in Love . . . With its hot performances and hilarious com-
edy, this movie has reinvented the big screen period drama – and we
should all be grateful for that.7
Or, as a journalist from the more upmarket Observer newspaper put it,
Shakespeare in Love ‘is to be celebrated as a costume drama that has noth-
ing to do with the heritage industry; it has too much life and wit for
that’.8
The implication is that museum culture, the period drama and espe-
cially the Shakespearean drama were generally considered to be of
limited appeal, too dry to be of real interest to a mass audience. The
cranking up of the romantic comedy in Shakespeare in Love, however,
enabled the film-makers to re-energize the genre, to create something
that would appeal to a wider audience. The crossover film must, by
definition, work in a range of markets and appeal to a range of
Andrew Higson 183
star vehicles – so that one might look to other films with the same stars,
such as the 1940s’-set Charlotte Gray (dir. Gillian Armstrong, 2001), with
Cate Blanchett of Elizabeth fame playing another feisty heroine, or the
1950s’-set biopic about Sylvia Plath, Sylvia (dir. Christine Jeffs, 2003),
with Gwyneth Paltrow of Shakespeare in Love fame.
What all this tells us is that, as business commodities and cultural
products, Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love were many other things
besides being films about the English Renaissance. Indeed, in some ways,
to treat them as texts that offer some sort of commentary on the Renais-
sance period is to take the films out of the cultural context in which they
circulate – or at least, it is to put them in a very specific, niche context, a
specialist context that has little resonance for a large proportion of their
audiences. Even so, they and more recent films like the Elizabeth sequel
and The Other Boleyn Girl clearly do, at one level, work as historical
fictions, and I now want to look at them more closely in these terms.
First, it’s worth noting that, as relatively small-budget crossover films
designed to work with both art-house audiences and multiplex audi-
ences, these films had to tread a careful line. On the one hand, they had
to be full of drama and not too austerely historical, since they had to
appeal to the populist multiplex audience; on the other hand, they had
to engage relatively seriously with the historical subject matter, char-
acters and themes, and exhibit a sense of historical rigour, in order to
please the upscale niche market, the educated middle-class art-house
audience.
None of these films was made by a historian, however, even if most of
them were directed by people who had previous experience with his-
torical drama and/or employed some sort of historical consultant or
otherwise researched the period. Michael Hirst, who wrote the screen-
plays for the two Elizabeth films and the television series The Tudors, has
perhaps become a sixteenth-century specialist, but as those productions
make very clear, he is not at all averse to modifying the historical record
for dramatic purposes. John Madden, director of Shakespeare in Love, was
something of a costume drama specialist, having previously directed
Ethan Frome (1993, set in early twentieth-century America), Golden Gate
(1994, set in 1950s’ America) and Mrs Brown (Victorian England), but he
had also recently directed episodes of the contemporary-set police series
Prime Suspect (1991–2006) and Inspector Morse (1987–2000) on television.
Mike Barker, director of To Kill a King, was brought in to the project
because of his previous work on another historical television drama,
Lorna Doone (2000) – that is, as someone who had done interesting
costume drama work, rather than as a Renaissance specialist.
Andrew Higson 185
Kapur, the Indian director of the two Elizabeth films, prided himself
on not being steeped in, or committed patriotically to, English history:
indeed, with his Australian leading actors and other non-Brits involved
in the productions, Elizabeth was conceived, in part, as an ‘outsider’s
view of British history’, or, as Kapur put it, ‘the revenge of the colo-
nials’.11 The director of The Other Boleyn Girl, Justin Chadwick, had at
least directed some episodes of Shakespeare Shorts (1996) for BBC Schools
TV, which puts him roughly in the right time frame. Later, he directed
the award-winning BBC adaptation Bleak House (2005), and it was on
the strength of this that he was brought in to direct The Other Boleyn
Girl. In other words, he was regarded as a specialist in period drama,
rather than in Renaissance drama. But he had also directed episodes of
Eastenders (1985–), The Bill (1984–), Byker Grove (1989–2006) and Spooks
(2002–) for television – therefore he can be seen simply as an experi-
enced director, rather than as a period specialist. As Chadwick stated, in
an interview, ‘I’ll do anything . . . [I] just like a cracking story, no matter
what genre or period.’12
None of the six films I’ve listed as being set in the English Renais-
sance period is straightforwardly an English or British film either: they
all have some American or European money behind them. Shakespeare
in Love was a Miramax film, for instance, The Other Boleyn Girl involved
American companies Focus Features and Scott Rudin Productions, while
The New World was a wholly American production. On the part of several
of the production companies involved, then, there was no particular cul-
tural commitment to English history or to the representation of England
and Englishness. Rather, the concern was to produce entertaining and
commercially successful films, rather than ‘accurate’ histories; to create
compelling drama with the sort of ingredients that might help make
money at the box office and beyond. Hence the Australian stars of the
two Elizabeth films, Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush and Abbie Cornish,
as well as Eric Bana as Henry in The Other Boleyn Girl, and the American
stars of Shakespeare in Love (Gwyneth Paltrow) and The Other Boleyn Girl
(Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman).
To think about the films in these ways is to suggest that, for some audi-
ences and for some in the film industry, a period film is a period film:
that is to say, it doesn’t really matter in which period the film is set, since
the pleasures on offer tend to be the same. In this respect, we are bound
to find some sort of reworking of the historical record, whether it’s get-
ting the costumes ‘wrong’ or conflating characters or imagining events
differently. Of the six films about the English Renaissance that I’ve iden-
tified, the one perhaps that its production team were most concerned to
186 Private Lives and Public Conflicts
the queen, like something out of a vampire film. In both the Elizabeth
films, the bulk of the action-adventure elements are about Protestants
and Catholics torturing and murdering one another. In Elizabeth: The
Golden Age, we have the comic caricature of Philip of Spain (Jordi Mollà)
as a Catholic zealot. And in The Other Boleyn Girl, religious reformation
turns out to be the offspring of a beautiful but petulant young woman
and a desperate but powerful man who will stop at nothing to achieve
their melodramatic goal.
The other key trait here is that of drawing parallels between past and
present, in terms of religious extremism and intolerance, where the par-
allel, the lesson to be drawn, is of more importance than adhering to
the historical record. If you know your ‘History’, you can piece together
much of the political background in these films – and perhaps feel
inspired to explore further in ‘proper’ history books after watching the
film. But if you don’t know your ‘History’, and aren’t too bothered by
that, the films still work: as spectacular costume films, as romantic dra-
mas, as action-adventure films, as serious, intelligent character studies
and so on.
As with any such historical fictions, there are in effect two narratives
at work, two ways of binding together the characters and events of the
drama, two relatively distinct causal chains interweaving and overlap-
ping, but also at times running free from one another. On the one hand,
there is the grand narrative of ‘History’, what is often referred to as the
historical record, the known and accepted facts. On the other hand,
there is the more intimate narrative of dramatic fiction, the narrative
that allows a film to work as a manageable and self-contained fiction.
‘History’ is in effect the backstory – although, as we have seen, the cre-
ators of historical dramas will often reorganize the backstory to suit the
requirements of the central fictional narrative.
The public crises, conflicts and power struggles around nationhood,
sovereignty and religious authority thus work as backdrops to the cen-
tral romantic drama – even in the least romantic of the films, To Kill a
King. At the same time, they are crucial to the narrative development
of the films: drama requires conflict in order to proceed. Occasionally, a
public conflict will occupy very much the foreground of the drama, as
with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
But, in effect, the scenes of the Armada emerge as swashbuckling
action and adventure. Of course, there has also been some prior political
and military debate – after all, this is an intelligent, thoughtful film too –
but, above all, the Armada sequence operates in the mould of the action-
adventure film. Thus the conflict in this instance comes to the fore as
Andrew Higson 189
a genre piece, and as the fulfilment of a known story (if we know any-
thing about the backstory, and the way it is usually presented as popular
history, we know that the Spanish Armada will need to appear). The nar-
rative motor of the film, however, is individual desire – Elizabeth’s desire
to fill the loss she experiences without a lover, her desire for Ralegh, her
displacement of that desire onto Bess and so on.
The same argument about individual desire as the narrative motor,
and history as the backstory, can be made for all the other films too, to a
greater or lesser extent. There are two layers of conflict in these films – in
the foreground, there are personal conflicts, the obstacles thrown in the
way of romantic fulfilment or the fulfilment of individual desire; in
the background, there are the public conflicts of ‘History proper’. Take
the character of Anne (Natalie Portman) in The Other Boleyn Girl, for
instance, and note how major historical developments turn out to be
the whim of this young woman seeking her destiny. The ending of a
narrative film will generally endeavour to resolve any remaining con-
flicts and allow characters to fulfil their destinies and in some way reach
a happy ending. With the historical drama, however, there are always
two narrative lines to endeavour to resolve: the intimate narrative in
the foreground and the backstory of ‘History proper’. Scriptwriters have
to work hard at these matters, and will often resort to the use of titles to
resolve the backstory – and just as often resort to a little more dramatic
licence in order to leave audiences with a sense of conclusion.
Dramatic licence or not, these films clearly do explore a series of
historical themes relating to crisis and nationhood in the Renaissance
period – but they are more likely to be promoted and discussed in terms
of their attention to the private lives of monarchs and other historical
personalities. Affairs of the heart thus take prominence over the public
crises and conflicts that tend to constitute the backdrop in these period
films. At the same time, it is worth noting the ways in which these films
construct the personal as irredeemably political. This focus on the per-
sonal is central to the way that the Renaissance currently figures on
screen. The Renaissance also figures more as a particular dramatic space
than as a particular historical moment. As such, the Renaissance is a
space for entertaining drama, for human drama; a space for exploring
characters and their relationships, especially their romantic and sexual
relationships, and the power struggles in which they are involved.
Films are also of course more than simply a string of narrative events;
those events need a space in which to take place, and the space must
be filled out with colour, texture and dimension, it must be fleshed out
with living characters – in other words, there needs to be a mise-en-scène
190 Private Lives and Public Conflicts
Notes
1. The chapter draws in part on material in Andrew Higson, Film England:
Culturally English Filmmaking Since the 1990s (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).
2. See, for example, Adam Sherwin, ‘Civil War Re-enacted in Battle for Viewers’,
The Times, 22 December 2001, p. 9.
3. On The Devil’s Whore, see the chapter by Jerome de Groot in this book. On
documentaries, see the editors’ Epilogue in this book.
4. See, for example, Sherwin, ‘Civil War Re-enacted’, p. 9.
5. Eddie Dyja, ed., BFI Film and Television Handbook 2000 (London: BFI,
1999), p. 22, and the entry for Shakespeare in Love on the Box Office
Mojo website, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=shakespearein
love.htm (accessed 10 April 2009).
6. Mike Goodridge, ‘Shakespeare in Love’, Screen International, 18 December
1998, p. 19.
7. Mariella Frostrup, ‘The Good, the Bard and the Lovely’, News of the World, 31
January 1999, p. 60.
8. Emma Forrest, ‘To Be a Hit or Not to Be’, The Observer, 24 January 1999, p. 25.
9. See Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since
1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 194–256.
10. Nick Hunt, ‘Case Study: To Kill a King’, Screen International, 21–27 March
2003, p. 13.
11. J. Hoberman, ‘Drama Queens’, Village Voice, Arts Section, 3–9 November
1998, http://www.villagevoice.com (accessed 20 January 2001); Kapur,
quoted in Gary Susman, ‘Not Like a Virgin’, The Boston Phoenix, 19–26
November 1998, http://www.bostonphoenix.com (accessed 20 January
2001).
12. Katie Toms, ‘New Faces, 2008: Film’, The Observer, 30 December
2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2007/dec/30/featuresreview.
review10 (accessed 14 September 2008).
13. Quoted in Sherwin, ‘Civil War Re-enacted’, p. 9.
14. Derek Elley, ‘To Kill a King’, Variety, 19–25 May 2003, p. 27.
15. Philip Kemp, ‘Love of the Common People’, Sight and Sound, 13(6) (2003),
p. 34.
16. Allan Hunter, ‘Troubled Feature Keeps Its Head but Lacks Focus’, Screen
International, 2–8 May 2003, p. 28.
192 Private Lives and Public Conflicts
17. Anita Gates, ‘Television: The Royal Life (Some Facts Altered)’, The New York
Times, 23 March 2008, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=
9A00E2DD1438F930A15750C0A96E9C8B63&sec=&spon=&&scp=4
&sq=tudors%20eating%20it%20up&st=cse (accessed 13 September 2008).
18. For a discussion of The Tudors, see Ramona Wray’s chapter in this book.
19. Quoted in Gates, ‘Television: The Royal Life’.
Epilogue: Documentary Reflections
Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete
193
194 Epilogue: Documentary Reflections
guns’ from the seabed can only reinforce. Although the emphasis in
The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan falls on the complexities of the early
modern diet, this is conducted through generous helpings of colonially
laced nostalgia. ‘Pumpkins . . . made their way to England from our new
American territories in Virginia’, the voice-over intones, in a remark that
is as striking for its specification of the vegetable’s origins as it is for
the suggestion that part of the US is magically still in British posses-
sion. What this amounts to is a kind of adventure in and of itself, a
revisiting of primal myths that places the documentary form, and its
representatives, in the place of daring discoverers. Heston Blumenthal
in Heston’s Tudor Feast is a case in point: cast in an idealized mould, he
is linked to ‘Tudor . . . seafarers . . . spreading English influence across the
world’, particularly when he is filmed traversing New York’s Chinatown
in search of live frogs for one of his signature dishes. The mobility
of the chef is elaborated as a virtue: navigating ethnic interstices, he
is imagined as an explorer sampling the delicacies of other cultures,
only to bring them back and make them ‘English’. It is no accident,
in this connection, that New York is dubbed the ‘New World’. Living
with the Tudors nuances this thematic trajectory. Here, the implication
is that the period was worth living not because of its thrilling expan-
sionism but because of a quieter, homespun creativity. According to this
schema, it is the national rather than the international that is to be cul-
tivated, with a concept of the domus being elevated over and above a
projection into other environments. An ideological response to a more
populist envisioning of the Renaissance, this construction is, of course,
no less romantic, as the documentary’s celebration of forms of artis-
tic/productive activity makes clear. Thus, Living with the Tudors opens
by informing us that the director-participants, Karen Guthrie and Nina
Pope, enact the parts of ‘limners’ or artists, presumably as befits their
non-Tudor roles as recorders of the project. It is a self-conscious deci-
sion, one that recalls for viewers the labour involved in the film-making
process. For example, an early sequence reveals a speeded-up montage
of a day on the lawns, which is framed by images of the ‘limners’ bent
over their work: the effect is to focus attention on an expression of vir-
tuoso skill that is no less valuable for being of older extraction. Once
again, the Renaissance as a resource for affirmation is evidenced.
Technically, the documentaries deploy a variety of methods for bring-
ing alive their chosen subjects to contemporary audiences. Going
hand-in-hand with its positivist evocation of the Renaissance is the
reliance, in Living with the Tudors, on slowly investigative camerawork
and a leisurely paced score that function to offset the notion of a more
196 Epilogue: Documentary Reflections
from her father’s shadow and as the ‘mother of British naval domi-
nance’: the latter formulation, in particular, is typically early modern in
its equation of maternity with political authority. Arguably, however, it
is only at the point where the ‘lost’ cannons are recreated and fired with
devastating results that the image of the Queen as extraordinarily potent
is given its clearest articulation. At least by proxy, Elizabeth I is the
entity behind this culminating explosive moment in a filmic manoeuvre
that grants her a phallic dominance. Here, metaphorically enacted and
resoundingly delivered is what the Tilbury speech promised – a male
woman vanquishing her enemies.
As this rehearsal of the documentaries’ engagement with the complex-
ions of class and gender might suggest, the ostensible subject of Heston’s
Tudor Feast, Living with the Tudors, The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan and
Timewatch: Queen Elizabeth’s Lost Guns is not really the past at all; rather,
as is testified to by the chapters in this book, it is the role the past might
play as a force in the present. Timewatch: Queen Elizabeth’s Guns, for
example, might be approached as a meditation on the forms of mod-
ern warfare, as an exploration into questions of national difference at a
time of global uncertainty. Harking back to a critical period when, the
documentary informs us, ‘the fate of . . . England hung in the balance’,
functions to mobilize current anxieties about borders, the economy and
relations with European neighbours. The contemporary preoccupation
of The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan is the ‘body beautiful’ and psychic
health. As Jerome de Groot argues, this genre of documentary ‘seems to
be moving towards an explicit concern with the consequences of bod-
ily affect on ways of defining subjectivity, both contemporaneously and
historically’.3 The result of the diet test – the presenters have lost weight
but are moody and unhealthy – is striking, bringing into play, as it does,
familiar considerations centred on social conduct, physical and men-
tal well-being, and achieving the correct ‘balance’. Heston’s Tudor Feast
makes a no less pertinent point. Its foregrounding of ‘extravagance’,
which is invariably performatively oriented (the feast, the chef remarks,
is his ‘curtain-raiser’), strikes a chord in an age of recession and cuts: in
this instance, the lure of history offers an antidote to what is deemed
lacking in the here-and-now.
But the documentary that is, to adopt a formulation of Stella Bruzzi,
most obviously ‘at heart, a performance’, is Living with the Tudors, not
least because of the consciousness of the participants that they are
acting out parts before a camera.4 Entering into fabrications of past
personae, it is suggested, permits a more productive relation with the
real world: to adopt the parlance of the documentary, the aim is to
Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete 199
recover a lost ‘way’. Shots of groups going through a dark tunnel and
into the sunshine establish this process as inherently ameliorative, the
implication being that living as a Tudor allows for enlightenment. ‘To
come [to Kentwell] was a sanctuary’, remarks one participant, adding,
‘It’s a way of washing out the old me.’ The ablution metaphor points
up the ways in which, as Mark Andrejevic contends, being watched can
operate therapeutically: ‘surveillance . . . serves to . . . facilitate self-growth
and self-knowledge’ and is of ‘educational and personal value’.5 Yet,
as the modern selves begin to percolate through towards the close, a
less rosy vision is offered. In a series of confessional moments, which
are woven into the fabric of the documentary in dialogic fashion, dis-
appointments and regrets surface (a job loss or a marriage break-up),
which suggests that present-day identifications are less secure and ful-
filled than their fictive historical equivalents. Scenes of divestiture and
the removal of make-up signal that not much remains after the perfor-
mance: the prospect of salvation and rescue fades, and the documentary
queries the rationale on which it has been based. It is a surprisingly
dystopian development, one that is of a piece with the ways in which
the directors, according to the voice-over, fell out with a number of the
participants during the course of film-making. The change in viewpoint
is crystallized in the final montage which, to the tune of a modern score,
combines scenes of packing up with speculation about the fate of the
enterprise: no successor to Kentwell, it emerges, has been appointed.
Notable is the suggestion of abandonment: the pageant dislimns, the
revels end and playacting – and its uses – are elaborated as insubstantial.
Thus far we have understood documentary reflections on the Renais-
sance by way of mainly English examples. Yet, as our introductory
invocation of Michel de Montaigne as a route from the early mod-
ern to the modern might suggest, and as the chapters in this book
point out, the Renaissance cannot belong to unitary or single-nation
categories. Complementing the documentaries discussed here is The
Flight of the Earls, a three-part work that unravelled the background
to, and the consequences of, the departure in 1607 of a company of
Gaelic lords, including Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, Rory O’Donnell,
Earl of Tyrconnell, and the Maguires of Fermanagh, from Ireland into
Europe. The Flight of the Earls is distinctive for reminding us of the
importance of acknowledging a pluralistic conception of the period;
it is also notable because it raises questions (these are formulated by
Paul Ward as ‘Who is telling this story? To whom? And why?’) ger-
mane to newer documentary formats.6 A key event in Irish history, the
moment when Hugh O’Neill and his distinguished company sailed out
200 Epilogue: Documentary Reflections
Notes
1. Greg Colón Semenza, ‘Introduction: An Age for All Time’, in Greg Colón
Semenza, ed., The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), p. 1.
2. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 19, 25.
3. Jerome de Groot, ‘ “I Feel Completely Beautiful for the First Time in My
Life”: Bodily Re-enactment and Reality Documentary’, in Erin Bell and Ann
Gray, eds, Televising History: Mediating the Past in Postwar Europe (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2010), p. 193.
4. Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000), p. 154.
5. Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Lanham: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2004), p. 145.
6. Paul Ward, Documentary: The Margins of Reality (London and New York:
Wallflower, 2005), p. 49.
7. Éamonn Ó Ciardha, ‘C’áit ar Ghabhadar Gaoidhil’, Proceedings from the 2007
McGlinchey Summer School, 10 (2007), p. 13.
8. Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 151.
9. On the significance of less established forms of commemoration of the early
modern, see Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, ‘Don’t Forget to Remember’, Times
Higher Education, 28 August 2008, p. 27.
10. Artists in Creative Enterprise: WordFlight (Rathmullan: The Stoner’s Press,
2007), p. i.
Index
203
204 Index