Filming and Performing Renaissance History

Filming and Performing Renaissance History

Also by Mark Thornton Burnett MASTERS AND SERVANTS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA AND CULTURE: AUTHORITY AND OBEDIENCE (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997) CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) FILMING SHAKESPEARE IN THE GLOBAL MARKETPLACE (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007)

Also by Adrian Streete PROTESTANTISM AND DRAMA IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) REFIGURING MIMESIS: REPRESENTATION IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE (co-edited with Jonathan Holmes) (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005)

Filming and Performing Renaissance History Edited by

Mark Thornton Burnett Adrian Streete

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete 2011 Individual chapters © Contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–27343–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

Preface Mark Thornton Burnett

xii

Introduction: Documenting the Renaissance Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

1

1 The Network King: Re-creating Henry VIII for a Global Television Audience Ramona Wray

16

2 Breaking Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama and Film Jesús Tronch Pérez

33

3 The Touch of Man on Woman: Dramatizing Identity in The Return of Martin Guerre John O’Brien

50

4 ‘Welcome to Babylon’: Performing and Screening the English Revolution Jerome de Groot

65

5 The Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials James Sharpe

83

6 The Golem, or the Communist ‘What You Will’ Martin Procházka

99

7 Horrible Shakespearean Histories: Performing the Renaissance for and with Children Kate Chedgzoy

112

8 Mark Rylance, Henry V and ‘Original Practices’ at Shakespeare’s Globe: History Refashioned Christie Carson

127

v

vi Contents

9 ‘There is So Much to See in Rome’: The Cinematic Materialities of Martin Luther’s Reformation Conor Smyth 10 The Pageant of History: Staging the Local Past, 1905–39 Michael Dobson 11 Private Lives and Public Conflicts: The English Renaissance on Film, 1998–2010 Andrew Higson

146 163

178

Epilogue: Documentary Reflections Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

193

Index

203

List of Figures

3.1 Bertrande gives evidence to the judges in Artigat in The Return of Martin Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1982) 3.2 Arnaud and Coras in the court at Toulouse in The Return of Martin Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1982) 3.3 The final meeting between Bertrande and Coras in The Return of Martin Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1982) 8.1 Mark Rylance stars in the 1997 production of Henry V at Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Richard Olivier 10.1 Mary Kelly’s illustration of an ideal pageant setting (‘Helmingham Pageant – The Value of Trees and Water’), drawn from one of her own projects 10.2 The finale of the Sherborne pageant, with the cast all shouting ‘Hail!’ 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 10.4 The cover of the printed edition of Greenwich Night Pageant, 1933, scripted by Arthur Bryant

vii

55 56 58 139

166 169

170 171

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank, at Palgrave, Paula Kennedy, Catherine Mitchell, Felicity Plester and Christabel Scaife for supporting this book and helping us to bring it to fruition. We are also indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the network, ‘Filming and Performing Renaissance History’, at Queen’s University, Belfast, and for enabling us to pursue the project. The Internationalization Fund at Queen’s provided funds for additional participants. The contributors to the various meetings gave wonderful papers and generated lively and exciting discussion. And we are grateful, finally, to the postgraduate and postdoctoral students at Queen’s who attended the symposia and offered assistance in myriad ways; they include Ruth Abraham, Victoria Brownlee, Patricia Canning, Majella Devlin, Ashley Dunne, Paul Frazer, Laura Gallagher, Edel Lamb, Adele Lee, Mary-Ellen Lynn, Rosa María García Periago and Conor Smyth.

viii

Notes on the Contributors

Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) and Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Christie Carson is Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her main area of research interest is the application of digital technology to teaching and research in the field of dramatic performance history. She has created a number of groundbreaking projects in this area, working with Cambridge University Press, the Performing Arts Data Service, the English Subject Centre, the British Library and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She is the co-editor of Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Kate Chedgzoy is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) and Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), the editor of Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) and the editor or co-editor of numerous other works. Jerome de Groot is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Royalist Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), Consuming History (London and New York: Routledge, 2008) and The Historical Novel (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). Michael Dobson is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. His publications include Performing Shakespeare’s ix

x

Notes on the Contributors

Tragedies Today: The Actors’ Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, with Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy, with Nicola Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), as well as many articles and book chapters. Andrew Higson is Professor of Film Studies at the University of York. He is the author of Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), English Heritage, English Cinema: The Costume Drama Since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking Since the 1990s (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). John O’Brien is Professor of French Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Anacreon Redivivus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) and the co-editor of Rémy Belleau, Les ‘Odes’ d’Anacréon (Paris: Champion, 1995), Montaigne et la Rhétorique (Paris: Champion, 1995) and Distant Voices Still Heard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000). He is currently editing the forthcoming Cambridge History of French Literature and re-evaluating the Martin Guerre narratives from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Jesús Tronch Pérez is an associate professor of English at the University of València. He is the editor of A Synoptic ‘Hamlet’: A Critical-Synoptic Edition of the Second Quarto and First Folio Texts of ‘Hamlet’ (València: Universitat de València, 2002) and the author of numerous other works. Martin Procházka is Professor of English, American and Comparative Literature at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of Romantismus a osobnost/Romanticism and Personality (Nakladel: Kruh Modernich ˚ 1996), Transversals (Prague: L.P.B., 2007) and co-author, Filologu, with Zden˘ek Hrbata, of Romantismus a romantismy/Romanticism and Romanticisms (Praha: Karolinum, 2005). He is also author of two textbooks and the editor/co-editor of numerous other works. James Sharpe is Professor of History at the University of York. He is the author of Crime in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Crime in Early Modern England 1550– 1750 (London: Longman, 1984/1998), Crime and the Law in English

Notes on the Contributors

xi

Satirical Prints 1600–1832 (London: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986), Early Modern England: A Social History 1550–1760 (London: Arnold, 1987/1997), Judicial Punishment in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996), The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of Football, Witchcraft, and the King of England (London: Profile Books, 2000) and Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman (London: Profile Books, 2004). Conor Smyth is a Ph.D. student in English at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he is writing a thesis on Philip Massinger and playwrighting practices in Jacobean and Caroline England. Adrian Streete is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and the co-editor of Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005). Ramona Wray is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. She is the author of Women Writers in the Seventeenth Century (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2004) and the co-editor of Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) and Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).

Preface Mark Thornton Burnett

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 theatrical 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 generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Crucial 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 studies of Renaissance literature and society. Secondly, the project integrated a trajectory of British representations with their non-British equivalents. The involvement of practice-based teams and individuals was a third vital dimension. The fourth interdisciplinary component, involving 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 imaginatively reproduced. ‘Temporalities and Materialities’ assessed the extent to which temporal boundaries and material objects continue to be reconstructed. xii

Preface

xiii

Details of all of these discussions are available on our website at http://www.qub.ac.uk/renaissancehistory. There, interested parties may also find the database (compiled by postgraduates Ruth Abraham, Majella Devlin, Anne Holloway and Adele Lee) concerned with reimaginings of the Renaissance across a range of modern media. This book has emerged from that project and represents some of the fruits of a rich and productive collaborative research experience.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: Documenting the Renaissance Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

At first sight, it is a museum exhibition like any other. Reproductions of maps adorn the walls, facts and numbers are illuminated, and objects such as belt buckles and gold coins present themselves for display. In this re-creation of the fate of the Girona, a galleass forming part of the Spanish Armada that sunk off the north coast of Antrim in 1588, the statutory elements of tried-and-trusted museum policies are put into service. In particular, facsimiles of ‘documents’ are deployed as guides, with the ‘instructions’ of Commander Medina Sidonia of the Spanish force for the ‘homeward journey’ being prioritized in the same moment as directives from the pen of Lord Howard, the English High Admiral. This documentary dimension is reproduced in an actual ‘documentary’, an interactive screen account of the discovery of the wreck of the Girona in 1967 by the Belgian nautical archaeologist, Robert Stenuit, and his mission to bring to the surface the ship’s contents. To adopt a formulation of Susan Pearce, this is a collection that makes available ‘the visible proof of understanding’, and everything is subsumed to an apparently impartial ‘illustration of certain general laws or tendencies’.1 Or, building upon dictionary definitions of ‘document’, in the exhibition a viewer is kept ‘informed and instructed’ and attention is directed to materials that ‘show’ and ‘point out’.2 At one level, the exhibition could be said to evade the political by electing to privilege narratives of the personal seemingly robbed of a contemporary purchase. For example, genealogies of families are offered testimony to the ‘characters’ involved in the experience, while the invitation to place a finger in a model of a ring allows the museum participant to trigger a recording which, in telling the story of a young Spanish nobleman, is designed to encourage an empathetic response. Similarly, the utilization of a generic tragic imprint would seem to fulfil 1

2

Introduction: Documenting the Renaissance

an essentialist function. A ring whose motto reads ‘I have nothing more to give you’ is captioned as revealing ‘the great human tragedy of loved ones lost’; arguably comparably motivated is the huge wall painting of the sinking which shows an assembly of drowning souls. But the realities of context insist upon a more variegated interpretation. For this realization of the end of the Girona is hosted by the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which, following a massive refurbishment initiative lasting two years, was reopened to considerable public acclaim in 2009. The museum – and what it offers for inspection – discharges vexed meanings in an environment which, historically, has been defined by religious tensions and conflicts. As commentators on museum history have noted, there is more to the institution than an ‘educational purpose’: ‘power play is implicit’ and, in a situation where ‘subservience and domination’ are in danger of being supported by the prevailing ideology, self-consciousness needs to be exercised in relation to the constructed nature of knowledge and the provision of judgement.3 To demonstrate the sixteenth-century struggle between England and Spain is, in some senses, to negotiate Protestant and Catholic sensibilities that obtain in Northern Ireland’s twenty-first century cultural landscape. In this connection, the Armada exhibition at the Ulster Museum furnishes a test case for examining the means whereby we access the early modern and for pinpointing the ways in which the representation of the period known as the Renaissance shifts and transmogrifies in response to the exigencies of the moment. Writing on Northern Ireland, Edna Longley notes that ‘endemic division’, which traditionally has maintained ‘sites of memory as sites of conflict’, is giving way to ‘commemoration as healing or “mourning work” ’, a process which entails ‘remembering the past in new ways, a remembering that enables forgetting’.4 Such a development would seem to be at work here: hence, at the Ulster Museum, conspicuous by its absence is any sense of victory, defeat, national celebration or triumphalism. Rather, the emphasis falls on the arbitrary nature of historical operation and on contingency; there is an interest in suffering and diversity, as is reflected in the anecdotal strategies of representation and in a more general disenchantment with partisanship. This, it might be suggested, is a post-ceasefire reading of conflict, one which makes visible the positions of both constituencies. There can be no distinction, as has obtained historically in museum policy, between ‘same’ and ‘other’ in this instance. Granted in its place are images of the monarchs, Elizabeth I and Philip II, in a juxtaposition that bespeaks their shared importance. Similarly, the fact that textual traces from the English and

Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

3

Spanish sides are re-created in an identical faux secretary hand suggests a vision that acknowledges each of the major players. In this sense, the Ulster Museum does not simply enact what Tony Bennett has termed ‘the principle of representational adequacy’ for ‘the cultures and values of different sections of the public’.5 Instead, the lavishly appointed exhibition space of one of Belfast’s most famous buildings bears witness to, as has been argued in a different context, an ‘individual attention to victims’ that demonstrates a positive engagement with the legacies of the past and a move towards political resolution.6 In so doing, although fashioned with no directly stated parallels with today, the re-creation of a defining event in European history brings into play a host of related questions. Whose Renaissance is it? Who might lay claim to cultural authority? Dislodging customary habitations and undoing an illusion of national ownership, the Ulster Museum display possesses a rich significance in terms of how the Renaissance period might be appropriated and reinvented. The kinds of debate to which the Armada exhibition gives rise have a precedent in early modern thought. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne spent the final years of his life producing a revised edition of his celebrated Essays. In the longest essay in the collection, An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Montaigne offers a reflection upon the deplorable effects of religious conflict in sixteenth-century France: Think whether we do not take religion into our own hands and twist it like wax into shapes quite opposed to a rule so unbending 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 managing 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 He goes on to condemn the ‘horrifying impudence with which we toss theological arguments to and fro’, particularly the question as to whether ‘it be permitted for a Subject to rebel and to take up arms against his Ruler, in defence of his religion’. As Montaigne observes: 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 In such a shifting landscape, where Protestants and Catholics are massacred for their faith, where the religion of the monarch cannot be guaranteed from one year to the next, and where religion is too often used to legitimate base political ambition and violence, Montaigne’s attempt to reflect upon the political realities of his day is marked by fissure and a scepticism towards absolutist claims. At one moment, the political act of rebellion is potentially legitimated; just as quickly, it becomes a proscribed act. Seen in this light, it is hardly surprising that, for Montaigne, scepticism offers a philosophical refuge from the vicissitudes of contemporary religious strife. More intriguingly, his scepticism is also aligned to an account of history that is, in some senses, strikingly modern. According to Montaigne, philosophical scepticism necessarily entails a similarly sceptical attitude towards history. Towards the end of An Apology for Raymond Sebond, he argues that: there is no permanent existence either in our being or in that of objects. We ourselves, our faculty of judgement and all mortal things are flowing and rolling ceaselessly: nothing certain can be established about one from the other, since both judged and judging are ever shifting and changing.9 Because our perceptual faculties are impermanent and subject to change, so our understanding of the world is never constant. To put it another way, both the subject and object of perception are permanently prone to alteration.10 It is significant that Montaigne should use various forms of the verb ‘to judge’ here since, as this term implies, any attempt to make sense of the world is always a retrospective activity, one that takes place in the present and that involves some kind of adjudication upon the past. Judgement, like perception, is an activity that is implicated in history but which can never properly encompass history in its entirety. Any judgement upon the past, will, as Montaigne implies, involve us in constructing a retrospective narrative that will invariably be partial, incomplete and subject to revision.11

Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

5

Montaigne therefore presents the modern scholar of the Renaissance with both an invitation and a problem. From the perspective of the twenty-first century present, his text represents an unusually measured assessment of the religious strife that scarred sixteenth-century France. The Apology points to the shifts and inconsistencies in religious and political allegiances that people were obliged to come to terms with. But it is also a document that points to its own partiality. It uses the instability of its own historical moment to flag up the difficulty of ever constructing an ‘objective’, positivistic account of history from the vantage point of the present. We could say that these extracts from An Apology for Raymond Sebond seem always to anticipate their own interpretation, to inscribe an indelible gap between the past and the present, and to insist that the present, flawed as it is, offers us a better vantage point than the naive faith that the historian might, in some empirical sense, ‘recover’ the past. This is an invitation to read the past not in its own terms, then, but to acknowledge that our accounts of the documents of history tell us as much, perhaps even more, about the present. Viewed in this way, we might even argue that Montaigne is the first Renaissance presentist.12 If the historical methodology of Renaissance critics in the 1980s and 1990s was largely determined between the twin poles of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, then the emergence of Presentism in the first decade of the twenty-first century can be seen as a conscious attempt to rethink certain ingrained attitudes towards the practice of historically informed criticism.13 Presentism is defined by its Montaignean scepticism towards history as a stable and recoverable object of study. It suggests that the writing of history and historically minded criticism is produced in an ongoing dialectical struggle between past and present. But for Presentism, our understanding of the past is overwhelmingly mediated and determined by the demands of the present. As Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes argue in the Introduction to Presentist Shakespeares, we can never:

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

Presentism does not emerge from a desire to speak with, or even to sleep with, the dead.15 In fact, for presentists, the dead should stay resolutely buried. The mistake of so much historically oriented criticism is to assume that the voices of the past are in fact anything other than echoes of our own voices. At first glance, Presentism would seem to be a complimentary methodology for those scholars concerned with understanding and conceptualizing how the Renaissance has been re-imagined, documented and consumed in the modern period. After all, one of the central premises of appropriation studies is that modern remakings of the Renaissance invariably tell us so much more about the present than they do about the past. That this phenomenon is largely impelled by economic imperatives has been impressively delineated by a number of scholars. For example, writing of Shakespeare’s perennial cultural popularity, Michael Bristol notes that ‘Commercial profit rather than a wish to guarantee the durable public value of Shakespeare is the motive that best accounts for the diverse enterprises of book publishers, theatre managers, film-makers and television producers.’16 Scholars of the Renaissance are invariably fascinated by the ways in which ‘their’ period is mediated by popular culture and the various historical negotiations that this might entail. As a number of contributors to this book point out, one of the main issues raised by such negotiations is that of historical ‘fidelity’ (or the lack of it). These gaps and inconsistencies are interesting in themselves for what they might tell us about popular understandings of the Renaissance. If Bristol is correct that those producing these films or TV programmes are much less concerned with historic ‘fidelity’ than commercial profit, then this might offer us one way of theorizing the gaps and oddities that historically oriented scholars of the Renaissance find in many modern mediations of the period. The demands of the marketplace are likely to inform, and perhaps even explain, any serious consideration of how the Renaissance is consumed in popular culture.17 But, of course, as Bristol also observes, there is more at play in these appropriations than just the economic imperative, crucial though that is. As Melissa Croteau has recently said of Shakespearean film, ‘we return to Shakespeare, periodically regenerating the Bard in our own images.’18 The plural construction is crucial here. The various ‘images’ of Shakespeare, and indeed of the Renaissance, in modernity are not only multifaceted and politically diverse, they are also historically various,

Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

7

forcing us to rethink the relationship of past to present. For just as the ‘past’ is never a stable or empirically recoverable entity in its own right, neither is the ‘present’ a consistently stable vantage point from which judgements about the past can be made. Indeed, as Montaigne notes, if we mistakenly assume that our subjective impressions of the present equate to a valorization of that present as possessing some epistemological superiority over the past, then we are likely to be disappointed. Both present and past, subject and object, are equally compromised locations of understanding. The problem with the present is that it is always in the process of becoming the past. Or, as Montaigne was acutely aware, the past itself was once the present. Relevant here is the example of the French religious wars on which Montaigne reflects. A scholar of Renaissance appropriations of the St Bartholomew Day Massacre in 1572, for example, might be interested in An Apology for Raymond Sebond. But he or she might equally examine Alexandre Dumas’ 1845 novel, La Reine Margot, or Patrice Chéreau’s 1994 film of the same name. In the case of each of these texts, Montaigne’s, Dumas’ and Chéreau’s, which ‘present’ is at stake? Which present should we foreground when interpreting these historical documents? The difficulty for Presentism is that it invariably privileges the vantage point of the present now. To take Chéreau’s film, we could view it as a modern consideration of the sixteenth century that speaks to us about the present. But we could just as easily read the film as mediating a mid-nineteenth-century take on the sixteenth century into the present, one that tells us much more about Dumas, and various nineteenth-century political and religious preoccupations. Historians of the Renaissance, especially those interested in appropriation, need to exercise a certain degree of caution in privileging the present as the only empirically valid vantage point from which to view and read the past. Of course, it is impossible to escape our critical situatedness in the present. But it is equally important to remember that the ongoing fascination in documenting and interpreting the events of the Renaissance starts during the Renaissance and continues unabated to the present day. What this shows is that Presentism does not simply reside in the present. Dumas was offering a ‘presentist’ reading of the sixteenthcentury past in 1845, just as Chéreau was in 1994, and even Montaigne in 1592. To foreground the present of now is potentially to downplay or even ignore the fascinating tensions and forces at work in the historical documents that we study, not all of which will be immediately available

8

Introduction: Documenting the Renaissance

to this present moment.19 This realization applies as much to An Apology for Raymond Sebond as it does to a film like La Reine Margot. Studying the Presentism of the past is crucial as it recalibrates the interpretive parameters of the present: reading Dumas’ nineteenth-century take on the sixteenth century may shed new light on that period, which, in turn, may make us rethink our dominant understandings of the Renaissance in the present. If we are to make proper sense of the ways in which Renaissance history is documented, mediated, performed, consumed and politicized in our own day, then it is also necessary to heed Montaigne’s warning that our twenty-first-century present will just as quickly become the past, one that a future present will recoup and refashion in its own image. The contributors to this book examine mainstream documents of Renaissance history alongside radically alternative accounts of the period. They encompass texts that are politically conservative as well as ideologically dissident. Just as there can be no one singular account of Renaissance history, argue our contributors, so the claims of the present cannot limit our readings of Renaissance history. As each chapter shows in its own way, from the sixteenth to the twentyfirst centuries, the Renaissance is too multifarious a phenomenon for our present adequately to contain. The chapters assembled in this book attest to the historical, cultural and geographical richness of Renaissance history as it is disseminated in a variety of media and across a range of broadly conceived types of performance. From modern Spanish filmic representations of Shakespeare to re-enactments of the English Civil War, from early twentieth-century pageant culture to the popular children’s series, Horrible Histories, important Renaissance players and personalities, various political crises and a spectrum of temporalities and materialities are analysed. Rather than impose a uniform historical and critical paradigm on the contributors, we decided that the volume would be best served by allowing a range of methodological approaches to come into conversation with each other. Nevertheless, in collecting essays by literary scholars, historians, film scholars and theatre historians, not all of whom might be expected to demonstrate a unified agenda or methodology, it is interesting to note the degree of common intellectual ground shared across the collection. To begin with, many of the contributors are animated by a perceived dichotomy between academic scholarship on the Renaissance and the more ‘popular’ manifestations of the period in modern culture. For some contributors, this division is a problem; for others it represents an invitation that calls on both academics and practitioners alike to do more to bridge the gap between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ understandings of the

Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

9

period. For Andrew Higson, the Renaissance as historical object of study is essentially an incidental matter in modern films dealing with the period, whereas for Christie Carson, the example of Shakespeare’s Globe in London demonstrates a successful and productive rapprochement between advanced scholarly and theatrical practice, one that has implications for audiences consuming Shakespeare in twenty-first-century culture. Another related issue of common interest across the essays is the gap, perceived or real, between the historical archive and more popular cultural manifestations of the Renaissance on screen, stage or television. As James Sharpe wryly notes, while the conservatism and wilful disregard for ‘history from below’ witnessed in much popular TV history has been regularly criticized, ‘a graph showing grain prices during a harvest failure is less immediately televisual than one of the nation’s favourite media historians striding meaningfully through yet another stately home’ (p. 83). The issue of precisely how the Renaissance gets documented and consumed in modern culture is of vital importance. Is it the job of televisual historians or, for that matter, film-makers to reflect the latest research developments within particular academic disciplines? Would a TV series based on a ‘history from below’ approach be possible or indeed commercially viable? Or should scholars be grateful that the Renaissance gets any airtime at all? This also pertains to other representations of the period. While very few modern popular films or TV series set in the Renaissance would claim to be representing ‘the facts’ in the same way as a David Starkey or Simon Schama, it is nonetheless significant that, in a resolutely digitized media world, these films and series may overwhelmingly be the dominant modes through which most people have any knowledge of or engagement with the Renaissance past. What is more, a significant proportion of this audience may be quite happy to accept, say, The Tudors, as a viable account of Henry VIII’s reign. Indeed, many spectators may not pay much attention at all to the issues of historical fidelity that tend to exercise academics. Academic scholars of the Renaissance dismiss these realities at their peril.20 Given this, what is the best service that scholars concerned with appropriations of Renaissance history can perform? Is it endlessly to point out the inevitable gaps between academic understanding of the period and popular manifestations of the Renaissance? Or is it instead to try and understand, on their own terms, the various cultural, political, historical and ideological forces that underwrite these films and programmes, and that ensure their widespread dissemination and popular

10

Introduction: Documenting the Renaissance

consumption? Despite a range of views and some lively differences of opinion, the contributors to this book largely follow this latter route. Consequently, the collection is divided into three discreet sections, each of which deals with a particular manifestation of how Renaissance history is appropriated in modern culture. The first, entitled ‘Players and Personalities’, examines a gallery of perennially fascinating Renaissance personages and looks at how they have been represented across media. Opening the section is Ramona Wray’s essay on the dominating Henrician figure at the centre of The Tudors. In it, she argues that history making and bodily discourse come together in the series to read both – that is, body and history – as text. In particular, she suggests, the series graphically illustrates the symbiotic relation shared by the historical process and the physical form in representing how one affects and inflects the other. In evocations of breakdown and collapse – Henry’s body is seen as corrupting itself from within and without – we see the Tudor concept of the body politic being put to postmodern use. Complementing this contribution is Jesús Tronch Pérez’s chapter which contends that modern Spanish filmic appropriations of William Shakespeare’s life have the present as their mutual focus. As Pérez argues, each of these films offers an iconoclastic assault on conservative Spanish understandings of the Bard. As these are largely predicated upon a Romantic conception of his genius and literary fertility, it is no mistake that these various Spanish films offer rewritings of, variously, Shakespeare’s literary biography, literary competence and sexuality. It is not that modern Spanish culture is reluctant to acknowledge Shakespeare’s status as a global cultural icon. Rather, as Pérez shows, Shakespeare’s modern Spanish assimilation reflects a culture that is not afraid to take the Bard down a notch or two in the name of national self-assertion. The last chapter in this section – by John O’Brien – examines the strange case of Martin Guerre in both his historical and contemporary manifestations. Answering James Sharpe’s call for ‘history from below’ to be assimilated into popular representation of Renaissance history, O’Brien argues that film possesses a rare ability to encapsulate the oral aspect of history (that which conventionally falls out) with the dominant scene of written history. This is particularly the case for the representation of women and female desire, an aspect of Daniel Vigne’s 1982 film, The Return of Martin Guerre, that is especially striking. Drawing upon the work of Hayden White and Natalie Zemon Davis, O’Brien points out the inherent provisionality of both the film and the historical archive as narrative modes of representation. Charting a deft path between the claims of a presentist and a positivist account of history, O’Brien’s chapter speaks eloquently

Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

11

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 battles, many of which unhelpfully gloss over the ideological divisions of the period they are representing. Indeed, de Groot suggests that the reason 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 characterized 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 ideological presuppositions of modernity. Some films, as Sharpe notes, like Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922), are closely grounded in a plausible 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 preoccupations of modern historians of witchcraft, such as the local support for Matthew Hopkins’ activities, the social upheaval against which he carried 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 Friˇc and released in 1952. Friˇc 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’. Throughout 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 conflicted 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 document 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 children in both the popular Horrid Histories series and in school workshops centred on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In common with a range of chapters collected here, Chedgzoy notes that, in both of her examples, the predominant mode of mediating the past is through monarch or exemplary 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 violence 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 children 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 reconsideration 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 audiences 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 communality 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 culture 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

foster new and collective ways of thinking about Renaissance history, and perhaps even as a means of re-imagining the future. In the next chapter, Conor Smyth examines a corpus of films dealing with the most temporally iconic of Renaissance figures, Martin Luther. In what is a nice historical irony, Smyth points out that Lutheranism, an ideology profoundly antipathetic to material and visual representation, should not have prevented numerous filmic representations of Luther and of his theological revolution. Indeed, in Irving Pichel’s 1953 film Martin Luther, the inability to represent objects in the mise-en-scène, or the refusal of words to account for Luther’s inner torment, comes to stand as a metonym for the theological impact that Lutheranism will have on his culture and beyond. Interestingly, as Luther re-emerges on the screen in later incarnations, we witness an increasing focus on his psychological personality until, in the last film dedicated to the Reformer, Eric Till’s 2003 Luther, it is a suspiciously modern cult of charismatic personality that comes to define his filmic construction. Nevertheless, as Smyth reminds us, the irreducible materiality of these films can never fully account for the absent temporality of Renaissance history, however much film tries to recover it through iconic objects like Luther’s ninety-five theses. The final two chapters examine how the various temporalities and materialities of Renaissance history have been manifested in the pageant and the heritage film. Michael Dobson’s essay studies the immensely popular phenomenon of pageants in the early part of the twentieth century. Most of these performances were amateur and formulaic in construction. However, as Dobson notes, they were also devoted to depicting a bucolic, providential and nationalistic account of British history within which the Renaissance played a key part. Indeed, the early history of sound cinema in the 1930s represents a subtle assimilation of many aspects of pageant culture. While the triumph of American modernity and the dissipation of a providential account of British history in the post-World War II generation saw pageant culture being displaced by other forms, Dobson’s chapter reveals the crucial role that this highly partial account of British history played in the ideological self-construction of early twentieth-century Britain. Andrew Higson’s chapter, on the other hand, focuses on the other end of the twentieth century. Building upon his seminal work on the heritage film industry, Higson argues that in modern films set during the Renaissance, the past and the present are experienced simultaneously by the viewer. Charting a route between the interpretive claims of the present, and the historical locatedness of the period, Higson notes that many Renaissance-based

14

Introduction: Documenting the Renaissance

films are in fact best understood as generic hybrids, as ‘middlebrow romantic dramas with a strongly English sensibility’ (p. 183). These films are commonly characterized by a focus on inheritance, nationhood, religious authority and history as a backdrop, with individual desire as the true motor of history. In this way, while history is part of the commercial package and appeal of such appropriations, the films invariably cannot avoid ‘reflecting obliquely on the present’ through the lens of the past (p. 191). In their logic of commodification, emphasis on romantic will and integration of a number of generic elements, the films discussed have several popular television counterparts. The theme of ‘Temporalities and Materialities’ is brought up to date by an Epilogue which considers documentaries about the Renaissance produced since 2007. As we have suggested, documenting the Renaissance has been a key concern of artists and intellectuals since the Renaissance. In a sense, then, the modern instances of this documenting can trace their lineage back to the period that they themselves are attempting to represent. But, as we have also seen, the endeavour to recover fully or adequately express the Renaissance in modern appropriations is always bound to fall short in a number of ways. So whatever else we might say about the fascinating attempts to appropriate Renaissance history for the modern era elucidated by our contributors, we can also say that the Renaissance as a cultural signifier performs an interestingly Janus-like function for modernity. On the one hand, the Renaissance is a marker of historical limits, of concerns and preoccupations very far removed from those of modern culture. Simultaneously, however, the Renaissance continues to mediate, in a range of complex ways, the concerns and preoccupations of the present. In doing so, this period’s ability, perhaps like no other, to highlight limitations, inequalities and difficulties in our own modern societies should not be underestimated. Renaissance history continues to act as an ideological provocation to the present. Whether that says more to us about the Renaissance or about ourselves is a question that will undoubtedly continue to be hotly debated.

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

3. Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 3, 230–2, 234. 4. Edna Longley, ‘Northern Ireland: Commemoration, Elegy, Forgetting’, in Ian McBride, ed., History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 223–4. 5. Bennett, Birth, p. 90. 6. Longley, ‘Northern Ireland’, pp. 230, 253. 7. Michel de Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 6. 8. Montaigne, Apology, p. 6. 9. Montaigne, Apology, p. 186. 10. See Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass, eds, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 11. See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 12. See Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from ‘Richard II’ to ‘Hamlet’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 13. For a good overview, see Hugh Grady, ‘Shakespeare Studies, 2005: A Situated Overview’, Shakespeare, 1.1–2 (2005), 102–20. For a counter to Presentism, see Robin Hedlam Wells, ‘ “Historicism” and “Presentism” in Early Modern Studies’, Cambridge Quarterly, 29.1 (2000), 37–60 and Adrian Streete, ‘The Politics of Ethical Presentism: Appropriation, Spirituality and the Case of Antony and Cleopatra’, Textual Practice, 22.3 (2008), 405–31. 14. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, ‘Introduction: Presenting Presentism’, in Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, eds, Presentist Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 5. See also Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). 15. See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988) and Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 16. Michael Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. x. 17. See Denise Albanese, ‘The Shakespearean Film and the Americanization of Culture’, in Jean Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, eds, Marxist Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 206–26. 18. Melissa Croteau, ‘Introduction: Beginning at the Ends’, in Melissa Croteau and Carolyn Jess-Cooke, eds, Apocalyptic Shakespeare: Essays on Visions of Chaos and Revelation in Recent Film Adaptations (Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2009), p. 19. 19. See Streete, ‘The Politics’, pp. 409–11. 20. See Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2008).

1 The Network King: Re-creating Henry VIII for a Global Television Audience Ramona Wray

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-thatnever-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 singled 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, temporal 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 characteristic 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 corruption, 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 impression 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 appropriately 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 conflict 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 audience 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 television project characterized by a feature-film quality (the series is shot entirely in HDCAM), a budget of tens of millions and a stellar, international 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 thirtyeight 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 narrative. 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 valuable 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 educated 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 ‘quality 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 Renaissance 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

I The Tudors is typical of most contemporary network programming in that it typifies ‘transnational productions that bring together finance, personnel and locations from across the globe’.10 Hence, when David Starkey accuses the BBC of ‘squandering’ public money on a historical drama deliberately ‘dumbed down to appeal to an American audience’, he rather misses the point.11 Filmed at Ardmore Studios, Ireland, The

Ramona Wray

19

Tudors was made by Peace Arch Entertainment for Showtime, in association with Reveille Eire (Ireland), Working Title Films (UK) and the CBS (Canada). As John McMurria notes, ‘the long-format programming that drives network branding campaigns is ever dependent on global audience reach’.12 Internationally distributed via Sony Pictures, and with lucrative sales to over seventy ‘territories’, The Tudors – and its vast marketing campaign – is just as likely to be experienced in Brazil or Colombia as in the US or the UK. The movement raises important questions around localization. Although the format of the paratext differs, The Tudors does not change content as it goes out locally, which suggests that its particular view of the Renaissance has a general application. Following other historical shows like Deadwood, Rome and Carnivale, The Tudors’ depiction of the Renaissance is revisionist; in particular, the series breaks clear from any expected ‘golden age’ heritage-based template. Rather, a conjuration of the Renaissance is characterized by a sense of upset and brutality, with the series paying vivid attention to the unstable materiality of Tudor existence. Post-watershed television visuals elaborate the Renaissance as a graphically traumatic and physically immediate event, and vigorously implied is the journey still to be taken towards more rational modes of situating bodily experience. This is reflected in the ‘dark, low-key look’ cinematography of the series – paintings, especially those by Caravaggio, are cited as inspiration; lighting is restricted on both set and location; and film stock is shot without filters.13 For all its splendour and sumptuousness, the Henrician court is dangerous and essentially unknown: angled anti-nostalgically, The Tudors situates the past as terror-laden and chaotic, as a period to withdraw from rather than actively embrace. In this sense, the detail of the period re-creation operates so as to steer a global audience away from ‘golden age’ stereotypes and towards a more variegated and anti-romantic imagining. The alienating nature of this evocation means that it is not easy to identify with period detail; instead, it is bodies that, in The Tudors, make for spectatorial involvement. Much criticism has focused on Showtime’s casting of the slimline, twenty-something Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a kingly object of desire. Here, commentators misread The Tudors’ effort to analogize: although standards of beauty were different in Renaissance England to those of today, they were, of course, equally artificial. But, more important for my argument, a detracting response to The Tudors ignores the fact that the series is what has been termed in television studies as a ‘ “long-format special-event” ’.14 Imagined across thirty-eight hours is, in the words of series creator Michael Hirst, ‘the whole arc of

20

The Network King

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 history, 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 beginning’ – establishes the principles. In this sequence, the torrent of visuals pauses first on the familiar contours of the Holbein portrait, then, seconds 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 journey 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 material form, artistic interpretation, Tudor iconography and postmodern reputation. The instance is exemplary of the way in which, in this adaptation, costume 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 incrementally into the costuming associated with his monarchical counterpart. Across all of the episodes, Henry’s costume – in a slowly paced and pieceby-piece development – modifies in relation to alterations to his bodily contours. The protagonist is represented as going grey, acquiring wrinkles 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 pustulemarked 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 backwards 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 questions 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 concerning 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 erection, 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 operating metonymically as a signifier of phallic incapacity, underwrites the series’ concern with a bodily predicament. The series links its concentration on bodies decayed and decaying 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

Henry is represented as articulating a prescient awareness of Renaissance medicine as hopelessly underdeveloped. The Renaissance is imagined as distinctive above all in medical respects, for this is a world wanting the global march of medical science. Hence, The Tudors deeply personalizes issues of child mortality, birth and infertility – issues which have, of course, become intensely medicalized in modernity. Insisting upon daily scrubbings of Edward’s accommodation (Henry’s son is played by both Eoin Murtagh and Jake Hathaway), the king is discovered as ahead of his time in terms of spotting the association between cleanliness and infection. Nostalgic for the power of forms of modern medicine without even realizing what they are, Henry, ironically, finds that his requests for cures and solutions will only founder because the relevant knowledge has not yet been acquired. The gap between contemporary and early modern forms of bodily understanding is graphically illustrated in a sickbed episode so severe that Brandon (Henry Cavill) calls upon the barber-surgeons to operate on Henry’s leg, taking upon himself personal responsibility for what is imagined as a precarious outcome (‘I will answer for it,’ he states). In the extended elaboration of the act of lancing, a powerful impression of early modern horror is provided. Most importantly, emerging from this moment of potential corporeal catastrophe is a connection between the body of the monarch and that of the nation.18 Crucially, the scenes leading up to Henry’s surgery are intercut with shots of the civil unrest sweeping England, unrest that culminates in the representation of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Unlike many US television shows, The Tudors showcases a series of different directors who bring a unique signature to particular narrative sequences. Ciarán Donnelly, who directed the four-hour storyline of the Pilgrimage of Grace episodes, was chosen, in his own words, because he was ‘visually cinematic in television terms . . . could handle action [and] battle scenes’ and was known as a ‘strong character actors’ director’.19 His remarks point to a distinctive approach; thus, even though the exterior scenes devoted to the Pilgrimage of Grace would seem, in their bigbudget and large-scale effects, to belong to a different category from the interior scenes concentrating on the monarch’s medical emergency, they mirror them conceptually. Henry’s body rebels at the point where his nation also erupts, and the strife of the country is written upon his own corpus. A figuration of intersecting crises is relevant here. As Henry’s sickened condition reaches its climax, news comes in of the taking of Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire by the rebel forces: the timing of the two events

Ramona Wray

23

points to an escalation of kinds of disaster both of which are given, in the series, a national dimension via the deployment of intercut scenes. Immediately afterwards, we are shown Henry’s own point of view; the protagonist is revealed in his chamber limping towards a balcony in order to greet his people, and because the camera mimics the effort involved, and because of aural accompaniments of laboured breathing, the audience is invited to participate by proxy. More tellingly, the construction of the scene introduces not only a politics of vulnerability but also a politics of performance. Privately, Henry is in agony; publically, he presents himself as impregnable to a crowd of well-wishers. It is a significant moment that opens a gap between the king’s ‘actual’ body and a performance of royalty, and, as viewers, we are implicated in the pretence. Interior and exterior, objective and subjective, come together in a discovery of two different bodies (material and conceptual) and, as a result, an increasing divorce between monarch and nation. As the body sickens from the inside, so does its owner, Henry, become concomitantly more tyrannical in his external conduct. Political extremity, in this conception, has a physical point of origin. The link is nuanced in the identification, in the ranks of the rebels, of a young man with a strawberry birthmark on his face: later, his head, dismembered from the body, is seen ghoulishly suspended as a public warning. Because these scenes articulate the perspective of the commons, who are represented as entertaining genuine grievances, the balance of empathy shifts, with Henry, despite his own sufferings, appearing in a more negative light. To experience The Tudors is to participate in a balancing act and to be directed to a number of conflicting positions of viewer engagement. And, if the mise-en-scène highlights the symbolic capital of the individual, it also exploits the emotional resonances of the mass. As Brandon states, the Henrician aim is to set ‘a terrifying example’. The Pilgrimage of Grace culminates in wholesale destruction, as is revealed in a spliced montage that shows, on the one hand, the leaders in the Tower in chains, and, on the other, the butchering of peasants, including women and children, in a field. Panoramic sweeps of the camera testify not only to the scale of the discontent but also to the excess of monarchical reaction: in the bodily spectacle is encapsulated a charged indication of royal policy out of control. By pinpointing male children among the corpses, a more pervasive interest in relations between fathers and sons is demonstrated, which reflects on Henry’s own situation. Several characters, including Brandon and Cromwell (James Frain), are humanized via their role as parents to sons. Key is the body of the young Edward (described by the nurse as ‘the

24

The Network King

most precious baby in England’) and, in particular, the distinctive 360◦ panning shot that shows Henry spinning his son around in semi-ecstatic reverie. The pace slows as the bond is affirmed; it is the only time the monarch is truly at peace. Yet, in the same moment, Henry is shown as planning a Machiavellian operation: because he understands paternal joy, it is suggested, he can attack his enemies at a primal level. When Henry is unable to capture a traitor, he will capture that traitor’s family instead, a strategy that is pursued most stringently in relation to Master Pole, nephew to Cardinal Reginald Pole (Mark Hildreth); scenes of the child playing in the Tower, cradling his wooden horse, are distributed throughout series three and in such a way as to stress the development of the protagonist’s vengeful approach. Henry’s pronounced limp at this point, moreover, functions to evoke Shakespeare’s Richard III and a stereotypical association with political tyranny that expresses itself at a familial-generational level. When Master Pole is finally executed, Henry gloats: ‘There you are, Pole – eat your heart.’ The moment takes its energy from a conjunction of a term of endearment and an implied act of cannibalism, which is all the more unsettling because of the accompanying idea of the king’s personal investment in the realities of paternity. The emphasis underlines again – this time with a ruthlessly material complexity – the difficulty of any final appraisal of the protagonist.

II One of the determining features of contemporary ‘quality television’ is the need to appeal to women as a significant part of the network audience.20 In The Tudors, with a few important exceptions, female roles are filled out, maximized and treated sympathetically. Such an emphasis bears out a gendered view of history, a view that Michael Hirst cites as a corrective to what he perceives to be the neglect and misogyny of traditional historiography: ‘historians . . . don’t tell you very much about the human relationships that Henry had with his wives,’ he states, adding, ‘I’ve discovered through reading and thinking that nearly all these caricatures [of the wives] are nonsense or only tell a little bit of the story.’21 Accordingly, The Tudors’ modus operandi is to make available multiple stories and frameworks of explanation which permit viewers to experience a range of gendered positions: we are encouraged to adjudicate between, and make decisions about, competing interpretations of a woman’s fall. Hence, Anne Boleyn, as Tom Betteridge argues, ‘is portrayed . . . as a victim of Henry’s burgeoning desire for Jane Seymour, Cromwell’s political machinations . . . her own

Ramona Wray

25

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 character are the consistencies inherent in the portrayals of females. Aristocratic women, for example, are invariably discovered as opposing 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 challenge’ 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 persuade 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 programming 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 crucifix 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 tending 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 generations 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 empathy 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 represented 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 disallows.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 maniacally 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

no one but myself,’ he warns Cromwell. At an immediate level, Jane Seymour’s passing prompts a depressive phase in which, attended only by the Fool, Will Somers (David Bradley), Henry contemplates his condition. The Shakespearean dimensions of the episode – the dialogue, full of double entendre, is faux Renaissance-dramatic, with Bradley bringing to mind a previous history of well-known Shakespearean performances – lend to the proceedings a construction of gravitas and authority. At the same time, the Lear-Fool/Henry-Fool equation alerts us to the missing ‘mother’ in Shakespeare’s play, introducing a variation both on the roles of women and the question of abuses of royal power. That suggestion of the transience of royalty is confirmed in the self-conscious spectacle, pivotally positioned at the centre of the third series, of the Fool sitting on Henry’s throne and laughing insanely. Who or what can occupy the royal seat? What is a king? These and other questions circulate via the performative substitution, suggesting a critical turning point: Henry himself must stand accused of folly, it is implied; monarchs may be replaced; the nation itself now inhabits a condition of distraction. The theatrical force of the mise-en-scène is in keeping with the series’ self-consciousness about other acts of representation. Above all, the Tudors enlists modalities of writing (letters, records, statutes and Acts of Parliament) as particularly ‘staged’ moments. Michael Hirst writes that ‘most of the historical sources are tainted or in some ways not to be trusted’, and this is borne out in the ways in which acts of writing are seen as mitigating against claims to ‘truth’.27 Aske’s hanging (which is characterized by shockingly low-angled and slow-motion camerawork) is intercut with the far more sedate scene of Cromwell blithely writing about it, driving home the gap between interpretation and experience. The disjunction makes literal what has been termed the ‘violence of representation’; exposing divisions of this kind, The Tudors spotlights discursive forms of power in their ‘most benign, defensive and nearly invisible form’.28 To cite Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse: ‘a particular order survives because it is dominant . . . residual or contestatory practices [fail] to find a place . . . because they [are] deemed disreputable’.29 Ruthless cross-cutting underlines the fact that it is Cromwell’s construction that survives into the historical record rather than the felt agonies of the rebel’s execution. As authority-figure, Cromwell mediates the world for public consumption and posterity; at the same time, as the series also suggests, all positions of authority are subject to fluctuation and contingency. The notion that historical operation is inherently arbitrary – and in thrall to chaos and contingency – is brought home in

28

The Network King

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 minister’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 truthless – 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’ representation of power as a corrosive force. In The Tudors, representatives of instituted authority are imagined as mirror images of the larger movements 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 belonging 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 discovered 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 comparisons. 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 institutional 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’ believers; 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 graphically 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 themselves; they also demonstrate how the series sustains television drama’s capacity for ‘leaving open, through a densely layered textual composition 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 execution 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, preoccupied, 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 battle wearing Laurence Olivier’s original tabard from Henry V (1944). The moment of intertextuality self-consciously points up a representational

30

The Network King

and temporal rupture. For, while Olivier’s audience accepted a battle waged on the unproblematic terms of God, patriotism and the common good, the audience experiencing Rhys Meyers contends with the discontinuities of religion, a trajectory of tyranny, the discordant notes of historiography, and a royal body in decline. It is this kind of ‘complex seeing’ that allows The Tudors to function as ‘quality television’ and to compete successfully in today’s global media marketplace.33

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-TheTudors-is-hilarious (accessed 14 May 2010). 3. Alison Weir summarizes this gap when she describes The Tudors as ‘cracking 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: Debating 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

12. John McMurria, ‘Long-format TV: Globalization and Network Branding in a Multi-Channel Era’, in Jancovich and Lyons, eds, Quality, p. 83. 13. Louise Bishop, ‘Regarding Henry’, Producer: The Digital Production Magazine, Summer (2007), pp. 8–9. 14. Jancovich and Lyons, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. 15. See ‘Spoilers – Season 4 of The Tudors’, http://tudorswiki.sho.com/page/ SPOILERS+-Season+4of+the+Tudors (accessed 2 April 2010). 16. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 143. 17. See ‘Spoilers – Season 4 of The Tudors’, http://tudorswiki.sho.com/page/ SPOILERS+-Season+4of+the+Tudors (accessed 2 April 2010). 18. For discussion of the Tudor body–state analogy, see Thomas Sorge, ‘The failure of orthodoxy in Coriolanus’, in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor, eds, Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 225–43. 19. See ‘Spoilers – Season 4 of The Tudors’, http://tudorswiki.sho.com/page/ SPOILERS+-Season+4of+the+Tudors (accessed 2 April 2010). 20. On the complex relationship between women and contemporary ‘quality television’, see Merri Lisa Johnson, ed., Third Wave Feminism and Television: Jane Puts it in a Box (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). 21. See ‘Spoilers – Season 4 of The Tudors’, http://tudorswiki.sho.com/page/ SPOILERS+-Season+4of+the+Tudors (accessed 2 April 2010). 22. Tom Betteridge, ‘Henry VIII and Popular Culture’, in Rankin, Highley and King, eds, Henry VIII and His Afterlives, p. 214. 23. Jackie Byars and Eileen R. Meehan, ‘Once in a Lifetime: Constructing “The Working Women” through Cable Narrowcasting’, in Horace Newcomb, ed., Television: The Critical View (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 149–56. 24. For a broader discussion of Elizabeth’s ‘pre-sexual childish body’ on screen, see Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 169. 25. I summarize here from two chapters by Peter Krämer: ‘The Lure of the Big Picture: Film, Television and Hollywood’, in John Hill and Martin McLoone, eds, Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations between Film and Television (Luton: John Libbey Media/Luton University Press, 1996), pp. 9–46, and ‘Post-classical Hollywood’, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds, The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 289–309. 26. One of the publicity stills for the fourth series of The Tudors shows the six wives miraculously reinstated. 27. See ‘Spoilers – Season 4 of The Tudors’, http://tudorswiki.sho.com/page/ SPOILERS+-Season+4of+the+Tudors (accessed 2 April 2010). 28. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘Introduction: Representing Violence, or “How the West was Won” ’, in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds, The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 9. 29. Armstrong and Tennenhouse, ‘Introduction’, p. 12. 30. Betteridge, ‘Henry VIII’, p. 215.

32

The Network King

31. Nelson, State of Play, p. 106. 32. See ‘Spoilers – Season 4 of The Tudors’, http://tudorswiki.sho.com/page/ SPOILERS+-Season+4of+the+Tudors (accessed 2 April 2010). 33. My thanks to Conor Smyth for his generous and expert research assistance on this essay.

2 Breaking Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama and Film Jesús Tronch Pérez

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 Renaissance 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

Molins’ Shakespeare (La Mujer Silenciada)/Shakespeare (The Silenced Woman) (1996), written for actress Carmen Belloch, is a monologue in which a mature Elizabethan woman, half-drunk, unfolds her life’s story to an imaginary audience in a tavern, telling how she is in fact the author of the characters and plays that her younger brother, William Shakespeare, is so famous for.4 If Cardeña’s La Estancia/The Chamber provides a fictitious explanation of the Marlovian attribution of Shakespeare’s plays, and Molins suggests the Bard’s sister as candidate, Salom’s El Otro William/The Other William (1998) dramatizes a version of the Derby theory.5 This play focuses on the secret dealing of William Stanley, Earl of Derby, with actor William Shakespeare who will pass Derby’s dramatic writings off as his own in return for a pound and three and a half shillings. A parallel farcical intrigue has Derby in trouble with his late brother’s widow over the inheritance, and with his own wife (whom Derby has tried to strangle out of jealousy). Both women join forces to bring Derby to justice and claim that he is mad. Derby needs Shakespeare to reveal the real authorship of his famous plays in order to prove his sanity, but the latter refuses, claiming a share of the glory because he revised the texts, and reminding Derby to be true to his word. In the end, at the news of Shakespeare’s death and of his having left no document renouncing his false glory, Derby feels bitterly defeated, although he is also deeply moved.6 Somoza’s Miguel Will (1997) shows Shakespeare in trouble during the composition, rehearsal and premiere of Cardenio. Struggling with the portrayal of Don Quixote (as he wants, against theatrical conventions, to depict both a noble knight and a fool), Shakespeare suffers from mental instability. In some of his hallucinations, he even meets Cervantes. He substitutes Don Quixote with a new character, Miguel Will, a man from Stratford who, having seen many plays, becomes mad and believes himself to be the author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Shakespeare performs the role himself in the first performance, but faints after the first scene. The play fails on the stage, but the king wants it performed at court without the gentlemanfool. Shakespeare’s young collaborator, John Fletcher, presents him with a revised manuscript, which Shakespeare destroys. Angrily despising glory, the defeated Shakespeare announces the end of his literary career.7 In París’ film, Miguel and William (2007), the story begins in London with the heroine Leonor (daughter of a Spanish merchant doing business in England) in love with young and promising playwright Will

Jesús Tronch Pérez

35

Shakespeare. She returns to Spain to get married to a rich but unpleasant and jealous duke. In his castle, she meets tax-collector Cervantes and asks him to write a comedy for her wedding. The young English lover turns up at the castle, and Leonor passes him off as her servant. Then she secretly schemes to use the talents of both writers in a unique play. But problems begin: the envious elder daughter of the duke plots to prevent Leonor from becoming duchess; an inquisidor seeks to take Cervantes prisoner and Leonor resorts to bribing him with the jewel the duke gave her as a wedding present; and the writers find out that they are independently writing for Leonor, suspect each other and become literary and love rivals. When the duke is told that Leonor keeps a lover to whom she has given the jewel, he threatens her with execution unless she shows it at the performance before the wedding. Suspecting Shakespeare, who has left the castle, Cervantes wrongly pursues him to get the jewel. After reconciliation, they join forces to help Leonor and to write the play. Leonor is saved, but the dreaded wedding is impending. Just after Leonor enters her marriage vow, the duke whispers to her that he will treat her like a whore, but Leonor whispers back to him something about Shakespeare that infuriates him. Just as the duke says ‘I do’, he suddenly suffers a deadly heart attack, which gives the film a happy ending – its young protagonist is left a rich duchess free to marry the man she loves. Surprising as these fictionalizations of Shakespeare may be to readers in anglophone countries, it should be pointed out from the outset that Spanish spectators do not have as assimilated a notion of Shakespeare’s life as do anglophone spectators. Therefore the capacity of these five productions to shock Spanish audiences is not as forceful and can only be measured against what we may infer as the received idea of Shakespeare in Spain. Biographies of Shakespeare in Spanish, and by Spanish scholars, are available as early as 1798 in Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s biographical note, based on that of Nicholas Rowe, which was included in his edition of Hamlet.8 As in the case of Moratín, most biographies are based on British sources that conform to the generalized notion that recognition of such a literary genius must correspond to the personal qualities of a virtuous and respectable man, marked by artistic and economic success. But for recent, generalized and popular ideas of Shakespeare the man, the most influential biographical images are likely to have come from the 1978 televised mini-series, Life of Shakespeare, or Will Shakespeare, shown on Televisión Española in 1991, and from the 1998 John Madden film, Shakespeare in Love, which was released in Spain

36

Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama and Film

in March 1999, after the theatre productions had been performed.9 Significantly, 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 phenomenon. In fact, significant examples date as far back as the mid-nineteenth century.10 From 1828 to 1848, there were successful 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 significant 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 ‘avuncular 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 authority’ 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 having 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

unspecified. In a short ‘Introduction’, after explaining to a general readership the problems and doubts around Shakespeare’s authorship, Salom states that his dramatization of the Derby theory is ‘the fruit of thorough research and study’ of William Stanley’s biography, and that ‘many scholars’ – they are not identified – support this attribution.17 Somoza prefaces his Miguel Will with ‘A note on the historical background of this play’, giving details about the King’s Men and about Cardenio, the collaborative authorship with Fletcher, the performance at court in 1613 and the play’s disappearance, and concluding that ‘the rest is fantasy’.18 With this, he confesses that the play was inspired by the possibility that Shakespeare read Don Quixote and strove to take its characters to the stage, and lets the reader, who may be unfamiliar with Shakespeare, appreciate the interweaving of historical facts and fancy. Miguel Will is situated in Shakespeare’s later years and his Stratford retirement, includes period setting and costumes, and contains biographically documented facts (the names of the players in the King’s Men and Shakespeare’s physician son-in-law). Another legitimization strategy is to endow these stories with factual details of Shakespeare’s documented life as well as those of his rivals, and arrange the events so that they can fit with the official biographies. Besides allowing spectators familiar with Shakespeare to indulge in allusions, it may be argued that this strategy seeks to avoid accusations of historical inaccuracy. Salom inserts details about Shakespeare’s parents, his wife and children, his being buried in a church in Stratford, and even the legend (now discredited) that the Bard poached deer from Sir Thomas Lucy’s park.19 The Chamber sets the action in 1593, just after Shakespeare is derided by Robert Greene as an ‘upstart crow’ and before the appearance of the first publication that printed his name, Venus and Adonis (1593). Through the dialogue, spectators learn that Shakespeare left his home and family in Stratford, and that his father was known for his gloves.20 In The Silenced Woman, in order to explain the existence of Shakespeare’s elder sister, Molins resorts to making this character seven years older than William, conceived by their parents before their marriage, secretly born, and ‘found in the woods’.21 He even includes such a specific detail as Ben Jonson’s description of Shakespeare’s ‘unblotted papers’, which is explained by Shakespeare’s sister as being in this condition because the ‘famous’ brother simply copied down what she dictated. And the publication of the sonnets, often suggested as issued without Shakespeare’s consent, is explained as an act of revenge by his

38

Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama and Film

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 written 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 established 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 equivalent in the film wears a trimmed moustache and beard around the chin, together with lush, long hair.

Demystifying Shakespeare the man As Douglas Lanier remarks, the received image of Shakespeare from Droeshout’s engraving projects notions of middle-class respectability and seriousness, as well as a ‘compelling, mature, self-possessed but finally enigmatic intellect’.26 Interestingly, the idea is disrupted in the plays and film under discussion.

Jesús Tronch Pérez

39

In The Silenced Woman, Shakespeare’s sister begrudges that her brother is materialistically ambitious, even obsessed with money, and disloyal to her by robbing her of her second love, the Young Man of the Sonnets.27 She even claims that he left Anne Hathaway pregnant because he was after her wealth.28 Lack of nobility of spirit and of trustworthiness, as associated with Shakespeare, is also seen in The Other William, where Shakespeare is portrayed as an opportunistic actor who lends his name to the plays written by the Earl of Derby.29 The servant Costrand describes Shakespeare as ‘a sharp youth . . . his habits somewhat dissolute – a rogue, a swindler and an insolent person’.30 Furthermore, he is presented as a womanizer, impudent, shameless and greedy (as he bargains over the price of each play). If ‘Shakespeare’ is generally associated with cultural sophistication, in Salom’s play he appears ignorant, for he does not know that Verona is an Italian city and he provides different spellings of his name: ‘Shakspo o Shaksper. They write it differently in different documents.’31 Later in the play, he is seen as someone who ‘hunts his creditors until he take them to prison’.32 The disparagement of Shakespeare’s personality is utilized to support the Derby theory when the Early of Derby explains that he chose that type of individual so that nobody would believe that he had written the plays.33 The film Miguel and William shows Shakespeare as a Latino lover, eager to bed young women and also men. The young, good-looking and sexy hero, played by Will Kemp, reminds us of Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love, but his ethos, attitudes and gestures are totally unrelated to the Romantic portrait in Madden’s film. At the beginning of the film, when the heroine Leonor tells him that she is going back to Castile, he stares at a map and asks himself ‘Where is Castile?’ In one scene, Shakespeare is drunk, in another he belches. After we have seen him with a maid under a bed, reminiscences of a libertine Don Juan arise when he eyes a young nun: later, both are discovered in post-coital rest. In general, Kemp’s Shakespeare is histrionic, farcical, even cartoon-like, as when anachronistically he goes crazy after scoring a goal and cries ‘Goal, England!’

Demystifying Shakespeare the writer While the name of Shakespeare bears connotations of world literary fame, natural genius and theatrical success, the plays and the film discussed here elaborate a Shakespeare at odds with the Romantic view of the genius who produced the renowned plays single-handedly. Three plays (The Silenced Woman, The Chamber and The Other William) deprive

40

Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama and Film

Shakespeare of the ‘authorship’ of his works altogether. In The Silenced Woman, Shakespeare is no more than a scribe putting on paper what his sister, the real author, dictates.34 In The Chamber, the actor Shakespeare is an apprentice, eager to learn from Marlowe, the real writer. In The Other William, Shakespeare only lends his name to the Earl of Derby and seems to tinker with the texts in some sort of minor revisional agency. The other two works do not contend the orthodox view of the authorship of Shakespeare’s works but present the poet and playwright at a critical moment in his artistic career. In the film Miguel and William, Shakespeare’s romantic adventure in Spain is shown as contributing to essential features of his artistry. From Cervantes, Shakespeare learns depth, wisdom and a dark vision of reality.35 Shakespeare himself makes this explicit: ‘I know I will be able to write tragedies, but at what cost.’ Like Shakespeare in Love, París’ Miguel and William places the playwright back in the expected canonical position – a young dramatist who learns through a personal love experience and who matures into the genius ready to give birth to future masterpieces. Some sort of collaboration between the two great writers is also imagined in Somoza’s Miguel Will, but the collaboration is of a different kind and Shakespeare is discovered as a mature author in a moment of creative crisis. The treatment is particularly demystifying. In the first scene, Shakespeare appears dissatisfied during a rehearsal of Cardenio because he wants his Don Quixote to be both noble and fool, as in Cervantes’ novel, while the actors protest that theatre conventions do not allow a character to show nobility and be a fool at one and the same time. In the following scene, in Stratford, the playwright confesses to being unable to strike the desired balance, becomes obsessed with the character and begins to show signs of mental instability. During the visit of his young collaborator John Fletcher, Shakespeare decides to turn Don Quixote into a fool. Back at rehearsals at the Globe, in the third scene, the playwright continues to be unhappy, and confesses that he does not know how to solve the problem. He wants the audience to be able to laugh cruelly at Don Quixote and simultaneously to believe in him and respect his nobility, an idea which Richard Burbage opposes. Shakespeare proposes that the company spreads a rumour to the effect that Burbage does not like his part and that he has sworn to stop his performance if he hears the slightest laugh from the spectators. In that sense, the role of Don Quixote will be played by the audience. In the fourth scene, one week before the opening, Shakespeare suffers from a mental disturbance, and after one of his hallucinations in which he meets Cervantes, the playwright realizes that the proposed solution is wrong. Just as Don Quixote

Jesús Tronch Pérez

41

was a common man who turned mad because he dreamed of the characters 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 (playing Luscinda) to help him in a trick to make his deranged neighbour Miguel Will go back to his home town. Miguel Will (wearing a barber’s basin) and Sancho arrive and sit down to watch the play. Luscinda appears and speaks to Miguel Will, asking him to journey to Stratfordupon-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 performance 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 eventually 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, disillusioned artist in the wane of his creative powers. Here, the renowned Shakespeare even despises worldly fame. Shakespeare’s is a story of failure 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 Shakespeare’s ‘cultural capital’ being what it is, there is no avoiding appropriation when his works or his historical associations are deployed in artistic production. In the case of The Other William, Salom utilizes Shakespeare to crown a forty-year career comprising many plays that deflated historical myths via comedy. Here, the emphasis is on desacralizing a myth relating to literary glory, a notion that, by the end of the play, the protagonist describes as banal.37 The play and its performance were reviewed unfavourably.38 If critic Mauro Armiño is correct in claiming that Salom had long ago lost his audience, it is not difficult to see in The Other William its author’s attempt to recover attention through the sensational and controversial treatment of the Shakespeare authorship question.39 Somoza’s Miguel Will was winner of the 1997 Cervantes Prize for Theatre, an award established by the Ministry of Culture to celebrate the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Cervantes’ birth. The production was subsidized by the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, and shown at the Festival of Classical Theatre in Almagro, as well as at the prestigious Teatro de la Comedia in Madrid, which is usually reserved for the classics. As Somoza himself explained, the play deals with the deep conflicts and inner turmoil of an artist, offers a reflection on writers, their works and the hardships of creativity, and pays homage to Cervantes.40 To this purpose, Somoza turns to Shakespeare, the iconic figure of a writer and artist, and creates a fiction in which the dramatist (himself a psychiatrist) imagines Shakespeare as pathologically obsessed with Cervantes’ novel and with the difficulty of re-creating in drama the complex and genial character of Don Quixote.41 In bringing together the two iconic figures of anglophone and Spanish-speaking cultures, Somoza’s play and París’ film invite readings of the stories from the perspective of comparative cultural and political methodologies as well as pointing up areas of difference between these cultures. Comparisons between Shakespeare and authors from the Spanish ‘Golden Age’ have been put forward since the eighteenth century, and the supposed rivalry between writers representing their respective cultures has also been used to express moments of discord between Spain, as the waning international political and military power, and England (‘the perfidious Albion’), as the emergent nation that would finally assume an equivalent status.42 Cervantes’ seniority of age (born seventeen years before Shakespeare) ‘naturally’ means that he is depicted as senior in literary terms.

Jesús Tronch Pérez

43

The film suggests that Shakespeare’s flourishing career rocketed after his encounter with Cervantes, although the influence is reciprocal: perhaps so as not to endorse a patronizing attitude, Cervantes is shown as renewing his art after the adventurous affair that brings these two geniuses together. A different stance may be perceived in Miguel Will. Here, Shakespeare is shown as unable to deal with Cervantes’ great character in artistic terms, while Cervantes appears as a senior figure that, although a ghost to Shakespeare, assists the English dramatist in his crisis. Moreover, the declining Shakespeare is represented as being unable to cope with a story that, as has been argued, is not derived from Bandello’s novella, Plutarch’s lives or a medieval legend, but from a masterpiece – Don Quixote.43 The elaboration of Cervantes’ superiority may function to satisfy historical regret over England’s rise to power at the cost of Spain’s decline. The production notes for Miguel and William point out that Cervantes was one of the few Spaniards who did not show hostility towards England.44 Matching the treatment of the protagonist, the film might be seen as prompting mutual understanding between the two countries at a time when historical rivalry was no longer subscribed to by younger generations. In their respective ways, Molins’ play and París’ film endorse a feminist programme that illuminates the canonical figure of male literary prestige. Molins enunciates this viewpoint by making a woman the ‘real’ author of the Shakespearean canon, presenting this woman as marginalized and ‘silenced’ by society; Inés París pursues a similar theme by portraying the story of a shrewd heroine who (like the protagonist of Shakespeare in Love, Viola de Lesseps) succeeds in overcoming patriarchal imposition and gender limitations, eventually having her own will and keeping both the duchy and her young lover. While Molins ‘silences’ Shakespeare the man (his play is a monologue spoken by Shakespeare’s sister), París’ vindication of women uses Shakespeare to turn him into a pastiche of a patriarchal male lover stereotype. The character of Shakespeare in Miguel and William lacks initiative: he is, rather, an instrument, the secret sexual weapon with which Leonor defeats the duke. The feminist agenda is hammered home when, towards the end of the film, the heroine Leonor, playing Desideria in the play before the wedding, recites an epilogue that reworks Shylock’s famous set speech in defence of his people as an apology for women. In Miguel and William, socio-economic tensions also come into play with the opposition between the spirited and successful protagonist, who is a merchant’s daughter, and the repulsive and despotic aristocrat, finally deceived and annihilated by female cunning. Cervantes’

44

Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama and Film

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 dominant 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 unashamedly 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 surrounding 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 fictionalizations 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

grew significantly after 1997. Performances of Shakespeare plays outnumbered productions of Spanish classics, to the extent that one journalist described the situation in 2006 as the ‘Bard’s Empire’.49 It is interesting, therefore, that at the same time that Shakespeare was becoming the ‘canonical’ playwright on the Spanish stage, Spanish dramatists were ‘toying’ with his status as a writer and presenting alternatives that ran counter to the preconceptions about his assumed greatness. In his discussion of nineteenth-century dramatizations of Shakespeare and of Salom’s The Other William, Keith Gregor provides two conclusions that are applicable to other recent fictionalizations: one is that ‘paradoxically . . . rather than belittle the Shakespearean claim to greatness, such fantasies . . . show just how firmly Shakespeare is rooted at the “forefront” of Spain’s theatrical culture’, and the second is that it is a measure of Shakespeare’s integration into Spanish culture ‘that the latter can cast in doubt, albeit in a lighthearted way, the former’s status as author of the works attributed to him’.50 As I have tried to show, doubt is cast not only on the issue of authorship but also on the received moral image of Shakespeare in such a way that contemporary social and artistic issues are addressed. In 1993, Rafael Portillo and Manuel J. Gómez-Lara argued that ‘in the context of an emerging pro-European attitude’ in post-Francoist Spain, Shakespeare’s drama assumed a new popularity because its author symbolized the country’s desired union with the international community as well as ‘the moral and aesthetic issues that Spaniards may share with other EU citizens’.51 If the integration of Shakespeare into Spanish culture is a sign of Spain becoming modern and European – achieving a first-world status by imitating Anglo-American cultural habits – then the Spanish iconoclastic productions from 1997 to 2007 may indicate that Spanish culture has certainly achieved that status as it mocks, questions, toys with and breaks one of its most important cultural icons.

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 translation 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 twovolume 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 encountering 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

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama and Film Tamayo y Baus appear in the extensive list compiled by Lawrence Schimel, Hardy Cook and C. M. Gordon, ‘Shakespeare, the Character: A Bibliography’, at http://www.shaksper.net/archives/files/charactr.biblio.html and at http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/shaksper/files/CHARACTR%20BIBLIO.txt. Gregor and Vidal, ‘The “Other” William’, p. 239. Manuel Tamayo y Baus, Un Drama Nuevo, ed., Alberto Sánchez (Madrid: Cátedra, 1979), p. 39. Quoted from Vanessa Thorpe, ‘Were these the Two Gentlemen of Madrid?’, The Observer, 21 July 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/jul/01/theat renews.film (accessed 10 January 2010). Salom, El Otro, p. 21. Somoza, Miguel Will, pp. 9–10. Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961); Salom, El Otro, pp. 43, 61, 87. Cardeña, La Estancia, p. 38. Molins, Shakespeare, p. 29. Molins, Shakespeare, pp. 46–7. See E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Antonio Sauro, quoted from Thorpe, The Observer, 2007. Salom, El Otro, p. 46. Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 110. Molins, Shakespeare, pp. 46–7. Molins, Shakespeare, p. 27. Lanier, Modern, p. 112. I translate here from the Spanish: ‘un joven muy despierto . . . sus costumbres son algo licenciosas. Un Truhán . . . un pícaro . . . insolente’ (Salom, El Otro, pp. 39–40). Salom, El Otro, p. 46. Anecdotally, the Earl of Derby decides to insert the ‘e’ in his name and pronounces: ‘Shakespeare, a difficult name no-one will remember.’ Salom, El Otro, p. 86. Salom, El Otro, p. 47. Molins, Shakespeare, p. 44. ‘Synopsis’ for Miguel y William, http://wwws.warnerbros.es/miguelywilliam (accessed 10 January 2010). Somoza, Miguel Will, p. 76. Salom, El Otro, p. 89. Mauro Armiño, ‘Culture bufa para Shakespeare’, El Siglo, 16 February 1998; José Ramón Díaz Sande, ‘El otro William, casi una comedia musical’, Reseña, 292, 1 March 1998, p. 19; Lorenzo López Sancho, ‘ “El otro William”: Fantasía escénica’, ABC, 25 January 1998, p. 107; Javier Villán, ‘Shakespeare y doña Margarita’, El Mundo, 1 February 1998, p. 62; Eduardo Haro Tecglen, ‘Impostores’, El País, 26 January 1998, p. 39; Juan Sol, ‘ “El otro William” ’, Ya, 3 February 1998. See Armiño’s remarks: ‘el comediógrafo famoso en el pasado Jaime Salom . . . se ha quedado sin ese público hace tiempo, y lleva desnortado casi dos décadas por los escenarios’ (‘the long-ago famous playwright Jaime

Jesús Tronch Pérez

40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

49

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’. 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. 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 contrasting 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). See also Angel-Luis Pujante, ‘Shakespeare or/and . . . ? The Spanish Counterpart 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. Somoza, Miguel Will, pp. 5–8. See, for instance, his exemplary novel, La Española Inglesa/The English Spanish Woman. Salom, El Otro, p. 39. Molins, Shakespeare, p. 46–7. Cardeña, La Estancia, p. 37. Lanier, Modern, p. 116. 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). Gregor, ‘Shakespeare as Character’, p. 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 subject differentiation is applied to bodily distinctions? These are some of the urgent questions raised by one of the most famous – indeed notorious – 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 knowing 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 ‘recognized’ 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 support 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. Moreover, 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 information 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 departments of early modern legal theory and practice.7 The term ‘presumption’ 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

even more interesting. After Martin Guerre is acknowledged as such by his uncle, he turns upon his wife: ‘How is it possible,’ he said to her, ‘that you lent your agreement to this deceit? With my uncle and sisters, there could be some excuse; but none in the touch of man on woman.’ And he continued for some time in this vein of bitterness, notwithstanding the warnings he received. This swayed the judges’ hearts and made them think that this violent outburst was a most piercing presumption in favour of recognizing him as the real husband.10 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 presumption, never fully stated, is tenuous to say the least and might even be said to fall within the least acceptable type of presumption, the temerarious, 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 convicted 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 sixteenthcentury 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 mentions 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 effectively 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 bitterly angry with his wife, did not deserve as heavy a punishment as Arnaud Tillier [du Tilh], for having been the cause of the wrongdoing 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 scotfree 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 condemned 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 Pasquier’s commentary is first and foremost related to the very point of law by which Martin Guerre is considered to be the real husband – the judges’ presumption of his identity based on the anger he displays towards Bertrande. The larger context, however, still related to Martin, is his desertion of his wife. Civil law maintained that remarriage could take place five years after the husband’s failure to return. Coras, who devotes no small amount of space to advocating that the abandoned spouse should display the continence of Penelope, allows that the civil law admits remarriage where the alternative might be licentiousness, but recalls that some interpreters of canon law do not allow remarriage even if thirty years have passed since the husband’s desertion; he also notes that in the absence of secure testimony about the death of the husband, report is sufficient to allow remarriage in civil cases.17 Where, however, Coras places the burden of responsibility on the woman, Pasquier takes the opposite view: the guilty party here is Martin Guerre, and his desertion of his wife the cause of the difficulties. He goes further still in advocating the death penalty for Martin Guerre and expressly drafting in the female perspective by way of support. It is a rare attempt to see the whole case from a diametrically opposite angle and implicitly to present Bertrande as something other than the weak, culpable creature, the supporter of family authority or the faceless nonentity that she can appear in other discussions of this case. I would wish to argue that the film The Return of Martin Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1982) extends and potentiates the possibilities of

54

The Touch of Man on Woman

Pasquier’s account by giving Bertrande a voice, an identity and a will.18 The film, I suggest, actively dramatizes her identity formation and gives a particular account of her subjectivity. Yet it does this gradually. When we first see her near the start of the film, at home in Artigat, she stands in the place to which she is summoned by the legal system which assigns her a role in the circuits of knowledge that are secured as well as transmitted by writing. The grouping of the judge of the Parlement, Jean de Coras, the unnamed judge of Rieux, the witness, Bertrande de Rols and the clerk, together with the accompanying officers of the court and soldiers, composes the scene of justice that is supposed to lead to the truth and constitutes the unfolding of the film narrative by flashback at this stage. Bertrande does not face us, but is initially half-turned away from the judges, both of whom she faces when answering questions concisely and confidently. Later she sits directly facing the two judges as she provides the information that composes the historical background of the case and of the film – Martin’s impotence, the remedies they tried, the birth of their son, Sanxi, Martin’s dispute with his father over the theft of grain and his departure from Artigat. Her relative calmness and modest demeanour are especially evident, but their significance only becomes apparent much later. In an action that foreshadows other similarly significant moments in the film, Coras stands by the side of or behind Bertrande when she speaks about her chastity – her sexual identity is one of the film’s crucial points. She is at pains to assert her chastity (‘I kept my honour intact’) and insists that she constantly prayed to St Catherine to bring Martin back. Everything points to the image of the faithful wife (Figure 3.1). This whole scene also foregrounds the relationship between speech and writing, in the form of the oral as opposed to the written record. Thinking back to Michel de Certeau’s work on orality, we can agree with him that it represents the ‘absent of history’: it is what is lost when writing seeks to supplant it or even merely to record it.19 A written record of orality is not the same as orality: there is a distinction between the oral that is captured in and by writing, and the oral that slips away from official systems of representation. At this point in the film, however, we are still at the moment when the oral record appears transparent to the spectator and Bertrande seems the model of the faithful wife standing modestly before the law and accepting her subjection to it (and thus the subjecthood it offers). This image of Bertrande is at one with the judicial flavour of the first few scenes in general: the opening shot is of the notary arriving in Artigat to record the terms of the wedding

John O’Brien

55

Figure 3.1 Bertrande gives evidence to the judges in Artigat in The Return of Martin Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1982). Courtesy of Photofest.

contract; next in sequence, as if to underscore its significance as the heart of the original problem, comes the celebration of the sacrament of marriage, a contract in canon law; then the detailed terms of the civil contract itself, which are dwelt on at some length; finally, moving out of the past and into the narrative present of the film, the arrival of Coras and the legal machinery of the Toulouse High Court as Bertrande prepares to tell her tale. These are interwoven with the personal story of the newly weds Bertrande and Martin, the story of a relationship that cannot be consummated, a contract that cannot be honoured. The salient features of this early scene recur when Arnaud appears before the High Court at Toulouse. Like the previous scene, this is essentially a community episode; the villagers of Artigat throng the court, along with court officials and judges. The formality of the courtroom with the judges now in red robes, including Coras, is a larger version of the scenes in Artigat and, in both cases, Coras is pivotal. In the written accounts, he is the recorder of the trial, not the kind of detective he becomes in the film where he stands close to the groups of family members as they are called forward to recognize the real Martin Guerre, and there are particular close-ups of Coras and Arnaud, who is compelled to sit while questioning Martin. The clash between the real Martin and Arnaud leads to Coras’ unmasking of Arnaud and this unmasking is

56

The Touch of Man on Woman

Figure 3.2 Arnaud and Coras in the court at Toulouse in The Return of Martin Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1982). Courtesy of Photofest.

conveyed visually in the film by the face-to-face exchange between him and the guilty party (Figure 3.2): CORAS: One moment. You say that you confided in him. 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’s avowal is then introduced by Coras’ invitation: CORAS (in close-up): We await only your confession, Arnaud du Tilh. 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. The actual confession, as filmed, is a composite of the explanations found in the printed accounts and removes the anomalies and incompatibilities found in them; it is also focused on the love story

John O’Brien

57

between Arnaud and Bertrande, which occurs in none of the accounts – we shall return to this aspect later. Yet the point once again is that the oral finally yields its truth before the law, and this offers a neat sense of closure to the question of imposture. Introduced by the signature phrase, ‘It’s true’, everything now becomes perfectly motivated and comprehensible, as the underlying story, the story about Arnaud that has not so far been told, emerges within the law court. However, the film is not yet over and between the courtroom scene with Arnaud and his execution comes another scene, this time between Bertrande and Coras (so echoing Arnaud and Coras in the Toulouse law courts). This will be a scene that, unlike the previous one, has no counterpart in any of the historical documents, even in composite form. The scene between Bertrande and Coras follows on immediately from the trial. It takes place before Arnaud is hanged; and Coras’ arrival in the village, accompanied in the film by the clerk, is heralded by the same ominous music that had played at the very beginning, when the notary rode into Artigat. Yet now Coras sees Bertrande alone; as soon as he enters the room, the other women depart; only the spectator will be the privileged witness of what is to transpire between the judge and the woman. And whereas at the start of the film Bertrande stands before the law, now she faces Coras and her body language is different – she tends to stand facing away from Coras, but also looking away from us. Here the invitation to confession is so that he can understand, while she remains stiff and inert. The judge speaks, and his words about her body and particularly her bodily desires contrast markedly with the rigid, submissive, downbeat posture of Bertrande as diegetically represented here: more than by words, she is characterized by silences, gestures, looks, nods. She does not at first fully voice her own story, but rather assents to Coras’ description of it, and when she does speak, Coras stands first to one side of her and then behind her. It is a gesture we have seen at other crucial junctures in the film; in this instance, it is as if the law were retiring somewhat before the woman’s account, or peering into a domain to which it did not have privileged access. Yet while Bertrande faces us, she does not look at us nor – initially – at Coras: she looks down and away (Figure 3.3). 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

CORAS: You took an immediate liking to the person who arrived? [Bertrande nods]. CORAS: Did he satisfy your desire for a man? [Bertrande smiles faintly, nods]. CORAS. Did you love each other? BERTRANDE (softly): Yes. CORAS: Were you accomplices from the beginning? You can tell me, it won’t go any further than this room. BERTRANDE (after a pause and a sideways glance at Coras): Arnaud and I got on well together. (Looks directly at Coras, then away). Martin had neglected me and walked out on me. Arnaud treated me with respect, like a real husband. He gained my complete confidence. When people began to talk, we said to each other: let’s go to court. (Looks at Coras again). By ourselves we would have won. (Looks away). If Martin hadn’t come back, we could have been legally proclaimed husband and wife and nobody would have said anything more about it. This episode operates at a variety of levels. It systematically and symbolically echoes and reverses the initial scene with Coras; in this closing part

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 reticence 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 discourse 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 willing 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 century 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 sixteenthcentury 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

somewhere as mundane as a domestic setting, in an insignificant village named Artigat. Female desire is, for this film, as much the other of history as is the uncanny imposture of Arnaud du Tilh. Two essays by modern historians have drawn out the wider conceptual implications of this film, especially in the first instance in relation to notions of authenticity and truth. From the depiction of a historically accurate social setting in a rural community through to Coras’ role in eliciting the truth from and about Arnaud and Bertrande, this is a film that attempts to live up to its claim that it is not ‘an adventure tale or an imaginary fable but a pure, true story’.20 This quotation from the publisher’s preface to the Memorable Verdict is cited by a voice-over in the title sequence of the film, and immediately followed (also by a voiceover) by the historical placing of the incident – it all started in 1542 in the reign of Francis I, in Artigat in the county of Foix – so as to underscore its commitment to authenticity. The question that now arises is how authenticity is to be understood. Is it the same as transcription, for example? What relationship does it have with the archival record, with the writing of history and with notions such as reflection and fidelity? In ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’, Hayden White draws specifically on the example of Martin Guerre to argue that, as a genre, the historical film should be compared, not to the discursive historical account, but to the historical novel, itself a genre about which historians feel uneasy.21 White contends that their misgivings about both stem from the possibility that they raise ‘the specter of the “fictionality” of the historian’s own discourse, whether cast in the form of a narrative account or in a more “analytical”, non-narrative mode’. He continues: ‘the historical monograph is no less “shaped” or constructed than the historical film or the historical novel. It may be shaped by different principles, but there is no reason why a filmed representation of historical events should not be as analytical and realistic as any written account.’ White’s radical line of thinking extends and qualifies Robert Rosenstone’s article, ‘History in Images/History in Words’, and he makes a point of critical importance when he asserts that ‘like the historical novel, the historical film draws attention to the extent to which it is constructed or, as Rosenstone calls it, a “shaped” representation of a reality we historians would prefer to consider to be “found” in the events themselves.’22 Here, as elsewhere in his article, White erodes the standard differences between the historian’s work as usually conceived and the medium of film or historical novel. He deliberately sees the same (Freudian-derived) processes at work in all these fields: ‘Every written history is a product of processes of condensation, displacement,

John O’Brien

61

symbolization and qualification exactly like those used in the production of a filmed representation. It is only the medium that differs, not the way in which the messages are produced.’23 White thus re-conceives questions of authenticity (truth, accuracy, the translatability of historical events into visual images) by locating them in the processes of representation, rather than in a pure science of historiography that might consider itself free from the symbolic processes characteristic of film or literature. Indeed, for White, while events occur, ‘facts are constituted by the subsumption of events under a description, which is to say, by acts of predication’. In postmodernist mode, he rereads history as a site of construction, shaping, selection, not of the transcription of an archival record or the reflection of things ‘out there’.24 It is not difficult to see how the moulded and dramatized nature of particular subjectivities in The Return of Martin Guerre might strike him as inherent in the nature of the historical enterprise per se, a token of how the past must be dealt with – inevitably but responsibly and analytically – in ‘fictional’ mode. Natalie Zemon Davis, who was the historical advisor for the film, comes back to Martin Guerre in her lecture, ‘ “Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead”: Film and the Challenge of Authenticity’, where she offers a complementary angle to the claims put forward by White.25 ‘Our knowledge of the past’, she maintains, ‘is something we struggle for; it comes from somewhere, is created, fought over, and changed.’26 She continues: ‘the historian wants first and foremost to let the past be the past, strange before it is familiar, particular before it is universal . . . . Historians are sensitive to anything that suggests that images and events are firmly documented when in fact they are only speculative or imagined.’27 For this reason, she adds, historians frequently use ‘perhaps’ or ‘may have been’ – a marked feature of her own writing. Like Hayden White, Davis advocates the idea that the past is not a given, but exists in the narrative that is made of it. She insists on this point by using the phrase, ‘to tell about the past’, not ‘to show it’, ‘to re-create it’ or even ‘to represent it’, and she gives various examples of how the past can be told while demonstrating our distance from it.28 One such method is ‘multiple tellings’ and although she does not specify the Martin Guerre case under this heading, it is clear that this technique, too, has its place in the film: Arnaud’s story, Martin’s story, the judge’s story and – not least – Bertrande’s story. This last is largely a fiction inasmuch as it has no counterpart in the written archive on the scale it is developed in the film. Yet its motivation and plausibility are careful and convincing. While the film in general has been criticized for being too romantic, little critical

62

The Touch of Man on Woman

attention has been given to the way in which it succeeds in portraying and dramatizing the constitution of a specific oral, female subjectivity, and the fidelity of such a dramatization to history lies, as we have seen, in the care with which it is placed in context: the settings, the discourse, the posture of the body, the different styles of clothing, the relationship between social ranks and between the sexes, the presence of authority (ecclesiastical, legal, familial, conjugal) – and how authority is resisted or skirted. The analytical nature of fiction; a past that is struggled for and created; images and events that are speculative; a subjectivity that is staged: all these elements inform what happens in The Return of Martin Guerre. The film implicitly foregrounds two versions of the past with which we are familiar: the puzzle that, on the positivist view, can be solved through patient historical reconstruction via documentary evidence, in contrast with the enigma that remains obdurately obscure and for which a possible explanation can only be formed by express recourse to speculation, hypothesis and supposition. In concrete terms, the satisfying closure brought about by Coras’ solving the case is contrasted with the unofficial story of Bertrande that has no proper end and whose motivations are recounted in oral mode, a story which emerges and disappears again as, at the end of the film, Bertrande is pulled back towards him by the real Martin Guerre, back into the historical silence to which the film attempts to give voice.

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

6. Pasquier, Recherches, I, col. 655: ‘Toutes lesquelles particularitez se trouverent depuis estre vrayes par le rapport de Martin Guerre’. 7. The two standard Renaissance treatises on presumption are Alciati, Tractatus de praesumptionibus and Menochio, De praesumptionibus, coniecturis, signis & indiciis. I am grateful to Ian Maclean for this information. See also Paul Foriers, ‘La conception de la preuve dans l’école du droit naturel’, La Preuve: Deuxième partie: Moyen âge et temps modernes, Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des institutions, 17 (1965), pp. 169–92; R. W. Serjeantson, ‘Proof and Persuasion’, in Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, eds, The Cambridge History of Science: Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 132–75. 8. New Advent, ‘The Catholic Encyclopedia’, http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/12403b.htm (accessed 8 August 2010). 9. The identifying marks were a double tooth, a broken nail on the right hand, warts and a red cast to his eye. They are listed in Pasquier, Recherches, I, col. 655; Guillaume Le Sueur, Histoire admirable d’vn faux et supposé mary (Paris: Vincent Sertenas, 1561), sig. Dr ; Coras, Memorable Verdict, p. 61 (in greater number). Pasquier’s list seems to be taken from Le Sueur. 10. Pasquier, Recherches, I, col. 656. 11. Pasquier, Recherches, I, col. 655, ‘Circonstances qui émeurent tellement les Juges en faveur de l’accusé’. 12. The three types of presumptions were ‘violent’ (violenta), admitting of no counter-argument; ‘probable’ (probabilis); and ‘light’ (levis) or ‘temerarious’ (temeraria). 13. Pasquier, Recherches, I, col. 656. 14. The exceptions are Coras, Memorable Verdict and Le Sueur, Histoire admirable. 15. Henri Estienne, ‘Apologia pro Herodoto’ in Herodoti Halicarnassei Historia ([Geneva]: Henri Estienne, 1570), sig. ∗∗∗∗ iir : ‘Alii enim sua fallacia in principum imperia aut in aliorum bona inuolarunt, aut certè inuolare conati sunt: at hic [i.e., Arnaut] in alienae vxoris possessionem inuolauit’; Le Sueur, Histoire admirable, sig. Aiijv . 16. Pasquier, Recherches, I, cols 656–8. In Le Sueur (sig. Ev ), the President of the court upbraids both Martin and Bertrande. 17. Coras, Memorable Verdict, pp. 6–7 for his praise of Penelope. 18. A partial transcription of the screenplay is to be found in Le Retour de Martin Guerre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982), pp. 13–112, where it is woven into a (fictitious) account of the whole tale by Catherine Boëre. 19. Michel de Certeau, L’Absent de l’histoire (n.p.: Mame, 1973), untranslated into English, although much of it was later incorporated into The Writing of History, translated by Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 20. Coras, Memorable Verdict, sig. ∗ ijr : ‘il ne vous est icy presenté vn Compte aduentureux, ou fabuleuse inuention: ains vne pure, vraye histoire’. 21. Hayden White, ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’, first published in American Historical Review, 93(5) (1988), pp. 1193–9. Consulted at http:// www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/reruns/rr0499/hwrr6c.htm (accessed 8 January 2010). 22. White, ‘Historiography’, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/reruns/ rr0499/hwrr6c.htm (accessed 8 January 2010). White refers to Robert

64

23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

The Touch of Man on Woman Rosenstone, ‘History in Images/History in Words’, American Historical Review, 93(5) (1988), pp. 1173–85. Consulted at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/ screeningthepast/reruns/rr0499/rrrr6a.htm (accessed 8 January 2010). White, ‘Historiography’, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/reruns/ rr0499/hwrr6c.htm (accessed 8 January 2010). White, ‘Historiography’, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/reruns/ rr0499/hwrr6c.htm (accessed 8 January 2010). A comparable discussion of history as construction is to be found in James Sharpe’s chapter in this book. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘ “Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead”: Film and the Challenge of Authenticity’, The Yale Review, 86 (1986–87), pp. 457–82; the lecture can also be consulted online at http://www.stanford. edu/dept/HPS/HistoryWired/Davis/DavisAuthenticity.html. For discussions of Davis’ role in the film and reactions to it, see Pat Auferheide, ‘Interview with Natalie Davis’, Radical History Review, 28–30 (1984), pp. 136–9; Edward Benson, ‘Martin Guerre, the Historian and the Filmmakers: An Interview with Natalie Zemon Davis’, Film and History, 13(3) (1983), pp. 49–65 and Edward Benson, ‘The Look of the Past: Le Retour de Martin Guerre’, Radical History Review, 28–30 (1984), pp. 125–35; Anthony Guneratne, ‘Cinehistory and the Puzzling Case of “Martin Guerre” ’, Film and History, 21 (1991), pp. 2–19. The most recent analysis of the film is Richard Burt, Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 137–68. Davis, ‘Any Resemblance’, p. 458. Davis, ‘Any Resemblance’, p. 459. Davis, ‘Any Resemblance’, p. 459.

4 ‘Welcome to Babylon’: Performing and Screening the English Revolution Jerome de Groot

The authors of Perfect Occurences, an army newsbook, chose in early May 1645 to open their account of the week with a description of a ‘Maygame; but such a one as is not usuall, and deserves to be taken notice of, and it is an action of Warre too’.1 The newsbook recounted the problem facing Colonel Blunt when trying to control the country people of Kent, who ‘love old customes’ and continue to ‘do every yeer what they have done in others before, and much pastimes, and drinking matches, and May-Poles, and dancing and idle wayes, and sin hath been acted on former May dayes’.2 Wishing to keep the people from sin but also from mutiny, Blunt ordered two regiments of foot to Blackheath to be trained and exercised, and 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 carefull 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’

maying in an other way, which might have occasioned much evill after many wayes as is before declared.3

Such interest in enacting warfare for entertainment was not unheard of. What makes this an extraordinary moment is that it presents reenactment as an immediate representation of wars that are still continuing. It has seemingly no obvious propaganda or polemic purpose, other than to present the general disorderliness of the Cavaliers, enshrining the binary of Cavalier and Roundhead and locating this representationally within the action of conflict itself. It also clearly presents the re-enactment of warfare as something seen, at least by those instituting this particular practice (Blunt), as distinct from theatre and other forms of ungodly popular culture.4 Somehow this outside entertainment is not something that will promote idleness or sin, but is educational and improving. This re-enactment is in between states, not popular entertainment but something officially sanctioned and controlled; it does not have the provocative potentiality of theatre, nor the interactivity and challenge to authority of carnival or maying. Enacting the conflict known to us as the civil war or the English revolution (two names amongst many), then, was something that was being undertaken even when the events themselves were under way. What this demonstrates, further, is the impulse – even contemporaneously – to represent the conflicts of the 1640s in performative and processional fashion. The event renders the wars politically, aesthetically and theatrically inert through the flatness of the performance. It does not attempt narrative or attempt to explain events, but simply renders the events of conflict – skirmishing, imprisonment of enemy combatants – as entertainment and education. In contrast to this, more recent accounts of such civil war games have often pointed out their innate savagery and the problematic status of a response to the national past coming via the celebration and reenactment of conflict. In doing so they demonstrate the prickly issues inherent in representing the wars on screen, and signify the keynote in such renderings: confusion and ambivalence often expressed in generic ambiguity. In Doctor Who: The Awakening, broadcast in 1984 and written by Eric Pringle, Doctor Who and his companions travel to the idyllic English village of Little Hodcombe.5 He arrives to discover the villagers re-enacting a battle of 13 July 1643. The area has been entirely isolated to facilitate the combat simulation. There is some dissent amongst the locals:

Jerome de Groot 67

SIR GEORGE HUTCHINSON: A Parliamentary force and a regiment for the King destroyed each other. And the village. THE DOCTOR: And you’re celebrating that? HUTCHINSON: Why not? It’s our heritage. MISS HAMBDEN: It’s a madness. HUTCHINSON: Miss Hambden disagrees with our activities. THE DOCTOR: I can understand why. HUTCHINSON: Who are you? THE DOCTOR: They call me the Doctor. HUTCHINSON: Are you a member of the theatrical profession? THE DOCTOR: No more than you are.6 The Doctor here points out the central ethical problematic issue associated 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, suggests 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 representational 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 reenactment 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 development 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’ performance 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 dubious 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 fracturing conflict at the heart of the nation. The episode demonstrates the various ways in which the revolutionary period lives in the contemporary 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 appreciation 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 demonstrating 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 similarly 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 significant, 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 influential arguments made by Andrew Higson in 1993 regarding the surfacing of Thatcherism in costume drama. As Higson argues in his revised version of this essay, in early 1980s’ costume drama – the ‘heritage’ film – ‘the past is displayed as visually spectacular pastiche, inviting a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social critiques so often suggested narratively by these films’.8 Higson argues that the costume dramas of the early 1980s re-presented the past as nostalgia, with a tendency to draw the ideological sting of the actual chaos of history. The versions of the civil war that are covered in the remainder of this chapter in the main avoid the disavowal of ideology that Higson traces, and in fact mainly present the 1640s as a decade of hardship, horror and fracture. In The Awakening, Hutchinson is the patrician landowner deploying the past politically in order to create a new paradise for himself, but he is prevented from doing so. The difference and the horror of the past are reasserted in the face of those who would ‘perform’ it as something politically inert, and thus the 1984 episodes suggest that the wars rebuff attempts to use them in politically conservative fashion. Put simply, memorializing the civil wars leads to further conflict. Indeed, film and television representations of the civil wars seem often to be the inverse of Higson’s argument: The heritage films, too, work as pastiches, each period of the national past reduced through a process of reiteration to an effortlessly reproducible, 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 Whilst the pastiche argument holds, as the representation of the civil wars might render them visually inert and reproducible, the ‘traditional conservative pastoral Englishness’ simply cannot survive the immersion in a war that tore the nation apart and gave rise to multiplying potential identities and subjectivities. This can be shown easily by the Doctor Who episode, a relatively minor popular cultural representation but one which demonstrates the complexity of engaging with this period. It is virtually impossible for the programme not to be political, nor to have overtones that emphasize the conflict’s engagement with national trauma, and internecine relationships that tear the village, the country and time apart. The Awakening critiques the unconsidered delving into a violent past as war games that help to manifest evil from another planet. Whilst the civil wars have rarely been represented on film and

70

‘Welcome to Babylon’

television, and whilst those representations often accrue around familiar and unthinking caricatures, narrative events and personalities, they do also present a richness of engagement with the past which prevents them from being mere pastiche. Most iterations avoid explicit engagement with the political radicalism of the key players, relying instead on either representing the war as it impacted upon domestic relationships or concentrating on a type of personality politics. They all, however, deal with the political implications of a conflict that foregrounded seemingly modern ideas relating to personal liberty, taxation, Ireland, loyalty, trauma and identity. The visualizations of the civil war in contemporary popular culture repeatedly avoid the smoothing, calculatedly educational and non-polemic performance of Blunt’s event, instead revealing a complex, fractured, bloody past that, if uncontrolled, may lead to disaster. One of the peculiarities of the 1640s and 1650s is a lack of manifestation in contemporary culture, particularly visual culture or in popular media. The highlights are few and far between. As the current volume amply demonstrates, there is increasing attention paid to later representation of the early modern period and adaptation and transmission of key ideas, images or texts. However, it is surprising how little of it relates to events or texts in the period 1642–1700. This is despite the fact that – or possibly because – the period had great political significance in intellectual life after the advent of television and film. Cromwell, Milton, Rainsborough and Lilburne were key figures in left-wing historiography during the early part of the twentieth century, influencing writers from Christopher Hill to Raphael Samuel. Yet there is very little film, television or dramatic work engaging with Milton, for instance, in comparison with that on Shakespeare, and the entire half-century before Defoe is repeatedly passed over. Apart from the texts discussed in this chapter relating to the 1640s and 1650s, one might bring to mind such major texts as Rose Tremain’s Restoration (1989), filmed by Michael Hoffman in 1995, or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy of Miltonic books (1995–2000), or several novels relating to the plague or the fire of London. The latter part of the seventeenth century has proved to be pretty fallow in contemporary popular culture. This is surely unusual and remarkable. The remainder of this chapter will consider the representation of the civil wars on screen in order to seek to demonstrate further this political and generic complexity and – through this elucidation – suggest that the reason that there is so little cultural product relating to this conflict is due to its innate complexity, but that this means that what there is avoids the pitfalls that Higson suggests befall other costume dramas.

Jerome de Groot 71

The list of on-screen fictive iterations of the war is extremely brief, with the revolution rarely being televised:

Film The Moonraker (dir. David MacDonald, 1958) Witchfinder General (dir. Michael Reeves, 1968) Cromwell (dir. Ken Hughes, 1970) Winstanley (dir. Kevin Brownlow, 1975) To Kill a King (dir. Mike Barker, 2003)

Television By The Sword Divided (BBC, 1983) Dr Who: The Awakening (BBC, 1984) Blackadder: The Cavalier Years (BBC, 1988) The Devil’s Whore (C4, 2008) Most common in British popular culture is the kind of caricaturing of the period that is found in Blackadder: The Cavalier Years (1988). This fifteen-minute special was shown for BBC’s Comic Relief telethon in 1988. Set in November 1648, it featured the show’s regulars Sir Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) and Baldrick (Tony Robinson) as the last defenders of the King. The special played on Blackadder’s regular inability to win political power: ‘One measly civil war in the entire history of England and I’m on the wrong bloody side!’10 Stephen Fry played Charles I as a floppy-haired version of the contemporary Charles, Prince of Wales, and the set-up was briefly sketched and traded on standard clichés – Cromwell’s warts, the extreme temperance of the Parliamentarians, the binary nature of the war, and the vanity of the King and his supporters: BLACKADDER: If the King dies we Royalists are doomed. We will enter a hideous age of Puritanism. They’ll close all the theatres, lace handkerchiefs for men will be illegal and I won’t be able to find a friendly face to sit on this side of Boulogne.11 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 suggests 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: MANCHESTER: As a magistrate you know that the King is the law in this land. CROMWELL: On the contrary my Lord Manchester it is the King’s duty to maintain the law. This is common land, it belongs to the people.12 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 lasting 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 engendering 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

Furthermore, Cromwell actively undermines the idealization of conflict. The first battle scene opens with Prince Rupert of the Rhine saluting Charles and his sons, enthusiastically calling out, ‘’tis a fair day for a fight. Where be the enemy?’17 This scene, with triumphant horns playing over it, is cut instantly and brutally with explosions, gunfire, death, fire, confusion and cowering, retreating soldiers. Unfortunately, this is then followed by a montage outlining the raising and training of the New Model Army, reifying the creation of a professional army able to compete with ‘the sons of gentlemen’. The centrepiece of the film is a ten-minute sequence at Naseby, with grandstanding battle scenes and lengthy shots of fighting, although this concludes with Cromwell wandering through the dead and dying after the battle and finding the body of his son, Oliver. Therefore, even this most seemingly providential and historic of victories (with echoes of the filmic Agincourt of Laurence Olivier’s 1944 Henry V) concludes in death and horror. Similarly, the opening voice-over of Witchfinder General emphasizes the horrific lawlessness of the chaotic period: The year is 1645. England is in the grip of bloody civil war. On the one hand, stand the Royalist party of King Charles. On the other, Cromwell’s Parliamentary party. The structure of law and order has collapsed. Local magistrates indulge their individual whims . . . an atmosphere in which the unscrupulous revel.18 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 lawless, 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 madness 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 particularly 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 authenticity 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: Winstanley was an exponent of religious communism and Marx is known to have studied the same pamphlets in the British Museum that we worked from (Soviet means Soldiers Council, a term from the English Civil War). With the execution of the King, the Diggers wanted the Royal lands, which were seized from the people, returned.22 The film used untrained actors to encourage a sense of roughness and directness in the vein of influential films such as Peter Watkins’ Culloden (BBC, 1964); it was also shot in black and white for this same reason. The dialogue was mostly drawn from Winstanley’s writing, implying an authenticity of voice. A contemporary account pointed out that ‘it is perhaps surprising that the more radical-political-heroic aspects of the country’s past have remained untouched by mainstream producers and independent film-makers alike.’23 Interviewed by Cineaste in 1980, Brownlow suggested that: [It] isn’t really a political film. It is a trip in a time machine back to the seventeenth century; a glimpse of a heroic attempt to change the way people lived . . . The film has resonances for today, but we tried not to make the obvious parallels. We even dropped the references to Cromwell’s troops fighting in Ireland. Winstanley’s own words – and his actions – are eloquent enough.24

Jerome de Groot 75

This suggests he sees the film as exploring historical political difference and agency, rather than the contemporary. He calls Winstanley’s work the ‘first socialist manifesto’, but also approvingly cites the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum calling the movie ‘science fiction of the past’.25 In his 1981 account of the transmission of left-wing theory, Raphael Samuel argued that one could point to the importance of history in socialist work in the arts: plays such as Red Ladder’s Taking our Time; films such as Kevin Brownlow’s Winstanley, and television productions such as Garnett and Loach’s Days of Hope have probably done as much to popularise a socialist interrogation of history as all the work undertaken in more traditional historical modes.26 The extremities of religious and political radicalism have also appealed to some writers interested in extremism, from Caryl Churchill’s play, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976), to Ronan Bennett’s compelling novel, Havoc in its Third Year (2004). Churchill’s play uses the transcripts of the Putney debates in its representation of Diggers, Ranters and Levellers. ‘We are fighting to be free men in our own land,’ says the character Mr Star, and the play articulates several positions of resistance and disenfranchisement.27 It is this tradition of political radicalism and the narrative of personal liberty that was brought out most explicitly in the most recent manifestation of the civil war on screen, Channel Four’s The Devil’s Whore. Most versions of the war engage with the politics of the period – it is nearly impossible not to, as even Blackadder dramatizes the execution of the Head of State – yet oftentimes they soft peddle the complexities of political and theological debate in favour of narrative simplicity. The Devil’s Whore explicitly sought to foreground the key political debates of the period in a revisionist attempt at rescuing the conflict from the cultural margins; it was screened in November–December 2008. It gained interested reviews and much press coverage in advance of the screening. The reasons for this anticipation were twofold: firstly, the subject matter and its relative scarcity on television allowed for speculation and some historical fetishization on the part of journalists; and secondly, because the writer of the series was Peter Flannery, whose Our Friends in the North (1996) had become a touchstone of dramatic innovation and politicized film-making. Channel Four is not an organization known for its historical drama, although it has made some brief interventions into this area over the past couple of years. The series was central to its winter programming schedule (it cost around £7 million

76

‘Welcome to Babylon’

and was given a prime-time slot, 9 p.m. on Wednesdays, having opened on a Saturday) and was intended to attract an audience interested in historical television but also subscribing to the Channel Four demographic signifiers – innovative, youthful, nonconformist. The series won three Royal Television Society awards, including best drama writing and best drama serial. It wore its radical historiography on its sleeve from the outset, with Peter Flannery claiming that the war ‘radicalised a lot of people and left a legacy of ideas which we’re still battling out’.28 Furthermore, what the writers and producers of the show pointed out repeatedly was the lack of representation of the 1640s and 1650s in contemporary popular culture. Some reviews called it ‘landmark’ though ‘bewildering’, whilst referring to the incomprehensibility of the times; others, though approving, termed it ‘bodice-rippingly melodramatic’.29 The novelist Ronan Bennett argued passionately that the show helped to make up for the lack of representation and memorialization of the period: ‘Flannery does us all a great service in reminding us of a revolutionary past of which the English often seem embarrassed, ignorant or in denial.’30 Alternatively, civil war historian John Adamson wrote in the blog The First Post that ‘Anachronisms and impossibilities abound . . . The Devil’s Whore has many strumpets, but none is more prostituted and exploited here than History herself.’31 Adamson’s post reflects a common annoyance amongst historians regarding accuracy, complexity and the liberties taken by dramatization. However, one might agree with him given that the writers of the series left so many hostages to fortune by repeatedly talking up their research and the show’s authenticity. The series was keenly interested in the idea of liberty, and the shift from the world of privilege in the 1630s through popular movements to a sort of personal, political and social reconciliation and agency at the conclusion was clear. For this reason, and the desire to follow the complex vagaries of events and affiliations, the sometime Leveller leader John Lilburne (Tom Goodman-Hill) was a central figure throughout, in a way unprecedented hitherto.32 Lilburne appears in the opening scenes, in contrast to the opulence of a court wedding: 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

ELIZABETH LILBURNE: John Lilburne whipped for raising his voice for justice and liberty. Welcome to Babylon, sir.33 Whilst this sequence is dated 1638, it introduces the keynote of the series: the idea of the birth of a particular type of English liberty in the crucible of the civil war. Furthermore, it introduces Lilburne, who is asked in the exchange to recant, as the central figure in the development of this sense of liberty, particularly in relation to the imprisonment and punishment of his body. Whereas Thomas Rainsborough (Michael Fassbender) is the moral hero of the series, and briefly outlines his impassioned thoughts about how ‘the poorest he that lives in England has a life to live’, Lilburne is the intellectual heart of The Devil’s Whore, inasmuch as the series attempted to grapple with ideas and principles. His demands for freedoms are less idealistic than those of his murdered collaborator Rainsborough. Indeed, one of the problems of the series – incoherence – might be put down to its attempts at following Lilburne’s twisting, turning political philosophy and set of compeers.34 The types of liberty that Lilburne fights for are recognizably modern in many ways but contorted and confused; oftentimes it seems that he is simply arguing for argument’s sake in the face of realpolitik reality and political expediency. The refusal of Lilburne to compromise, to pause or to calcify in his thinking (his protean complexity and shifting and fidgety political integrity) is a motif for the war itself in the popular imagination, a roiling, challenging set of conflicts rearranging the dynamics of the nation through destruction and fragmentation. The series became increasingly bedraggled by the extremely complex politics, social and religious experiments and events of the 1640s. At times, due to its desire to explore all aspects of the conflicts, the drama became quite incoherent. This is not necessarily a criticism. The inability of a modern television programme to impose the clarity of narrative upon the war demonstrates its protean nature as an event and its virtue to scholars of costume drama, namely, that it eschews clarity and simplicity, forcing a complexity of engagement and a chaotic maelstrom of representation. Sexby, Fanshawe and Lilburne, debating in prison later in the war, articulate the move to polemic and to even more radical politics: JOHN LILBURNE: This is the fight now. SEXBY: Words? JOHN LILBURNE: Read.

78

‘Welcome to Babylon’

ELIZABETH LILBURNE: You hold his life in your hands. Both sides will call it treason. FANSHAWE (reading): ‘Parliament to be adjourned and a new one to be elected by all men of good faith, not only those with property.’ JOHN LILBURNE: The levelling up of men cannot begin until this is accomplished. FANSHAWE: ‘That new Parliament to have Charles Stuart arrested and tried as a man of blood.’ SEXBY: Who will do the levelling up? JOHN LILBURNE: The army . . . there is no other engine that drives the world’s turning but the army.35 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 resonances 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 regarding 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 genocide and pillage. This serious consideration of the violence of the state becomes subsumed into a more inchoate representation of the multitudinous 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. However, 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 purging of Parliament to reform it. Lilburne repeatedly asks the question,

Jerome de Groot 79

‘Why no election?’, to which Cromwell replies ‘Because the country will vote for the king’s men’.37 Lilburne is directly presented as the voice of parliamentary democracy in contradistinction to the increasingly autocratic Cromwell. On another occasion he asserts, ‘We shall not live like slaves’, and he attacks the profiteering, greedy MPs ‘at home counting their money’, finally being arrested by some of his former comrades.38 When interrogated about an early pamphlet, Elizabeth Lilburne (Maxine Peake) states, ‘Sir, some of the pages are mine. John and I are of one mind and one flesh.’39 Lilburne becomes the articulation, in some ways, of a liberal notion of political agency and freedom, asserting the common-law rights of man and also gender equality. The other characters constantly use his adopted nickname, ‘Free-born John’, and there is a clear echo of the modern inalienability of human rights in this terminological sense of being born into liberty. Similarly, when asked about property, Rainsborough argues that redistribution is necessary to ensure freedom for all: CROMWELL: Where’s that land to come from Thomas? RAINSBOROUGH: It must come from those who have too much.40 In the end, Lilburne dies, imprisoned by Cromwell for railing against the hypocrisies of his former comrade in arms: his enduring representation in the series is of obduracy but unflinching honesty in attempting to point out hypocrisy. Asking for pen and ink in his final prison, he attempts to disown his wife and son when he realizes they have (or Angelica Fanshawe [Andrea Riseborough] has) asked Cromwell to visit him: ‘Did I not tell you not to ask the tyrant for anything?’41 In the teeth of this, his wife attacks him as a ‘man who loved a crown of thorns . . . who each new day nailed himself to the cross of freedom. And where is that freedom now, sir? And when was that freedom ever for me?’42 Their domestic rift illustrates the dead idealism of the earlier episodes and demonstrates the Cromwellian-created death of radical possibility (and the nation’s implacable move to compromise and stability). It also presents Lilburne as a martyr, driven to a lonely death and recanting at the last: ‘It was all mistaken . . . To change the temporal world . . . all that matters is what waits for us. When I am free.’ 43 Lilburne and Rainsborough rarely appear in drama or novels of the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries concerning the civil wars. They are figures who are either part of the radical margins or are culturally ignored and passed over. Whilst Winstanley attempted to memorialize

80

‘Welcome to Babylon’

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 radical 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 culture. 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 complex 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 disease; 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 themselves 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 3. Perfect Occurences, sig. V1v . 4. See Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 5. Part One (19 January 1984), 6.40–7.05 p.m.; Part Two (20 January 1984), 6.40–7.05 p.m. 6. Eric Pringle, The Awakening, BBC, Part One. 7. Eric Pringle, The Awakening, BBC, Part One. 8. Andrew Higson, ‘Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film’, in Lester D. Friedman, ed., Fires Were Started: Thatcherism and Cinema, 2nd edn (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 91. See also Andrew Higson’s chapter in this book. 9. Higson, ‘Re-presenting the National Past’, p. 95. 10. Ben Elton and Richard Curtis, Blackadder: The Cavalier Years, BBC One, Friday 5 February (1988), 9.45–10 p.m. 11. Blackadder: The Cavalier Years. 12. Cromwell, Irving Allen Productions (dir. Ken Hughes, 1970). 13. Cromwell. 14. Cromwell. 15. To Kill a King, FilmFour/IAC Film/Natural Nylon Entertainment/Rockwood Edge/Scion Films/Screenland Movieworld GmbH (dir. Mike Barker, 2003). 16. See Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001). 17. Cromwell. 18. Witchfinder General, Tigon British Film Productions/American International Productions (dir. Michael Reeves, 1968). 19. These parallels are also developed in the discussion of the film offered by James Sharpe in his contributory chapter in this book. 20. Witchfinder General. 21. Cited in ‘Winstanley’, a Milestone Film Press Release, at http://www. milestonefilms.com/pdf/Winstanley.pdf (accessed 23 October 2009). 22. Cited in ‘Winstanley’, a Milestone Film Press Release, at http://www. milestonefilms.com/pdf/Winstanley.pdf (accessed 23 October 2009). 23. Verina Glaessner and Kevin Brownlow, ‘Winstanley: An Interview with Kevin Brownlow’, Film Quarterly, 30(2), (1976–77), p. 18. 24. The interview is reprinted in ‘Winstanley’ at http://www.milestonefilms. com/pdf/Winstanley.pdf (accessed 23 October 2009). 25. Glaessner and Brownlow, ‘Winstanley: An Interview’, pp. 22, 20. 26. Raphael Samuel, People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Taylor & Francis, 1981), pp. xi–xii. 27. Caryl Churchill, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (London: Nick Hern Books, 1995), p. 11. 28. Serena Davies, ‘The Devil’s Whore’, The Telegraph, 15 November 2008, http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/3563279/The-Devils-Whore.html (accessed 6 October 2009). 29. Sarah Dempster, ‘Pimping the Devil’s Whore’, The Guardian, Thursday, 20 November 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/tvandradioblog/ 2008/nov/20/devils-whore-episode-one (accessed 6 October 2008); Tom Sutcliffe, ‘Last Night’s Television’, The Independent, Thursday, 20 November 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/lastnights-television-the-devils-whore-channel-4br-dangerous-adventures-forboys-five-1026133.html (accessed 6 October 2008).

82

‘Welcome to Babylon’

30. ‘Remember the Revolution?’, The Guardian, Friday, 14 November 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/nov/14/monarchy-television (accessed 6 October 2008). 31. See http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/45938, news-comment, news-politics, devils-whore (accessed 20 October 2008). 32. Goodman-Hill is actually related to Lilburne, sixteen generations on. 33. Martine Brant and Peter Flannery, The Devil’s Whore, Company Pictures/HBO Films/Power, Episode 1, Channel Four (22 November 2008), 9 p.m. 34. The Devil’s Whore, Episode 2, Channel Four (26 November 2008), 9 p.m. 35. The Devil’s Whore, Episode 2. 36. Feisal G. Mohamed, ‘Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 120 (2005), pp. 327–40. 37. The Devil’s Whore, Episode 2. 38. The Devil’s Whore, Episode 1; Episode 2. 39. The Devil’s Whore, Episode 1. 40. The Devil’s Whore, Episode 2. 41. The Devil’s Whore, Episode 4, Channel Four (10 December 2008), 9 p.m. 42. The Devil’s Whore, Episode 4. 43. The Devil’s Whore, Episode 4.

5 The Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials James Sharpe

Underlying this chapter is a concern, shared by many academic historians, about the lack of fit between what they do (or think they do) and what the public is offered by way of a view of the past through channels of information other than the academic monograph or the scholarly article.1 This concern is one that I feel especially as a working social historian whose perspective on the early modern period has been, and still is, informed by a ‘History from Below’ approach.2 I remain perplexed as to how English history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as it is portrayed in popular novels, in Simon Schama’s television series History of Britain, in movies even as avowedly modernistic as Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) and in anything by David Starkey, presents a view of the early modern English past which is certainly thematically, and probably ideologically, conservative. Since the 1960s, two or possibly by now three generations of social and cultural historians have opened up a totally new perspective on the history of early modern England.3 As far as those controlling most of the ways in which the public gain access to history are concerned, they need not have bothered. The public is fed warmed-over version after warmed-over version of the lives of Tudor monarchs, while the experiences of their subjects remain largely unexplored in non-academic history. There are, I accept, practical difficulties here: a graph showing grain prices during a harvest failure is less immediately televisual than one of the nation’s favourite media historians striding meaningfully through yet another stately home. But there are surely some themes that could be used to open up a wider view of the early modern past. This chapter addresses one such theme, witchcraft, which constitutes an attractive focus for such an exercise. Firstly, from the viewpoint of the academy, there has been a massive flourishing of research and publication by 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 Conversely, 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, witchhunting 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 concentrate 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 industry 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 cannot 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

Häxan begins in didactic form with what is in fact essentially an onscreen lecture. But after this we soon move on to a depiction of a witch ‘in her infernal dwelling’ in 1488 (the date is not accidental: 1487 was the year of publication of that most notorious of demonological works, the Malleus Maleficarum). This ‘infernal dwelling’ contains all of the paraphernalia that we would associate with witchcraft, not least a large cauldron. The body of an executed criminal is brought there to be used for occult purposes, and Karna the witch makes a love potion for another woman, which is employed to good effect on a middle-aged monk. We are introduced to other aspects of witchcraft, and the normality of belief in witchcraft and in the devil is emphasized. As one title reads: ‘such is the Middle Ages, everywhere people see the deeds of the witch and the devil. And precisely from this, strange things happen.’ Strange things happen much more quickly as we enter the central section of the film in which (and again here there is a nod at the Malleus Maleficarum and the Papal Bull Summis Desiderantes Affectibus of 1484) ‘the pope sent travelling judges to Germany’. Attention shifts to the house of ‘Jesper the Transcriber’. Jesper is dangerously ill, and the suspicion grows (aided by the divination of a cunning man) that he has been bewitched by a poor old woman who frequents the house, Maria the weaveress. Maria is reported to the authorities, and is arrested, interrogated and tortured. She confesses, and, in a pattern that has so often been traced by witchcraft historians, implicates others; the household of Jesper is torn apart as accusation follows accusation. Maria’s confession also includes an account of going to the witches’ sabbath, which allowed Christensen to deploy his knowledge of demonological texts to good purpose. Pushing the special effects available c. 1920 to their limits, Christensen created some remarkable sequences, notably those in which witches fly on broomsticks to the sabbath. Once they arrive there, the viewer is treated to the sabbath with all the relevant details furnished by the demonologists: witches have sexual relations with the devil, the devil offers unbaptized children to be eaten, witches who have not been wicked enough are beaten by the devil, and a succession of witches come and kiss the devil’s buttocks. Maria also implicates Karna, the witch whose home was depicted earlier in the film, and in another remarkable sequence Karna and her associates are seen acting as midwives as Maria gives birth to demons fathered on her by the devil. Christensen then takes something of a detour, showing a convent full of demonically possessed nuns, has a section showing the audience the instruments of torture available to witch-hunters, and then ends the film with a sequence fetching the story up to 1922. This sits rather

86

Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials

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, probably 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 personage, 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 following 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

of witchcraft against their wives. The suspicions against Anne were revived when the family of the woman engaged to Anne’s son declared that, although she had been formally acquitted, her neighbours still suspected her.12 The story was reconfigured in 1908 by a Norwegian writer, Hans Wier-Jennsen, and translated into English as Anne Pedersdotter in 1917 by John Masefield. This dramatic work formed the basis of Dreyer’s movie. The play is set in 1574, although for reasons that remain elusive Dreyer moved the story to 1623. In the play and the film, Anne is not a widow, but rather Absalon’s second wife, nearly forty years his junior. Absalon’s son, Martin, returns after spending nine years studying abroad, and he and his new stepmother fall in love. Anne’s relationship with her husband is unsatisfactory on both a physical and an emotional level, while she is also the recipient of more or less overt hostility from Merete, Absalon’s mother, who, inter alia, compares her disparagingly with her son’s first wife. The first third or so of the film, however, focuses on the capture, trial and execution of a local witch, Herlofs Marte. As her trial unfolds, it becomes apparent that Anne’s mother, now deceased, had been accused of witchcraft, that Marte had shielded her and that Absalon had also protected her, deflected from his duty to root out Satan’s agents by his feelings for Anne. Marte now asks the clergyman for help, and when he refuses it she threatens to reveal Anne’s mother’s track record as a witch. Absalon manages to organize the trial and execution so that she is unable to do so, and, in particular, intervenes to prevent her from being tortured in order to name other witches. The theme of witchcraft is handled differently in this film than in Häxan – indeed, the film is remarkable for its low-key approach and its slow pace.13 With the capture, trial and execution of Marte we have something of the flavour of the conventional approach to witchhunting. The film opens in her cottage, with her giving another elderly woman a potion, whose efficacy she guarantees on the grounds that it was made of herbs gathered from under the gallows. The two women then hear the witch-hunters, and Marte asks, ‘Who are they hunting now?’ She is subsequently captured after a short pursuit, and interrogated and tortured, but essentially we see the end of this process – after a long panning shot of her judges she is revealed from behind, halfnaked, confessing freely to the leading questions directed at her after a session on the strappado. Her execution is also handled graphically, with her being attached to a ladder and lowered face-first onto a bonfire while a choir of young boys sings the Dies Irae.

88

Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials

More unusual, however, is the way in which the theme of witchcraft is woven into the psychology of Anne. Absalon tells her and Martin of her mother’s connections with witchcraft, and in particular that she had the power to summon the dead. Anne is immediately interested in the notion that humans can have such power. Towards the end of the film, she imagines her husband’s death in a conversation with Martin. A little later, Absalon is called out to attend to another of Marte’s judges, Laurentius, whom she cursed at her interrogation and who is now dying. On his return, after walking through a stormy night, Absalon declares himself oppressed with thoughts of death and, as the conversation develops, Anne tells him that she has often wished him dead, and also tells him of her affair with Martin, upon which he falls dead from a stroke. At Absalon’s funeral, Martin, who has promised to stand by Anne, makes a declaration, apparently sanctioned by local custom, that his father died naturally and that nobody was responsible for his death. His grandmother, however, declares that Anne killed Absalon through witchcraft; as a result Martin lets his doubts about the liaison with Anne get the better of him and denounces her. She refuses to clear herself, and confesses that she has used the Evil One’s influence to kill her husband and ensnare his son. We assume that trial, torture and execution will follow: the film ends with the singing of the Dies Irae and, in the final shot, a cross transforming into a gallows. The theme of witchcraft is dealt with much more explicitly in the Wier-Jennsen play than in Dreyer’s film. Day of Wrath was, of course, filmed and released when Denmark was under Nazi occupation, and it is possible that Dreyer decided to treat the issues of oppression and ideological pressure as lightly as possible.14 Yet the film does open up some themes that have recently come to the fore in witchcraft research, notably that of inter-generational conflict between women as a background to accusation. And the focus on how Anne, reacting to the pressures she is experiencing, comes to define herself as a witch, touches on two important problems. Firstly, it raises the issue that one of the things witchcraft was about was power. The witch’s acquisition of the ability to harm her enemies was clearly a way in which the relatively powerless, like Anne in a household dominated by her hostile motherin-law, could exercise power: in Anne’s case, the power to kill an elderly and unloved husband, the power to attract a younger lover. And, secondly, Dreyer’s plot addresses a question that is currently exercising historians but for which as yet we have no answer: whether any of those who were executed as witches during the craze actually thought themselves to be malefic witches.

James Sharpe

89

Dreyer’s Day of Wrath therefore presents a subtle, nuanced and, in certain ways, elusive depiction of early modern witchcraft. These qualities are in very short supply in relation to the third film we shall consider, Witchfinder General.15 Again, we have a real historical episode and an earlier work of fiction. The episode was England’s only large-scale witchhunt, which occurred in the eastern counties between 1645 and 1647, that resulted in perhaps 250 people being tried for witchcraft or at least subjected to initial interrogation, of whom at least 100 were executed. This outbreak is associated with the man who was involved in many of the trials, Matthew Hopkins, the ‘Witchfinder General’ of the film’s title.16 The work of fiction is a novel by Ronald Bassett, also entitled Witchfinder General, first published in 1966, and reissued by Pan Books in 1968 to coincide with the release of the film.17 The novel was written shortly before Alan Macfarlane’s major reinterpretation of English witchcraft, which includes a brief analysis of Hopkins’ witch-hunting activities.18 But Bassett is remarkably successful in catching the atmosphere of the period, setting the witch-hunts firmly in the context of the disruption caused by the English Civil War and the way in which that conflict was increasingly being conceived by contemporaries in ideological terms. The film Witchfinder General is, in fact, a very free adaptation of the novel. It seeks to personalize this particular witch-hunt by concentrating on a fictionalized version of one of those actually executed in 1645, parson John Lowes, vicar of Brandeston in Suffolk. The historical Lowes was a contentious man, an octogenarian who had previously been in conflict with his parishioners and was suspected of papist leanings.19 In the film, although the themes of conflict with his parishioners and the fears of popery are drawn on, he is portrayed as a sort of archetype of old English virtues. He has in his care a niece, Sara, who is in love with a Parliamentary soldier, Richard Margery, whose military talents raise him remarkably rapidly from private soldier through cornet to captain. After spending the night with Sara, Richard rides back to rejoin his unit, his departure being closely followed by the arrival of Matthew Hopkins, played with obvious relish by Vincent Price, and his assistant, John Stearne. Lowes is subjected to the pricking test and is walked (a standard practice in the Hopkins trials aimed at wearing suspects down), but Sara manages to obtain better treatment for him by granting sexual favours to Hopkins, and is subsequently raped by Stearne. Margery hears that Lowes is in trouble, returns to Brandeston and discovers that the priest has been executed, while Sara tells what has happened between her and the two witch-hunters. The young soldier vows vengeance, which

90

Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials

he obtains. The couple are arrested as witches at a location where the 1645 witch-hunt flourished, Framlingham, and are taken to a torture chamber. There, however, aided by two of his troopers, Richard Margery breaks loose from his chains, blinds Stearne with his spurs, and proceeds to hack at Hopkins with an axe, being prevented from killing him when one of the troopers, disgusted by this butchery, shoots Hopkins to put him out of his misery. By this stage Margery is clearly mad – he screams ‘you took him from me’ to the soldier who shot Hopkins – as is Sara: the film ends with her screams. Witchfinder General is firmly located in the British horror movie genre. Tigon British Film Production, the company that made it, was trying to set itself up as a serious rival to Hammer, and the choice of Vincent Price as Hopkins was hardly fortuitous, although it was made against the wishes of the director, Michael Reeves (indeed, relations between the director of the film and its star were strained throughout its making).20 Reeves himself is an interesting figure. A public schoolboy who seems to have been obsessed by film from his early teens, Reeves made three movies, Witchfinder General being the last, before his death at the age of twenty-five in January 1969 from a drug overdose. His two previous films, Revenge of the Blood Beast and The Sorcerers, were both horror movies. Reeves’ early death gave him something of a cult status, which has possibly helped bolster the later reputation of Witchfinder General. Part of this reputation lay in Reeves’ decision to push the film’s violence as far as possible, which provoked intervention by the British Board of Film Censors and a lengthy correspondence between Reeves and the then chairman of the Board, John Trevelyan.21 The theme of violence is further underscored by the characterization of John Stearne, Hopkins’ assistant, in reality a man, like Hopkins, on the fringes of gentility, and who was to write a vigorous defence of their witch-hunting activities.22 In the film, a dynamic is established between the would-be genteel and to some extent fastidious Hopkins, and a thuggish, sadistic Stearne, who alternates between torturing suspects and, in the best traditions of the British period horror movie, drinking and wenching in taverns. Conversely, the film benefitted from using some of the locations where Hopkins had operated: one is left with a sense of the horrors of the witch-hunt working itself out against an English pastoral background, with numerous shots of its protagonists riding through an East Anglia at its autumnal best as a pastiche folk-tune score plays. What impression, then, does Witchfinder General create about the witch-hunts? Obviously, its pretensions to historical accuracy are limited. Interestingly, in his correspondence with John Trevelyan, Reeves justified much of what the film portrayed on grounds of historical

James Sharpe

91

accuracy, although the basis for this claim remains problematic. This is best exemplified in the climactic scene, a witch-burning at Framlingham.23 Witches in England were hanged rather than burnt, but in 1645 a woman surnamed Lakeland was burnt at Ipswich, but for petty treason rather than witchcraft proper, as she had allegedly bewitched her husband to death.24 In the film, the woman shown being burned at Framlingham was named Elizabeth Clarke, portrayed as a young blonde, whereas the ‘real’ Elizabeth Clarke was an elderly and poor one-legged woman who was one of the first suspects to be interrogated by Hopkins at Manningtree in Essex.25 What is of special interest is that, in the film, Clarke’s burning involves her being attached to a ladder and lowered onto a bonfire, exactly as Herlofs Marte had been in Day of Wrath, but unlike how, to the best of my knowledge, any English witch was ever executed. Reeves had obviously seen the earlier film. Another problem lies with the motivation of Hopkins as witch-hunter, admittedly an issue that remains difficult to resolve. The basic notion in the film, and probably the most sustainable one historically, is that Hopkins’ main motivation was religious zeal. However, much is also made (as is regularly the case in popular discussions of the Hopkins trials) of Hopkins receiving fees for his activities: the film does not resolve the tension between these two motivations. But what is at least implicit in the film is that Hopkins and Stearne, despite their role as catalysts, were operating with the active support and approval of many of the inhabitants of parishes where witches were suspected, a symbiosis which is now seen as crucial by historians. The film also, like Bassett’s novel, manages to convey the impression, again crucial to the context of the trials of 1645–47, that the times were out of joint. This point is perhaps best emphasized by the frequent appearance of soldiers: fighting skirmishes, drinking in taverns, recovering after battle, trading for horses or attempting to requisition them, trying to conscript John Stearne into the Parliamentary army. And finally, and rather unexpectedly, Witchfinder General does make a direct reference to that most vexing of issues, why so many witches were women. In conversation with an innkeeper at Framlingham, Hopkins comments on how the female sex seems prone to wickedness. What conclusions can be drawn from these three films? Perhaps the first issue to tackle must be the underlying problem that cinema is fundamentally a narrative medium while history involves analysis, qualification and getting to grips with complexity.26 An ideal history of the European witch-hunts would consider the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, pre-Reformation tendencies for reform within the Christian Church and hence the history of Christian theology

92

Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials

between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries; it would consider medieval scholasticism, Aristotelian science, Neoplatonism and the scientific revolution; it would also take on board the rise of agrarian capitalism, pressures on local communities, early modern state formation and the operation of early modern judicial systems; to which might be added gender theory, the history of generational conflict and popular beliefs. Getting this into a ninety-minute or two-hour narrative movie is inherently daunting. But what is striking is that all three of the films I have examined here do, intentionally or otherwise, show an awareness that belief in witches in late medieval and early modern Europe operated on a variety of levels. This is perhaps most marked in Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, and it is worth quoting Natalie Zemon Davis, who has also written on this film: Witchcraft emerges in the film, as it does in recent scholarship, as a complex phenomenon that merges folk belief and clerical doctrine and is concerned with such daily matters as health and sexuality . . . The genius of Day of Wrath, noted by many critics, is its unfolding of a story that can be interpreted at every step in either natural or supernatural terms not only by today’s viewers but also by the men and women of the seventeenth century. Why does Martin come to Anne? Why does Absalon die? Why does Anne cast the devil as her helper? The intersection between wish, despair, and cultural belief is given remarkable narrative and visual expression.27 Witchcraft as a historical phenomenon worked at a variety of cultural and intellectual levels, and it is surely not beyond the ability of film to convey this. The next issue is how far these films, or indeed any film, depict or can depict reality. This, in turn, raises the problem of what we mean by reality, or, to revert to a possibly less problematic term, historical accuracy.28 On one level, academic historians, popular historians, the makers of films with historic themes, the makers of history programmes for television and historical novelists share a broadly similar approach: they find an interesting historical episode or topic, they study it, they reflect on the process of studying, and on the strength of all this construct a version of the past which, according to their different objectives and the conventions of the genre within which they are working, seems internally consistent and capable of being understood by their target audience.29 I am also acutely aware that the grammar of cinema is different from that of the printed word, and that both composing in a

James Sharpe

93

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 benefits 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 historically 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 importance – 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: Reality and credibility are the components of authenticity best achieved (so I have been suggesting) when films represent values, relations, and issues in a period; when they animate props and locations by their connections with historical people; and when they let the past have its distinctiveness before remaking it to resemble the present.35 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 originality, that the theme of witchcraft, possibly like all historical topics,

94

Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials

can best be made comprehensible through the reconstructed or imagined experience of a small number of people (and I write this as the author of a micro-history dealing with one specific witchcraft case, that involving the supposed bewitchment of a Berkshire girl called Anne Gunter at the beginning of the seventeenth century).36 Two of the films considered here do so explicitly: Day of Wrath, with witchcraft working itself out in the dynamics of a Lutheran pastor’s household, and Witchfinder General, with a focus on a story of doomed love set against the context of the Matthew Hopkins witch-hunts. And, as I have suggested, some of the most powerful passages of Häxan revolve around the destruction of Jesper the Transcriber’s household through witchcraft accusations. The problem seems to be how to relate these individual stories to those contextual issues I have already mentioned. And, although this device can sometimes be leaden, it can probably best be done by occasional resort to a voice-over or narrator. Thus what is probably the least intellectualized of the films under consideration here, Witchfinder General, benefits from a relatively lengthy commentary near its beginning which (however simplistically) sets the scene for those ignorant of mid-seventeenth-century English history, placing the events that follow in the context of civil war and the breakdown of normal systems of law and justice. And, lastly, what prospects do these films on witchcraft suggest for historical films dealing with the ‘ordinary’ inhabitants of the early modern period? Reflecting on this, I feel strangely comforted. Again, there are tremendous difficulties here. What we ‘know’ about these people almost always comes to us in heavily mediated forms, normally through official or legal documents, or through such loaded documentation as the pamphlet dealing with the witch trial. To this must be added the preconceptions of the film director about the period, and the immense problems of reconstructing an approximation of everyday life in the early modern period, and then making this approximation comprehensible through film. But the potential is surely there: in my more optimistic moments I look forward to a temporary cessation of the media’s obsession with Tudor monarchs, and the release of an English equivalent of The Return of Martin Guerre.37

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

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

95

history – scholarly, scientific, measured – fulfils the need for that larger History, 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. 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. 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). 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). 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. 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). 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. Kevin J. Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: Films about Medieval Europe (Jefferson and London: McFarland, 1999), p. 227. 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 rereleased 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. 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. 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 earlier 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., Encyclopedia 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 number 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 violence 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 history 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

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

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 established 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. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘ “Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead”: Film and the Challenge of Authenticity’, The Yale Review, 86 (1986–7), p. 470. Problems around historical accuracy and film figure prominently in Mark C. Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (London: Cassell, 1996). A comprehensive, if perhaps somewhat uncritical, introduction to the various 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). 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 University 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 seminal pioneering work: George Bluestone, Novels into Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). See, for example, Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’, in Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation, pp. 54–76. See, for example, Dudley Andrew, ‘Adapting Cinema to History: A Revolution 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. 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 adaptation 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 assembled 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 distinguished 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

Two days before the Epiphany in 1952, a nationalized Czechoslovak film industry released its most expensive product so far, a historical comedy in two parts, Císaˇruv ˚ pekaˇr a Pekaˇruv ˚ císaˇr/The Emperor’s Baker and the Golem.1 In the grim times of the Cold War, which were marked by compulsory manifestations of revolutionary élan, political show trials and a deepening economic crisis followed by the collapse of the currency in 1953, audiences enthusiastically welcomed this film, starring one of the most popular Czech comedians and a leading avant-garde artist, Jan Werich (1905–80).2 Many spectators still remembered a play on which the communist blockbuster was based, the extravaganza, Golem, which was produced at the Osvobozené divadlo (Liberated Theatre) in Prague in November 1931 by Werich and his friends: Jiˇrí Voskovec (1905–81), his fellow-actor and co-author; Jaroslav Ježek (1906–42), a leading Czech jazz composer; and Jindˇrich Honzl (1894–1953), a major Czech modernist theatre director.3 The impressive cast, which teemed with well-known actors and actresses of the pre-war period, and the film director, Martin Friˇc – the leading figure of pre-war Czechoslovak cinema – not only demonstrated the power of the regime but made forcefully apparent the dedication of Czech artists to the ideals of the communist revolution.4 In contrast to contemporary historical films representing a seventeenth-century peasant insurrection or the fifteenth-century Hussite movement as an upheaval of Czech national power and pride foreshadowing the communist revolution, the movie portrays the reign of the Habsburg emperor, Rudolph II (1576–1611), as a deep crisis of the Renaissance affecting all classes and spheres of society.5 It starts with a scene of military violence: the army breaking into a synagogue and demolishing it in search of the golem.6 Subsequent scenes 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 convinced 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 ‘melancholy’ 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 mirror, he does not recognize himself, and is convinced of his identity only after comparing two mirror-images of his face. Rudolph’s ‘virtual’ identity 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 contrary, it subverts not only the political power of monarchy but also the intellectual and spiritual power of art. Although Rudolph is a passionate 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 ruling ideology of socialist realism, it has also an opposite aim: to identify the crisis of imperial authority with a general decay of bourgeois values 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 polished 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 General 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 blazing 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 (Matˇej) who becomes Rudolph’s substitute. The two characters are linked by a process of parodic inversion, 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 better collect art and pursue alchemy. Matthew refuses Rudolph’s offer,

Martin Procházka 103

rendering, as any simulacrum does, ‘the order of participation, the fixity of distribution, the determination of the hierarchy impossible’.21 When Rudolph sees that Matthew cannot be persuaded, he dismisses him, saying, ‘So do what you can, and we are going to make ourselves historically impossible.’ Although this expression is taken from the vocabulary of communist propaganda (the bourgeoisie has ‘made itself historically impossible’), it also resonates with Deleuze’s description of the triumph of the simulacrum, which ‘establishes the world of . . . crowned anarchies . . . [and] assures a universal breakdown . . . but as a joyful and positive event’.22 The fight for the possession of the golem is related to these scenes as the moment of the eternal return of the secret of creation, the power over the renewal of the world as well as over its ultimate destruction. As Deleuze points out: The manifest content of the eternal return can be determined in conformity to Platonism in general. It represents . . . the manner in which chaos is organized by the action of the demiurge . . . The eternal return, in this sense, is . . . monocentric, and determined to copy the eternal . . . this manifest content marks rather the utilization and survival of the myth.23 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 Although at some moments Matthew the baker appears to be this ‘simulacrum’ and the hero of the eternal return, he ends up as a communist doctrinaire, teaching bewildered astrologers and alchemists but also enthusiastic craftsmen and maidservants a simple ideology of mutual expropriation and communal labour. This pseudo-wisdom is summed up in an inept pleonastic refrain of a communist song – ‘If everybody gives everyone everything we will have everything in common’ – which concludes the film and lends the carnival scenes a totalitarian framework. In contrast to this, the Golem play concludes with entirely

104

The Golem, or the Communist ‘What You Will’

different songs, maintaining a genuine carnival atmosphere: a drinking ditty, sung by the Emperor and based on the contemporary folklore of Prague pubs, and a boastful and parodic march of the ‘hundred per cent men’, with the clowns Prach (dust) and Popel (ashes) ending up, together with the golem, in the centre of the final tableau.25 In contrast to the carnivalesque liberation of the golem in the play, the film trivializes his esoteric meaning as symbol of a germinal living matter and a Kabbalistic mystery of divine creation to convert him finally into a useful machine, a huge oven for baking bread.26 ‘We do not want war’, says Matthew, exorcizing the golem’s destructive energy. When the clay monster starts to bake, he adds, ‘Look, folks, we are right’, confirming the authority of the communist ideology. In this way, the eternal return is converted into the repetition of the same. The violence of this act erases the last traces of the Golem play which preceded and inspired this film. In the play, the golem was not represented as a clay monster but as a young man in love with an artificial woman called Sirael, who finally decided to prefer her own creator, a young astrologer, Bˇrenˇek, to the rather clumsy and naive homunculus. This burlesque plot of the love of two artificial beings could even ˇ have been a parody of the ending of Karel Capek’s utopian drama, R.U.R. (1920). In contrast to the Golem extravaganza, in the film Sirael is no longer an artificial woman, ‘a materialised ray of moonlight’, but a buxom Czech maiden kidnapped by the foreign imposter, notorious alchemist and magician, Edward Kelley, and forced to serve as a tool of his hoax played on the Emperor – the creation of an astral being.27 Sirael, whose actual name is Catherine (Kateˇrina), falls in love with Matthew and in this way all the mysteries of the simulacrum are tamed and dissolved in cosy scenes of romance. The major obstacle to this domestic idyll, Kelley, soon acquires features of the ‘agent of imperialism’ who organizes a conspiracy of courtiers against Rudolph and Matthew ‘in the name of the civilization’ – a transparent allusion to the principles of the then recently founded NATO. Kelley’s metamorphosis is balanced by the revelation of the ‘working-class origin’ of the other principal alchemist, Scotta, who is no other than Jack the Cowherd (Honza Skoták) and who becomes Matthew’s chief ally and supporter in his peaceful communist revolution. Werich’s remake of the avant-garde extravaganza may still shock by its blatant communist populism. Moreover, it was among the first Czechoslovak movies shot in colour to be exported to the West as a

Martin Procházka 105

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 popular 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 viewers 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 budget . . . 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 Ondˇrej Suchý, Werichuv ˚ Golem a Golemuv ˚ 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 exorbitant but still the highest in the post-Second World War Czechoslovak film industry. On contemporary criticism of the film’s costs, see Suchý, Werichuv ˚ Golem, p. 104, quoting a letter of the Czechoslovak Communist 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 Tuˇcek, ‘Mˇenová reforma v mezinárodním kontextu’ (‘Currency Reform in International 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, Werichuv ˚ 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 director, 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, Werichuv ˚ Golem, p. 51). 4. Originally, the movie was directed by Jiˇrí Krejˇcík, 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 Svˇedomí/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 Krejˇcík responsible for the delays and growing expenses associated with the film. Stallich had even volunteered to direct the movie before the new director, Friˇc, signed his contract. See Suchý, Werichuv ˚ 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, charmingly 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 Jiˇrí Voskovec, untitled prefatory note to Golem, in Hry ˇ Osvobozeného divadla [Prague: Ceskoslovenský 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, mystery 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 satiˇre’ (‘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 Friˇc, 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 precursor to the working-class struggle against international imperialism. Early in 1951, the production of Císaˇruv ˚ pekaˇr was almost stopped as a result of a conflict 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 ˇ (1897–1961), and the director of the State Film Company (Ceskoslovenský státní film), Oldˇrich Macháˇcek (1902–90), argued that Císaˇruv ˚ pekaˇr would be shown on US television and thus have a much wider propagandistic impact

Martin Procházka 107

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

than Psohlavci. Finally, the ‘government’ lobby won, not because of its more pragmatic arguments, but because of purges in the Communist Party apparatus 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). 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 hiding 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). 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 drinking 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. Císaˇruv ˚ pekaˇr a Pekaˇruv ˚ císaˇr (dir. Martin Friˇc, 1951). The film was released on DVD in 2008. All quotations are translated by the author of this chapter. 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). 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, Werichuv ˚ 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. 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 distinction operates completely within the world of representation. Rather, it has to do with undertaking the subversion of this world – “the twilight of the idols” ’. The joke might have been aimed at the film’s chief opponent, the Communist Party Culture and Propaganda Secretary, Bareš. Philipp Lang of Langenfels came from a Jewish family from Prague. After his early conversion to Christianity, he became a choirboy in the orchestra of Ferdinand, the Archduke of Tyrolia (1529–95). He married a maid

108

The Golem, or the Communist ‘What You Will’

of the Archduchess, became a valet of the Archduke and was knighted in 1582. In 1592 he was appointed Lieutenant of Innsbruck Castle. He was forgiven his intrigues, including the forgery of his master’s signature and seal. After the Archduke’s death, he returned to Prague, where he rose to prominence at Rudolph’s court and in 1603 became his First Chamberlain. The Emperor bestowed on him enormous wealth (a domain in Bavaria and about 200,000 florins worth of gifts) and a number of offices. Finally, Lang fell into disfavour when he started to support the Emperor’s brother, Matthias, in 1607. After Rudolph had been deprived of the title ‘Roman Emperor’ and the Empire had been partitioned, Lang died in prison. 14. In the Golem extravaganza this arbitrariness is, together with indeterminacy, a principal feature of the representation of universal history, including the formation of the Earth and the emergence of life. The comical dialogue in Scene 7 (entitled ‘Sub specie aeternitatis’) is enacted by Werich and Voskovec in the roles of two clowns called Prach and Popel (their names, meaning ‘dust’ and ‘ashes’, parody the Christian view of the transitory and vain nature of human life). These ‘ephemeral beings’, with ‘universally painted white faces unconnected with any character, rank or role’, embody the ‘heterotopia’ of theatre: ‘they have originated somewhere between the stage apron and the props storage room, in this privileged territory hovering outside time and space’ (Werich and Voskovec, prefatory note to Golem, p. 95). In contrast to the Emperor in the film, the clowns in the play are rather abstract, modernist figures, resembling in some respect Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot. However, unlike Beckett’s clowns, they also play traditional farcical roles of milites gloriosi, commending themselves to the audience as ‘hundred per cent men’ and ‘roaring, clattering and vociferating with . . . boastful complacency’ (Werich and Voskovec, prefatory note to Golem, pp. 95–6). Moreover, they have distinct Shakespearean ancestors, especially Sir Toby and Sir Andrew and even Falstaff (Werich and Voskovec, Golem, p. 133). Their acting and dialogues are characterized by conflicting traits of philosophical absurdity based on modern science: cosmic history is seen as a ‘chaos’ of events, where people are reduced to ‘protoplasm’ and the Earth to the ‘hot gas on the bummel’ (Golem, pp. 158, 157). Crude farce and features of Shakespearean comedy produce a kind of theatrical ‘heteroglossia’ which undermines both the contemporary intellectual views of reality, influenced by quantum physics or structuralist linguistics, and the authoritarian, nineteenth-century primordialist views of history, those celebrating the ancient, glorious past as an essence of national identity. In the film, these features are suppressed: science is seen in narrowly practical terms (as a problem of the control and use of nuclear energy), and the representation of a historical crisis is dissolved in the utopia of an idyllic non-violent people’s revolution. 15. Scotta arrived in Prague in 1590. According to C. J. S. Thompson, Alchemy and Alchemists (New York: Dover, 2002), he was a ‘mysterious individual’ and ‘was said to have discovered a great secret’ (p. 154). After escaping from Prague, he went to Coburg, ‘where he managed to dupe the Duchess with the story of the discovery of the Stone’ (p. 154). 16. The word ‘shem’ refers to the Hebrew formula ‘Shem ha-Mephorash’ – ‘the 72-fold name of God contained in Exodus 14: 19–21’ (David Godwin,

Martin Procházka 109 Godwin’s Cabalistic Encyclopaedia [Woodbury: Llewellyn, 1999], p. 283). While in the film the inscription is on a small ball, which can be inserted into the hole in the golem’s forehead, in the play the letters are engraved on the artificial teeth of Rabbi Loew stolen by the alchemist, Scotta, together with the golem, from the attic of the synagogue. The representation of the ‘shem’ in the play thus undermines the authority of the inscription, connected in the Kabbalistic tradition with the world called sefirot, the world of names or letters (not only written but also ‘pronounced’ or even ‘thought’). According to Moshe Idel, the late fifteenthcentury Rabbi Yohanan ben Isaac Alemanno, whose teachings might have been seminal for Rabbi Loew, saw the artificial anthropoid as ‘constituted by letters, astral forces and super-astral form’ (Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid [Albany: SUNY Press, 1990], p. 172). The creation, called also ‘the emanation of the world sefirot’, was made possible by means of the combination of letters: ‘according to the 231 gates, which include 462 houses, one with all [of the letters] and all with one and so . . . when you will take any part of the emanation, you will find there all the emanation . . . by the means of which all the existence emerged and is created ex nihilo’ (Rabbi Joseph ibn Zayyah’s commentary Zeror ha-Hayyim, MS Montefiore 318, fol. 64a–b, quoted by Idel, Golem, p. 161). In the Golem play, this esoteric interpretation of the artificial man as a symbol of divine creation (see Idel, Golem [p. 173], who refers to an untitled treatise by Alemanno, MS Paris BN 849, fol. 17b) is parodied by connecting the golem with the basic animal and technological aspects of human nature grotesquely represented by the artificial teeth of Rabbi Loew. Nonetheless, this parody is not so far from the Kabbalist teaching as might appear: according to Idel, the golem ‘serves the role of a silent witness of the creativity inherent in the tools which served God and men’ (Golem, p. 265). In contrast to the play, the possession of the ‘shem’ in the film is taken seriously and is equated with the problem of the control and use of atomic energy and the danger of nuclear war. While the play makes fun of the esoteric lore in a ballet scene entitled ‘A Kabbalistic Passacaglia’ (Werich and Voskovec, Golem, pp. 117–21) and represents the golem, among others, as a betrayed, jealous lover in a popular broadside ballad, the film shows him, fully in keeping with communist propaganda, as a destructive monster stolen by ‘the imperialist war-mongers’. (For the ballad, see Scene 4’s ‘The Dreadful Song of Golem’, a translation of which can be found at http://jicha.jan.sweb.cz/strasliva.html). In other words, while the Golem play demystifies the golem, making him a representation of common human qualities, the film represents him as a secret of power and control in the bipolar world of the Cold War. Thus, Werich’s golem develops from the parody of general humanity to a caricature of post-World War II visions (and simulacra) of global power. Herrman Christoph Russworm (1565–1605) was a Protestant nobleman from Thuringia who, in 1585, converted to Catholicism and in 1589 became a chief bodyguard of the French maréchal, Christophe de Bassompierre (1547–96). He was condemned to death for several crimes, including the murder and rape of a young noblewoman, but he managed to escape and

110

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

The Golem, or the Communist ‘What You Will’ joined the armies of Rudolph II. He gained a reputation as an experienced and intrepid soldier in the campaign against the Turks, led by Rudolph’s brother, Matthias. In 1596, he captured the Hatvan Castle in Upper Hungary and became one of the generals of the imperial forces. In 1598, he was imprisoned on the basis of the false accusation of his chief enemy, Field Marshal Adolf of Schwarzenberg (1551–1600). He again escaped from prison and persuaded Rudolph of his innocence. In 1601, he was appointed field marshal and commander of another campaign against the Turks, where he distinguished himself by a great victory at Budapest, having defeated a much larger enemy army. In 1605, he became the victim of a conspiracy between two Italian officers, Giovanni Giacomo (1565–1626) and Francesco di Belgioioso (1572–1605), who were in league with the aristocratic family of Lobkowitz (blaming Russworm for the suicide of one of its members) and possibly also the First Chamberlain, Philipp Lang. The Emperor sentenced him to death and he was publicly beheaded in the Old Town Square in Prague. In the film, Russworm is the only victim of the golem’s destructive energy. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 141. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 262. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 262. From 1599 onwards the Danish scholar Tycho Brahe was the imperial astronomer and astrologist. He tried to combine the Ptolemaic and Copernican hypotheses of the geocentric and heliocentric universe. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 263. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 263. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp. 263–4. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 264. Werich and Voskovec, Golem, pp. 182–4. Kabbalistic mysticism was aimed at ‘the elaboration of the theurgical meaning of human activities’ (Idel, Golem, p. 277) and the anthropomorphic understanding of God. Whereas in the Golem play this meaning is parodied and secularized, in the conclusion to the film it is erased: the mystical anthropomorphism is transformed into a functionalist representation of the ‘collective body’ of the working class. Werich and Voskovec, Golem, p. 95. Edward Kelley (1555–97) came to Prague from Poland in 1584, together with Dr John Dee (1527–1609). He established himself at the imperial court and was made a member of the Czech nobility, but was arrested and imprisoned in 1591 because of a conflict with an imperial official Georg Hunkler, who had accused him of deceit. Although he managed to escape from his first prison, the Kˇrivoklát Castle, he was arrested again and imprisoned in the castle of Most. After another abortive attempt at escape, he was finally pardoned by Rudolph but had to stay in the castle, where he also completed Tractus de lapide philosopharum/A Treatise on the Philosopher’s Stone in 1597 shortly before his death. Kelley’s hoax is staged as a great spectacle for the Emperor and his court. Invoking the mystical world sefirot and using a number of other Kabbalistic terms in his magical mumbo-jumbo, the alchemist debases esoteric lore, making it a ruse of ‘international imperialism’. As an anonymous

Martin Procházka 111 contemporary reviewer pointed out, although Kelley’s intrigues may deceive ‘those in power’, they cannot mislead ‘the sound and clear reason of the people’ (Kino, 31 January 1952, quoted in Suchý, Werichuv ˚ Golem, p. 155). 28. According to Suchý, between 1952 and 1955 the film was shown in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Colombia, Denmark, France, Iceland, India, Italy, Lebanon, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, the UK, Uruguay, the US and Venezuela (Werichuv ˚ Golem, p. 161). 29. ‘The Emperor’s Baker and More Golem Movies’, Black Hole, http://www. blackholereviews.blogspot.com/2007/04/emperors-baker-1951-and-othergolem.html (accessed 22 April 2007). 30. ‘The Emperor’s Baker and More Golem Movies’, Black Hole, http://www. blackholereviews.blogspot.com/2007/04/emperors-baker-1951-and-othergolem.html (accessed 22 April 2007). For other commendatory opinions pointing out the visual nature of the film’s humour, see Dave Sindelar, ‘Cisaruv pekar a Pekaruv cisar (1951)’, Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings, http://scifilm.org/musing2357.html (accessed 24 January 2008).

7 Horrible Shakespearean Histories: Performing the Renaissance for and with Children Kate Chedgzoy

What happens to public knowledge about Renaissance history and culture when it is transformed into a mode of performance aimed at children, or staged to include their participation? How do children engage with such performances, and what do they learn about the Renaissance in doing so? How do the versions of this period offered to children both resemble and differ from those circulating in more formal modes of historical knowledge, and in cultural mediations of history aimed at adults? To what extent are children able to appropriate those discourses in order to produce their own knowledge about the past? This chapter asks how the critical issues addressed in this book are transformed and illuminated by studying the ways in which the history of the early modern period is mediated to children through performance. By examining two contrasting versions of the Renaissance produced for consumption by children as theatre audiences, TV viewers and participants in dramatic workshops, I explore how discourses of the past are configured for children. In the first half of the chapter, I consider the representation of the Renaissance in several manifestations of Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories series.1 Extremely popular with its target audience of children aged approximately seven to twelve, this body of books and performancebased material (including a stage adaptation and two TV series) is produced by adults for consumption by children, in a context that combines commercial imperatives with educational aspirations. Like other popular aspects of children’s culture such as Harry Potter and Doctor Who, materials from the Horrible Histories phenomenon have been incorporated into children’s play – I have observed children in the eightto ten-year-old age group drawing on the books’ fascination with the 112

Kate Chedgzoy

113

gruesome and revolting aspects of life in the past, or picking up motifs from the TV series, as resources for their improvised games in the playground. Studying the Horrible Histories phenomenon thus allows us to consider both how the past is packaged for children’s consumption, and how those youthful consumers actively reshape the materials made available to them. In the second half of the chapter, I look from a different angle at the ways in which children fashion their own understanding of Renaissance culture and participate in the production of a performance of Renaissance history, by reflecting on a workshop production of an abbreviated version of Macbeth staged with a group of ten- and eleven-year-old children in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the spring of 2008.2 Taking place within schools, yet structured as an exception to normal school routines, the workshop process was tightly controlled and overseen by adults. Yet, at the same time, it created a temporary space within the school year which enabled students to bring their own understandings of the Renaissance to bear on their re-creation of a celebrated text by a playwright who is closely identified with that prestigious cultural moment. Like the Horrible Histories, the workshops played across the boundaries of high and popular culture, education and entertainment, to form a liminal space where children could encounter and produce performance-based representations of Renaissance history. Formally, generically and contextually disparate, these two examples nevertheless have a good deal in common. Both engage the same age group, involve a range of performance modes and address different historical contexts. Both occupy distinctively liminal positions in relation to formal educational structures and child-directed cultures of entertainment. Though they are inevitably positioned in relation to current educational agendas and imperatives, in ways I will elaborate on below, nonetheless neither the Horrible Histories nor Chris Heckels’ workshops are driven primarily by them, and both portray themselves as in some ways oppositional to or subversive of mainstream educational agendas. The explicitly pedagogic purpose of these versions of the Renaissance crucially distinguishes attempts to film or perform Renaissance history for children from versions of the period produced for an unmarked, but presumptively adult, audience. Films, TV dramas and historical novels that take Renaissance history as their subject matter may aspire to a certain cultural cachet based on the idea that they are somehow improving, but are not usually self-consciously didactic – qualities which contribute to the identification of such texts as middlebrow.3 Children are less susceptible than adults to the middlebrow agendas implicit in this

114

Horrible Shakespearean Histories

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 performances 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 probably 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 interest. Questions of how violence might best be represented to the young, however, and the consequences of portraying it, are fraught with controversy. 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 children’s imaginative play.4 How violence is represented in these texts, how it inflects the politics of their engagement with themes of historical conflict 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 selfconsciously 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

where it took place when I observed it – for instance, I witnessed the workshops in an inner-city location, and the director, Chris Heckels, has found that children in rural schools respond rather differently to the same programme of activities. Although the Horrible Histories books have been marketed around the world and widely translated, the performance versions on which I concentrate are the products of distinctively British practices of repertory theatre and subsidised TV production. This local focus illuminates some specific aspects of the British relationship to the national past. However, the underlying issues – concerning children’s learning in school and beyond, their engagement with representations of the past and the processes by which they make sense of such representations – have wider resonance. A comparative study of the interactions of educational imperatives, the repackaging of the past for youthful consumers and children’s own cultures in other national contexts would be instructive.

I 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 Company’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 meritorious 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 curriculum. This is partly just a marketing strategy of course – school groups are good business – but it also speaks to a larger anxiety about the relationship 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 educational 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 Histories phenomenon began as a series of non-fiction books written by Terry Deary and illustrated primarily by Martin Brown, with some contributions by other illustrators.7 The first books to appear were The Terrible Tudors and The Awesome Egyptians, published in 1993, and at the current 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-uponAvon). 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 publications 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 Television 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

Kidnapped and critically acclaimed contemporary children’s novels – for example, David Almond’s Skellig. The stage production of The Terrible Tudors has played more or less continually to full houses around the UK, under the auspices of the Touring Tales Theatre Company. It is almost certainly coming soon to a theatre near you, and not just if you live in the UK: at the time of writing in December 2009, the BSC’s Horrible Histories touring company is performing to the anglophone expatriate community in Dubai. The Horrible Histories productions draw on many of the theatrical resources common to theatre for children: a small cast, each of whom moves in and out of many roles on stage; a very simple set (the stage is typically bare, but back-projection is used); judicious employment of a small number of props; and plenty of song, storytelling, terrible jokes and audience participation. What kind of understanding of and engagement with history is being elicited from the youthful audiences at these performances? With their emphasis on violence, disorder and excrement, the Horrible Histories could in one sense be described as history from below for children. Though this emphasis is fairly novel in the presentation of historical information and narrative for a young readership, in terms of the history of British comic writing and popular history it is a very familiar vein in most ways. The books and spin-off productions have an irreverent attitude towards the past, familiar in British popular historical discourse since W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s 1066 and All That.10 They mix a focus on high politics with snippets from social history, relying heavily on anecdote and factual information presented in trivia mode, and there is almost nothing about sources or historical method – aspects of historical discourse that are now key to the way history is taught in schools to children of an age able to enjoy the Horrible Histories. Learning about the past is thus presented as a matter of acquiring information rather than engaging with analysis or interpretation. One exception to this tendency can be found in the stage productions, which share a format in which three of the performers vow to demonstrate the utter vileness of their subjects, while the fourth argues that they did in fact have some redeeming features. It would be generous to claim that this process dramatizes the movement of scholarly debate about history, but it does at least stage the importance of debate and informed opinion, rather than the gathering of facts as trivia. The understanding of the historical process that shapes volumes dealing with British history is fundamentally monarchical. In the period with which the present volume is concerned, the Terrible Tudors are followed by the Slimy Stuarts. In the case of the Tudors, the focus in the

118

Horrible Shakespearean Histories

TV version is entirely on Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, the latter presented as a subject of celebrity culture in a series of recurrent skits concerning her appearance in ‘Oh Yea!’ magazine – a parody of the celebrity gossip magazine OK!. A voice-over that offers nuggets of information about royal daily life – that Elizabeth suffered from smallpox, for instance, or that in bathing four times a year she revealed unusual enthusiasm for personal hygiene – is paired with a series of close-ups that present Elizabeth’s body as filthy, scarred and repulsive. By constructing one of the few powerful women of British history in this way, the programme objectifies her as a spectacularly grotesque body. Coupled with the focus in the stage and TV representations of Henry VIII on his proliferation of wives, rather than on the Reformation, the Act of Union with Wales or any other significant political action, this means that there is no space to present women as historical agents in the Horrible Histories’ version of the Renaissance. In addition, this elite, monarchical emphasis is somewhat at odds with Terry Deary’s declared position, which claims to value social history and making a personal connection with the past more highly than aristocratic trivia: ‘Monarchs don’t matter much – peasants matter more. You and I can’t relate to a psychopath like Henry VIII.’11 Yet monarchs loom large in the books, TV and theatre versions of the Horrible Histories. Though ‘peasants’ as a class do feature, it is usually as the victims of a wider social process – a heap of bodies in a wheelbarrow illustrating the impact of plague; a country yokel surprised to have a chamber pot emptied over his head from a window as he wanders the streets of London. Ordinary people are invoked as a social group, and are not unjustly shown to be history’s ‘losers’, but they are rarely accorded the dignity of individualization, and so we are not often invited to ‘relate’ to them as we are to aristocrats, royals and people of achievement. Though Deary is very interested in story as a means of eliciting a thoughtful and emotional engagement with the past, in fact story is rarely used in any manifestation of the Horrible Histories to encourage children to identify with humble folk. This absence is perhaps surprising, given the success of micro-history in revivifying the lives of ordinary people for adult readers of popular historical writing. In terms of content and historical method, then, the Horrible Histories are rather old-fashioned – to be more generous, one might say that they draw on tropes that have proven their enduring popularity. What of the way in which they represent the past? The question of how they depict violence is pertinent here, because it is pervasive in so many of the stories and events featured. There is some spectacular staging of violence in the stage version of The Terrible Tudors, often in a

Kate Chedgzoy

119

rather pantomimic, quasi-comic mode – such as when the 3D glasses issued to allow the second half to be staged in ‘Bogglevision’ create the illusion that Mary Queen of Scots’ newly lopped head is hurtling into the audience. But, as this example suggests, this violence tends to be represented in a distinctively theatrical mode which is non-realistic and highly conventional. What that means for its effect on audiences is of course a very complex question, as testified by the extensive critical debate on the stage history of Titus Andronicus, to take just one example. Debates about the impact of representations of violence on child viewers have tended to focus on realistic modes such as Hollywood film, but the staging of violence in live theatre can raise a different set of issues. Let me take just one example from The Terrible Tudors. At one point, the audience are invited to join in a football chant reciting what happened to Henry VIII’s wives, with graphic hand actions illustrating the old mnemonic ‘divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived’.12 Listening to – let alone participating in – such collective gloating over violence against women, who are not even named in this particular version, was not a comfortable theatrical experience; not least because I was aware that many of the children around me had no sense at all of why it might conceivably be troubling. One reading of this moment might argue that part of the problem is specifically to do with this pantomimic style of performance, which demands that the audience participate in chant and thereby endorse the violence – there is no room for questioning, resistance or critique. Conversely, it might be proposed that it is precisely because of its sociopathic trivialization of his marital career that the football chant moment works to prevent the audience from ‘relating to’ Henry VIII – if, by Deary’s use of that term, we are to understand the portrayal of a character as someone with whom we might identify, someone who seems to be a person like us. The emphasis in the Horrible Histories books tends to be on the otherness of the times and places described, and this is a useful complement to the stress on empathy and identification that often characterizes school-based approaches to the study of the past; but at moments like this, historical distancing slides too far into a failure to acknowledge that, however different from us, the people who inhabit the landscapes of the past were indeed people too. The CBBC TV series likewise cannot resist foregrounding the same aspect of Henry’s career but handles it quite differently, in a song sung by Henry that invites a more sympathetic evaluation of his motives. Filmed dancing alone in the gardens of Hampton Court Palace, and repeatedly framed in close-up, Henry lugubriously tries to justify his treatment of his ‘six sorry wives’ as a reasonable, if regrettable, response

120

Horrible Shakespearean Histories

to their unreasonable behaviour or personal failings. He is presented as a sinister and threatening figure, drawing on codes familiar from other visual representations of ‘bad guys’ to construct him as the psychopath Deary invokes. One episode of the Horrible Histories TV series demonstrates an unusually complex and multilayered approach to the representation of the past, in a scene that sets out to challenge Shakespeare’s dramatic characterization of Richard III as an equally psychopathic figure. Rehearsing the actor who is to play Richard, Shakespeare is accosted by the ghost of the historical Richard, who accuses him of refashioning history in his plays and misrepresenting the past. A relatively simple opposition between Shakespeare’s fictions and the ‘real facts’ about Richard is set up, but the scene does convey something of the processes that can lead to the presentation of complex realities as simple historical facts. The relationship between fact and fiction was also constantly foregrounded in the workshop-style production of Macbeth that forms my second case study. This privileging of Shakespeare as the final example in the structure of my chapter reflects his prominence in staging, filming and otherwise representing the Renaissance to youthful audiences. This imbalance raises questions about the distinctive – and in some ways problematic – status of Shakespeare in the British education system, and more generally in popular culture, revealing as it does how he often functions as a kind of embodiment of, or proxy for, the culture and history of the Renaissance.13 A workshop focused on Macbeth may be considered an odd choice of case study for an essay on the filming and performing of Renaissance history, but in a context where Shakespeare comes to signify Renaissance history, the disjunction between the project of this book and the play’s dramatization of an episode from medieval Scottish history is less awkward than it is symptomatic.

II The workshop involved twenty-nine students in their final year of primary education from a consortium of six local schools, and was funded under the government-sponsored (and highly contested by teachers, parents and educationalists) ‘Gifted and Talented’ scheme, which is designed to provide additional educational challenges for the most able pupils and thereby aims to contribute to a culture of higher aspirations for all in schools.14 The schools involved are located in a ring of inner suburbs in Newcastle which include both some of the leafiest and most

Kate Chedgzoy

121

affluent, and some of the most deprived and socially excluded, wards in the city. The children therefore came from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Taking up the whole of a school day each week for a period of six weeks, the workshops and the production that concluded 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 startingpoints 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 culture. 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) engagingly 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 knowledge 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 session, 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

articulation of the desire to communicate with the dead that motivates not only scholars like Stephen Greenblatt, but also Horrible Histories author Terry Deary. The children agreed that ‘he spoke funny’, and that his plays were written in old English, revealing a sense of Shakespeare and his moment as distant and alien. Most groups recognized that moment as one that might fairly be described as Elizabethan; one group suggested Shakespeare was Elizabeth’s favourite author, another had him down as a Victorian. Some powerful myths were in circulation: a rambling tale was told of a plot to kill Elizabeth foiled by Shakespeare (a story that features in several novels for children, such as Geoffrey Trease’s Cue for Treason [1941]), and one group confidently asserted, ‘Most people don’t believe he wrote his plays.’ Chris Heckels prepared her own scripts for the production, using as a starting-point the thirty-minute scripts prepared for the Shakespeare Schools Festival (SSF).16 This was partly because she felt that the SSF scripts were overly truncated, and she wanted to expand them to a running time closer to forty minutes, but she also made editorial changes. In the case of Richard III, for instance, she felt that women’s roles had been cut disproportionately heavily from the Shakespeare Schools Festival version, and reinstated excised material to give more time to roles such as Margaret. All sessions were cast in a race- and gender-blind way, so the concern here was not with giving the girls a chance to perform in significant roles. Rather, Chris Heckels articulated her priority as being to ensure that the children did not get a perspective on Shakespeare and on the historical events and processes refracted in his plays that sidelined women’s roles. Nevertheless, she acknowledged that her choice of plays was itself inflected by concerns about gender – girls are willing, in her experience, to tackle plays of any genre, whereas boys of ten and eleven shy away from the romantic comedies and late plays (from anything, indeed, with a plot that involves courtship and other soppiness). Questions of sexual politics were not explored in the process of workshopping and staging either play, however, except on the very rare occasions when they were posed by child participants. This is in part because analysis and interpretation of such aspects of the plays were not a primary concern: the focus was more directly on enabling the children to gain sufficient understanding of the action of the plays to enable their theatrical realization. Drama offers an opportunity for boys and girls to interact with each other in ways not constrained by the strongly normative gender expectations that inform many of their self-directed activities and preferences for reading material and screen viewing at this age. I mentioned above my observation

Kate Chedgzoy

123

of playground games drawing on material from the Horrible Histories: it is notable that such play likewise involves both boys and girls, and that the Horrible Histories are exceptional among cultural materials directed to children in this age group in the strength of their appeal to both genders. Both Richard III and Macbeth deal directly with themes of national conflict and crisis, and both of them are of course permeated by violence, both in the stage action, where child characters are often the victims of staged acts of violence, and in the dramatic language, in which metaphors of childhood are often used to convey vulnerability and aggression. And both draw on historical sources, re-presenting the history of earlier moments in response to current political agendas at the time they were first staged. While Macbeth does not directly depict the history of the period 1500–1660, then, it is to a considerable extent shaped by it and reflects and comments on it, as numerous recent critical studies on the play’s engagement with post-union British politics as a refraction of medieval Scottish history attest.17 The workshops introduced the children to the idea of making rather than consuming live performance, giving them an opportunity to share their ideas about what performance and Shakespeare involve. Chris Heckels created a sense of the seriousness of this shared undertaking by inviting the children to think of themselves as actors embarking on a new production and thereby handing them a certain amount of agency in the remaking of Shakespeare’s play for a new audience. In the early sessions, where the focus was on building the children’s knowledge and understanding of the play, and their capacity to engage with it in specifically performance-oriented ways, Chris Heckels gradually took them through the story of the play, asking them questions to confirm details and contribute ideas, and pausing to invite two or three of them at a time to act out key moments. As the sessions went on, the number of hands waving when she asked for volunteers increased, particularly when witches were called for – and boys as well as girls were eager to play the witches. Assigned to small groups to pool their knowledge and ideas about Macbeth, they proved to be surprisingly confident and accurate in the knowledge they could bring to the theatrical project. The most succinct account ran like this: Mac beth He’s a man He has a wife

124

Horrible Shakespearean Histories

He killed lots of people He’s Scottish There’s witches in the play Its Verry VIOLENT (Death) 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: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Macbeth wants to be king he meets witches he kills loads of people to become king and his wife kills herself he kills king kings heirs run away he gets beaten by mc duff He was a Scottish Lord He kills his best friend and his best friends fammily He starts seeing ghosts kills king to become king gets killed himself then old kings hier comes back 9. he was Scotish 10. the witches predict he will be deffeted when the trees move and the man wasn’t born by a woman In their comments on the pervasive violence of the story, the children combined an awareness of the moral questions posed by Macbeth’s behaviour with a pleasure in the licit, contained acting-out of violence that seemed to me to derive in part from the conjunction of the kinds of violent imaginative play many of them (especially boys) enjoy in the playground, with an adult-endorsed, highly prestigious activity. Thus a girl with the almost-Shakespearean name of Paris who played Lady Macbeth with some hesitation, but growing confidence and certainty, through the sequence of Duncan’s murder and its aftermath sat down with a big grin at the end of her performance, declaring ‘that was good’. And indeed it was: there was a clarity, directness and energy to the way these children engaged in the serious play of acting out moments of intense violence that was very impressive. What was lacking, in my opinion, was a forum in which they could reflect on and process what they thought about that staged violence, and more broadly about the crises and conflicts of the play they were taking part in, in which both

Kate Chedgzoy

125

child characters and metaphors of childhood loom so large in situations of cruelty and violence. The sessions provided no space for such questions to be addressed, and I have no way of knowing what the children made of the material they were exposed to in their own subsequent conversations and play.

III The multifaceted visible and verbal presence of children in this version of Macbeth – as performers, and as important aspects of the script being performed – is in striking contrast to the Horrible Histories. In the latter, both the TV programmes and stage performances address children, but only adults appear in them. This does not seem to detract from their popularity: children are used to being presented with a version of the world in which adults are front and centre. It does, though, seem like a regrettably missed opportunity to invite a youthful audience to engage with the history of childhood, particularly given Terry Deary’s own emphasis on his desire to help children establish a subjective connection with the past. Such a connection was powerfully, if obliquely, established by the Macbeth workshops, enabled by the centrality to the performance process of the children’s own participation in interpreting and realizing the play, understood as script rather than work of literature. Yet children’s enthusiastic and playful responses to the Horrible Histories incorporate their version of the past into the culture of childhood, nuancing the adult-authored text in the act of reception. Like Chris Heckels’ Macbeth workshops, the Horrible Histories show that, given the opportunity, children can be sophisticated and active consumers and producers of fictions about Renaissance history.

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 violence in children’s play, see Penny Holland, We Don’t Play with Guns

126

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Horrible Shakespearean Histories Here: War Weapon and Superhero Play in the Early Years (Maidenhead and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003). See http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk (accessed 30 December 2009). See http://www.blackpoolgrand.co.uk/shows/1/1194/Horrible-Histories-THETERRIBLE-TUDORS.htm (accessed 15 September 2008). 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. 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. 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. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London: Methuen, 1930). 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). For a still from the show illustrating this moment, see http://www.blackpool grand.co.uk/media/6938_Tudors1.JPG (accessed 30 December 2009). See, for example, Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). See http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/giftedandtalented (accessed 30 December 2009). See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0974729/plotsummary (accessed 30 December 2009). See http://www.ssf.uk.com. 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

After a preview season in 1996, Shakespeare’s Globe opened officially in June 1997 with two productions: The Winter’s Tale, directed by David Freeman, and Henry V, directed by Laurence Olivier’s son, Richard, starring artistic director Mark Rylance in the title role. While the modern dress production of The Winter’s Tale was the first performance to be seen by critics, reviewers invariably commented on the two opening productions as a pair. The Elizabethan costumes and setting, plus the allmale cast of Henry V, gained much greater critical attention and approval than the opening production. This tendency to favour and single out the ‘original practices’ productions as indicative of the ‘real’ work of the Globe will be considered here. In this chapter, I chart the creative approach undertaken in this production and its critical reception in order to illustrate how the Globe Theatre has instigated a serious and sophisticated debate about representing the Renaissance. The aim, then, is to evaluate not the artistic quality of this production of Henry V but rather its effectiveness in posing new and complex questions about our understanding of the past and how it can usefully be represented today on stage for a live audience. While the most celebrated and widely known adaptations of Henry V are on film, I would argue that the single point of view of the audience in this medium works against the fabric of this complex play. In both the Olivier (1944) and Branagh (1989) films, the audience is guided, through the work of the director and the camera, to identify with the great king at the story’s centre. In Branagh’s version, the angle of the camera in the St Crispian’s Day speech, in particular, shifts from the adoring audience of men about to go into battle to the view, from the King’s perspective, of his compliant subjects. There is little doubt in this portrayal, with 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 established 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 members – 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 meaningmaking is shared, this new/old building has proved provocative. In its opening season, this theatre forced recognition of just how passive audiences 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 underpinning 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

intersection of the culmination of the controversial Globe project and the long-standing relationship between the play and a vision of British identity as articulated through conquest and great leadership. In order to demonstrate the impact of this production, I look at critical accounts of it, which reveal as much about the position of the critics as they do about the effectiveness of the performance. I focus in particular on the critical reception of the building itself and the audience interaction it developed. The ideals of Renaissance individualism are articulated in a physical way in this space that silently (and at times not so silently) challenges the much more modern concept of individualism based on the rights and freedoms of corporate capitalism, but also on class-based ideas about culture in general and Shakespeare in particular. This theatre presents a real challenge to audience expectations for those who have developed their ideas about the consumption of culture through viewing twentieth-century film, television and more conventional theatre performance. To indicate the importance of this production within the history of the Globe Theatre project, it is essential to recall that when the theatre first opened there were many who wanted the venture to fail. Sam Wanamaker had spent nearly thirty years of his life trying to make his dream a reality and sadly did not live to see this opening season. Some critics poured scorn on this American actor’s vision of a popular working theatre along the Thames, branding it a theme park or monument before the theatre had even staged its first performance. Indicative of the weary and aloof attitude with which Shakespeare’s Globe was first received is an article by Bryan Appleyard who, writing in The Independent in 1995 before the theatre was even completed, says: From its inception this project seems to have been specifically designed as a provocation or rebuke towards English cultural attitudes. Shakespeare is, after all, more than just the greatest creative artist we, or perhaps humanity, has produced. He is also an embodiment of England. What you do to him, you do to us.3 The assuredness of this assessment of the project is quite breathtaking, but it is this tone that helps us to remember the pre-performance attitudes towards this venture. It also helps to remind us how greatly both times and attitudes have changed in the past decade. Few journalists now in this destabilized post-9/11, Iraq war, credit crunch world would put forward a position of such distempered intolerance and national confidence. The relationship between Shakespeare, British identity and ‘foreign’ control is no longer a matter for casual mockery.

130

Shakespeare’s Globe: History Refashioned

So the Globe’s intervention in interpreting Shakespeare’s theatrical history was seen as a provocation, and added to this was the choice of the play that is most closely bound up with British identity, Henry V. This play has at its centre both a critique of British cultural attitudes and a celebration of the creative process of retelling history on the stage. The critical response to this opening season tackled head-on the conflicting objectives of this new building, both as a site for learning about the past and as an active participant in creating a new vision of the past in the present. Shakespeare’s Globe did not, as W. B. Worthen suggests, just ‘reflect a desire to see performance releasing original Shakespearean meanings’.4 It was not simply to be an exercise in re-imagining the past. Mark Rylance as artistic director was also very keen to think about how this theatre could reinvigorate the theatre of the present and could instigate a process of broadening the interpretive horizons of these plays, locked as they were at the time into the conceptual understanding that characterized ‘Directors’ Theatre’. It is interesting to chart the extent to which reviewers of Henry V in 1997 invested themselves in this theatre’s potential for social and theatrical change. Appleyard’s notion of a challenge or provocation can be read in these initial responses. The description of the opening of The Winter’s Tale seems to lean on national and cultural stereotypes which, as Paul Prescott points out, pit British amateurism and seriousness against American polish and superficiality.5 Charles Spencer writing in the Daily Telegraph says: ‘After all the years of delay and frustration, the Globe Theatre opened for its first full season yesterday. In characteristic British fashion, it wasn’t quite ready.’6 Michael Billington in The Guardian moans: 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 So English anxieties about the potential embarrassment the theatre might cause are aired first. This is followed, however, by genuine excitement about the potential impact of the venture. Charles Spencer goes on to say: ‘It is the most exciting theatre in London, mysterious yet familiar, epic yet capable of extraordinary intimacy.’ 8 Robert Butler’s excitement is tempered by his clear vision of the conflicting demands of presenting

Christie Carson

131

a past experience to a present audience: ‘It makes you wonder if the Globe realises just how important a role it has to play, not within the heritage industry, but within British theatre.’9 What is clear from these first performances is that it was the audience reception and involvement, as much as the theatre’s presentation, that would determine the success or failure of the venture. This collaboration between audience and actor is of course the subject of Henry V as well as the aim of any production of the play. Paul Taylor writes in The Independent: At the official opening of the reconstructed Globe Theatre, the drumming cast of Henry V moved forward over the rush-strewn apron-stage, and Mark Rylance, artistic director and leading actor, intoned those famous lines which here have a resonant self-reference: ‘May we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?’ Plugs for new venues don’t come more poetic than that.10 But what critics realized quite quickly is that it is the self-referential nature of the space that turns out to be what is most thrilling about it. The audience and actors together recreate their collective vision of the Renaissance in the moment of performance. Taylor goes on to say: This theatre – in the inn-yard intimacy of its architecture and its exposure to the elements (there was torrential rain at the first night of Henry V) – promotes an amazing sense of audience solidarity, and if this weren’t a potential liability as well as a strength, then there would be no excitement to it.11 What is useful to trace here is the way that performances in this building have forced a re-evaluation of both scholarly practices and entertainment 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: It is easy to prattle condescendingly about the Globe as a heritage theme park. Not so. This is a commercial enterprise with an artistic purpose: to find out, through live performance, how the greatest body of plays written by one man worked in the theatre and how it appealed to, and was received by, its audience. This is theatrical and cultural history in action.13 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 architecture 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 cultural 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 theatrical 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: Perhaps the first ‘original practice’ I tried to follow was my understanding that Shakespeare and his company responded to the topical issues of the Elizabethan and Jacobean audience. They were not just putting on plays to make money. The Globe experiment could not just be about itself. To be a theatre our plays had to reflect the world outside. In the first season, Henry V (1997) was about a group of people earning a new land for themselves with words, encountering the fate they have inherited and risking everything, and The Winter’s Tale was about the rebirth of something that had been lost. These ideas

Christie Carson

133

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 connection 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 overlooked. 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 discourse 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 considerations 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 interpretation to produce a possible reconstruction from it. There is not enough evidence to definitively produce an ‘original practices’ production 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 interpretations 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 This statement indicates an investigative research approach that reflects scholarly methods but also combines very well with the pragmatic and creative working practices of a theatre designer. Tiramani has become one of the foremost experts in the field of early modern clothing by spending many years studying the material practices of the period. Tiramani’s conclusions from that research were first seen on the Globe stage. She has since gone on to write about this research and has been working as a Visiting Professor of Costume in the School of Art

134

Shakespeare’s Globe: History Refashioned

and Design at Nottingham Trent University since 2008, reinforcing the link I am putting forward between scholarship and this theatre but also the perceived ownership of the outcomes of this experimental process. The artistic team at the Globe developed a clear distinction in their own minds between ‘authentic practices’, which would have involved a comprehensive attempt at re-enactment of particular productions, and ‘original practices’, which denoted an experimental and selective approach to aspects of Renaissance theatre practice that could be tested practically in the space. Tiramani justifies this approach quite logically by focusing on the commercial imperatives of Shakespeare’s theatre: There is a large body of evidence concerning the costuming of plays in the early modern period, which suggests that much of the playing apparel of the late sixteenth-century actor was contemporary dress. This does not mean that actors in the late sixteenth century did not strive to give their productions a historical flavour, or an exotic style, but it was not possible for them to create a set of completely new, specifically designed costumes for every play in their repertoire, either financially or practically.19 The opening season artfully positioned the theatre between its conflicting 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 contrast, invokes a battle and a great victory based on rhetoric and theatrical style. Given the critical reception the theatre had received in the leadup 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 consciously 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. ‘Eventually, 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: By 2005, it was clear that the audience at Shakespeare’s Globe was comprised of many who were returning annually, and to more than one production, exploring forms of historically informed experimentation, and that this type of audience, a ‘Globe’ audience, is not only eager and willing to take on board a good deal of extra-ordinary visual and aural information, but is able to store and build upon their experiences in the space.22 It is this aspect of the experiment, the development of an informed and willing group of audience members, but also critics, over an extended period of time, that I would like to highlight through the change in critical reception this theatre has had in the decade since the first performance startled reviewers. In following this reception I argue that the artistic team at the Globe have advanced in both scholarship and theatrical practice in significant ways. Critical opinion of the work of the theatre quite quickly moved away from the anxious introduction mapped out above, but there were few serious attempts to critique the complex dialogue that this theatre sets up with audience expectations and ideas of cultural capital. Looking at the siege at Harfleur just a year after this performance took place, Michael Cordner, reviewing the opening season for Shakespeare Survey in 1998, states: ‘There was a persistent failure of imagination here, which produced an extraordinary reading of the conclusion to Henry’s speech to the Governor of Harfleur.’23 Cordner articulates the preoccupation that contemporary criticism has had with the brutality of this speech which shows a leader quite unimaginable for the rest of the play. He points out that ‘the speech can be a moment of discovery for Henry about what military command may demand of the men who undertake it and/or a moment of revelation for the audience about the conduct of which “the warlike Harry” may prove capable.’24 Cordner recounts the impact of the speech in performance: Rylance inched his way through the speech improvisatorially, with recurrent glances at his supporting commanders, as if for inspiration

136

Shakespeare’s Globe: History Refashioned

for further horrors with which to intimidate the French. Then, on its last words, he looked once again at his comrades and smirked jovially at them. We were to understand that the whole thing was a ruse, a jape, a fantasy which was sure to dupe the credulous French, but which there was no actual risk of the good-hearted English carrying out. It was a serious misjudgement, since it reduced the entire encounter to the status of a hollowly theatrical comic routine.25 Cordner says that this directorial ‘imperfection’ made it impossible for the audience to ‘reconnect with the harsh imperatives of actual warfare’, but what the critic draws attention to is the gap between textual expectations of this scene and its re-creation in this new space.26 While Cordner bemoans that lack of realistic evidence of battle in the costumes and in the characterization of Henry, what he overlooks is the way Rylance involved the audience in his construction of the character. Rylance’s approach to performance highlighted the act of representation, engaging the audience in the interpretive process. Cordner’s resistance to a theatre that does not support visually the realism of the language illustrates the struggle the Globe Theatre has had in encouraging its critics to take a new view of how these plays might have successfully negotiated between the present and the past in their own period. On the one hand, Cordner applauds the participatory nature of the space: ‘Audience members, especially those standing in the pit, are themselves an intrinsic part of the spectacle and potentially influential performers in it.’27 However, he also points out the dangers of characterizations based on stereotypes, particularly when combined with a newly enfranchised audience: Thus, in 1.2, the reference to ‘the weasel Scot’, for example, provoked 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 Cordner’s position that Shakespeare at the Globe was not sufficiently serious is one that was shared by several of the original reviewers of this production. Patrick Marmion writes in the Evening Standard: If you like your Shakespeare serious, this may not be the right production, even if it is a fascinating insight into the dynamics of

Christie Carson

137

Shakespearean theatre. But if you fancy a bit of lowest common denominator slapstick, hurry on down.29 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 productions instigated another debate about cultural expectations. Susannah Clap writing in The Observer addresses the issue of class and entertainment 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 workingclass 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 spectacle which, she says, is contrasted in the Globe space by an emphasis

138

Shakespeare’s Globe: History Refashioned

on the sound of the words. Directly comparing the 1997 productions of Hamlet at the RSC and Henry V at the Globe, she writes: While the RSC production relied strongly on cinematic effects, treating its audience as film spectators, silent and unacknowledged within the darkened theatre, the Globe production worked, primarily through auditory interactions, to animate the audience.34 Marshall points out ‘that the visual emphasis promises ownership and mastery, while an auditory emphasis delivers a complex, playful textuality’.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: Those present in the Globe, as viewers or as players, joined together in making sounds. Visually, however, the opening moments were diffusive; the actors were not yet fully costumed, and even when Mark Rylance began to speak the words of the Prologue, he made no attempt to offer himself as a unifying visual presence. Rylance’s performance as Henry was foreshadowed by this initial manner of speaking the Prologue’s part: his Henry maintained a slight but canny distance from his own role; he was king and commentator in one.36 The recognition of the audience as an active participant in the action was something that the theatre artists were quick to acknowledge and to identify as the defining difference of performing in this space. Rylance states: ‘Our building was demanding our style of play whether we liked it or not because our style was to hold an audience’s heart and mind for a few hours in that space.’37 Like Marshall, Rylance was very aware of the dominance of the sound of the lines in this theatre: ‘There would always be someone who could not see our faces, so the only story-telling tool we could rely on in that space was our voices.’38 In discussing Henry V, Rylance points out the extent to which his training as a naturalistic actor aiming for psychological realism was challenged in this space: ‘I had to become a story teller as well as a part inside the story.’39 This shift in perspective of the actors from personification of the roles to presentation of a story had a further result in the creation of the play in performance. As Marshall says, ‘Because individual spectators were empowered to speak,

Christie Carson

139

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.

the audience as a whole became aware of the multiple subjectivities it contained.’40 This recognition of active differences in the audience is fundamental to understanding the Globe Theatre as a politically viable collective public space. The idea of the specificity of experience leading to an understanding of multiple subjectivities is worth pursuing for a moment. At this first performance, as Cordner explains, the audience were exploring their own role in the drama. The hissing at the non-English characters, which Cordner attributes to a presumed ‘Elizabethan response’, might just as easily be attributed to the conditioning of a pantomime audience. However, whatever the motivation, the outcome of such a response is dependent on the audience’s multiple subjectivities. Marshall says that, with French members of the audience in attendance, the hissing at French characters became more problematic than when Cordner attended (since he only speculates about what a French couple might think viewing the play). Catherine Silverstone, writing about the production in 2005, says that the ‘spectators exhibit a range of responses from complicity to resistance.’ But she suggests that ‘however knowing and ironic their responses might be, these displays of hissing or booing locate the Globe, in this instance, as a site for playing out contemporary anxieties about national identity.’41 The introduction of irony to the space

140

Shakespeare’s Globe: History Refashioned

adds a further layer of interpretive complexity since irony requires a knowing audience, without which any response can undermine the performer’s intent. The irony about irony, then, is that it is the receiver or interpreter who determines the status of a response rather than the performer. The moment of hissing in the Globe space made it clear that, as Silverstone suggests, the audience as a group had to negotiate anxieties about cultural difference and national identity. The Globe Theatre, in this moment, proved that it had the capacity to be both ironic and true at the same time with the same production – this is a powerful combination. Silverstone concludes by stating: ‘Aside from some construction and technical staging details, the Globe project actually tells us much more about twenty(first)-century culture than that of the early moderns.’42 I would argue this is precisely what gives it the potential to be a powerful contemporary political theatre. Tracing the critical response to this theatre into the twenty-first century, there is a perceptible shift towards an appreciation of the importance of the reconstructed space in demonstrating the coming together of theory and practice in the present moment, drawing together the real and the reconstructed to develop new collective meanings. But the importance of renewing an interest in history and historical material objects takes two culturally specific paths. From North America comes an appreciation of this theatre’s role in changing global ideas about Shakespeare and history. Susan Bennett, in her discussion of tourist Shakespeare in London, poses the question: 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 W. B. Worthen similarly articulates the way that the Globe Theatre presents a particular articulation of Shakespeare’s plays as they intersect with history: 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 processes of meaning-making that go towards creating our complex, internationally 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 concern 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 highlights the connection between reviewing practices and Shakespeare scholarship: The critique of the perceived pantomime, sporting, Disneyfied and multinational Globe audience is motivated by the assumption that none of these conditions is appropriate to the perpetuation of what is valuable in Shakespeare. Subtlety, sub-text, psychology, thematic and linguistic complexity are the characteristically valorised concepts of twentieth-century Shakespearean criticism and reception.46 What is acknowledged here, quite unusually, is that the subjectivity of these reviewers is largely based on the critical visions of Shakespeare that were popular when these reviewers were studying English literature at university. Through this conditioning, reviewers, according to Prescott, conclude that ‘the would-be authentic space for Shakespeare, the facsimile of the theatre in which many of his plays premiered, is repeatedly critiqued as unworthy of his plays.’47 The Globe, then, is found wanting precisely because of its ability to upset literary assumptions. Like Prescott, I find this approach to the theatre’s work both limited and debilitating. However, I would like to highlight the work of two other British scholars, with theatrical experience of their own, who point out how the Globe has had an impact specifically on theatricality in the UK, taking up the notion that this theatre presents a theatrical as well as a literary challenge. Abigail Rokison, in an article in Shakespeare in Stages, looks

142

Shakespeare’s Globe: History Refashioned

at the way that Edward Hall’s Propeller Theatre has set up an all-male company that contests the Globe’s vision of ‘authenticity’: Hall’s company provides the most immediate analogue to the theatre companies of Shakespeare’s age, having an all-male ensemble, many of whom have been members since the company’s first production. However, Propeller’s productions differ significantly from the Globe’s ‘original practices’ productions, suggesting an alternative approach to the issue of ‘authenticity’, through the combination of traditional aspects of Renaissance performance with a contemporary aesthetic.48 Through a new theatre company, then, questions emerge that challenge the aims of the Globe, spreading the debate about historical reconstruction and authenticity more widely. Stephen Purcell, in his wide-ranging study of popular theatre in Britain, notes the way that the plays themselves are altered in performance in the Globe space: ‘Genuine ad-libbing (as opposed to scripted interpolation) tends to be found more often at the Globe than any other mainstream Shakespearean theatre today. This distinctive aspect of performance at the Globe is perhaps a requirement of the space itself.’49 Another aspect of Globe influence cited by Purcell is the way that metatextual activity has become part of the vocabulary of new plays written for this space. Purcell comments on the way that Peter Oswald, in his new work for the Globe entitled The Storm, based on a play by Plautus, incorporated a moment of scripted metatextuality. Mark Rylance’s character in the play turns to the audience members to reassure them that: We’ve got permission. The playwright actually phoned up Plautus and said, ‘Titus Maccius, is it all right if we’re not strictly period?’ And Plautus answered, ‘Look Pete, I wouldn’t be talking to you now if it wasn’t for anachronisms. You go ahead and use them!’50 Drawing attention to the gap between the world of the play and its audience 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 understanding 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 represent 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 ‘original 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 passivity 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: Conventional audience behaviour is intensely class-coded, particularly in the Shakespearean theatre, and while fantasies of a ‘class-less’ theatre are impossible to realise, they can provide a site for cultural contestation. In any case, imagining Utopias, even if they are ultimately discarded as naive or unworkable, is surely the first step anyone takes towards acting for progressive political change. Furthermore, in acting out the fantasy of communality, the spectator is no longer a passive consumer of a packaged spectacle, but an active participant in a social event.55 The initial season of this theatre and this production of Henry V in particular, then, served to restart an essential and potentially political dialogue with theatre audiences and critics about how each one of us

144

Shakespeare’s Globe: History Refashioned

must negotiate an interpretive debate with the material available to us to represent the Renaissance at a specific moment in time. The constant reanimation of that debate on a daily basis in the reconstructed space stands as a testament to the provocative visions of Shakespeare, Wanamaker and Rylance, which helped to anticipate the participatory nature of making history in the twenty-first century.

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 Independent, 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 KarimCooper, 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 Subjectivity 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 University 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

In 1760, the German town of Wittenberg lost a particularly notorious casualty to the fires of international war. With the territory embroiled in Europe’s Seven Years’ War, the town was set alight by a French bombardment which seriously damaged the Schlosskirche (or Castle Church) and permanently destroyed the wooden doors that adorned its entrance. Not long after their erection in the formative years of the sixteenth century, these doors became historically nominated as the location of Martin Luther’s posting of his ‘Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences’, the Ninety-Five Theses, which, so the legend goes, sparked the European Reformation and the various profound historical changes that it entailed.1 Although the wooden originals have long since been replaced by bronze replicas, the Church Doors, and the scroll that adorned them, remain at the imaginative centre of the early modern Reformation, as reconstituted in the mediations of historical memory and generic representation.2 Luther’s material act of nailing paper to wood has experienced ongoing discursive transmutations, as the Reformation itself has been subject to reformulation across the borders of time, place, culture and media. This chapter explores the ways in which the Church Doors’ moment is represented in modern cinematic biographies of Luther, and what the idiosyncrasies of these representations suggest about the films’ understandings of early modern historical categories: under consideration are Martin Luther (dir. Irving Pichel, 1953), Luther (dir. Guy Green, 1974) and Luther (dir. Eric Till, 2003). Although explicitly concerned with the religious changes of the Reformation, these films’ divergent and individually complex conceptions of the period are significantly beholden 146

Conor Smyth 147

to the Renaissance myth of the inauguration of the subject, displaying familiar modes of conceptualizing the historical phenomenon of the early modern. The chapter attends to the constructions of early modern modes of temporality, suggesting ways in which the films situate the Reformation within a historicity that privileges originality, and identifies within the period the emergence of variously recognizable modern sensibilities. In addition, by recognizing the constitutive materiality of these kinds of temporalities, the broader status of material objects as indices of historical place and ideological commitment can be explored – in particular, how the nailing of the scroll to the Castle Church acts as a powerful cipher for the productions’ elaboration of the early modern. This chapter is not concerned with the relative historical veracity of the films’ representations of this event, paying attention rather to the more worthwhile question of how reconstructions of such historical fictions participate in the ongoing process of cultural re-imagination.3 The initiation of a dialogue between the two categories suggests the complexity of the cinematic relationship between the temporalities and materialities of the Renaissance period, particularly in articulating shifts in religious thought. In exploring the three films, I will be attentive to the inevitable points of contestation and negotiation produced by attempts to represent, within a cinematic grammar, a devotional and subjective ideology constituted by antipathy towards the material and the visual.4 This relationship will be positioned as a determining dynamic that operates within the films, a dynamic that is qualified by contexts of production and consumption, by the films’ understandings of historical process, and by the politics of Reformation and Renaissance subjectivities.

I 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 significance. The film’s voice-over, reminding the viewer that the doors

148

‘There is So Much to See in Rome’

were, in fact, the ‘customary place’ to post local announcements and disputations, stresses this apparent unimportance. This seeming insignificance is mediated, however, by the insistence on a correspondingly powerful temporal suggestion. ‘None could know’, the voice-over promises, of the eventual consequences of the document, and these are demonstrated in a montage which shows the subsequent translation and circulation of Luther’s writing across place and social rank. The film marks this moment as a hardly spontaneous but hugely potent point within the historical process, and frames this power as of a particularly hidden kind. The material document on the wooden door is unnoticed and unread by the public: it remains unseen. But this acts to confirm, rather than negate, its importance. The historicity of temporal rupture is coded by a negotiated materiality tinged with negation, and this ultimately defines the dynamic of the film’s coding of the early modern. The film opens with a rhetorical strategy that immediately privileges a historicity of originality. Over the visuals of conventional historical documentation, an expository voice-over’s introduction anchors its construction of early modern temporality in a schematic of historical rejuvenation. The Holy Roman Empire is described as an alien no-man’s land, a ‘strange and mysterious commonwealth’, rife with ‘superstition and fear’ and bizarre pagan beliefs. Suggestively invoking Christopher Columbus’ near-contemporary discovery of the New World, the film positions Luther at the point of a historical re-beginning (a ‘renaissance’, if you will) which permanently breaks from this medieval anarchism and produces its Luther as a prophet of a rationalist, empirical modernity. Produced in Allied West Germany in the twilight of World War II, and researched and partly funded by the Lutheran Church, the film represents Luther as something of a religious martyr, a man of conscience who speaks his beliefs in the face of the Church’s bureaucratic tyranny. Luther is cast as individual and subjective in opposition to an institution that preaches, as the voice-over reminds us, ‘absolute obedience’ to Church and King. His freedom ‘to believe freely’ in the face of the authorities asserts the rights of a pan-historical internal space, and of the human being more generally. This is a Luther for a West dismayed by the persecution by Nazi fascism. It echoes clearly the romantic portrait of Luther adopted in Roland Bainton’s celebratory biography, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther, published in English in 1950. Bainton’s popular book, participating in a further cultural reinscription of the Luther myth, reformulated the monk’s

Conor Smyth 149

confrontation with Church authority through a paradigm of post-war Anglo-American triumphalism. Bainton subscribed to an appropriate conception of temporal demarcation, identifying, for example, the Diet at Worms where Luther refused to recant his writing as the place where ‘the past and the future were met’.5 Accordingly, the film borrows its defining image from Worms, when Luther’s conclusion of his defence of the individual conscience is presented in a defiant facial close-up. This close-up was crucial in selling the film to a predominantly Anglo-American public, functioning as the primary image in the film’s promotional campaign and being replicated in billboards, advertisements and subsequent VHS and DVD sleeves. ‘No man can command my conscience!’ booms the tagline of a typical American poster. Another image used in the American promotional campaign dramatizes the anti-totalitarian coding of this statement quite clearly: a response to the heading, ‘Why this film is important’, reads ‘because its challenge to fight for freedom is needed by today’s half-free civilisation’.6 The film translates its conception of Protestant and Renaissance subjectivity through a modern emphasis on the sanctity of individual interiority, and this thematic presupposition strongly conditions the film’s vexed relationship with cinematic materialities. Pitchel’s Luther is one who, true to his faith, privileges the hidden in contradistinction to the visible. This is first marked in Luther’s trip to Rome, the obvious embodiment of Catholic devotional ideology. The contrast between Lutheran and Roman experiences is visualized in the montage of his activity in the city: the vicar-general’s reverential voiceover celebrates the indulgences offered by various relics such as the remains of St Paul and St Peter, but Luther’s facial expressions register dissatisfaction towards the objects with which he is presented. When the vicar-general promises that ‘there is so much for the Christian to see . . . in holy Rome’, apparently blinded to the comment’s pejorative potential, he articulates a dialectical viewpoint that is central to the film: that which obtains between a Catholicism constituted by a proliferation of visible things and a Lutheranism which seeks meaning beyond the literalism of material objects. As such, the film comes to value varying kinds of absence, formulated in spiritual, psychological and physical terms. Luther defines his personal development through the invocation of a continual and constitutive sense of internal lack. In the opening scene, the reformer explains his decision to leave a career in law for monastic service in the ambiguous admission that there is ‘something missing’ in his life. This internal dissatisfaction remains persistent in his progression through his

150

‘There is So Much to See in Rome’

studies: when Spalatin, an old schoolmate, enquires if Luther has found ‘what he is looking for’, the protagonist admits that he has not. A profundity of lack is also evoked in recurrent motifs of endless movement: Luther configures his scriptural exercises as a perpetual ‘search’ for truth, a motion expressive of, as the vicar-general is warned, a threateningly ‘restless mind’. Configuring Lutheran ideology as the embodiment of this movement towards truth, the film highly esteems that which is lacking or hidden, that which, in some form, is not. At one point, Luther renders this emphasis on negativity in fascinatingly corporeal terms. He articulates the pervasive sense of absence behind the ‘decoration’ of his learning through a rhetoric of bodily partition: he explains that he has all his knowledge ‘here’ (touching his head), and can ‘pour it out from here’ (indicating his mouth), but, gesturing towards his heart, declares that this subjective dimension remains unsatisfied. The dichotomy Luther suggests between the mind and the heart (or the soul) registers a limitation of outward glories and challenges the ethical efficacy of perceptual decoration. This ongoing dialectic between absence and presence erupts, at various points, in the film’s mise-en-scène. In the opening alehouse scene, Luther’s friends thank their ‘absent host’ as a close-up fills the frame with Luther’s empty chair, providing a visually distinctive moment and signalling a preoccupation with physical negativity. Later in the scene, Luther shuns the material clutter that signifies his now defunct institutional identity: he passes his vestments and books to his friends, declaring that ‘where I’m going, I won’t need this, or this, or these’. Following the vicar-general’s celebration of donated relics, Luther is, in contrast, positioned in an empty room, with bare walls and sparse fittings. And, in repeated arrangements of the film’s frame, Luther’s spatial isolation from surrounding material furniture is accentuated: the scene at the Diet at Worms, for example, closes with a tilted overhead shot which obscures the rest of the location, spatially privileging Luther and his pamphlets. The mise-en-scène regularly orchestrates, in visual terms, the material disavowal of the Lutheran experience. This implicit rejection of the material object within the mise-en-scène underscores a self-consciousness about the film’s own representational processes. Film is, of course, a medium that privileges the act of seeing: it functions on the willingness of an audience to devote considerable visual attention to the shapes of light presented to them. For Christian Metz, a Lacanian film theorist, the ‘foundation of the whole edifice’ of film is the audience members’ ‘passion for seeing [his emphasis]’.7 Psychoanalytic film theory’s exploration of, in Laura Mulvey’s formulation, an ideology of ‘representation [and] the perception of the subject’

Conor Smyth 151

has foregrounded the conditioned visual ethics of cinematic reception.8 While qualifying the complex nature of the cinematic gaze, these models have highlighted its tendency to make a fetish of the viewed object in a process of depersonalization and decontextualization – or, briefly to glean from a historically exotic idiom, to idolize it.9 The film openly stages the contested ethics of visual veneration in a discussion between Luther and his vicar-general about the devotional efficacy of the crucifix. Their debate poses the question of the precise significatory function of the object: whether it is figurative of the person of Christ to whom it gestures, or whether it has become unacceptably literalized and worshipped on its own material and aesthetic terms. Luther asks, ‘Is it God’s supreme gift of his only son we worship or is it the status of the wood, the rust of the nail we adore?’ The frame’s tableaux accentuate the staging of visual recognition: the crucifix under evaluation prominently occupies the right-hand border of the frame, while the men theorize their perception on the opposite side. Here, the film appears to be reformulating the religiously divisive issue of early modern visual hermeneutics in an enterprise of cinematic self-evaluation. At another point, this visual self-consciousness produces a brief but suggestive disturbance of the integrity of the cinematic frame. When the monastic order is presented with an assortment of relics, including a morsel of the bread of the Last Supper and a fragment of Christ’s cross, the film registers Luther’s opposition to the objects through crosscutting, which contrasts the protagonist’s despondent expression with the vicar-general’s ceremonial pride. Luther’s visual rejection of the object’s spiritual legitimacy is emphasized by the incremental turn of his head away from the site of their display and is further registered within the mechanics of the frame itself. In shots of the two, Luther and the displayed object never cohabit the frame comfortably: typically, Luther’s dismayed face prominently occupies the background and the relic is awkwardly positioned in the foreground, the border of the frame partitioning its presentation and disrupting its cinematic presence. Metz understands the mechanics of framing as one of the most powerful elements of the cinematic fetish, and locates the frame’s horizon as a charged expression of visual negotiation: it is this ‘boundary [his emphasis] that bars the look, that puts an end to the “seen”, that inaugurates the downward (or upward) tilt into the dark, towards the unseen, the guessed-at’.10 Metz’s perceptual shift from the ‘seen’ to the ‘unseen’ articulates the dynamic that informs the film’s attitude towards the subjective priorities of its historical subject and its ambivalent relationship with diegetic objects. Luther’s perceptual rejection of the objects, and their contested habitation on the fringes of the frame,

152

‘There is So Much to See in Rome’

is thus motivated by correspondent visual ideologies. In this context, Martin Luther is a productive film for situating the contested theoretical exchanges between thematic commitment and the representational process: between, in other words, a particular mode of early modern temporality and the realities of cinematic materiality.

II Of all the representations of the Church Doors’ moment under consideration here, that of director Guy Green’s Luther (1974), the filmic adaptation of British playwright John Osborne’s 1961 play of the same title, is the most remarkable. After Luther’s (Stacey Keach) delivery of a sermon against relics and indulgences from the Castle Church pulpit, the choral figure of the Knight (Julian Glover) enthuses that ‘to the joy of the common people and young fellows like myself . . . he nailed his heresy to the door.’ The verbal suggestion remains non-visualized, however, with the relegation of the posting of the theses to off-screen status. The camera catches a brief glimpse of the document hanging on the door, but pays it little attention, briskly tracking away to the face of the Knight delivering his monologue. The significance of the document, and its evocation of historical transformation, is barely acknowledged. This can be understood partly as a translation of the play’s ambivalent staging of the moment. The play locates the posting of the theses at the close of 2.3, which is constituted by the performance of Luther’s sermon against indulgences. Before the sermon, Luther enters to find a child, ‘dirty, half-naked and playing intently by himself’: the protagonist’s offer of his hand to the child is gravely rejected, as it ‘slowly, not rudely, but naturally’ skips ‘sadly out of sight’. Luther then delivers his sermon on Romans 1: 17 and ‘walks up the steps to the Church door, and nails his theses to it’.11 The allegorical child-figure’s rejection suggests a decisive rift between Luther and a world of childhood innocence, configuring the posting of the theses as a melancholic but necessary self-assertion marking a moment of significant subjective realization. A sense of important change is acknowledged, but in a psychological, not historical, register. This is the register primarily employed by the film for its realization of early modern religious experience. And, within this idiom, Luther’s subjective experience is marked by recurrent motifs of haunting absence. ‘Every day’ he sees the ‘darkness and the hole in it’ and is plagued by an internal ‘nameless horror’ threatening to engulf him in sublimation. In 1.2, the play represents this on stage with ‘an enormous round cone, like

Conor Smyth 153

the inside of a vast barrel, surrounded by darkness’.12 Influenced by Erik Erikson’s 1958 Luther biography, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, which anchored its approach within the idiom of fashionable Freudian psychoanalysis, Osborne’s vision is motivated by the subjective experience of Luther over his historical situation. Indeed, ‘the historical character’, the playwright ultimately admitted, ‘is almost incidental’.13 Luther articulates his threatening psychic lack, and subsequent subjective fragmentation, in rhetoric of intense negativity: ‘Not! Me! I am not!’ he screams in a violent fit. Articulating a desire for physical nullification, and seemingly enlisting a Hamletian subjective formulation in an act of ideological re-legitimization, he wishes that his body would ‘leak and dissolve and I could live as bone’.14 This negation is not intermittent but fundamentally constitutive: for Osborne, ‘only negation’, observes Luc M. Gilleman, ‘can give sense to an existence deprived of positive means of asserting itself’.15 An awareness of the negated absence at the centre of subjective development creates, in turn, an insistence on the importance of doubt. Luther in Green’s film complains to the order that ‘all you can teach me in this sacred place is how to doubt’ and conceptualizes this as ‘agonising’ persistence of ‘murmurings in my heart’. Luther’s antipathy towards material objects is framed within this constitutive sense of personal absence. He condemns the relics of the upcoming procession of ‘All Saints’ as objectionable trinkets and mocks the worshippers who will ‘sleep outside in the streets all night with the garbage’ to get a look at ‘the dressing up of all kinds of dismal things’. Luther associates the spiritual emptiness of the objects with that of the viewing subject: he calls the relics ‘shells for shells, empty things for empty men’. The parishioners, he complains, will have to be held back while they ‘struggle to gawk’ and ‘stuff their eyes’ on scraps of relics. It is the worshippers’ fascination with the corporeality of God above his immaterial presence, emphasized by the consumption metaphor, that Luther finds so outrageous. The overbearing sense of inwardness of Osborne’s Luther is given fuller stylistic expression because of differences in genre and commercial context. The play sketches Luther’s inner world through an expressionistic visual topography, eschewing a naturalist mode of expression for a more symbolic catalogue of abstractions. As knives, naked bodies, cones, circles and children all gesture towards a fascination with, as Gilleman notes, ‘pre-conceptual forms of knowledge’, Luther’s psychic landscape bleeds into its natural counterpart.16

154

‘There is So Much to See in Rome’

The film, however, struggles adequately to visualize Osborne’s symbolist aesthetic. The flexibility awarded to Osborne’s stage aesthetics allowed him to conceive of a psychic landscape which the film, necessarily constituted by a conventional cinematic naturalism, cannot wholly translate. Only at one point does the insistence on realism break down: anxious over his first Mass, Luther sees a graphic vision of Christ and the hell fires that torment him. The film registers Luther’s ambivalence towards the physical though facial expressions and condemnatory dialogue, but overall Osborne’s formal experimentation affects little beyond the temporal and spatial fragmentation of the narrative. Early modern materialities are here reconstituted according to the aesthetic leverage of genre and context: visualizing the non-visual, as it were, is a significantly more difficult process with a camera than it is with a stage board. In both productions, the preoccupation with subjective absence informs a sceptical, even anti-teleological, mode of temporality. The compromised representation of the scroll moment registers the compromised status of change and action in the film’s wider understanding of history and the self. Within Osborne’s vision, temporality is a layered construction: the early modern is codified through the postmodern. Or, more specifically, the early modern’s teleological significance is qualified by a postmodern scepticism of the value of the historical narrative as a credible producer of meaning. The character of the Knight, who, in his expanded cinematic role, provides intermittent historical exposition, is the conduit of this revisionist historiography. He introduces Luther as ‘the man that did in four of the seven sacraments, denied the miracle of the Mass, crippled the Pope, raised the Holy Scriptures over the authority of Rome and the individual conscience over mother Church herself’. This romantic litany of titles, however, is parodied by a sarcastic delivery and outrage directed at Luther for having abandoned those who ‘got your Reformation going’. Luther’s real title, the Knight suggests, is that of ‘butcher’, the camera rushing for a frenzied close-up as he smears blood on his vestment. The film’s aggression towards historical positivism is manifested in the verbal challenges to the legacy of Luther, who is labelled by the Knight a hypocrite and a coward unwilling to make personal sacrifices for change. Gesturing towards a bloody corpse in a wheelbarrow, the Knight declares, ‘I am bleeding. He has bled. And you are alive and well, cuddling in the arms of your nun.’ The verbal and visual markers of the Knight and the dead body express the guilty conscience of history, whose ‘progress’ is paid for by common blood.

Conor Smyth 155

Moreover, the prevalence of doubt compromises the subjective decision-making process and the subsequent value of historical action. When an aged vicar-general (Peter Cellier) confronts the protagonist over his defiance at Worms, Luther admits that he ‘was not sure’ about his decision: ‘I listened to God’s voice, and all I could hear was my own’, he states. The self-assertion that gives birth to the future has a hole at its centre. When Luther claims, ‘It doesn’t matter why I did it, only what came out of it’, the Knight, articulating the irresolvable logic behind Osborne’s production itself, demands ‘Doesn’t it?’ The rational and humanistic motivation behind historical change is quite unknown, even to Luther himself. The teleological linearity that locates Luther’s defiance as a centrifugal point of emergence becomes irrevocably compromised by the ambiguous nexus of the psychic personality. The production’s presupposition of an ahistorical subjectivity translates theological doubt into secular psychological lack, and Luther is defined by an existential anxiety recognizable to twentieth-century sensibilities. Within Osborne’s psychological sketch, there is, then, an implicit erasure of historical process. The temporalities of the early modern and the postmodern blur almost into indistinction.

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 affinity 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, culminating 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 transgression. 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 common 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 triumphant 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 suggests an ancestral alliance between the Reformers and the modern audience. This history, however, is qualified through an insistence on the politics 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 translation 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, typically, 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 Renaissance, especially his title role in Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998).17 In both films, a canonical marker of the early modern is, gently 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 esotericism and rehabilitates Luther as a man of the people. While delivering

Conor Smyth 157

a sermon against relics, he strolls around the pews, lounging on furniture and telling jokes about indulgences like a stand-up preacher. Arriving at Worms for his Diet, Luther is mobbed by a mass of adoring fans. During the hearing, in the pauses between dialogue, the camera engages in schizophrenic cross-cutting between Luther, the trial’s audience, Emperor Charles V (Torben Liebrecht) and Prince Frederick the Wise (Peter Ustinov), emphasizing the public significance of his responses. When he refuses to recant, the camera lingers on the dumbstruck authorities, listening to a crowd outside chanting Luther’s name like a rock concert audience. Fiennes’ Luther aspires to embody the historical everyman. This particular transmutation of Luther is deployed with specific audience effects in mind. That Luther is a project designed to convert as well as entertain is admitted by Executive Producer Dennis Clauss in an interview with the Christian film website, ‘Hollywood Jesus’. Explaining that they intended to ‘reach out’ to a mainstream audience, Clauss cites the inspiration of evangelical writer Bob Briner’s popular book of 2000, Roaring Lambs, which argued that Christians should engage with mainstream culture in spreading their message.18 This clear ideological prejudice, coupled with the heavy German interest in a romantic portrayal of the figure, necessitates a brazenly sympathetic and saccharine representation of the hero.19 When reaching out for a model to satisfy a mass audience, the scriptwriters inevitably seized upon a model familiar to mainstream cinema. Luther is transformed into a collage of standard Anglo-American cinematic hero types: the rebel schoolboy, doodling in his boredom before challenging his tutor; the man of action, telling an iconoclastic mob to ‘get out . . . before I beat you out’; the romantic lead, flirting coyly with Katherine von Bara (Claire Cox). Similarly, Luther’s existential anxieties and guilt over the authorities’ crushing of the peasants’ rebellion are channelled into a presentation of sensitivity and facile empathy, which is expressed in modern therapeutic terms: he tells Katherine that ‘some days I’m so depressed I can hardly get out of bed’. Recognizable contemporary registers are employed to emphasize Luther’s relevance to the public at large, both early modern and modern. The film thus constructs an early modern temporality in which Luther aligns himself easily with the audience’s modern conceptions of subjectivity, as it is constituted primarily by personality. This is an important point of distinction between this representation and the others discussed here: while paying lip service to the value of the immaterial in his faith, Fiennes’ Luther is legitimized within the contours of the

158

‘There is So Much to See in Rome’

materially present. The film’s desire for an uncomplicated accessibility produces a level of comfort with Luther’s cinematic presence: his movement, his body and his physical interaction with the public are markers of the constitutive value of external expression. Unsurprisingly, then, Luther’s material objects enjoy a fairly uncomplicated, sometimes positive, status. The film does register an aversion towards cinematic objects, but this is displaced from Luther. Principally, the theme is associated with Prince Frederick: an early shot of his store of relics shows him lovingly fawning over the lavish objects, and this is contrasted with a later visual concentration on empty rooms. Luther may protest to his congregation that ‘Christ is not found in relics of pilgrimages but here, in our faith’, but the film recognizes the hero’s compatibility with its cinematic objects. When the viewer catches a glimpse of Luther exiled in Wartburg, working on a German translation of the New Testament, the scene is strewn with books and pages, visualizing Luther’s intellectual and political development in the cumulative impression of paper materials. The final translation is crystallized in a bound copy, which Luther offers to Duke Frederick with a delicate reverence. Frederick warns that the book will ‘split us from Rome . . . forever’, as the gaze of both camera and prince linger on the powerful object. That the almost holy significance of Luther’s Bible is informed by its affective historical, rather than religious, power is telling of the film’s larger relationship with temporality and materiality. Designed to sell the Lutheran legend to maximum effect, the film prioritizes Luther’s popular accessibility, and this necessitates the assistance of the furniture of the frame in the uncomplicated realization of the man and his message. This enacts the ideological enlistment, in other words, of cinematic things.

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

explosion of lightning fuses the various sounds and, within the truncated grammar of the modern film trailer, the knock of hammer on nail morphs neatly into an illustration of powerful historical metamorphosis. The viewer experiences, for the moment at least, a simultaneity of temporal and material categories. This is a symmetry which, as discussed, is less neatly achieved in the larger productions, even in Till’s more sympathetic Luther. The construction of the early modern deployed primarily is one which privileges the embryonic presence of modern forms of subjective experience, characterized by the categorical absences of the sacred personal conscience and the insufferable psychic lack in the 1953 and 1974 renditions. Encoded within these distinctions is an individually expressed, but structurally affinitive, acknowledgement of a compromised (or a fallen) materiality: the body, the relics and the objects of the cinematic frame become realities which, in the Lutheran experience, must be disavowed or somehow transcended. The contested status of the scroll on the Church Doors acts as a recurrent and powerful locus for the principal dialectical exchanges of the films. The scroll insists on its visual contingencies of time, place and thing in its almost arbitrary conjoining of ink, paper and wood. In tandem, it embodies both a religious ideology that privileges the non-material and, in the films’ acts of transcription, a subjective mode whose corresponding impenetrability is stressed. This tension between an early modern temporality anchored in absence, and a cinematic materiality constituted by visual presence, means that the engagement with the scroll is a theoretically and, moreover, an ethically loaded moment. The level of ambivalence, even subtle embarrassment, that the films display towards the scroll is suggestive of this tension. In Martin Luther (dir. Irving Pichel, 1953), the scroll goes unnoticed by the crowds in the street, its legitimacy unrecognized by the popular eye. In the stage play, Luther, the scroll participates in a private moment of subjective development and, in its cinematic translation in Luther (dir. Guy Green, 1974), the cinematic gaze merely flirts with the scroll’s visual presentation. Even in Luther (dir. Eric Till, 2003), when Luther bangs the nails into the door, the camera leaps forward in space and dwells on the devotional tableaux of the altar, the echoing of the hammering suggesting a temporal resonance which diverges from, though is tied to, the material presence of the scroll. In foregrounding dominating tensions, the scroll can be posited as a metonymic device for the films’ own internal dynamics. Viewed in

160

‘There is So Much to See in Rome’

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 subsequent 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 literalistic 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 visually 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 theoretically 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 representations of the past, the difficulties of correlating historically alien cultural priorities, and the potential disconnections between early modern 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 castle. 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

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

Martin Luther Posted the 95 Theses’, http://www.reformationtours.com/site/ 490868/page/180550 (accessed 4 January 2010). Any study that considers Luther’s posting of the theses on the Castle Church Doors must acknowledge the historically contested nature of the event. The widespread acceptance of the doors’ status as locations for the posting of ecclesiastical and local notices suggests the probable truth of the matter. This assumption was shaken in 1961, however, by the historian Erwin Iserloh, who argued that the act has no credible evidential basis, given its absolute reliance on the second-hand testimony of Luther’s colleague, Philip Melanchthon, made in the preface to his posthumous edition of Luther’s collected works. Iserloh accepted that Luther would have communicated his writing to local authorities on 31 October 1517, but concluded that the famous posting of the theses was, in fact, ‘a legend’. See Erwin Iserloh, The Theses Were Not Posted: Luther Between Reform and Reformation, trans. Jard Wicks (Boston: Beacon, 1968), p. 110. The debate received new vitality in 2006, with the apparent discovery in Jena University and State Library of a handwritten note by Luther’s secretary, Georg Rörer, which posited the nailing of the theses to any number of Wittenberg churches. The continuing interest in the potential veracity of the moment is telling of the ambiguous complexity of the historical record. The historical facts of the event, however, are less relevant than its enduring imaginative capital. Indeed, much recent criticism of historical film-making’s representations has departed from conventional methodologies which contrast the ‘real’ history with its filmic ‘representation’. See Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Pepper, American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 3–4. Acknowledgements of the imaginative constitution of historical memory offer reformulations of post-war historiography’s exploration of the ethical implications of the historical narrative. At the centre of this historiography was Hayden White, whose influential work sought to collapse the discursive distinctions between ‘factual’ historicity and ‘literary’ imagination, emphasizing the debt of conventional historical records to rhetorical, imaginative and ideological strategies. See Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artefact’, in Geoffrey Roberts, ed., The History and Narrative Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 221–36; Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). For cinema itself as a species of materiality, see the chapter by Andrew Higson in this book. Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: The Life of Martin Luther (New York: Abingdon Press, 1950), p. 181. This material is found in the various bonus features of the Martin Luther DVD, Vision Video, 14 February 2008. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Ben Brewster, Alfred Guzzetti, Celia Britton and Annwyl Williams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 52.

162

‘There is So Much to See in Rome’

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 reception 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 overlap 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 dimension 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 production 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 essential to recouping the funds initially invested: out of a worldwide box office return of approximately £30 million, two-thirds came from German pockets. 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

In thinking about the early modern past in general, anglophones still habitually use the phrase ‘the pageant of history’, as if picturing the sequence of historical events as so many decorated floats in a passing procession. My main project in what follows is to unpack this dead metaphor, to think through the pageant of history in terms of the history of pageants. I am going to look at the extent to which the ‘pageant of history’ metaphor has not in fact been dead at all over the last century, but has lived on, both for film-makers determined to make an emblematic spectacle of the Renaissance, and especially for their immediate precursors in amateur dramatics. The largest-scale expressions to date of a perennial desire to perform Renaissance history, I shall show, belong not to Hollywood in the days of Cinemascope but to the ruined castles and village greens of England between 1905 and 1939. The blossoming and passing into obsolescence of the spectacular communal dramatic form that evolved there reveals much about the understanding of the national past and its relation to the present, which briefly sustained a sense of imperial destiny, civic pride and ethnic identity in early twentieth-century Britain. J. R. Planché and Sir Walter Scott notwithstanding, the desire not just to research but to re-enact the processions and progresses of the Renaissance finally achieved full expression in 1905, in the first outdoor work of a single remarkable artist, Louis Napoleon Parker.1 Every bit as commanding as his Christian names might suggest, Parker had already followed three careers before inventing the Edwardian historical pageant. He was a respected composer, who had been made a fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in 1898, and, as well as taking an interest in the English folk-song revival associated with Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, he was one of the first and keenest English disciples 163

164

The Pageant of History 1905–39

of Wagner, whose grandiose notions of a total theatre embodying the consciousness of a people he clearly sought to emulate. Parker had also established himself as a successful West End playwright, enjoying a transatlantic hit, for example, with his costume drama, The Cardinal (1903). Just as importantly to his subsequent career handling large and potentially mutinous crowds as a pageant-master, Parker had also spent nineteen years as a schoolteacher, at Sherborne School in Dorset. Sherborne was one of a number of private schools involved in the educational outdoor revival of Greek tragedy, a form which for Parker and other pageant-masters, as for Wagner, constituted an enabling precedent.2 It was in celebration of the 1200th anniversary of the foundation of Sherborne Abbey that Parker devised his first historical pageant, staged among the ruins of the town’s Norman castle in the summer of 1905 by a cast of some 900 local volunteers, with all the profits from its 2000 ticket sales per show donated to local charities.3 This massive theatrical spectacle attracted extensive national press coverage, and it immediately caught the public imagination. Parker was promptly commissioned to devise another such show in Warwick the following summer, this one employing a cast of 2000 and seating 5000 spectators per show, and his ensuing Dover pageant of 1908 was on a similar scale.4 By the end of 1909 Parker had also produced pageants for Bury St Edmunds, Colchester and York. Liverpool, Potter Heigham, Oxford and St Albans, among many smaller towns, staged their own in 1907; Chelsea, Cheltenham, Winchester and Pevensey theirs in 1908.5 During the ensuing few years the vogue spread to ever further reaches of the kingdom. In the week of 10–13 August 1910, for instance, a pageant mainly scripted by one Gilbert Hudson was staged ‘in the historic ruins of Pickering Castle’ in North Yorkshire, in what the published script-come-programme makes clear was a concerted bid to attract more visitors to this little-known market town.6 Such pageants continued to be staged down to the outbreak of World War II: E. M. Forster scripted two, Abinger Pageant (1934) and England’s Pleasant Land (1938), which would provide part of the inspiration for the Poyntz Hall pageant at the centre of Virginia Woolf’s novel, Between the Acts (1941).7 In essence, as Roger Simpson has observed, the pageant as created by Parker is ‘a chronicle play in which a social body rather than an individual is the hero’.8 While sometimes parasitic on Shakespeare’s histories for individual episodes, the genre extends the reach of the Shakespearean history play chronologically to something getting back towards the medieval mysteries – the Warwick pageant covers 2000 years instead of the mere 150 dramatized in Shakespeare’s two tetralogies –

Michael Dobson

165

but it narrows that scope geographically, dealing not with mankind or the English monarchy but with the development of a single local community. Despite its thirty-year heyday, the form did not evolve a great deal, partly because few individuals other than Parker, Frank Lascelles, Arthur Bryant and Mary Kelly, author of How to Make a Pageant (1936), ever dared to attempt more than one.9 But one other reason for the way in which the overwhelming majority of these shows follow exactly the recipe pioneered by Parker at Sherborne is simply that he got it right first time. As far as the Edwardian provinces were concerned, this sort of event presented the pageant of their history just as they wanted to see and understand it. Mary Kelly describes the usual pattern perfectly: The majority of pageants resemble each other as closely as peas. There is the Spirit of the Ages dressed in grey-blue, or Father Time, or some character, who ‘narrates’ (usually in rather halting blank verse) between the episodes, to explain what they are about. There are the Episodes: The Romans occupying Britain, The Founding of an Abbey, An Olde Englyshe Fayre, The Visit of Good Queen Bess . . . and so on; ending with a great round-up of Spirits, of Peace, of Harmony, of the District Nursing Association, the Boy Scouts, the Women’s Institutes, the British Legion, and a number of other associations, followed by all the performers, all singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.10 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 juxtaposition 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 himself 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

weren’t available as a backdrop, Mary Kelly recommended using woodfringed spaces featuring reflective bodies of water, which might redouble the visual effect (Figure 10.1). She was particularly keen on employing horses, preferably ridden by expert members of the local hunt. (Humans may fail to get the drama across, she observes, but horses never do.)13 As for what historical incidents these processions should dramatize, most pageant-masters shared a sense of the canon of recognizable English history which they had imbibed from a combination of Shakespeare, the Britannia section from Caesar’s Gallic Wars and the works of Sir Walter Scott. After their brief forays into prehistory, the Warwick and St Albans pageants, for example, included substantial excerpts from the Henry VI plays, about Warwick the Kingmaker and the battle of St Albans respectively, while the Dover pageant somehow found a pretext for incorporating parts of Henry V. (Parker’s Warwick pageant, incidentally, also incorporates the arraignment at Warwick of Piers Gaveston from Marlowe’s Edward II, the only staging which any part of that controversial play would have for many years.) The spirits of History and Imagination who compere the Pickering pageant, similarly, after giving us a bad King John straight out of Ivanhoe, depict Richard II confined in Pickering Castle, where he quotes verbatim from

Figure 10.1 Mary Kelly’s illustration of an ideal pageant setting (‘Helmingham Pageant – The Value of Trees and Water’), drawn from one of her own projects. Mary Kelly, ‘Pageants’, in Harold C. Downs, ed., The Theatre and Stage, 2 vols (London: Pitman, 1934), II, p. 737. Courtesy of Writers’ Resources, Oxford.

Michael Dobson

167

Shakespeare’s play about himself. (In between, he is obliged to endure a local jester, and a choir of Yorkshire maidens who sing ‘Sumer is icumen in’ to him.) What is especially striking about most of these pageants is the prominence they give to the Tudor period, especially the reign of Elizabeth. Dover varies the pattern slightly by producing a youngish Henry VIII showing the harbour fortifications to Katherine of Aragon, but Warwick and St Albans both feature immense processional guest appearances by an Elizabeth and her court straight out of Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth. The last episode of the Sherborne pageant is set in 1593, when Sir Walter Ralegh comes home to his manor and has his tobacco-pipe extinguished by an anxious servant, while Parker’s 1907 pageant at Bury St Edmunds culminates with a re-creation of Elizabeth I’s visit in 1578. Likewise, although brave Queen Bess could not appear in person at Pickering because everyone knew she had never risked travelling that far north, the final scene enacted there in 1910, as in several other Edwardian pageants, depicted news reaching the town of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The last words of dialogue proper, before the choric spirits begin their concluding fourteen-syllable rhyming couplets and the assembled company sing ‘The Song of Pickering’ and ‘O God our help in ages past’, are ‘God save our gracious Queen Elizabeth!’ – at which ‘Banners [are] displayed’, there are ‘Trumpetings, shouts and cheers’, and ‘Girls dance’.14 After the Elizabethans, apparently, unless your town was picturesquely involved in the civil wars as dramatized in Scott’s Woodstock, all was anticlimactic, pageantry-free modernity, and hardly worth staging.15 As a result, almost all of Mary Kelly’s specific advice on how to cast a pageant concerns how to get the right person for ‘the familiar Queen Elizabeth scene’.16 It is as if, in lieu of having a formally recognized national costume in which to dress up on special occasions, the English simply resorted to farthingales and doublet and hose as an instinctive default setting. When Parker himself cashed in on the success of his outdoor triumphs by composing a comparable show for ordinary commercial presentation, it was, predictably, another Tudor spectacular. Drake: A Pageant Play in Three Acts was produced by Beerbohm Tree at Her Majesty’s Theatre, in the Haymarket in 1912, and was then successfully revived soon after the outbreak of World War I. It finishes with one of Parker’s signature huge processional crowd scenes, this one representing the victory parade to St Paul’s after the repelling of the Armada: 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 In a less exalted mood, E. F. Benson’s fictitious pageant in Mapp and Lucia (1931) similarly centres entirely on Elizabeth and her favourite sea dog. The comparatively unambitious Riseholme pageant depicted by Benson simply consists of Elizabeth knighting Drake on a replica of the Golden Hind specially built in the village pond – hence plenty of greenery and reflective water – and then, cued by a messenger announcing the approach of the Armada, processing across the road to make her 1588 Tilbury speech outside the local pub. Why this preoccupation with Elizabeth in the early twentieth-century pageant? One local reason is that these shows, town-specific though they may be, partake extensively in contemporary enthusiasm for the British Empire. Britannia was a frequent member of their casts from Sherborne onwards: in the finale of the Warwick pageant she was even attended by pages who each carried a flag bearing the name of a British colony. After producing pageants in Cambridge (1924) and Oxford (1926), the future author of Our Island Story, Arthur Bryant, adopted key elements of the genre for a ‘Conservative Empire Day Procession’ in Hackney in 1929, which, as well as showing the four continents presenting Britannia with ‘the fruits of empire’, also depicted Drake receiving the news of the Armada’s approach while playing bowls, the lighting of a beacon and the news of victory.18 As this example suggests, in its heyday Gloriana was widely regarded as the empire’s founder. Kitty Barnes’ 1931 pageant involving Elizabeth, Drake and Ralegh, Adventurers, was specifically composed for performance by children on Empire Day (May 24), and even the interwar armed forces shared this imperial enthusiasm for reliving the days of Elizabeth. Composers of pageants sometimes remarked that in both practicalities and aesthetics the form was closely analogous to the military tattoo, and the connections between the pageant and the tattoo, like those between pageantry and imperialism, were also visible from the outset.19 At the culmination of the Sherborne pageant, for instance, in a striking anticipation of a subsequent quasimilitary rally elsewhere, the entire cast, having assembled to the strains of Wagner’s march from Tannhauser, all saluted in unison and shouted ‘Hail!’20 Punch, reviewing Bryant’s immense Greenwich Night Pageant of 1933, explicitly considered it as a naval alternative to the RAF’s annual display at Hendon and the Army’s at Aldershot – as well they might, since its finale featured 3000 well-drilled performers grouped in front of

Michael Dobson

169

silhouettes of the British battlefleet.21 It was an appropriate comparison, too, since the Greenwich pageant was dominated by Elizabeth, and as recently as 1930 the Aldershot tattoo had incorporated a pageant of Elizabeth I addressing her troops at Tilbury.22 Despite the alarms and excursions of World War I, apparently, in the 1930s Elizabeth’s victory in 1588 still marked a convenient happy ending, the point after which there were to be no more defining wars for national survival (Figures 10.2–10.4). As this reading may suggest, the pageant was committed to a view of the past if anything more providential than that of Shakespeare’s histories. Sherborne, Warwick and even Pickering were clearly always destined to flourish, just as the island nation as a whole was set aside for victory and security. As Bryant’s Greenwich finale puts it: 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 committed 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 conservative 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, prehistoric 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 representation 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 something 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. Coronations 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 predigested 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 pursuers, “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 himself.) 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 The Legions of Rome . . . The first barbarian invaders – Saxons, and later the Danes – harrowing, burning, and plundering. First Christian monks of Rome . . . The Normans . . . The Tudors . . . Spacious days of Queen Elizabeth.28 To the makers and consumers of English pageants, apparently, history consisted largely of the Romans sailing across, interbreeding and taking over, then the Saxons sailing across, interbreeding and taking over, then the Vikings sailing across, interbreeding and taking over, then the Normans sailing across, interbreeding and taking over, and then the Spanish Armada sailing across and not even managing to land. After which history was over, since, German threat or no German threat, there were to be no further changes to the ethnic identity of the English shires. Change came in the Edwardian period, even so, including the development of new communications technologies. From the outset, pageants provided an irresistible subject for the owners of cine cameras, and footage survives from a number of these events (notably Warwick),

Michael Dobson

173

albeit rather inaccessibly in local history archives. With the coming of sound cinema in the 1930s, though, film could suddenly deliver spectacle, dialogue and music to larger audiences even than those who came to Warwick, Dover or Greenwich. The new medium, however, did not immediately wipe out the pageant: it was merely that the pre-war talkies cannily adopted elements of the historical pageant as part of their stock-in-trade. The first internationally successful British sound film was that swaggering pageant, Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry the Eighth (1933), and in 1937 Korda went on to produce Fire over England, directed by William K. Howard. Adapted from A. E. W. Mason’s novel, Fire over England, like any self-respecting pageant, reaches its climax with Elizabeth’s visit to Tilbury in 1588 – a sequence that begins with a long equestrian processional entry past woods and water, of which Mary Kelly would have been proud. The link between the early costume movie and the pageant is even more obvious in another of this film’s forebears, made two years earlier. Arthur B. Woods’ Drake of England (1935) was simply a film adaptation of Louis Napoleon Parker’s very own Drake. Sadly, it is now almost impossible to obtain Drake of England outside the archives of the British Film Institute. However, a less elusive direct successor goes one better than Parker, by not just providing the knighting, the Tilbury oration and the victory celebrations, but by compressing all three into one culminating crowd scene. In 1940, Michael Curtiz made The Sea Hawk, with Errol Flynn as the fictitious Geoffrey Thorpe and Flora Robson repeating the role she had already played in Fire Over England, that of Elizabeth. Thorpe is rewarded by the Queen for intercepting Spanish intelligence and warning of the approach of the Armada, in a finale of pure pageantry that neatly conflates the knighting of Drake, a topical paraphrase of the Tilbury speech, and the flag-waving and cheering of the Armada victory. In Errol Flynn’s other Elizabethan costume drama, however, the attitude to pageantry is very different, largely because the spectacle is designed for the consumption of a different national audience. Although Mary Kelly had advised canny business managers that ‘The interest in pageants is particularly great in America, and it is well worth advertising in the American shipping lines’, in practice catering to an American perspective on the English past might prove fatal to most of the form’s founding assumptions.29 While in 1905 the inhabitants of Sherborn, Massachusetts, had sent a letter to Sherborne, Dorset, boasting of their ‘filial pride’ in the ‘mother town’, Americans now increasingly saw their history not as a continuation of England’s but as marking a complete ideological break from it: for them, established modernity now

174

The Pageant of History 1905–39

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 ultimately 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 quietly 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 incongruously 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 Virgin 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 perspective 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 changing. The definitive public events designed to assert a continuity with the Renaissance were now no longer nationalistic processions but international 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 occasions, 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 victories 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 thinking 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 celebrate 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 Channel but the English gene pool were clearly numbered. Other than for Americans, who felt that it did not really apply to them anyway, history 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

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

The Pageant of History 1905–39 Pageant’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge University, 2005); Deborah Sugg Ryan, ‘ “Pageantitis”: Frank Lascelles’ Oxford Historical Pageant, Visual Spectacle, and Popular Memory’, Visual Culture in Britain, 8(2) (2007), pp. 63–82. Gilbert Hudson and others, The Pickering Pageant (Pickering: Boak & Sons, 1910). For further images of the 1910 Pickering pageant, see Gordon Clitheroe, Pickering: The Second Selection (London: History Press, 2002). Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 46–54. Roger Simpson, ‘Arthurian Pageants in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Arthuriana, 18(1) (2008), p. 63. Mary Kelly, ‘Pageants’, in Harold C. Downs, ed., The Theatre and Stage, 2 vols (London: Pitman, 1934), II, p. 737. On Kelly, see especially Mick Wallis, ‘Drama in the Villages: Three Pioneers’, in Paul Brassley, Jeremy Burchardt and Lynne Thompson, eds, The English Countryside Between the Wars: Regeneration or Decline? (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2006), pp. 102–15. Kelly’s How to Make a Pageant is in fact merely a slightly expanded paraphrase of her description of ‘Pageants’, in Downs, ed., Theatre and Stage, II, pp. 689–92, 735–8, 783–6, 833–6, 881–4, 929–32, 981–4, 1035–8. Kelly, ‘Pageants’, p. 689. For a case study of the local politics of all this, see Michael Woods, ‘Performing Power: Local Politics and the Taunton Pageant of 1928’, Journal of Historical Geography, 25(1) (1999), pp. 57–74. Percy Mackaye, Caliban by the Yellow Sands (New York: Doubleday, 1916), p. xviii. Kelly, ‘Pageants’, pp. 786, 929. Hudson and others, Pickering Pageant, p. 49. ‘The Song of Pickering’ was published commercially by Novello and Sons of London, independently of the pageant’s text, presumably in a further attempt to raise the profile of ‘Hill-guarded Pickering,/Queen of our Vale!’ (Hudson and others, Pickering Pageant, pp. 55–6). More recent history could be left to Noel Coward, whose Cavalcade (1931) and This Happy Breed (1939) are essentially pageant-like chronicles of representative families instead of representative towns. Kelly, ‘Pageants’, pp. 930–1. Louis Napoleon Parker, Drake: A Pageant Play (London: John Lane, 1912), p. 67. See the Bryant Papers preserved in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London, file J/4. See, for example, Kelly, ‘Pageants’, p. 931. Given the widespread use of pageantry by subsequent totalitarian regimes of both right and left, it is worth considering whether the form that Parker pioneered helped to encode and bequeath the megalomania inherent in high British imperialism. Punch, 21 June 1933, p. 681. ‘When, in addition to all this [Tudor pageantry surrounding Elizabeth’s christening, using the dialogue from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII], Henry VIII comes out in a smart green suiting and takes the babe in his arms, one feels that pageantry can go on further . . . That Raleigh’s cloak and Drake’s

Michael Dobson

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

177

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. Arthur Bryant, Book of the Pageant, Greenwich, 1933 (London: Fleetway Press, 1933), n. p. 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. Kelly, ‘Pageants’, pp. 691–2. ‘[T]hey can wear lovely clothes, and heraldry, and so on, and feel themselves as important as the principals’ (Kelly, ‘Pageants’, p. 930). Kelly, ‘Pageants’, p. 736. Bryant Papers, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London, file J/4. Kelly, ‘Pageants’, p. 1035. Goodden, Story, pp. 15–17, 27–8. 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. 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. Dobson and Watson, England’s Elizabeth, pp. 76–8, 231. 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. 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

The spectator of a film set in the Renaissance period is like a time-traveller, ceaselessly flitting between past and present. Temporality is both unfixed and carefully delineated. The cast and crew of the film play a complex game, one that must both underline the different temporalities of past and present, the distinctiveness of past and present, and blur temporal boundaries so that they become indistinct to the spectator, and past and present can be experienced as one and the same. This time-shifting is negotiated through the materiality of the filmic process. In one time zone is the spectator, perhaps sitting in an audience of contemporaries, in a modern cinema, the film itself competing with a range of other consumer goods, from the popcorn in the spectator’s hand to the attractions described in the advertisements that precede the film. In another time zone are the characters that play out the drama that unfolds on the screen, surrounded by material objects that are intended to confirm this is a sixteenth-century world. Central to this experience are the actors who must embody these inhabitants of the sixteenth century. In this case, let us imagine that the spectator is watching Clive Owen playing the part of Walter Ralegh in Elizabeth: The Golden Age (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 2007). Yet last night, the same spectator watched a DVD that proposed the same actor was a Roman Briton, on the cusp of the Dark Ages (King Arthur (dir. Antoine Fuqua, 2004)), and only a week earlier, they watched another DVD in which Owen masqueraded as a manservant in a 1920s’ country house (Gosford Park (dir. Robert Altman, 2001)), while Owen appeared as himself on the celebrity pages of this morning’s newspaper. Film-makers endeavour to overcome this time-shifting experience by inserting Owen 178

Andrew Higson

179

into a mise-en-scène filled with what purports to be the material culture of the sixteenth century. But it is important to the success of the film that the spectators also recognize Owen as a modern star, whose presence helps to sell the film as one that can mean something to the twenty-first-century spectator. In this chapter, I examine the imprecise temporal and material experience of what we call the Renaissance through a series of recent films set in England in the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries.1 If these films are sold in part on their ability to reconstruct a specific period in the past, they also insist on their ability to enthral and entertain the modern-day spectator. Inevitably, representations of the Renaissance change according to the time in which the representation is created, the medium for which it is created and the audiences to whom it is addressed. My task here is in part to examine how a particular type of contemporary film imagines the Renaissance, how it depicts this particular historical period, and in particular the various historical characters, themes and developments on which they focus. But I will also underline the extent to which such representations of the Renaissance are circumscribed by the other attractions of the filmic experience. I’m therefore just as interested in the various ways in which the film industry thinks about such films, how they work as media commodities, and the different ways in which audiences have made sense of them. The two most prominent English-language ‘Renaissance films’ of recent years were both released in 1998: Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth and John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love. Both are biopics of sorts, one dealing with Elizabeth Tudor’s journey to the throne and the early part of her reign, and the other offering a highly fictionalized, tongue-in-cheek account of a passage in the life of Shakespeare. Both were very successful as films, doing exceptional business at the box office for the kinds of films they were, and both were widely discussed. It is perhaps surprising, then, given their cultural prominence, that they were not followed by a string of other films set in the same period. Indeed, since the release of Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love, there have been only four other English-language films that are set in the Renaissance period and that deal with English characters. In 2003, Mike Barker’s To Kill a King, about the rise to power of Oliver Cromwell and the beheading of Charles I, showed on selected screens in the UK. The New World, Terence Malick’s film about the early years of the English colonial settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, incorporating the story of Pocahontas, appeared in 2005. Almost ten years after Elizabeth, Kapur’s sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, dealt loosely with the mid-Elizabethan

180

Private Lives and Public Conflicts

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 documentary 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 HartDavies’ 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 Virgin 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 boundaries. 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, meanwhile, 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 television 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 demonstrate, 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 audiences 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 historical 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 business, 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 market 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 target 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. JeanPierre 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 International, 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 comedy, 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 nothing 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 especially 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

audiences; part of the success of Shakespeare in Love was that it could work very effectively both for a highly educated and culturally discerning middle-class audience and for a mainstream romantic comedy audience. The success of Elizabeth, meanwhile, owed much to its blending of different genres. This generic hybridity enabled it to draw in both the audience for the more genteel and romantic costume dramas of the modern past, and those audiences seeking the attractions of the historical adventure or the political thriller.9 The same production team tried to recreate the formula with the sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 2007), but with much less success. Even so, the same hybrid sensibility is very much to the fore, and the film again offers both the feminine pleasures of the romantic costume drama and the masculine pleasures of the action adventure film. If Elizabeth, Shakespeare in Love and their few Renaissance-set successors are, at one level, simply further entries in the crossover category, at another level they are variants on the costume drama – that is, they are variants on a popular film genre rather than a branch of the discipline of history. As such, they share as much with films like Stage Beauty (dir. Richard Eyre, 2004), set in the Restoration period, Pride and Prejudice (dir. Joe Wright, 2005), set in the early nineteenth century, or Gosford Park, set in the 1920s, as they do with films set between 1500 and 1660. Shakespeare in Love also shares much with other recent literary biopics, such as Finding Neverland (dir. Marc Forster, 2004) about J. M. Barrie, or Miss Potter about Beatrix Potter; while Elizabeth belongs to a long line of recent biopics about English royalty, from The Madness of King George (dir. Nicholas Hytner, 1994), to Young Victoria (dir. Jean-Marc Vallée, 2009), to The Queen. In a similar vein, the British distributor of To Kill a King saw the film as likely to attract ‘older, more discerning cinemagoers who hanker after upscale period fare such as Mrs Brown’ – another major crossover costume drama success from 1997, about the private life of Queen Victoria, which shares little with To Kill a King besides being a well-made costume drama with an English monarch at the centre of its narrative.10 Another way of thinking about Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love is to regard them not as early modern films, but as middlebrow romantic dramas with a strongly English sensibility – in which case one might cite such contemporary-set films as Notting Hill (dir. Roger Michell, 1999), Love Actually (dir. Richard Curtis, 2003) or The Holiday (dir. Nancy Meyers, 2006) as successors. We can also view Elizabeth, and to some extent Shakespeare in Love, as examples of female-centred drama, and as

184

Private Lives and Public Conflicts

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 Renaissance 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 audiences, 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, characters 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 historical drama and/or employed some sort of historical consultant or otherwise researched the period. Michael Hirst, who wrote the screenplays 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 colonials’.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 experienced 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 Renaissance 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 cultural 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 audiences 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 getting the costumes ‘wrong’ or conflating characters or imagining events differently. Of the six films about the English Renaissance that I’ve identified, the one perhaps that its production team were most concerned to

186

Private Lives and Public Conflicts

present as a true historical representation, a proper history lesson, was To Kill a King. Kevin Loader, the film’s producer, for instance, stated in an interview that he was ‘often shocked how little people know about this fascinating period’ – and the film is clearly an effort to rectify this situation, going to some lengths to present its drama as authentic and historical.13 But even this film makes an on-screen statement, admittedly right at the end of the credits, tucked well away from view, that reads: ‘This film is based on history; however, certain characters and events have been combined and/or fictionalised for dramatic purposes.’ The film also adopts many of the most familiar devices for establishing the authenticity of its vision. It opens with a series of informational titles providing historical detail and context, which are presented in stark white script on a black screen, with no musical accompaniment, establishing a sense of sombre concentration and an almost educational feel. After a highly stylized title sequence, reminiscent of that of Elizabeth, we move to a very low-key opening scene, the camera lingering on Fairfax (Dougray Scott) as he reminisces in voice-over about the civil war and about his friend Cromwell (Tim Roth). The understatement of this speech is typical of the de-glamorization of the film as a whole and the avoidance of showy effects. Several of the scenes are shot in period locations, but as with the costumes and interior designs, one gets a sense less of the mise-en-scène being presented as spectacle and more of all this detail providing an authentic backdrop to the action. There are also plenty of references to, and impersonations of, historical documents, events and characters. Reviews of the film noted the difference of the production. As one critic put it, To Kill a King presents a view of history in which ‘discourse, ideas and dialogue [are] more important than visual effects’.14 Another suggested that the film was very much not ‘history in the heritage mode’, but ‘a rare historical movie that focuses on politics rather than spectacle’ and which is ‘calculated to arouse serious discussion’.15 It is, in that sense, ‘a history lesson propelled by ideas rather than action’.16 Another strategy adopted by the film-makers in an effort to achieve a sense of historical authenticity was the avoidance of using American actors. But by adopting such a rigorous line, the producers made it very difficult for themselves to raise the necessary finance for the film, which twice went bankrupt, then failed to secure an American distributor, and finally flopped at the UK box office. At the other end of the spectrum of historical accuracy, we have The Tudors, the ‘steamy’ television series ‘which critics could take or leave but many viewers are eating up (the costumes! the sets! the sex

Andrew Higson

187

scenes!)’.17 Aiming to maximize audiences, the programme makers were not afraid to depart from the historical record, changing the timing and details of events, names of characters, their relationships with one another, their physical appearance and so on.18 As Michael Hirst, the show’s creator and writer, put it, the producers ‘commissioned me to write an entertainment, a soap opera, and not history . . . And we wanted people to watch it.’19 Despite the operation of dramatic licence, these films and television programmes clearly do still operate as commentaries on the Renaissance period, even if this is perhaps a specialist interest for only particular audiences – and often misleading as a guide to the historical record. How then do these films represent Renaissance history? On which historical characters, themes and developments do they focus? And how do they focus on them? How do they deal with these historical characters, themes and developments? In their different ways, they all deal with the problems of inheritance, the relations between family and nation, the importance of marriage as a political and an economic contract as much as a social contract, the desire to produce male heirs and so on. These issues are, of course, central to the two Elizabeth films and The Other Boleyn Girl: who is Elizabeth to marry and can Henry produce a male heir? Legally or religiously sanctioned sex is thus presented as a means to political power, a means of preserving sovereignty. Political power itself is variously represented as devious, treacherous and authoritarian – even if at times alluring – in figures such as Walsingham and Oliver Cromwell, two generations of Norfolks and the Boleyns; it is really only in the figure of Elizabeth that politics also emerges occasionally as a generous, decent and subtle vocation. All of the films, in their various ways, also deal with the struggle over nationhood. English monarchs are threatened by the empire-building of their European compatriots and religious leaders in the two Elizabeth films and The Other Boleyn Girl. In Shakespeare in Love, The New World and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, we see Englishmen aspiring in the name of their sovereign to establish new colonies in Virginia. And in To Kill a King we see Cromwell, Parliament and the king debating and contesting the future of the nation and its political arrangements. Perhaps the overriding crisis or conflict explored in these films is the crisis over religious power and authority, a crisis that pervades the two Elizabeth films and The Other Boleyn Girl, but which is presented variously as horror, as action-adventure, as comedy and as family drama. Thus, in Elizabeth, we have the hooded figure of the Catholic stalking

188

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 parallel, 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 dramas, 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 overlapping, 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 creators 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 central 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 actionadventure 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 anything about the backstory, and the way it is usually presented as popular history, we know that the Spanish Armada will need to appear). The narrative 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 conflicts 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 personal 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

of ‘History’. There may be two narratives, two ways of binding events together, but there can only be one mise-en-scène – but even then one can see the so-called historical record inserting itself into the mise-en-scène and the soundtrack, through historical documents, images, artefacts, buildings, music and so on. Such details function both as mise-en-scène and as markers of authenticity, drawing on ‘History’ to authenticate the fiction. The Renaissance space on the big screen in recent years is also generally a spectacular space, a space of monumental architecture, a space filled with luxurious furnishings and fittings and rich costumes, a space of fabulous colour and texture. This is so except, of course, when the drama moves away from the royal palaces, when the mise-en-scène becomes much more down to earth and, in the case of The New World, literally closer to nature, raw as opposed to civilized. Even in England, though, the landscapes around the royal castles and palaces offer a premodern, prelapsarian vision of England’s green and pleasant land. There are three other raw mise-en-scènes that appear in these films: the battlefield, the torture chamber and the executioner’s platform. These remind us of the distance of the past, suggesting that there was still some way to go before the dangers of medievalism could be left behind and the refinements of modernity could be fully attained – even if, in many ways, film-makers sought to establish parallels between past and present. These more dangerous mise-en-scènes rarely remain on screen for too long in these films; while the mixing of genres is important as a means of maximizing their audience appeal, the core sensibility is humanist and romantic, rather than gory or action-based. In any case, these films generally lacked the resources to mount epic battle scenes, although Kapur tried to with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. The English Renaissance thus figures as a spectacular space, but a space whose spectacle and whose central protagonists are always under threat; it is thus also a precarious and dangerous world – this is not the genteel past of Jane Austen or Merchant-Ivory. This Renaissance space is also dominated by powerful, magisterial characters; by extravagant, theatrical characters; by characters with voices of authority – even if that authority is constantly challenged, both in public and in private, behind closed doors. How then to sum up? What are these films about? The answer to that question really depends on who is considering the films. Contemporary film-makers, film companies and film audiences are perhaps less interested in the Renaissance per se, and more interested in this period

Andrew Higson

191

in history as a space in which to explore fascinating, larger-than-life personalities, romantic liaisons and power struggles, amidst spectacular costumes, architecture and landscapes. But these films are also used as vehicles for reflecting obliquely on the present – and the film-makers have carefully designed these Renaissance dramas so that they have a recognizably modern sensibility, intended to appeal to contemporary audiences. All this, of course, is also true of a great many other types of films – in this sense, then, the Renaissance is really a side issue with these films!

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

No genre testifies to the fascination with history more than the documentary. Themselves documents that illustrate the tensions and possibilities that inhere in the present/past relationship, recent productions demonstrate that audience expectation, nostalgia and global dialogue continue to play defining roles in the reanimation imperative. Five examples – The Flight of the Earls, broadcast on BBC2, Northern Ireland, on 2–4 September 2007; Heston’s Tudor Feast, broadcast on Channel 4 on 17 March 2009; Living with the Tudors, directed by Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope in 2007; The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan, broadcast on BBC2 on 17 June 2008; and Timewatch: Queen Elizabeth’s Lost Guns, broadcast on BBC2 on 21 February 2009 – bear out the extent to which the Renaissance is filtered through contemporary preoccupations and requirements, suggesting a concerted drive to mine this particular historical juncture for its transferable applications. As might be expected, it is Shakespeare who initially declares himself the point of contact for a movement back into the past. In The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan, for example, the two presenters, Giles Coren and Sue Perkins, bandy Shakespearean quotations as they sample, for one week, a Tudor diet: the overlay of citation lends the enterprise a kind of authenticity and, in addition, serves to grant the participants an informed status in keeping with the bourgeois, mercantile characters they impersonate. But Shakespeare does not appear only in semi-reverent guise. As befits his status as an iconic figure who can be alternately eulogized and mocked, the Bard is simultaneously problematized as an arbiter of meaning. Observes celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal, who aims in Heston’s Tudor Feast to ‘recapture’ the ‘lost greatness’ of England’s ‘culinary heritage’, ‘Forget Shakespeare, if there’s one thing the Tudors pioneered . . . it’s drinking beer’. The injunction is, 193

194

Epilogue: Documentary Reflections

of course, purposefully bathetic and demotic; at the same time, there is the suggestion that there are alternative means of conjuring history, that what was can be accessed via several routes. Beyond Shakespeare, it implied, the Tudors and ourselves may not be very dissimilar. These are, we should recall, popular modes of documentary, kinds of programming that showcase a playful engagement with history, and it is testimony to the capaciousness of the documentary genre that they are accompanied by productions that take a more sober approach to the business of Renaissance reconstruction. Hence, in Timewatch: Elizabeth’s Lost Guns, the defining conceit is the promise of revising the established historical record. As the presenter, Saul David, remarks: ‘A mile off the rocky coast of the Channel Island of Alderney lies a shipwreck that could rewrite English naval history.’ The quest is to establish whether a sunken Elizabethan warship deployed cannons whose identical dimensions would have allowed for prowess in battle. The powers of modern technology and marine archaeology, it is suggested, are instrumental in eradicating error, and remedying omission, in the promotion of interpretive infallibility. From rewriting to re-enactment is a small step. Living with the Tudors takes as its framing device the experience of a group of volunteers at Kentwell Hall, Suffolk, who, over the course of several summers, operated as costumed sixteenth-century participants: the documentary details the background to the phenomenon and, in so doing, allows the ‘real-life’ stories of the major players to infiltrate the narrative. The effect is to stress how modalities of playing function in a mediating capacity – how a version of the Renaissance structures present-day selves. And, because of the omnipresence of the camera and the public in Living with the Tudors – paying visitors to Kentwell Hall spectate upon the re-enactment experience – a powerful impression of the theatrical visibility of the project is afforded. ‘The Renaissance’, remarks Greg Colón Semenza, is most obviously significant as a ‘historical source of national pride, inspiration, and even moral authority’, and it is arresting that, in the majority of the documentaries, the echoes of imperial agendas sound forcefully.1 Distinctive about the Renaissance, according to this reading, is the association of the period with the beginnings of the British Empire, which suggests, in turn, a romantic reification of a glorious ‘golden age’. The theme consistently punctuates the commentary accompanying Timewatch: Elizabeth’s Lost Guns, as in the detail that the warship ‘fought the Armada’ and a subsequent invocation of ‘Nelson’. Historical referents coalesce to affirm a sense of an unsurpassed naval superiority, a state of affairs that the equivalently heroic raising of the ‘lost

Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

195

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 possession. 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 expansionism but because of a quieter, homespun creativity. According to this schema, it is the national rather than the international that is to be cultivated, 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 artistic/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 decision, 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 virtuoso 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 bringing 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

frenzied modernity. A mise-en-scène composed of birdsong and greenery undergirds the mood, while an absorption in the world of the Tudors is communicated via an initial filmic hesitation to label the re-enactors with their real names: no other identifications, it seems, are important. Re-enactment is also to the fore in Timewatch: Queen Elizabeth’s Lost Guns, although here it is scenes of reconstruction, characterized by fire and smoke, that furnish the documentary with its period detail. Matching these insets are shots – of speedboats racing or divers plumbing the depths – that help to bolster the sense of urgency: to ‘discover’ the guns, it is suggested, is akin to experiencing their explosive impact on sixteenth-century seas. Where Timewatch: Queen Elizabeth’s Lost Guns is drawn to the visual grammar of action, The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan prioritizes the logic of excess. Glimpses and lists of the meals undertaken by the presenters – Meat Pottage, Stewed Mutton Steaks, Manchet Bread, Capon with Damsons and Calf’s Foot Jelly – highlight the differences between then and now: this rendition of the Renaissance depends, for its effect, on alienating encodings of consumption. Heston’s Tudor Feast, too, privileges excess, not least in the chef’s creation of a frog blancmange, a mythical beast and bone marrow rice pudding for his guests. On the one hand, the predilection for the ‘extravagant, flamboyant and spectacular’ is predicated on assertions of precedent: shots of Heston Blumenthal scouring the shelves of the Bodleian Library give his mission validity and purpose, while also confirming the centrality of his explorer persona. As he exclaims, ‘I found an original recipe in a manuscript from the period.’ On the other hand, Heston’s Tudor Feast, as the documentary’s manufactured dishes and adaptations of cooking instructions demonstrate, is also forced to admit that a transparent reproduction of history is impossible. Fredric Jameson writes that the ‘past’ is only ever recoverable ‘through stylistic connotation . . . the glossy qualities of the image’: we are obliged, he concludes, ‘to seek History by way of our own . . . simulacra’.2 More so than other documentaries, Heston’s Tudor Feast fits this postmodern bill, with its frequent use of cartoons, animation and graphics suggesting an approach to the Renaissance that trades upon visual substitutes. Or, to put the point in another way, in the place of reconstruction, Heston’s Tudor Feast stresses the representational valences of suggestion and style. To such strategies of realization, telling issues of class and status are attached. In Heston’s Tudor Feast, for instance, ‘extravagance’ translates as a concentration on the assumed habits of the elite: the documentary’s nodes of connection are with monarchs rather than plebeians, and the thrust of the narrative is towards seeing the banqueting practices

Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

197

of royalty as socially representative. This homogenizing implication, as well as bearing the imprint of popular series such as The Tudors, is reflected in the guests invited to the feast itself, which unfolds as a coup de théâtre: Alex Zane, Sophie Ellis Bextor, Cilla Black, Jay Rayner, Ruth Watson and Kelvin MacKenzie, who partake of Heston’s ‘spectacular’ fare, are in many ways the new aristocracy, at least insofar as their public selves are indissoluble from their prominence as popular celebrities. Very rarely do the documentaries attend to the tangled permutations of the Elizabethan social order: this, it might be assumed, would run the risk of denting the marketable illusion of a Renaissance period linked to finery and prosperity rather than their material opposites. Instead, arguably as a mechanism for addressing absent questions of class, the documentaries approve types of assertion or resistance staged by women, finding in modes of female agency reflections on larger inequities. Despite the remark of Patrick Phillips, the Svengali owner of Kentwell, that the ‘epic spectacles’ constitute his ‘game’, Living with the Tudors is a woman’s film in the sense that its female directors operate as auteurs, sculpting the events they witness into a narrative continuum; in this respect, the documentary is characterized by acts of potential subversion which promise to make available alternative perspectives and even rival interpretations. Woman as proactive subject is more stridently articulated in The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan, in which Shakespeare aids Sue Perkins in a successful deflation of the male ego of Giles Cohen: ‘that is all sound and fury signifying nothing’, she notes, pointing jokily at her co-presenter’s codpiece. The fact that it is Macbeth who is appropriated here, from a play otherwise preoccupied with the ultimate sidelining of women, makes all the more resonant the intervention. Elsewhere in The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan, Sue Perkins is represented as gravitating not to the role of subservient housewife, as the dynamic of the documentary might suggest, but to her monarchical counterpart, Elizabeth I: as the presenter states, while plucking on a lute, Tudor women were ‘keen to emulate their Queen . . . an all-round style icon’. The point is not, we think, that The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan here wants to indulge in another royal fantasy; rather, attention is directed to issues of class mobility and female aspiration, issues which themselves owe a debt to portrayals of Elizabeth I in popular cinema. But the most extended treatment of the Queen is reserved for Timewatch: Elizabeth’s Lost Guns. This production is premised on a peculiar construction of female power that gestures backwards to the gendered ambiguities of the famous Tilbury speech in order to suggest the uniqueness of sixteenth-century English seafaring forces. Hence, Elizabeth I is described as a daughter emerging

198

Epilogue: Documentary Reflections

from her father’s shadow and as the ‘mother of British naval dominance’: 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 complexions 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 modern 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 bodily 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 mental 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, disappointments and regrets surface (a job loss or a marriage break-up), which suggests that present-day identifications are less secure and fulfilled than their fictive historical equivalents. Scenes of divestiture and the removal of make-up signal that not much remains after the performance: 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 Renaissance by way of mainly English examples. Yet, as our introductory invocation of Michel de Montaigne as a route from the early modern 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?’) germane 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

of Rathmullan harbour, states Éamonn Ó Ciardha, ‘marked the effective collapse of an independent Gaelic Ulster and prepared the way for the subsequent plantation . . . and full incorporation into the new tripartite Stuart monarchy’; a further ramification was the ‘emergence of an Irish Catholic military, religious and intellectual diaspora’.7 Matching the significance of its subject, The Flight of the Earls allows historian-presenter, Antaine Ó Donnaíle, the full range of technical resources at the production company’s disposal. Hence, re-enactment scenes, sweeping shots of various English and European city locales, such as London and Madrid, and the deployment of a replica of a sixteenth-century galleon make for stirring visuals and emphasize that this is a narrative of epic proportions. What of the perspective that the documentary endorses? In one sense, it could be argued that the commentary subscribes to a highly sympathetic reading of the experiences of the main historical players: the music is mournful and elegiac, the English forces ranged against the Irish soldiers during the Nine Years’ War are described as ‘very nervous’, and, crucially, except for the title, the term ‘flight’ is never used. To do so could be to suggest a potential abnegation of local responsibility and to invoke allegations of treachery and cowardice. Moreover, as we are treated to aerial shots of Antaine Ó Donnaíle ascending rocks and confronting snowy wastes, it becomes clear that his efforts retrace the Herculean peregrinations of the lords across Europe and that this is something of a personal odyssey. What Nicola King has labelled ‘rememory’ or ‘the belatedness of traumatic memory’, a ‘point of intersection between individual memory of personal experience and cultural or collective memory’, is hinted at in Antaine Ó Donnaíle’s indication of the ‘Callan river’ and recollection of his points of reference.8 ‘I grew up [here]’, he states, adding, ‘But we didn’t bother with Cowboys and Indians . . . The game we played was the Battle of the Yellow Ford’ (the 1598 military encounter between the native Irish and an English expeditionary force at which the latter was ambushed and routed). And, when we consider the presenter’s name, Antaine Ó Donnaíle, it is possible to posit a further connection, a link back to the Gaelic lord, Rory O’Donnell, and a desire to resurrect history via the pursuit of kinship networks. It would be a mistake, however, to infer that such strategies of representation amount to no more than a monocular envisioning of the past. Internally, the point of view of the English in Ireland is also considered, suggesting a narrative to and fro. Crucially, The Flight of the Earls was broadcast in the Irish and English languages (Antaine Ó Donnaíle is bilingual) on different channels on different occasions:

Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

201

potential viewers were encouraged to make interpretive choices. This, we contend, is not so much a symptom of the bifurcated identity of the documentary’s subject, Hugh O’Neill, who held an English title but entertained Irish loyalties, as an expression of the material and cultural complexities of the modern-day island of Ireland, which aspires to be collaboratively funded, intercommunicative and mutually governmental. In addition, The Flight of the Earls addresses its theme from a pan-European perspective (as Antaine Ó Donnaíle notes towards the close, O’Neill, for a period, occupied ‘the heart of international politics’), a representational procedure that invites a host of questions supplementary to those outlined above. Whom or what do we remember? How should that project of remembrance be conducted? As in the Ulster Museum exhibition, the documentary imperative is finessed, with a conjuration of origins facilitating an engagement with the present that allows for reflection and dialogue. These questions are important in another way for, as its commentary establishes, The Flight of the Earls coincided with the four-hundredth anniversary of this pivotal episode: 2007 was a commemorative year and, as such, the documentary was not an isolated incident.9 Over the course of 2007 was staged a series of events – conferences, seminars, exhibitions, clan gatherings, shows, concerts, golf competitions and the erection of a sculpture – whose festive tenor was designed to showcase the centrality to history of the earls’ leave-taking and subsequent exile. Notably, these occasions assumed a north–south character: although the north-west and Donegal (Ireland) played host, so, too, did the north (Northern Ireland), as is indicated by celebrations in Omagh and Belfast. If this was a crossborder phenomenon, some of the notes struck in the commemoration resonated more widely still. Theatre productions, and the archival materials that inspired them, toured globally (to Belgium and Switzerland, for example), which points to shared conversations and the pooling of interests on a worldwide basis. One example impresses: a poetry competition based on the story of the ‘flight of the earls’ resulted in contributions from young writers as far afield as Eastern Europe and the Middle East. As the published anthology of winning entries makes clear, the opportunity to produce ‘imaginings of loss and new beginnings’ was eagerly taken up.10 In this textual manifestation of reflections on that ill-fated seventeenth-century journey, motifs of forgetting and remembering, ending and exodus, migration and stasis, connection and communication, are vividly encapsulated. If, as we argued earlier, there is an instructive dimension to the act of documenting, then it is surely here, in a collection that demonstrates the spectrum of media

202

Epilogue: Documentary Reflections

engagements with the Renaissance, that plays up the ways in which nation, possession and dispossession continue as areas of concern for the popular imagination, and that highlights what is left behind in the need productively to move forwards.

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

Abinger Pageant, 164 Adamson, John, 76 Adventurers, 168 Agyeman, Freema, 121 Akass, Kim, 30 Albanese, Denise, 15 Aldam, Gillian, 96 Almond, David, 117 Altman, Robert, 178 Amelie, 182 Andrejevic, Mark, 199, 202 Andrew, Dudley, 97 Angry Aztecs (Deary), 116 The Animated Tales, 121 Anne Pedersdotter, 87 An Apology for Raymond Sebond (Montaigne), 3–5, 7, 8 Appleyard, Bryan, 129 Ardmore Studios, 18 Armiño, Mauro, 42, 48 Armstrong, Gillian, 184 Armstrong, Nancy, 27 Atkinson, Rowan, 71 Auferheide, Pat, 64 The Awesome Egyptians (Deary), 116 Bacon, Sir Francis, 46 Bainton, Roland, 148–9 Bana, Eric, 185 Barker, Mike, 11, 71, 179, 184 Barnes, Kitty, 168 Barrie, J. M., 183 Barry, Jonathan, 96 Bassett, Ronald, 89 BBC, 71, 180 Bell, Erin, 202 Belloch, Carmen, 34 Bend It Like Beckham, 182 Bennett, Ronan, 75, 76 Bennett, Susan, 140 Bennett, Tony, 3 Benson, Edward, 64

Benson, E. F., 168 Bergin, Joan, 20 Berraondo, Xavier, 46 Betteridge, Tom, 24, 28 Between the Acts (Woolf), 164, 175 Bextor, Sophie Ellis, 197 Beyer, Absalon Pedersen, 86–7 The Bill, 185 Billington, Michael, 130 Bingo, 44 Birmingham Stage Company, 116 Bishop, Louise, 31 Black, Cilla, 197 Blackadder: The Cavalier Years, 71–2 Blackpool Grand Theatre, 115 Blanchett, Cate, 184, 185 Bleak House, 185 Blumenthal, Heston, 193, 195, 196 Boëre, Catherine, 63 Bolger, Sarah, 25 Bond, Edward, 44 Bordwell, David, 95, 96 Borondo, Sara, 49 Bounda, Constantin V., 107 Bradley, David, 27 Brahe, Tycho, 102, 107, 110 Brant, Martine, 82 Brassley, Paul, 176 Braudy, Leo, 162 Brenton, Howard, 142 Brewster, Ben, 161 Briggs, Robin, 95 Briner, Bob, 157 Bristol, Michael, 6 Britton, Celia, 161 British Board of Film Censors, 90 Brown, Martin, 116 Brownlow, Kevin, 11, 71, 74, 75 Bruzzi, Stella, 198, 202 Bryant, Arthur, 165, 168, 171 Burchardt, Jeremy, 176 Burgess, Anthony, 44 203

204

Index

Burnett, Mark Thornton, 1, 193 Burt, Richard, 116 Butler, Beverley, 170 Butler, Robert, 130, 144 Byars, Jackie, 25 Byker Grove, 185 By The Sword Divided, 71, 80 Cameron, James, 97 Campillo, Laura, 49 Cannadine, David, 97 Capek, Karel, 104 Cardeña, Chema, 33, 34 Cardenio, 34, 38, 40–1 The Cardinal, 164 Carnes, Mark C., 97 Carson, Christie, 9, 12–13, 127 Carter, Alan, 162 Cave, Terence, 162 Cavill, Henry, 22 CBBC, 116 CBS (Canada), 19 Celenio, Inarco, 47 Cellier, Peter, 155 Certeau, Michel de, 54, 63 Cervantes, Miguel de, 33, 35, 40, 41, 42, 43–4 Cervantes Prize for Theatre, 42 Chadha, Gurinder, 182 Chadwick, Justin, 180, 185 The Chamber, 37, 38, 39–40, 44 Channel Four, 71, 75–6, 180 Charlotte Gray, 184 Chedgzoy, Kate, 12, 112 Chéreau, Patrice, 7 Christensen, Benjamin, 11, 84, 85–6 Christian-Jaque, 105 Churchill, Caryl, 75 Cineaste (magazine), 74 Císaˇruv ˚ pekaˇr a Pekaˇruv ˚ císaˇr/The Emperor’s Baker and the Golem, 99 Civil wars, on screen representation of, 70–80 Blackadder: The Cavalier Years, 71–2 Cromwell, 71, 72–3 The Devil’s Whore, 71, 75–80 Dr Who: The Awakening, 66–70, 71 To Kill a King, 71, 72 The Moonraker, 71, 72

By The Sword Divided, 71 Winstanley, 71, 74–5 Witchfinder General, 71, 72, 73–4 Clap, Susannah, 137 Clark, Stuart, 95 Clauss, Dennis, 157 Clitheroe, Gordon, 176 Cohen, Giles, 197 Cohen, Marshall, 162 Cohen, Walter, 162, 177 Collins, Joan, 174 Comic Relief, 71 Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, 42 Contemporary network programming, 18 Cook, Hardy, 48 Coras, Jean de, 50 Cordner, Michael, 135–6, 139 Coren, Giles, 193 Cornish, Abbie, 185 Costume drama, Thatcherism in, 68–9 Cox, Claire, 157 Cromwell, 71, 72–3 Cromwell, Oliver, 179, 187 Croteau, Melissa, 6–7 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 182 Cue for Treason (Trease), 122 Culloden, 74 Curry, Tom, 47 Curtis, Richard, 183 Curtiz, Michael, 173, 174 Daily Telegraph, 130 Daston, Lorraine, 63 David, Saul, 194 Davies, Serena, 81 Davis, Bette, 174 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 10, 61, 92, 93 Davis, Tracy C., 145 Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag), 86–9 Days of Hope, 75 Deary, Terry, 112, 116, 118–20, 122, 125 De Certeau, Michel, 54 De Groot, Jerome, 11, 65 Deleuze, Gilles, 100, 103 Dempster, Sarah, 81 De Rols, Bertrande, 50, 51

Index De Sevilla, José Manuel González Fernández, 47 The Devil’s Whore, 11, 71, 75–80, 180 Dies Irae, 87, 88 Dobson, Michael, 13, 163 Doctor Who, 112, 121 Documentary reflections, 193–202 Domvile, Barry, 170 Donnelly, Ciarán, 22 Don Quixote, 37, 43 Doran, Stanley, 105 Drake: A Pageant Play in Three Acts, 167 Drake of England, 173 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 86, 88, 89 Dr Who: The Awakening, 66–70, 71 Dumas, Alexandre, 7 Du Tilh, Arnaud, 50 Duval, Alexandre, 36 Duvivier, Julien, 106 Dyja, Eddie, 191 Dymkowski, Christine, 145 Eastenders, 185 Eccles, Mark, 48 Edward and Mary – The Unknown Tudors, 180 Edward Hall’s Propeller Theatre, 142 Edward II, 44, 166 Elizabeth, 20, 83, 179, 180–2, 183–8 Elizabeth I, 180 Elizabeth: The Golden Age, 178, 179–80, 183, 188, 190 Elley, Derek, 191 Elliott, Kamilla, 97 El Otro William/The Other William, 33, 34 Elton, Ben, 81 EMMY awards, 17 The Emperor’s Baker and the Golem, 11, 12 England’s Pleasant Land, 164 English Renaissance on film, 1998–2010, 178–91 connections between films, 180–1 Elizabeth, 179, 180–2, 183–8 as historical fictions, 184–90 Shakespeare in Love, 179–83

205

English Revolution, performing and screening, 65–80 civil wars, on screen representation of, 70–80 Doctor Who: The Awakening, 66–70 Perfect Occurences, 65–6 Erikson, Erik, 153 Essays (Montaigne), 3 Essential viewing, 17 Estienne, Henri, 52 Esty, Jed, 176, 177 Ethan Frome, 184 Evening Standard, 136 Event television, 17 Eyre, Richard, 183 Fanfan la Tulipe, 105 Fassbender, Michael, 77 Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe, 202 Festival of Classical Theatre (Almagro), 42 Fiennes, Joseph, 39, 155, 156 The Financial Times, 137 Finding Neverland, 183 Finlay, Robert, 62 Fire over England (film), 173 Fire over England (Mason novel), 173 The First Post (blog), 76 Flannery, Peter, 75–6 Fletcher, Bruce, 30 Fliflet Braein, Edvard, 95 The Flight of the Earls, 193, 199–201 Focus Features, 185 Foriers, Paul, 63 Forrest, Emma, 191 Forster, E. M., 164, 170 Forster, Marc, 183 Foster, Neal, 116 Frain, James, 23 Franssen, Paul, 47 Fraser, Robert, 46 Frears, Stephen, 182 Freeman, David, 127 Friˇc, Martin, 11–12, 99 Friedman, Lester D., 81 Frostrup, Mariella, 191 Fry, Stephen, 71 Fuqua, Antoine, 178

206

Index

Galiana, Manuel, 46 Gallic Wars, 166 Gaskill, Malcolm, 96 Gates, Anita, 192 Gibson, Pamela Church, 31 Gilleman, Luc M., 153 Girona, 1–2 Glaessner, Verina, 81 Glover, Julian, 152 Golden, Richard M., 95 Golden Gate, 184 Golden Hind, 168 Golem, 99–105 Gómez-Lara, Manuel J., 45 Goodden, Cecil P., 169 Goodman-Hill, Tom, 76 Goodridge, Mike, 191 Gordon, C. M., 48, 176 Gosford Park, 178, 182, 183 Grady, Hugh, 5 Gray, Ann, 202 Grazia, Margreta de, 15 Green, Guy, 146, 152, 159 Greenblatt, Stephen, 122 Greene, Robert, 37 Greenhalgh, Susanne, 126 Greenstreet, James, 46 Greenwich Night Pageant, 168–71 Gregor, Keith, 45 Gregory, Philippa, 180 The Guardian, 130 Guerre, Martin, 10, 50–62 Guerre, Pierre, 52 Guillermo Shakespeare, 36 Guinness, Alec, 72 Guneratne, Anthony, 64 Gunpowder, Treason and Plot, 180 Guthrie, Karen, 193, 195 Guy, John, 16 Guzzetti, Alfred, 161 Hackett, Helen, 126 Halligan, Benjamin, 96, 98 Hamilton, Cicely, 170 Hamlet, 35 Hardy, Robin, 73 Haro Tecglen, Eduardo, 48 Harris, Richard, 72 Harry Potter, 112

Hart-Davies, Adam, 180 Harty, Kevin J., 95 Hattaway, Michael, 49 Havoc in its Third Year (Bennett), 75 Hawkes, Terence, 5 Häxan, 11, 84–6 Heckels, Chris, 113, 115, 121, 122, 123 Henry V, 127 Henry VIII (Gregory novel), 180 Henry VIII (TV mini-series), 181 Henry VIII, re-creating for global television audience, 16–30 see also The Tudors Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Bainton), 148 Hester, Marianne, 96 Heston’s Tudor Feast, 193, 195, 196 Higson, Andrew, 9, 13–14, 69, 178 Hildreth, Mark, 24 Hill, Christopher, 70 Hill, John, 31 Hirst, Michael, 19–20, 24, 29, 180, 184, 187 His Dark Materials, 70 The History of Britain, 83, 180 Hoberman, J., 191 Hodgdon, Barbara, 144 Hoenselaars, Ton, 47, 177 Hoffman, Calvin, 46 Hoffman, Michael, 70 Hogan, Bosco, 28 The Holiday, 183 Holland, Penny, 125–6 Holland, Peter, 175 Home Box Office, 16 Honigmann, E. A. J., 48 Honzl, Jindˇrich, 99 Hopkins, Matthew, 11 Horrible Histories, 115–20 Horrible Histories, 8, 112 The Horribly Huge Press-Out-and-Build Book, 116 The House of Flying Daggers, 182 Hough, Andrew, 30 Howard, Jean E., 15, 31, 162, 177 Howard, William K., 173 Howell, William Dean, 47 How to Make a Pageant (Kelly), 165 Hudson, Gilbert, 164, 170

Index Hughes, Ken, 71, 81 Hughes-Warrington, Marnie, 96–97, 98 Hunt, Nick, 191 Hunter, Allan, 191 Hutcheon, Linda, 97 Hutchings, Peter, 96 Hytner, Nicholas, 183 IMDb (Internet Movie Database), 121 Incredible Incas (Deary), 116 The Independent, 129, 131 In Extremis, 142 In Search of Shakespeare, 180 Iserloh, Erwin, 161 Inspector Morse, 184 Ivanhoe, 166 Jameson, Fredric, 196 Jancovich, Mark, 17 Ježek, Jaroslav, 99 Jeffs, Christine, 184 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 182 Johansson, Scarlett, 185 Jonson, Ben, 37 Johnson, Merri Lisa, 31 Juliá Martínez, Eduardo, 47 Kapur, Shekhar, 20, 83, 178, 179, 183, 185, 190 Karim-Cooper, Farah, 144, 145 Keach, Stacey, 152 Kelly, Mary, 165–6, 167, 170, 171–2 Kemp, Philip, 191 Kemp, Will, 39 Kenilworth, 167 Kennedy, Dennis, 174 Kennedy, Maeve, 30 Kennedy, Maria Doyle, 25–6 Kidnapped (Stevenson), 117 To Kill a King, 11, 71, 72, 179, 180, 183, 184, 186 King, Nicola, 200 King Arthur, 178 Kipling, Rudyard, 172 Knutsen, Gunnar W., 96 Korda, Alexander, 173 Koster, Henry, 174 Krämer, Peter, 25

207

Krejˇcík, Jiˇrí, 106 Kurosawa, Akira, 29 La Estancia/The Chamber, 33, 34 Lamont, Peter, 97 Lanier, Douglas, 38 La Reine Margot (Dumas), 7, 8 Lascelles, Frank, 165 Lee, Ang, 182 Lefranc, Abel, 46 Les Recherches de la France, 50 Le Sueur, Guillaume, 52, 63 Levack, Brian P., 96 Liebrecht, Torben, 157 Life of Shakespeare, or Will Shakespeare, 35 Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, 75 Lion Television, 116 Littlewood, Kevin, 170 Living with the Tudors, 193, 194, 195–6 Loader, Kevin, 186 Longley, Edna, 2 Lorna Doone, 184 Love Actually, 183 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 38 Luther (Green), 152–5, 159 Luther (Till), 155–8, 159 Luther, Martin, 13 Luther, modern cinematic biographies of, 146–60 Luther (Green), 152–5 Luther (Till), 155–8 Martin Luther (Pichel), 147–52 Lyons, James, 17 Macaulay, Alastair, 137 Macbeth, 12, 113, 120–5 MacCauley, Claire, 25 MacDonald, David, 71 Macfarlane, Alan, 89 MacGinnis, Niall, 147 Mackaye, Percy, 165 MacKenzie, Kelvin, 197 Madden, John, 35, 36, 39, 121, 156, 179, 184 Madmen, 17 The Madness of King George, 183 Magnussen, Charles, 84 Maley, Willy, 126

208

Index

Malick, Terence, 179 Malleus Maleficarum, 84, 85 Människor, Två, 96 Mapp and Lucia, 168 Marcus, Leah, 81 Marikar, Sheila, 30 Marmion, Patrick, 136–7 Marshall, Cynthia, 137–9 Marshall, Peter, 30 Martin Luther (Pichel), 147–52, 159 Masefield, John, 87 Mason, A. E. W., 173 Masque of Hope, 175 Matheson, Hans, 28 Mauro, Antonio, 36 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 162, 177 McBride, Ian, 15 McCabe, Janet, 30 McCallion, M., 45 McCrisken, Trevor, 161 McLoone, Martin, 31 McMurria, John, 19 McSorley, Gerard, 25 Meehan, Eileen R., 25 Memorable Verdict, 60 Merchant, Tamzin, 28 Metz, Christian, 150 Meyers, Nancy, 183 Michell, Roger, 183 Miguel Will, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44 Miguel y William/Miguel and William, 33, 34–5, 36, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44 Miramax, 185 Mise-en-scène, 13, 23, 26, 27, 150, 179, 186, 189–90, 196 Miss Potter, 182, 183 Mohamed, Feisal G., 82 Molina, Alfred, 156 Molins, Manuel, 33, 34, 43 Mollà, Jordi, 188 Monarchy, 180 Montaigne, Michel de, 3–5, 7 The Moonraker, 71, 72 Moratín, Leandro Fernández de, 35 Morgan, Peter, 181 Mortimer, John, 47 Mottram, Ron, 95 Mrs Brown, 183, 184

Mulvey, Laura, 150–1 Munden, Marc, 11 Murphy, Andrew, 126 Must see television, 17, 18 The Mysterious X, 84 Naremore, James, 97 Neegaard, Ebbe, 95 Neill, Sam, 28 Nelson, Robin, 30, 32 Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 113 Newcomb, Horace, 31 News of the World (newspaper), 182 The New World, 179, 185, 190 Niche audience, 18 Noonan, Chris, 182 Northam, Jeremy, 28 Nothing Like the Sun, 44 Notting Hill, 183 O’Brien, John, 10–11, 50 Observer (newspaper), 137, 182 Ó Ciardha, Éamonn, 200 O’Connor, Marion F., 31 Ó Donnaíle, Antaine, 200–1 O’Donnell, Rory, 200 Olivier, Laurence, 29–30, 127 Olivier, Richard, 127, 137 O’Neill, Hugh, 199–200, 201 Orduña, Juan de, 47 Orgel, Stephen, 174 Osborne, John, 152–5 O’Sullivan, Maurice J. Jr., 47 Osvobozené divadlo (Liberated Theatre), 99 Oswald, Peter, 142 The Other Boleyn Girl, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185 The Other William, 38, 39–40, 42, 44 O’Toole, Peter, 16, 17 Our Friends in the North, 75 Our Island Story, 168 Owen, Alison, 180 Owen, Clive, 178–9 Pageant, history of, 163–75 Barnes, Kitty, 168 Benson, E. F., 168

Index Bryant, Arthur, 168–70 Kelly, Mary, 165–6, 167, 170, 171–2 Parker, Louis Napoleon, 163–8 A Pageant of Great Women, 170 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 184 Pan Books, 89 Pancheva, Evgenia, 49 Par, Alfonso, 47 París, Inés, 33, 34, 40, 43 Park, Katherine, 63 Parker, Louis Napoleon, 163–8, 173 Pasquier, Estienne, 50, 52–3 The Passion of Joan of Arc, 86 Peace Arch Entertainment, 19 Peake, Maxine, 79 Pearce, Susan, 1 Peckinpah, Sam, 73 Pedersdotter, Anna, 86–7 Pepper, Andrew, 161 Pérez, Jesús Tronch, 10, 33 Perfect Occurences, 65–6 Perkins, Sue, 193, 197 Perrin, Claude, 95 Peter, John, 132 Phillips, Patrick, 197 Pichel, Irving, 13, 146, 149, 159 Planché, J. R., 163 Plath, Sylvia, 184 Pope, Nina, 193, 195 Portillo, Rafael, 45 Portman, Natalie, 185, 189 Potter, Beatrix, 183 Prescott, Paul, 130 Presentism, 5–8 Presentist Shakespeares, 5–6 Presumption, 51–2 of judge or man (iudicis or hominis), 51 of law (iuris), 51 Price, Vincent, 73, 89, 90 Pride and Prejudice, 183 Prime Suspect, 184 Pringle, Eric, 66 The Private Life of Henry the Eighth, 173 The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, 174 Procházka, Martin, 11, 12, 99 Puck of Pook’s Hill (Kipling), 172

209

Pujante, Angel-Luis, 47, 49, 177 Pullman, Philip, 70 Punch, 168 Purcell, Stephen, 142 The Queen, 182, 183 Radford, Michael, 162 Raengo, Alessandra, 97 Rafter, Dennis, 46 The Rape of Lucrece, 38 Rayner, Jay, 197 Reeves, Michael, 11, 71, 90 Renaissance, documenting, 1–14 issue of how, 9 Montaigne, Michel de and, 3–5, 7 presentism and, 5–8 Renaissance, performing, for and with children, 112–25 Horrible Histories, 115–20 workshop production of Macbeth, 120–5 Renaissance lawsuits, 50 Renoir, Jean, 97 Restoration (Tremain), 70 The Return of Martin Guerre, 50–62 Reveille Eire, 19 Revenge of the Blood Beast, 90 Revisionist, as Renaissance depiction, 19 Rhys Meyers, Jonathan, 16, 17, 19, 20, 30 Rice, John, 41 Richard II, 174 Richard III workshops, 121, 122 Riseborough, Andrea, 79 Roaring Lambs (Briner), 157 Robert, Clemence, 36 Roberts, Gareth, 96 Roberts, Geoffrey, 161 Robinson, Tony, 71 Robson, Flora, 173 Rodríguez, Encarna Vidal, 47 Rokison, Abigail, 141–2 Román, Blanca López, 47 Roper, D., 49 Roper, Lyndal, 95 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 75 Rosenstone, Robert, 60

210

Index

Rossi, Ernesto, 47 Roth, Tim, 72, 186 Rowe, Nicholas, 35 Royal Academy of Music, 163 Royal Shakespeare Company, 128 Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) Festival Theatre, 137–8 Royal Television Society award, 76 Rudolf II, Emperor of Habsburg, 11–12 R.U.R., 104 Rush, Geoffrey, 185 Ryan, Deborah Sugg, 176 Rylance, Mark, 127, 128, 130, 132–3, 134, 138–9, 143 Salom, Jaime, 33, 34, 38, 41 Samuel, Raphael, 70, 75 Sanders, Julie, 20 Sarris, Andrew, 95 Sauro, Antonio, 48 Scaramouche, 105 Schama, Simon, 9, 83, 180 Schimel, Lawrence, 48 Schoenbaum, Samuel, 46 School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University, 133–4 Scott, Dougray, 186 Scott, Walter, 163, 166, 167 Scott Rudin Productions, 185 Screen International, 182 The Sea Hawk, 173 The Secret Life of Elizabeth I, 180 Sellar, W. C., 117 Semenza, Greg Colón, 194 Serjeantson, R. W., 63 Shakespeare, William, 10, 33–45 appropriating, 42–5 biographical legitimization of, 36–8 the man, demystifying, 38–9 the writer, demystifying, 39–41 Shakespeare Amoureaux, 36 Shakespeare dramatizations, Spanish theatre and, 33–45 appropriating Shakespeare, 42–5 biographical legitimization of, 36–8 1828–1848 offerings of, 36 Miguel and William, 34–5 1996–1998 offerings of, 33–4

Shakespeare the man, demystifying, 38–9 Shakespeare the writer, demystifying, 39–41 Shakespeare in Love, 35–6, 39, 40, 43, 44, 121, 156, 179–83, 184 Shakespeare in Stages, 141 Shakespeare Schools Festival (SSF), 122 Shakespeare’s Globe audience members and, 128 Henry V and, 127–44 opening reviews of, 129–32, 136–8 Rylance, Mark and, 127, 128, 130, 132–3, 134, 138–9, 143 Tiramani, Jenny and, 133–4 Wanamaker, Sam and, 129 Shakespeare (La Mujer Silenciada)/ Shakespeare (The Silenced Woman), 33, 34 Shakespeare Shorts, 185 Shakespeare Survey, 135 Sharp, Cecil, 163 Sharpe, James, 9, 11, 83 Shaughnessy, Robert, 126 Sherwin, Adam, 191 Showtime, 16, 19 Sidney, George, 105 Sidonia, Medina, 1 Sight and Sound: Two Models of Shakespearean Subjectivity on the British Stage, 137 The Silenced Woman, 37, 38, 39–40, 44 Silverstone, Catherine, 139–40 Simpson, J. A., 14 Simpson, Roger, 164 Sindelar, Dave, 111 The Six Wives of Henry VIII, 180 Skellig (Almond), 117 Skoták, Honza, 104 Slater, Gilbert, 46 Smyth, Conor, 13, 146 Sokolova, Boika, 49 Somoza, J. C., 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 42 Sony Pictures, 19 The Sopranos, 17 The Sorcerers, 90 Sorge, Thomas, 31 Spencer, Charles, 130 Spooks, 185

Index Stage Beauty, 183 Standards Site, 115 Stanley, William, 37 Stallich, Jan, 106 Stam, Robert, 97 Stearne, John, 89, 90, 91, 96 Starkey, David, 9, 16, 18, 83, 180 Stenuit, Robert, 1 Stevenson, Jack, 95 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 116–17 Stone, Joss, 21 The Storm, 142 Straw Dogs, 73 Streete, Adrian, 1, 193 Suchý, Ondˇrej, 105, 106, 107, 111 Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, 85 The Sunday Times, 132 The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan, 193, 195, 197 Susman, Gary, 191 Sutcliffe, Tom, 81 Svensk Filmindustri, 84 Sylvia, 184 Taking our Time, 75 Tamayo, Manuel y Baus, 36 Tannhauser, 168 Taylor, Paul, 131 Teatro de la Comedia (Madrid), 42 Temporality, early modern modes of, 146–60 see also Luther, modern cinematic biographies of Tennant, David, 121 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 27 The Terrible Tudors (Deary), 115, 116–19 Thompson, C. J. S., 108 Thompson, Lynne, 176 Thorpe, Vanessa, 48 1066 and All That (Sellar and Yeatman), 117 Tigon British Film Production, 90 Till, Eric, 13, 146, 155, 158, 159 Timewatch: Queen Elizabeth’s Lost Guns, 193, 194, 196 Tiramani, Jenny, 128, 133 Titus Andronicus, 119 Toms, Katie, 191

211

Touring Tales Theatre Company, 117 Träger, Josef, 106 Trease, Geoffrey, 122 Tree, H. Beerbohm, 165, 167 Tremain, Rose, 70 Trevelyan, John, 90 Tuˇcek, Miroslav, 105 The Tudors, 9, 10, 16–30, 180, 184 audiences of, 18 casting, 17 costuming in, 20–1 errors on, 16–17 female roles in, 24–30 historical accuracy of, 186–7 hours of television vs. years of history, 17–18 Pilgrimage of Grace episodes, 22–3 Renaissance depiction of, 19–24 Ulster Museum, 2–3 Un Drama Nuevo/A New Play, 36 Ustinov, Peter, 157 Vallée, Jean-Marc, 183 Vallejo, Javier, 49 Van Kampen, Claire, 128, 133, 135 Vávra, Otokar, 106 Vega, Ventura de la, 36 Venus and Adonis, 37, 38 Vigne, Daniel, 10, 53 Villán, Javier, 48 The Virgin Queen, 174, 180 Voskovec, Jiˇrí, 99 Wallace, Annabelle, 25 Wallis, Mick, 176 Wanamaker, Sam, 129, 143 Ward, Paul, 199, 202 Watkins, Peter, 74 Watson, Nicola J., 31, 175, 177 Watson, Ruth, 197 Weiner, E. S. C., 14 Weir, Alison, 30 Wells, Robin Hedlam, 15 Werich, Jan, 99 West, Dominic, 78 The West Wing, 17 Whateley, Ann, 46 What the Tudors Did for Us, 180

212

Index

White, Hayden, 10, 60, 61 The Wicker Man, 73 Wier-Jennsen, Hans, 87 Williams, Annwyl, 161 Williams, Ralph Vaughan, 163 Willie, Rachel, 80 Winstanley, 11, 71, 74–5, 79–80 The Winter’s Tale, 127, 130, 134 Witchfinder General, 11, 71, 72, 73–4, 89–91 The Witch in History, 84–6 Witch trials, cinematic treatment of early modern, 83–94 Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag), 86–9 Häxan, 84–6 Witchfinder General, 89–91 Withington, Robert, 175 Women’s Institutes of Cambridgeshire, 172 Wood, Michael, 180 Wood, Peter, 47

Woods, Arthur B., 173 Woodstock, 167 Woolf, Virginia, 164 Worden, Blair, 81 Working Title Films, 19, 180–1 Worthen, W. B., 130, 140 Wray, Ramona, 10, 16 Wright, Joe, 183 Wrightson, Keith, 95 Yeatman, R. J., 117 Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (Erikson), 153 Young Victoria, 183 Zabalbeascoa, J. A., 47 Zane, Alex, 197 Zhang, Yimou, 182 Ziegler, W. G., 46 Zumel, Enrique, 36