Filming and Performing Renaissance History PDF

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.
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save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
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permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
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as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2011 by
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Contents
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgements viii
Notes on the Contributors ix
Preface xii
Introduction: Documenting the Renaissance 1

Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete
1 The Network King: Re-creating Henry VIII for a Global

Television Audience 16
Ramona Wray
2 Breaking Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama

and Film 33
Jesús Tronch Pérez
3 The Touch of Man on Woman: Dramatizing Identity in

The Return of Martin Guerre 50
John O’Brien
4 ‘Welcome to Babylon’: Performing and Screening the

English Revolution 65
Jerome de Groot
5 The Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials 83

James Sharpe
6 The Golem, or the Communist ‘What You Will’ 99

Martin Procházka
7 Horrible Shakespearean Histories: Performing the

Renaissance for and with Children 112
Kate Chedgzoy
8 Mark Rylance, Henry V and ‘Original Practices’ at

Shakespeare’s Globe: History Refashioned 127
Christie Carson
v
vi Contents
9 ‘There is So Much to See in Rome’: The Cinematic

Materialities of Martin Luther’s Reformation 146
Conor Smyth
10 The Pageant of History: Staging the Local Past, 1905–39 163

Michael Dobson
11 Private Lives and Public Conflicts: The English

Renaissance on Film, 1998–2010 178
Andrew Higson
Epilogue: Documentary Reflections 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) 55
3.2 Arnaud and Coras in the court at Toulouse in The Return
of Martin Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1982) 56
3.3 The final meeting between Bertrande and Coras in The
Return of Martin Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1982) 58
8.1 Mark Rylance stars in the 1997 production of Henry V at
Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Richard Olivier 139
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 166
10.2 The finale of the Sherborne pageant, with the cast all
shouting ‘Hail!’ 169
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 170
10.4 The cover of the printed edition of Greenwich Night
Pageant, 1933, scripted by Arthur Bryant 171
vii
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank, at Palgrave, Paula Kennedy, Catherine Mitchell,

Felicity Plester and Christabel Scaife for supporting this book and help-
ing 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, Univer-

sity of London. Her main area of research interest is the application of
digital technology to teaching and research in the field of dramatic per-
formance 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 Chil-
dren: 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 Cul-

ture 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 Univer-

sity Press, 2006), The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation
and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), The Oxford Com-
panion 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, Uni-

versity 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 forthcom-
ing 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
Filologů, 1996), Transversals (Prague: L.P.B., 2007) and co-author,
with Zdenĕk Hrbata, of Romantismus a romantismy/Romanticism and
Romanticisms (Praha: Karolinum, 2005). He is also author of two text-
books 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 Mod-

ern England: A Social History 1550–1760 (London: Arnold, 1987/1997),
Judicial Punishment in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), Instru-
ments 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 Univer-

sity, 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 Uni-

versity, 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 Seven-
teenth 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
Over the last one hundred years, many of the events and personalities of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been brought, via a variety
of visual mediums, before home, cinema, exhibition, festival and the-
atrical audiences. These representations are not only important because
they are reproduced in large numbers, but because they are the main
sources of information about how the early modern period is interpreted
and reinterpreted in the popular consciousness. Concentrating on all
types of filmic and performative examples, and posing questions about
the constructedness of images of the Renaissance and the circulation of
dominant visual signatures, a series of workshops and symposia between
2007 and 2009 at Queen’s University, Belfast, investigated the corpus of
hybrid realizations of the years between 1500 and 1660.
The project, ‘Filming and Performing Renaissance History’, was gen-
erously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Cru-
cial to our project was a series of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural
encounters. Firstly, the events placed in dialogue commentators on, for
example, theatrical performance, heritage cinema, television and stud-
ies of Renaissance literature and society. Secondly, the project integrated
a trajectory of British representations with their non-British equiva-
lents. The involvement of practice-based teams and individuals was a
third vital dimension. The fourth interdisciplinary component, involv-
ing curators, heritage officers and museum studies specialists, focused
upon the means whereby the Renaissance is communicated in museum
installations, in exhibition practice and in re-enactment ‘experiences’.
Accessing the Renaissance in this fashion generated a genuine sense
of the modalities of historical representation, of what the Renaissance
‘means’ and of how its meanings have been negotiated in modernity.
We had three meetings. ‘Players and Personalities’ was devoted to
assessing the significance of the ways in which all types of early modern
historical figures and groupings, celebrated and quotidian, emerge into
representational visibility. ‘Representing Conflict, Crisis and Nation’
explored how the myriad contests of 1500–1660 have been imagina-
tively reproduced. ‘Temporalities and Materialities’ assessed the extent
to which temporal boundaries and material objects continue to be
reconstructed.
xii
Preface xiii
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 reimag-
inings 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
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 formu-
lation of Susan Pearce, this is a collection that makes available ‘the
visible proof of understanding’, and everything is subsumed to an appar-
ently 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 interpre-
tation. 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 inspec-
tion – discharges vexed meanings in an environment which, historically,
has been defined by religious tensions and conflicts. As commenta-
tors on museum history have noted, there is more to the institution
than an ‘educational purpose’: ‘power play is implicit’ and, in a sit-
uation 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 divi-
sion’, 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 his-
torical 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 distinc-
tion, 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 exhi-
bition 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 sig-
nificance 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 unbend-
ing and direct. Has that ever been seen more clearly than in France
today? Some approach it from this side, some from the other; some
make it black, others make it white: all are alike in using religion for
their violent and ambitious schemes, so like each other in manag-
ing their affairs with excess and injustice, that they make you doubt
whether they really do hold different opinions over a matter on
which depends the way we conduct and regulate our lives.7
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
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 mas-

sacred 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 vicissi-
tudes 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
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 van-
tage point of the present. We could say that these extracts from An
Apology for Raymond Sebond seem always to anticipate their own inter-
pretation, 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 docu-
ments 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 con-
scious attempt to rethink certain ingrained attitudes towards the prac-
tice 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
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 res-
olutely 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 con-
ceptualizing 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 publish-
ers, 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 histor-
ical negotiations that this might entail. As a number of contributors
to this book point out, one of the main issues raised by such nego-
tiations 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 odd-
ities that historically oriented scholars of the Renaissance find in
many modern mediations of the period. The demands of the mar-
ketplace are likely to inform, and perhaps even explain, any seri-
ous 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,
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 epistemologi-
cal 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 inter-
ested 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 privi-
leges 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 cen-
tury into the present, one that tells us much more about Dumas, and
various nineteenth-century political and religious preoccupations. His-
torians 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 situated-
ness 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 sixteenth-
century 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
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 Renais-
sance in the present. If we are to make proper sense of the ways in
which Renaissance history is documented, mediated, performed, con-
sumed 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 main-
stream documents of Renaissance history alongside radically alternative
accounts of the period. They encompass texts that are politically con-
servative 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 twenty-
first 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 per-
formance. 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, impor-
tant 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 invi-
tation that calls on both academics and practitioners alike to do more
to bridge the gap between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ understandings of the
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 impli-
cations 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 cul-
tural manifestations of the Renaissance on screen, stage or television.
As James Sharpe wryly notes, while the conservatism and wilful dis-
regard 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 repre-
sentations 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 nonethe-
less 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 Renais-
sance 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 pro-
grammes, and that ensure their widespread dissemination and popular
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 Renais-
sance 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 pro-
cess 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. Complement-
ing 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 biogra-
phy, 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. Answer-
ing 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 his-
tory. 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 provi-
sionality 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
to those ‘historical silences’ that film can give voice to and, in so doing,
bears witness to its capacity to alter our conception of a past that we
thought we knew.
The second section, ‘Crisis and Conflict’, opens with a chapter by
Jerome de Groot that takes as its subject the civil war, one of the most
seminal events in British history but also an event that, as de Groot
points out, has had a fairly charmed life in popular appropriations. If the
civil war is remembered in popular culture today, then it is most often
through various societies dedicated to the re-enactment of civil war bat-
tles, many of which unhelpfully gloss over the ideological divisions of
the period they are representing. Indeed, de Groot suggests that the rea-
son for the civil war’s relative lack of visibility in popular film and TV
is because of its ideological complexity. Conversely, what there is, like
Winstanley (dir. Kevin Brownlow, 1975), To Kill a King (dir. Mike Barker,
2003) and The Devil’s Whore (dir. Marc Munden, 2008), tends to be char-
acterized by its ideological seriousness and refusal to turn the period
into pastiche or an exercise in nostalgia. The radical lineage of the civil
war may not have been exploited as fully as other aspects of the period’s
history, but its potential for film-makers and audiences alike to reflect
on Britain’s alternative political history is clear. Likewise, James Sharpe’s
chapter on the legacy of Renaissance witchcraft, as mediated through
twentieth-century film, asks us to encounter the often radical alterity
of the past, and its refusal to conform to the expectations and ideo-
logical presuppositions of modernity. Some films, as Sharpe notes, like
Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922), are closely grounded in a plausi-
ble historical understanding of Renaissance magic. Others, like Michael
Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968), owe more to Hammer horror than to
the historical archive. But, as Sharpe also shows, Reeves took his film
seriously enough to make a range of claims for its historical accuracy,
however problematic these claims might be. In fact, almost in spite of
itself, the film touches proleptically upon a range of recent preoccupa-
tions of modern historians of witchcraft, such as the local support for
Matthew Hopkins’ activities, the social upheaval against which he car-
ried out his work, and the problematic fact that so many witches were
women. As Sharpe concludes, the possibility for future film-makers to
tackle the historical reality of Renaissance witchcraft successfully will
perhaps best be realized in a more micro approach similar to Vigne’s The
Return of Martin Guerre.
Martin Procházka’s chapter turns our focus onto a Czech film, The
Emperor’s Baker and the Golem, directed by Martin Frič and released
in 1952. Frič took as his subject the reign of the Habsburg Emperor
Rudolf II (1576–1612) and his search for the mythical ‘golem’. Through-
out the film, as Procházka notes, realism is frequently subverted, and
the aesthetic games it plays with mimesis can be read as a challenge
to the ruling ideology of socialist realism favoured by the communist
authorities. The fact that the film-makers chose a particularly con-
flicted period in Bohemian and European history in which to set their
film offers us another interesting illustration of the ways in which the
political upheavals of the Renaissance are used time and again to doc-
ument and address the political iniquities of the present. The Emperor’s
Baker and the Golem contrasts scenes dealing with the aristocracy with
more demotic representations of lower-class existence. Similarly, Kate
Chedgzoy’s chapter examines the interactions between high and low
representations of the Renaissance. However, by contrast, her focus is
on the ways in which the period is packaged for and consumed by chil-
dren in both the popular Horrid Histories series and in school workshops
centred on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In common with a range of chap-
ters collected here, Chedgzoy notes that, in both of her examples, the
predominant mode of mediating the past is through monarch or exem-
plary figures like Shakespeare. When people of lower class do appear in
the Horrid Histories series, for example, then it is most often as objects
of ridicule or mockery. Chedgzoy also observes the prevalence of vio-
lence and the frequent marginalization of women in representations of
Renaissance history aimed at children. So, while it is undoubtedly the
case that children can prove to be discerning consumers of Renaissance
history, Chedgzoy reminds us that it is necessary for adults and chil-
dren alike to reflect carefully on the ideologies underpinning the most
popular of those histories.
The final section in the book is devoted to ‘Temporalities and
Materialities’. It begins with Christie Carson’s authoritative reconsid-
eration of the current cultural, theatrical and ideological status of
Shakespeare’s Globe theatre on London’s Southbank. As the Globe
project developed, and as theatrical professionals, academics and audi-
ences alike worked in collaboration within the new theatrical space, it
soon became clear that the sceptical reception provoked by the theatre
in its early years would have to be rethought. In particular, the com-
munality of the theatrical space and its sheer difference from modern
theatrical structures enabled, as Carson argues, a direct challenge to
modern conceptions of individualism and ‘class-based ideas about cul-
ture in general and Shakespeare in particular’ (p. 129). Indeed, given
that it is a reconstruction of a Renaissance theatre, Carson suggests that
the Globe’s most valuable legacy may well turn out to be its ability to
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 represen-
tation, 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 assimila-
tion of many aspects of pageant culture. While the triumph of American
modernity and the dissipation of a providential account of British his-
tory 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
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, nation-
hood, 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.
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: Collabora-
tion, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge
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 Contempo-
rary 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-that-
never-happened speaks to a niche audience capable of understanding –
and taking pleasure from – The Tudors’ edgy and playful approach to
the historical record. Staged solely for advertising purposes (Henry and
the Pope never meet in the series itself), the photograph purposefully
courts controversy, provoking assessments such as David Starkey’s that
The Tudors is ‘terrible history with no point’.1 Other historians have sin-
gled out the fact that, in addition to the fictive encounter, the pope
in the picture is, of course, the wrong pope (it was Pope Clement VII,
not Pope Paul III, who refused the divorce and excommunicated Henry).
This ‘error’ – along with many of The Tudors’ signature telescopings, tem-
poral switchings, accelerations and substitutions – has been seized on as
either a bizarre anomaly (‘Quite why the Pope has to be the wrong one
is a mystery,’ reflects John Guy) or a genuine mistake indicative of poor
research.2 The confusion among the critics is revealing of the gap that
currently exists between traditional scholarship and a relatively new
mode of television programming, one which often has historical and
literary adaptation at its heart.3 Rather than anomaly or mistake, the
image described above is indicative of some of the ways in which The
Tudors functions to encourage a process now recognized as characteris-
tic of quality television – a ‘complex seeing’.4 The process works in part
through intertextuality: because it is O’Toole who plays the Pope, the
character is associated with world-weariness, dissoluteness and corrup-
tion, qualities that remind viewers of Home Box Office’s rival figure, the
mafia don, Tony Soprano, and reflect an insouciant reading of faith. By
16
Ramona Wray 17
the same token, Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ elegantly febrile looks – and his
reputation for playing enigmatic and disturbed roles – creates an impres-
sion of a moody, sensitive and self-destructive Henry.5 The privileging of
two star personalities ensures that the break with Rome – and viewers’
comprehension of the significance of the Reformation – takes on appro-
priately seismic proportions. In addition, O’Toole and Rhys Meyers are
linked at a celebrity level by their Irish ‘hellraiser’ reputations and at a
theatrical level by the recollection of O’Toole’s famous performance as
Henry II: the pairing in this case draws on early modern iconography
to lend another layer to contemporary understandings of the con-
flict between England and the papacy as a familial separation between
father and son. Thus, the portrayal, while deftly maximizing O’Toole’s
charismatic performance – and usefully foregrounding the consistently
oppositional nature of the forces of Rome – successfully translates the
metaphorical complexities of Renaissance ideologies. More broadly, the
self-conscious fakery of the meeting – the important element of play –
draws our attention to the artifice of the cinematic frame, spotlighting
The Tudors’ foregrounding of interpretation and its concomitant reading
of history as inherently unstable. Refuting any easy sense of the ‘truth’,
and insisting on the place of violence in processes of historiography, The
Tudors illustrates, in exciting and compelling ways, the important role
of television in a new making of the past.
Produced by a transnational organization for a multinational audi-
ence and winner of prestigious EMMY awards, The Tudors is exemplary
of a current aesthetics of television. Television, over the last ten to fifteen
years, has undergone a fundamental shift. Mark Jancovich and James
Lyons argue that, in response to declining network audiences and the
growth of satellite and cable channels, contemporary TV has witnessed
the emergence of ‘ “must see” television’ shows, such as The Sopranos,
The West Wing and Madmen, that are not simply part of ‘a habitual flow
of television programming but . . . “essential viewing” . . . distinguished
by the compulsive . . . practices of dedicated audiences who organize
their schedules’ to facilitate the viewing event.6 The Tudors’ re-creation
of the life of Henry VIII constitutes just such ‘event television’ – a tele-
vision project characterized by a feature-film quality (the series is shot
entirely in HDCAM), a budget of tens of millions and a stellar, interna-
tional cast. Perhaps most distinctive is The Tudors’ epic scale: series one
(ten hour-long episodes) opens in 1509, the year of ascension; series
two (also ten hour-long episodes) concludes in 1536, on the day of
the execution of Anne Boleyn. Series three (eight hour-long episodes)
opens with Henry’s wedding to Jane Seymour, while the fourth series
18 The Network King
(ten hour-long episodes) ends with Henry’s death in 1547. With thirty-
eight hours of television devoted to exactly that many years of history,
The Tudors constitutes an extraordinarily detailed take on the reign and
an unprecedentedly ambitious attempt to televise history. In between
the monarch’s ascension, marriages and death, viewers are introduced
to all the major personalities of the period. Foreign and domestic affairs
are generously referenced, while broader European contexts are kept to
the fore, with the Reformation a key structuring component of the nar-
rative. Renaissance history has simply not been dramatized on this scale
before.
The reach and ambition of The Tudors are intimately connected to
contemporary notions of audience. Against a backdrop of declining
audiences, ‘ “must see” television’ is designed to appeal to ‘the most valu-
able audiences: affluent viewers that advertisers are prepared to pay the
highest rates to address’.7 In its compulsiveness, then, such television
is designed to attract not so much a volume audience as ‘highly edu-
cated consumers who value the literary qualities of these programmes’;
indeed, because of this movement towards and embrace of a so-called
‘niche audience’, television has been able to acquire and boast a ‘greater
cultural legitimacy’.8 Exploring further the meeting place between ‘qual-
ity television’ and the reshaping of history, this chapter argues that
historical reconstruction and bodily discourse come together in The
Tudors in a television phenomenon which reads both – that is, body
and history – as text. In particular, I will suggest, series three and four
are striking in the extent to which they prioritize the body of the
monarch as a cipher for the shifting polarities of politics and nation.
One effect of this dialogic method is a powerful sense of the Renais-
sance as a dystopian juncture, the political complexions and gendered
implications of which have a modern purchase. Perhaps, paradoxically,
the uncomfortable and unsettling version of Henry that emerges has
much in common with the historical controversy that continues to be
waged around his person and reign.9
The 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 associ-

ation 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 audi-
ence 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 sump-
tuousness, 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 his-
tory, which, as Julie Sanders has demonstrated, rely ‘upon the reader’s
awareness . . . of [the] life and the mythology surrounding it’, The Tudors
asks an audience to abandon preconception.16 A central summarizing
voiceover – ‘You think you know the story but you only know how it
ends: to get to the heart of the story you have to go back to the begin-
ning’ – establishes the principles. In this sequence, the torrent of visuals
pauses first on the familiar contours of the Holbein portrait, then, sec-
onds afterwards, on a seated Jonathan Rhys Meyers as monarch. The two
polarities at either end of a spectrum are highlighted, and in such a way
as to stress Holbein as the destination point and Rhys Meyers as the jour-
ney towards that end. The process is literalized, for, in the last episode of
the final season, we see Henry sitting for Holbein who is completing the
iconic painting. At one level, underscored is the way in which, through
an aging process, the Henrician protagonist becomes the subject and
object of representational tradition. At another level, the scene exposes
the disjunction between the sitter (whom the audience apprehends)
and the work (which is revealed as seeing in a different fashion). The
body of the monarch emerges as a point of negotiation between mate-
rial form, artistic interpretation, Tudor iconography and postmodern
reputation.
The instance is exemplary of the way in which, in this adaptation, cos-
tume functions less as a manifestation of historical reconstruction than
as a visual aid to direct interpretation and to facilitate audience response.
As in the climax to Elizabeth (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 1998), where the young
sovereign turns herself into the Virgin Queen, Henry grows incremen-
tally into the costuming associated with his monarchical counterpart.
Across all of the episodes, Henry’s costume – in a slowly paced and piece-
by-piece development – modifies in relation to alterations to his bodily
contours. The protagonist is represented as going grey, acquiring wrin-
kles and putting on weight: he assumes proportions that, if they do not
make him the facsimile of popular tradition, certainly suggest that he is
more materially substantial. Crucial is the addition of layers of padding,
with Henry gradually assuming darker hues and fur-lined outfits that
correspond to a less upbeat and affirming outlook. Joan Bergin, costume
designer for the series, describes ‘an extraordinary journey . . . unrivalled
in film or TV . . . it begins with a concept of [Henry] as a kind of a
rock star of his time . . . through to the state he is at the end . . . which
is . . . sour, decaying, disillusioned and disappointed.’17 Costume in this
Ramona Wray 21
formulation, then, expresses not only the effects of growing old but also
a physical and psychological interconnection.
Discharging a parallel purpose, and also in part filling in for Henry’s
obesity, is the attention given to the ulcerated leg. Henry is represented
as receiving the wound after a joust goes awry in the first series; as
the costuming becomes more excessive, so is the inflamed and pustule-
marked limb of the monarch increasingly prioritized until, by the third
series, we are treated to frequent scenes of painful suffering and the
shocked reactions of the assembled courtiers. This is far from the excited
and exciting display of the stripped male body that characterized earlier
episodes. If, previously, the twin tropes of sex and sport undergirded
the erotic energy of The Tudors’ visuals, this is summoned later only in
order to be inverted, with the emphasis falling instead on debilitation
and crisis. The body that is laid out here is not for sexual admiration or
activity but for medical comment and intervention. It is notable that,
in the third series, the first occasion on which we witness Henry naked
is when he is being examined by his doctors. Even if it gestures back-
wards to the aesthetics of what has gone before, then, the scene reveals
an ironic treatment of some of the series’ governing representational
strategies.
But it is with the treatment of Henry’s impotence that The Tudors ques-
tions most forcefully the protagonist’s status as an object of sexual desire
and a sexually desiring subject. The first hint of a lack of function is
given when the king states, in series three, ‘It’ll take a good sport to
make me amorous again’, the comment suggesting difficulties concern-
ing arousal. In this context, it makes logistical sense that we see Henry as
a stud horse struggling with the kingly duty to be reproductive. Scenes
between Henry and Anne of Cleves (Joss Stone) are revealing here, for
the dominant tone is one of awkwardness, and underlined is a sense of
mutual disgust. In particular, the wedding night episode is dominated
by the motif of the failing phallus, characterized, as it is, by the camera
focusing on Henry launching himself at Anne of Cleves, losing his erec-
tion, masturbating and finally admitting defeat. In the disaster of the
encounter, both parties are implicated: Anne of Cleves frets afterwards,
‘If I cannot please the king, will he kill me?’ And, as the detailing of the
‘smell’ of Henry attests, central is the diseased ‘leg’, which, itself oper-
ating metonymically as a signifier of phallic incapacity, underwrites the
series’ concern with a bodily predicament.
The series links its concentration on bodies decayed and decay-
ing with what is constructed as the period’s dangerous medievalism:
in describing those who attend on him as ‘quacks and charlatans’,
22 The Network King
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 person-
alizes 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 cul-
minates in the representation of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Unlike many
US television shows, The Tudors showcases a series of different direc-
tors who bring a unique signature to particular narrative sequences.
Ciarán Donnelly, who directed the four-hour storyline of the Pilgrim-
age of Grace episodes, was chosen, in his own words, because he was
‘visually cinematic in television terms . . . could handle action [and] bat-
tle 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 big-
budget 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 con-
struction 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. Politi-
cal 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, dismem-
bered 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 empa-
thy 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, includ-
ing 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 develop-
ment 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 accompa-
nying 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, com-
peting 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 char-
acter are the consistencies inherent in the portrayals of females.
Aristocratic women, for example, are invariably discovered as oppos-
ing the tyrannical Henry in minor or discrete ways: in Jane Seymour’s
(Annabelle Wallace) smile at Robert Aske (Gerard McSorley), the leader
of the Pilgrimage of Grace, or in Brandon’s wife begging him to ‘show
mercy’ to the rebels and their families, a purchase on limited resistance
is encoded. Cast in a semi-interrogative mould, these women typify the
representational strategies of ‘quality television’ which, in Jackie Byars
and Eileen R. Meehan’s formulation, tends to eschew a ‘systemic chal-
lenge’ to social-patriarchal structures and to endorse, instead, ‘generally
personal’ resolutions.23 (Thus, Jane Seymour is seen as unable to deter
Henry from persecuting Catholic dissenters, but she does manage to per-
suade him to bring her stepdaughter, Mary [Sarah Bolger], to court.)
The exception to the rule, of course, is Elizabeth (Claire MacCauley),
as when Mary explains her father’s jubilation at Edward’s birth: ‘A boy
is more important.’ Elizabeth’s response – ‘I don’t think so’ – indicates
that, at the age of six, the princess is already contesting primogeniture.24
Moreover, as this forward-looking moment makes clear, elaborated in
miniature is the recognizable amalgam of types of male and female
familiar from later manifestations of the queen as well as a clearly
defined ‘systemic challenge’; here, The Tudors trades upon the virtues
of a narrative futurity.
The fact that Mary is discovered as attending Jane Seymour at the
birth is indicative of affirming relations between the series’ various
stepmother figures. For Peter Krämer, the regularity of television pro-
gramming produces a cornucopia of intertextual allusions, in part as
a way of ensuring that the viewing of some shows is judged essential;
in the representation of women in The Tudors, we see such allusions
working in concerted thematic deployments.25 A wedding gift – a cru-
cifix once owned by Katherine of Aragon (Maria Doyle Kennedy) –
is illicitly passed to Jane Seymour upon her marriage; later, the new
queen is seen wearing the religious symbol as an adornment while tend-
ing to the poor and tacitly supporting the rebellious cause. As well as
granting to Jane Seymour saintliness, the visual detail of the crucifix
makes her a type of Katherine of Aragon in manner and persuasion: she
emerges as a metaphorical inheritrix and cipher for gendered continuity.
Such an idea is brought home in the scene where, the court paralysed
26 The Network King
with fear, Jane Seymour goes into labour with the crucifix clutched in
her hands, to be told by Mary, ‘Katherine is here with us . . . and will
help you.’ The reminder of the object’s passage through royal genera-
tions and across the series itself keeps Katherine of Aragon in viewers’
minds (she is recalled as a ghostly entity) and emphasizes the fact that
bonds between women occupy a powerful niche. Where male bonds
are shattered, female areas of association endure, even in the cases of
women who have never met. Underscored is a notion of female empa-
thy that is placed in opposition to male competition via a procedure
that encourages us to seize upon, and read, subliminal connections.
The circulation of the crucifix is an example of the ways in which the
series’ mise-en-scène keeps past wives at the forefront of an audience’s
imagination: even after they have been beheaded or abandoned, women
are still, in important senses, players. Hence, Anne Boleyn (Natalie
Dormer) appears in the title frame for the third series despite the fact
that she is long gone, the suggestion being that she is still at large,
either in the conjurations of the other characters or in manifestations
of Henry’s cynicism, lack of trust and disappointment. Henry is repre-
sented as haunted by his behaviour in relation to his wives. In the final
episode of the fourth series, a metaphorical visitation takes on a literal
incarnation when the previous spouses return as ‘angels of death’, their
similar costuming pointing up a shared history and mutual agenda.
Each is allowed the opportunity to confront the monarch before his
solitary death (the scene takes the finale of Shakespeare’s Richard III as
its cue), offering the comeback that drama requires but history disal-
lows.26 Yet, in view of the fact that the wives have always inhabited the
series’ psychic frame, the episode is neither unexpected nor fantastical:
Henry’s haunting has been prepared for and emerges from a narrative
and episodic continuum.
If spectral encounters are a point of intersection, then so, too, are
deathly experiences. Most obviously, Henry is affected by the death of
Jane Seymour, which is envisioned as in large part producing the mani-
acally possessed Henry of The Tudors’ latter storyline. Staging strategies
point up Henry’s grief, as in a ruthless cut that moves from his plea that
Jane should not die (‘Please don’t leave me. You are the milk of human
kindness, the light in my dark world’) straight to the formal ‘laying out’
of the queenly body. Here, a crane-shot of Henry and the corpse alone
in a vast architectural space underscores a stark sense of isolation and
desolation. The language of the passage associates Henry with a nexus
of infantilization, vulnerability and enlightenment, while subsequent
episodes are notably marked by an upgrade in his paranoia: ‘I trust
Ramona Wray 27
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 condi-
tion. 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 miss-
ing ‘mother’ in Shakespeare’s play, introducing a variation both on the
roles of women and the question of abuses of royal power. That sug-
gestion 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 ques-
tions 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 contes-
tatory practices [fail] to find a place . . . because they [are] deemed disrep-
utable’.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 fluctua-
tion 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 minis-
ter’s now desperate tones with the honeyed voice of Catherine Howard
(Tamzin Merchant), who is shot naked in bed with her royal lover. The
juxtaposition not only makes a mockery of legal function, but, more
importantly, suggests that a key historical text is a worthless – and truth-
less – document compiled under duress. Tom Betteridge argues that The
Tudors ‘looks back, nostalgically, to a time when the space of history
was clear and transparent’, but, in fact, the series performs a contrary
manoeuvre: it suggests that there never was such a time.30 Even as it
is being written, history is being mystified; even as it is taking place,
history is being represented and falsified.
Consistent with the cynicism of these episodes is The Tudors’ repre-
sentation of power as a corrosive force. In The Tudors, representatives of
instituted authority are imagined as mirror images of the larger move-
ments to which they subscribe, with personalities such as Cromwell,
Cranmer (Hans Matheson), Bishop Fisher (Bosco Hogan) and More
(Jeremy Northam) consistently identified with the discrete agendas and
perspectives of the Reformation. Political comment is not direct; rather,
it is mediated through oblique reflections on the relative integrity –
or not – of politicians and their attendant conduct. A struggle obtains
between all the forces invoked, but none can be labelled as belong-
ing to unambiguously good or evil categories. Rather, power expresses
itself as a pervasively corrupting influence. For example, characterizing
Cromwell’s arrival in the place of the corrupt Wolsey (Sam Neill) is an
emphasis on renewal and integrity. Yet, by the third series, he is discov-
ered as accepting bribes from landowners agitating to win his and the
king’s approval; the observation – that the practice allows the minister
to assume his place as ‘the richest man in England’ – exactly rephrases
an earlier assessment of Wolsey, which suggests that the possession of
dominion circles back upon itself. Corruption is more widely written
still. A narrative procession of venal popes and cardinals marks Rome
out as a particularly compromised space, but The Tudors is at pains to
suggest that all the faiths represented invite mutually invidious com-
parisons. English archbishops function no less powerfully than their
Catholic counterparts to point up the symbiotic relation shared between
political machination and religious protestation: there is a sense of insti-
tutional and social malaise which invites viewers to court contemporary
parallels.
Ramona Wray 29
This is not to suggest that, in The Tudors, there are no ‘true’ believ-
ers; however, as the instance of Cardinal Pole demonstrates (he intends
to restore Catholicism by force), belief is invariably imagined as giving
way to a fanaticism with affinities to some forms of modern terrorism.
Pockets of resistance are distributed across Europe; covert operations are
continually on the move; and members of Henry’s court are subject to
the techniques of guerrilla warfare. Yet, thanks to an assembly of graph-
ically corporeal episodes, it is impossible to forget that, whatever kind
of terrorism this might be, it is always matched by state operations.
Or, to put the point in another way, The Tudors places on display the
problem of defining terrorism when state policy and extremist political
activity intersect. The contemporary – and international – resonances
and debates that are ventilated as a result are striking in and of them-
selves; they also demonstrate how the series sustains television drama’s
capacity for ‘leaving open, through a densely layered textual composi-
tion without closure, the possibility of metaphorical readings’.31 Hence,
judicial procedures are seen to be wholly inadequate, while torture is
portrayed as widespread and visually explicit. The filming of violence is
a case in point, and it is noticeable that, over the course of the whole
series, each execution is granted a particular imprint, guarding against
viewer complacency. In the first series, More’s traumatic isolation on
the executor’s platform is expressed in a shot of the crowd from his own
point of view; the dynamic is reversed in the treatment of the execu-
tion of Katherine Howard in the fourth series, for here the spectators,
positioned below the victim, look up to the event in collective horror.
Differences obtain, too, at the level of sound, pace, editing and diegesis.
Because these scenes and others like them reveal, as Michael Hirst states,
an ‘individual visual style’ and a ‘particular meaning’, an audience is
never allowed to relax into a sense of representational predictability.32
The tyrannical expressions of the series’ protagonist retain their edge,
and in such a way that viewers are kept sensitized to the permutations
and continuing relevancies of the state apparatus. The current age, pre-
occupied, as it is, with debating the ethics of government, the uses of
torture and the causality of war, has precipitated us into looking at the
early modern with much less innocent eyes.
A sense of just how much our collective perceptions of the state
have changed is encapsulated in the costuming for one of series four’s
final spectacles – the siege of Boulogne. In a breathtakingly cinematic
sequence which draws heavily on Akira Kurosawa, Henry rides into bat-
tle wearing Laurence Olivier’s original tabard from Henry V (1944). The
moment of intertextuality self-consciously points up a representational
30 The Network King
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 dis-
continuities 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-The-
Tudors-is-hilarious (accessed 14 May 2010).
3. Alison Weir summarizes this gap when she describes The Tudors as ‘crack-
ing good drama, but as a historian, my hair’s standing on end’. See Sheila
Marikar, ‘ “Tudors”: History Stripped Down, Sexed Up’, ABC News, 29 March
2008, http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=4545935 (accessed 14 May 2010).
4. Robin Nelson, State of Play: Contemporary ‘High-End’ TV Drama (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 184.
5. For a full discussion of the casting, see Ramona Wray, ‘Henry’s Desperate
Housewives: The Tudors, the Politics of Historiography, and the Beautiful
Body of Jonathan Rhys Meyers’, in Greg Colón Semenza, ed., The English
Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2010), pp. 25–42.
6. Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, ‘Introduction’, in Mark Jancovich and
James Lyons, eds, Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry, and Fans
(London: BFI, 2003), pp. 2–3.
7. Jancovich and Lyons, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.
8. Jancovich and Lyons, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. For a discussion of aesthetics and
quality in television, see Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, ‘Introduction: Debat-
ing Quality’, in Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, eds, Contemporary American
Television and Beyond (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 1–11.
9. For a discussion of Henry and the historians, see Peter Marshall, ‘Henry VIII
and the Modern Historians: The Making of a Twentieth-Century Reputation’,
in Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley and John N. King, eds, Henry VIII and
His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), pp. 246–66.
10. Jancovich and Lyons, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. On this subject, see also Nelson,
State of Play, pp. 56–60.
11. Andrew Hough, ‘BBC period show, The Tudors, is “historically inaccurate”,
leading historian says’, Telegraph, 10 August 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.
uk/culture/tvandradio/6005582/BBC-period-show-The-Tudors (accessed 14
May 2010).
Ramona Wray 31
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:
18. For discussion of the Tudor body–state analogy, see Thomas Sorge, ‘The fail-
ure 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.
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).
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.
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.

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 Renais-
sance playwright. In this chapter, I shall discuss how these texts break
the received image of Shakespeare: they do so through comedy, farce or
comedic treatment, and appropriate a famous historical figure in order
to address specific social and artistic issues in contemporary Spanish
culture. I introduce each work in turn.
Cardeña’s La Estancia/The Chamber (1996) shows Shakespeare and
Marlowe as room-mates in a strange relationship of political intrigue
and love over a period of five months before 30 May 1593 (the day
of Marlowe’s death). Shakespeare has managed to sneak into Marlowe’s
secret chamber because he wants the renowned author of Tamburlaine
to teach him how to become a great poet, while Marlowe, a spy working
for Sir Francis Walsingham (responsible for Elizabeth I’s secret service),
utilizes him as his double. Shakespeare betrays Marlowe and reports his
secret residence, but he is overreached by Marlowe, and the ‘dead man
in Deptford’ is Shakespeare. Feeling himself indebted to his room-mate
and former lover, Marlowe swears that he will write the greatest works
ever and will use Shakespeare’s name.
33
34 Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama and Film
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 stran-
gle 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 lat-
ter 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 conven-
tions, 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 gentleman-
fool. 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 busi-
ness 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 unpleas-

ant 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 some-
thing 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 pro-
ductions 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 schol-
ars, 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 per-
sonal 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
in March 1999, after the theatre productions had been performed.9 Sig-
nificantly, París’ film of 2007 shows many elements in common with
Madden’s Oscar-nominated filmic fantasy.
Biographical fantasies on the Spanish stage are not a new phe-
nomenon. In fact, significant examples date as far back as the
mid-nineteenth century.10 From 1828 to 1848, there were success-
ful productions of Ventura de la Vega’s Spanish version of Alexandre
Duval’s romantic comedy of jealousy, Shakespeare Amoureaux.11 In 1853,
Enrique Zumel produced a less notorious biographical play, Guillermo
Shakespeare, based on Clemence Robert’s French novel, ‘a Hugoesque
fantasy that casts Shakespeare as the virtuous and handsome brother’ of
the villainous protagonist.12
An originally Spanish dramatization is Un Drama Nuevo/A New Play
written by Manuel Tamayo y Baus in 1867.13 One of the most signif-
icant tragedies in nineteenth-century Spanish drama, the play shows
Shakespeare as playwright and director in his maturity; the star of his
company, Yorick, is involved in an intrigue of jealousy, adulterous love
and artistic rivalry. Tamayo y Baus depicts Shakespeare as an ‘avun-
cular counsellor, desperately trying to avert the potential tragedy of
illicit love, but gradually losing his grip on the situation till, in an
act of hot-blooded revenge, he murders the play’s villain Walton’.14
Despite this murder, the devoutly Christian Tamayo projects an image
of Shakespeare as ‘full of nobility in his soul, dignity, and moral author-
ity’ in the conflicts besetting the players of his company, and therefore
as a figure of respectability in consonance with the assumed virtues of
a canonical literary figure. By contrast, the more recent productions
practise different kinds of desacralization.15
Biographical legitimization
One feature in all the recent iconoclastic fantasies that deserves our
attention is the fact that their authors justify and seek to legitimize their
alternatives to the received biography. As if anticipating criticism against
their debunking of an established cultural authority, they profess hav-
ing studied biographies of Shakespeare and of alternative candidates.
For instance, Antonio Mauro, producer of the film Miguel and William,
stated that they ‘did a lot of research during the screenwriting, and there
is very strong evidence that Shakespeare was well-versed in Cervantes’
work’.16 Some authors resort to prefaces or notes in theatre programmes
to explain why they offer an alternative biographical theory, based not
on their own imagining but on scholarly accounts, which they leave
unspecified. In a short ‘Introduction’, after explaining to a general read-

ership the problems and doubts around Shakespeare’s authorship, Salom
states that his dramatization of the Derby theory is ‘the fruit of thor-
ough 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 back-
ground 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 retire-
ment, 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 allu-
sions, 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 appear-
ance 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 mar-
riage, secretly born, and ‘found in the woods’.21 He even includes such
a specific detail as Ben Jonson’s description of Shakespeare’s ‘unblot-
ted 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
sister, because Shakespeare stole another lover from her: she wrote the
sonnets to the fair youth and dedicated some to a dark lady, but in
revenge published them under the name of her brother.22
Shakespeare’s adventures in Spain in the film Miguel and William take
place in 1590, in the middle of the so-called ‘lost’ years between 1585
and 1592, and this is made clear in the initial titles.23 As the producers
argue, ‘our story is something of a fiction based on facts, but it certainly
could have happened.’24
In Miguel Will, Somoza provides an explanation for the fact that
Cardenio was not included in the First Folio and later published as writ-
ten by Shakespeare and Fletcher: Shakespeare was dissatisfied with the
play because it was a failure; James I ordered that the foolish knight Don
Quixote be removed; Fletcher anticipated Shakespeare in the manuscript
revision; and Shakespeare ordered Heminge and Condell, the Bard’s
fellow actors and editors, never to regard Cardenio as his play.
Yet scrutiny reveals that some of the plays are not historically accurate.
For instance, Salom places his action after Love’s Labour’s Lost had been
written, probably in 1594 and 1595, overlooking the fact that William
Shakespeare had his narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of
Lucrece published in 1593 and 1594 respectively.25
Another legitimizing element is the physical presentation of the
character of Shakespeare. In keeping with the action set in 1612, the
production of Miguel Will has the English playwright in the estab-
lished likeness of a middle-aged man, with moustache and beard and
a high-domed bald forehead, derived from Droeshout’s engraving, the
frontispiece to the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays published
in 1623, and from the Chandos portrait, dated around 1610, when
Shakespeare was forty-four years old. Even The Chamber, set in 1593,
characterizes a twenty-nine-year-old Shakespeare by his more mature
features. In contrast, the young Shakespeare in The Other William wears
a van Dyck or General Custer-like moustache and goatee, and his equiv-
alent in the film wears a trimmed moustache and beard around the chin,
together with lush, long hair.
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.
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 trustworthi-
ness, 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 disso-
lute – a rogue, a swindler and an insolent person’.30 Furthermore, he is
presented as a womanizer, impudent, shameless and greedy (as he bar-
gains 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 dis-
cussed 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
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 author-
ship 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 imag-
ined 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 cre-
ative 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 play-
wright 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 cru-
elly 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 play-
wright realizes that the proposed solution is wrong. Just as Don Quixote
was a common man who turned mad because he dreamed of the charac-
ters in the chivalric fiction he was reading, so would the Don Quixote in
Cardenio be a man who, having seen many plays, becomes mad and
believes himself to be the author of the plays attributed to William
Shakespeare. The delirious Shakespeare names his new character Miguel
Will and decides that he will perform the part himself.
The fifth scene stages the première of Cardenio, including the recorded
voices of the spectators. The ‘inner’ play shows a performance of the
story of Cardenio interrupted by a character who asks John Rice (play-
ing Luscinda) to help him in a trick to make his deranged neighbour
Miguel Will go back to his home town. Miguel Will (wearing a bar-
ber’s basin) and Sancho arrive and sit down to watch the play. Luscinda
appears and speaks to Miguel Will, asking him to journey to Stratford-
upon-Avon, kill the usurper of his fame, ‘William Shakespeare’, and
never to write again, to which Miguel Will agrees. A short time into the
play, Shakespeare (playing Miguel Will) faints in earnest, but the per-
formance of Cardenio continues as Burbage takes up the role of Miguel
Will. In the last scene, back in Stratford, Fletcher and Burbage talk about
the play’s fiasco, although the latter acknowledges that spectators even-
tually both laughed at Miguel Will’s madness and listened to him in
earnest.36 A recovered Shakespeare learns from Fletcher that the King
expects Cardenio to be performed at court and recommends removing
the gentleman-fool character. Shakespeare agrees, but Fletcher hands
him an already revised manuscript. Shakespeare then throws this into
the fire, exhorts Burbage and Heminge to burn anything related to
Cardenio in case they ever decide to publish a compilation of his works,
and decides to abandon his profession. Left on his own, Shakespeare
receives a visit from Cervantes who tries to reassure the former by
prophesying that they will both be regarded as the greatest authors
in all literature, to which the Bard replies angrily, ‘I don’t fucking
care!’
Instead of the expected positive image of a successful and famous
playwright, Somoza depicts Shakespeare as a bitter, insecure, disillu-
sioned artist in the wane of his creative powers. Here, the renowned
Shakespeare even despises worldly fame. Shakespeare’s is a story of fail-
ure that, interestingly, occurs not only in the mental decline of aging
but also when the mediocre upstart Fletcher begins to win royal favour.
By showing his strained relationship with John Fletcher, Miguel Will
ultimately endorses the idea of Shakespeare as the individual author,
struggling alone with his own creativity and finding collaboration as an
alternative form of writing of little interest.
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 desacral-
izing 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 claim-
ing 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 produc-
tion 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 writ-
ers, 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 polit-
ical 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.
The film suggests that Shakespeare’s flourishing career rocketed after

his encounter with Cervantes, although the influence is reciprocal: per-
haps 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 fem-
inist 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 patri-
archal 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 char-
acter 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 aristo-
crat, finally deceived and annihilated by female cunning. Cervantes’
antagonistic attitude towards the duke reinforces the clash between the
aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and the resolution of the conflict in
favour of the middle-class characters (notably, the merchant replaces the
duke as social authority) conforms to the then emergent and now dom-
inant ideology that has removed privileges of birth, facilitates upward
social mobility and rewards individual virtues with economic success.
Another significant feature is the connection between Shakespeare
and homosexuality in all of the productions except Miguel Will.
The issue is not uncommon in Anglo-American fictionalizations:
for instance, in the TV mini-series, Shakespeare and the Earl of
Southampton appear as homosexual lovers. In contrast to Shakespeare
in Love, which mutes or even evades homoerotic possibility and shows
an unequivocally heterosexual Shakespeare, the film Miguel and William
includes an episode in which the homosexual inquisidor is deceived
(the Bard appears as a male prostitute). In The Other William, Salom
drops the hint that the ‘actor’ Shakespeare not only goes after girls but
also boys – ‘según malas lenguas’ or ‘as gossip has it’.45 In The Silenced
Woman, Shakespeare falls in love with his sister’s second love, the young
addressee of the Sonnets.46
More notably than in the other productions, The Chamber unashame-
dly constructs Marlowe and Shakespeare as lovers. From the start,
Cardeña alludes to Marlowe’s homosexuality, and later the author of
Edward II suggests that the poor actor, Shakespeare, labours under the
mistaken belief that his problems would disappear after a sexual tryst
with his theatrical rival.47 Both characters are shown embracing each
other, Marlowe fondling Shakespeare and finally bedding the Stratford
actor.
In their respective ways, these plays appropriate the prestige surround-
ing Shakespeare with a view to vindicating homosexuality or equal
rights for homosexuals in Spain, of particular relevance at the beginning
of the century: a pro-same-sex movement achieved a change in Spanish
law in 2006 and resulted in the legitimizing of same-sex marriages.
Many, if not all, of the features I have described will not have
been new to those familiar with biographical fictions such as Anthony
Burgess’ Nothing Like the Sun (1964) or Edward Bond’s Bingo (1973), but
whereas in the Anglo-American world the most typical treatment is the
preservation of ‘traditional cultural authority’, these five Spanish fiction-
alizations are significantly irreverent, are removed from bardolatry and
three of them are anti-Stratfordian.48
The late twentieth-century interest in the biographical Shakespeare
coincided with a surge of Shakespearean productions in Spain, which
grew significantly after 1997. Performances of Shakespeare plays out-

numbered 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 sta-
tus 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 sym-
bolized 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 cul-
ture 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
15 June 1997, and elsewhere. I have consulted both the video recording
at the archive of the Centre de Documentació de Teatres de la Generalitat
Valenciana and Chema Cardeña, La Estancia/La Puta Enamorada/El Idota de
Versalles (València: Universitat de València, 2000), pp. 27–96. The play was
awarded the Best Text Prize by the Valencian Theatre Critics in 1996.
Manuel Molins’ play, Shakespeare (La Mujer Silenciada), was directed
by Xavier Berraondo and performed by Carme Belloch at the Teatres de
la Generalitat Valenciana (premiered on 15 October 1996) and the Sala
Palmireno, in València, between 1996 and 1997. I have consulted both
the video recording at the above-mentioned archive and the text printed
in Manuel Molins, Shakespeare (La Mujer Silenciada) (Hondarrubia: Hiru,
2000).
A co-production of the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico and Focus,
J. C. Somoza’s Miguel Will was directed by Dennis Rafter, and premiered at the
Teatro Municipal in Almagro on 17 July 1997, and also performed at Teatro
de la Comedia in Madrid in November of the same year. I have consulted
J. C. Somoza, Miguel Will (Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores y Editores,
1999), and a video recording provided by the Centro de Documentación
Teatral del Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escéncia y la Música in Madrid,
which presents minor variations in the script that do not affect my
analysis.
A production of Marquite S. L., Jaime Salom’s El Otro William was directed
by Manuel Galiana, and premiered at the Teatro del Centro de la Villa in
Madrid on 23 January 1998. I have consulted Jaime Salom, El Otro William:
Un Hombre en la Puerta (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1998), pp. 17–89.
There is a reprint (Madrid: Fundación Autor, 1998) and an English transla-
tion in Jaime Salom, Three Comedies: ‘Behind the Scenes in Eden’, ‘Rigamaroles’,
‘The Other William’ (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2004).
3. Miguel y William (dir. Inés París, 2006) is available on DVD.
4. See Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1970), pp. 620–7, for attributions of Shakespeare’s works (or part of them)
to women – to Ann Whateley, to Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare’s wife) and
even to Elizabeth I.
5. The Marlowe theory was initiated by W. G. Ziegler’s novel, It was Marlowe:
A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries (1895), and popularized by Calvin
Hoffman’s The Murder of the Man Who Was ‘Shakespeare’ (London: Max
Parrish, 1955). Gilbert Slater’s Seven Shakespeares (London: C. Palmer, 1931)
included Marlowe (‘returned from the dead in 1594 as Shakespeare’) in the
secret fantastic-seven committee that wrote Shakespeare’s works, together
with Sir Francis Bacon, the Earls of Oxford, Derby, Rutland, Sir Walter Ralegh
and the Countess of Pembroke (see Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, pp. 595
and 621–4).
The Derby theory was first suggested by James Greenstreet in a series
of articles in 1891 and 1892, supported by Robert Fraser’s The Silent
Shakespeare (1915) and notoriously publicized by the French scholar Abel
Lefranc in a number of publications since 1919, culminating in his two-
volume A la Découverte de Shakespeare (Paris: Albin Michel, 1945–50). See
Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, p. 614.
6. For a more detailed summary and a critical commentary, see Keith Gregor
and Encarna Vidal Rodríguez, ‘The “Other” William and the Question of
Authority in Spanish Stage Depictions of Shakespeare’, SEDERI, Spanish and
Portugese Society for English Renaissance Studies, 12 (2002), pp. 237–46.
7. In ‘A Meeting in Valladolid’, a short story in his collection The Devil’s Mode
(London: Hutchinson, 1989), Anthony Burgess had Shakespeare encounter-
ing Cervantes in this Spanish city, which at the time was the seat of the
Spanish court.
8. Inarco Celenio [Leandro Fernández de Moratín], Hamlet (Madrid: Oficina de
Villalpando, 1798). For this and other Spanish biographies, see Blanca López
Román, ‘Biografías españolas de Shakespeare’, in José Manuel González
Fernández de Sevilla, ed., Shakespeare en España: Crítica, Traducciones y
Representaciones (Alicante: Pórtico, 1993), pp. 137–57.
9. Directed by Peter Wood, written by John Mortimer and with Tom Curry as
Shakespeare, the six-episode series was produced by Associated Television
and Radiotelevisione Italiana, and was shown in the United Kingdom on
ATV in 1978.
10. Eduardo Juliá Martínez, Shakespeare en España: Traducciones, Imitaciones e
Influencia de las Obras de Shakespeare en la Literatura Española (Madrid:
Tipografía de la Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1918); Alfonso Par,
Shakespeare en la Literatura Española, 2 vols (Madrid and Barcelona: Librería
General de Victoriano Balmes/Biblioteca Balmes, 1935), and Representaciones
Shakespearianas en España, 2 vols (Madrid and Barcelona: Biblioteca Balmes,
1936 and 1940); J. A. Zabalbeascoa, ‘Shakespeare, personaje de ficción’, Héroe
y Antihéroe en la Literatura Inglesa: Actas del V Congreso de AEDEAN (Madrid:
Alhambra, 1983), pp. 391–401; and Keith Gregor, ‘Shakespeare as Character
on the Spanish Stage: A Metaphysics of Bardic Presence’, in A. L. Pujante and
T. Hoenselaars, eds, Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (Newark and
London: University of Delaware Press, 2003), pp. 43–53.
11. See Par, Representaciones, I, pp. 74–226. In Barcelona, the French original was
performed in 1810 (Par, Representaciones, I, p. 88), and an Italian version in
1866 by Ernesto Rossi’s company (Par, Representaciones, II, p. 75). Duval’s
comedy is anthologized, in English translation, in Maurice J. O’Sullivan,
Jr, ed., Shakespeare’s Other Lives: Fictional Depictions of the Bard (Jefferson
and London: McFarland, 1997), and recently studied by Paul Franssen,
‘Shakespeare in Love, 1804; or Conquering the Continent with William’, in
Shakespeare, Les Français, Les France, Cahiers Charles V, 45 (2008), pp. 211–30.
12. Par, Representaciones, I, pp. 194–8. Enrique Zumel, Guillermo Shakespeare:
Drama en Cuatro Actos Precedido de un Prólogo, y en Verso, Original de
D. Enrique Zumel (Granada: Impr. y Librería José María Zamora, 1853);
Gregor, ‘Shakespeare as Character’, p. 46.
13. Par, Representaciones, II, p. 22. The text is preserved in manuscript at
the Biblioteca Nacional (MSS/14294/3), and in print (Madrid: Imp. de
J. Rodríguez, 1867). William Dean Howell’s adaptation (with titles A New
Play and Yorick’s Love) was performed in the US in 1878 and (also in
London) in the 1880s. A film version was made by Spanish director Juan
de Orduña (1946). Gregor (‘Shakespeare as Character’, pp. 52–3) also points
out versions in France, Germany and Italy. Neither Duval, Zumel nor
Tamayo y Baus appear in the extensive list compiled by Lawrence Schimel,

Hardy Cook and C. M. Gordon, ‘Shakespeare, the Character: A Bibliogra-
phy’, at http://www.shaksper.net/archives/files/charactr.biblio.html and at
http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/shaksper/files/CHARACTR%20BIBLIO.txt.
14. Gregor and Vidal, ‘The “Other” William’, p. 239.
15. Manuel Tamayo y Baus, Un Drama Nuevo, ed., Alberto Sánchez (Madrid:
Cátedra, 1979), p. 39.
16. 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).
17. Salom, El Otro, p. 21.
18. Somoza, Miguel Will, pp. 9–10.
19. Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1961); Salom, El Otro, pp. 43, 61, 87.
20. Cardeña, La Estancia, p. 38.
21. Molins, Shakespeare, p. 29.
22. Molins, Shakespeare, pp. 46–7.
23. See E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ (Manchester: Manchester
24. Antonio Sauro, quoted from Thorpe, The Observer, 2007.
26. Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), p. 110.
27. Molins, Shakespeare, pp. 46–7.
29. Lanier, Modern, p. 112.
30. 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).
31. 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.’
35. ‘Synopsis’ for Miguel y William, http://wwws.warnerbros.es/miguelywilliam
(accessed 10 January 2010).
36. Somoza, Miguel Will, p. 76.
38. 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.
39. 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
Salom . . . has found himself out of the audience’s favour for a long while and
disoriented on the stage for almost two decades’). See Armiño, ‘Cultura bufa
para Shakespeare’.
40. Somoza, ‘Una nota’, p. 10; Sara Borondo, ‘José Carlos Somoza, un autor vivo
en un Festival de Teatro Clásico’, La Tribuna, 18 July 1997, p. 14.
41. Somoza, ‘Una nota’, p. 10. Interestingly, one of the earliest comparisons
between Shakespeare and Cervantes can be traced to a writer of a similar
name, José Somoza, who in 1832 translated fragments from Henry IV and
wrote a commentary on the coincidence of two contemporary geniuses con-
trasting the behaviour of men of honour and rogues (see Angel-Luis Pujante
and Laura Campillo, Shakespeare en España: Textos 1764–1916 (Murcia:
Ediciones de la Universidad de Murcia, 2007), p. 87).
42. See also Angel-Luis Pujante, ‘Shakespeare or/and . . . ? The Spanish Coun-
terpart in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, in Boika Sokolova and Evgenia
Pancheva, eds, Renaissance Refractions: Essays in Honour of Alexander
Shurbanov (Sofia: St Kliment Ohridski University Press, 2001), pp. 157–69.
43. Somoza, Miguel Will, pp. 5–8.
44. See, for instance, his exemplary novel, La Española Inglesa/The English Spanish
Woman.
46. Molins, Shakespeare, p. 46–7.
47. Cardeña, La Estancia, p. 37.
48. Lanier, Modern, p. 116.
49. Javier Vallejo, ‘El imperio del Bardo’, El País, 25 February 2006,
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/arte/imperio/Bardo/elpbabart/20060225
elpbabart_14/Tes (accessed 10 January 2010).
50. Gregor, ‘Shakespeare as Character’, p. 51.
51. Rafael Portillo and Manuel J. Gómez-Lara, ‘Shakespeare in the New Spain;
or, What You Will’, in Michael Hattaway, B. Sokolova and D. Roper, eds,
Shakespeare in the New Europe (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994),
p. 220.
3
The Touch of Man on Woman:
Dramatizing Identity in The Return
of Martin Guerre
John O’Brien
How do bodies stand before the law? How does the law deal with their
subjectivity, materiality and opacity? In particular, what gender and sub-
ject differentiation is applied to bodily distinctions? These are some of
the urgent questions raised by one of the most famous – indeed notori-
ous – of Renaissance lawsuits, the Martin Guerre case. In 1548, Martin
Guerre, a peasant from Artigat, a village in the south-west of France near
the Pyrenees, left his wife and son and disappeared. Eight years later, a
man claiming to be Martin turned up in Artigat and was accepted as
such by Bertrande de Rols, Martin’s wife. The stranger was an imposter,
Arnaud du Tilh, and after three years he was put on trial for imposture
(among other charges) and executed in September 1560.1 This historical
incident attracted wide and long-lived attention throughout the early
modern period and is an exemplary instance of the ways in which the
selfhood and identity of particular groups and individuals emerge into
representational visibility.
One of the most extensive accounts of the case is by Estienne Pasquier,
contained in his major work Les Recherches de la France.2 This account,
in turn, is indebted to the much larger legal study composed by Jean de
Coras, one of the judges at the trial at the Toulouse law courts where
the case was heard.3 Yet in crucial ways, Pasquier’s version differs from
his source’s. The context he delineates is that of perplexity, where the
law is becalmed. The text abounds in the markers of dilemma: ‘in this
perplexity’, ‘while the judges were in this predicament’, ‘in this conflict’
(each stage in the proceedings is characterized by a difficulty in know-
ing how to proceed).4 The problematic nature of the case, moreover,
relates directly to questions of identity and subjectivity. Arnaud’s return
is characterized by a discussion of the tokens which ‘prove’ who he is –
50
John O’Brien 51
the intimacies and private details such as what passed between Martin
and Bertrande on their wedding night or the clothes that he left in a
chest. This is information which only the true husband could provide,
we are told, and because Arnaud knows all these details, he is ‘recog-
nized’ as Martin Guerre. He is admitted into the village community and,
more especially, into Bertrande’s bed. Recognition is thus constituted by
tokens; identity depends on material signs; the self is known through
display.5 These patterns of recognition, identity and display are then
repeated during Arnaud’s trial, at which stage they change from tokens
into evidence (whether they also constitute proof is one of the points at
issue). The privacies (‘privautez’) rehearsed during the scene of Arnaud’s
arrival in Artigat now become the ‘particularities’ (‘particularitez’) – the
concrete details, the specifics – that are produced by Arnaud in sup-
port of his claim to be Martin Guerre. These details are now expanded
to include not only what passed between husband and wife on their
wedding night but who brought them the caudle (‘chaudeau’), then
Martin’s impotence, and the old wise woman who had released him
from it, together with the times, places and persons involved. More-
over, Pasquier adds, these specifics (the term is twice repeated, framing
the account of the trial) ‘were subsequently found to be true according
to the report of Martin Guerre’.6 Even when the real Martin Guerre turns
up in court, Arnaud still maintains his (false) identity and, indeed, when
locked away in a separate room from Martin, is able to provide informa-
tion about his reception of the sacrament of confirmation that matches
word for word the testimony provided by Martin himself.
In these circumstances, small wonder that the judges are in a
quandary and presumption comes to be considered as valid evidence.
‘Presumption’ was one of the most complex and unsatisfactory depart-
ments of early modern legal theory and practice.7 The term ‘presump-
tion’ occurs twice in Pasquier’s account, and is used in the technical legal
sense of ‘a reasonable conjecture concerning something doubtful, drawn
from arguments and appearances, which by the force of circumstances
can be accepted as a proof . . . It is never in itself an absolute proof, as
it only presumes something is true.’8 Such presumption is divided into
two parts: presumption of law (iuris), where there are legal precedents
and similarities on which to draw; and presumption of the judge or man
(iudicis or hominis), where the law is silent and the judge must form his
own judgment. The first occurrence of ‘presumption’ in Pasquier is in
the plural and signifies the factors that militate in Arnaud’s favour: the
physical defects that mark his body, as they did Martin’s, and Arnaud’s
resemblance to Martin’s sisters.9 But it is the second occurrence which is
52 The Touch of Man on Woman
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 pre-
sumption, never fully stated, is tenuous to say the least and might even
be said to fall within the least acceptable type of presumption, the temer-
arious, which cannot be taken as valid proof.12 It is a solution to the
legal predicament, but hardly a satisfactory end to the trial. Pasquier
almost concedes as much in a telling statement: ‘Notwithstanding, by
a final judgement of September 1560, he [Arnaud] was declared con-
victed of the charge against him.’13 Notwithstanding the evidence which
is ambiguous; notwithstanding the emotional impact which sways the
judges in the absence of more substantial proof; notwithstanding the
conduct of the trial which is hardly an outstanding instance of judicial
prudentia and effectively evacuates the recognition of Martin as the real
husband of proper meaning. Pasquier will soon give proof of his own
objections to these proceedings.
One person is present throughout this drama but silent in a way none
of the men are: Bertrande de Rols. In most of the published sixteenth-
century accounts, she features little and the motivation behind the
charge she brings against Arnaud is unclear – the written accounts seem
uncertain whether it was indeed fully her own initiative or prompted
by Pierre Guerre, for example.14 Henri Estienne’s short account men-
tions that Arnaud wished to take possession of another man’s wife; Le
Sueur speaks of Arnaud wishing ‘to have enjoyment of Guerre’s wife and
goods’; both refer to her in terms of possession and property, thus effec-
tively depriving Bertrande of any personal identity, which is equated
with the non-identity of a chattel.15 Without commenting directly on
John O’Brien 53
this aspect, Pasquier feels strongly that justice has not been done in this
trial and adds a coda which is without parallel in any other accounts,
either contemporaneous or later:
I would want to ask whether this Martin Guerre, who was so bit-
terly angry with his wife, did not deserve as heavy a punishment
as Arnaud Tillier [du Tilh], for having been the cause of the wrong-
doing by his absence . . . For a man should not be allowed to leave
his wife, especially for so long, and at the end of it all get off scot-
free by indulging in anger in front of his judges. It seems to me that
that is just a travesty of justice . . . If Martin Guerre had been con-
demned to death because, as the real husband, he had without due
cause deserted his wife for ten whole years – an absence that was the
main reason behind this imposture – I believe that our descendants
would have praised that verdict as most venerable. At any rate, I am
sure women would have welcomed it.16
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 deser-
tion 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 sup-
porter 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
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 trans-
mitted 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 sol-
diers, 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 pro-
vides 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 sig-
nificant 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 writ-
ing 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, mov-
ing 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 essen-
tially 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 writ-
ten 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 com-
pelled to sit while questioning Martin. The clash between the real Martin
and Arnaud leads to Coras’ unmasking of Arnaud and this unmasking is
Figure 3.2 Arnaud and Coras in the court at Toulouse in The Return of Martin
Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1982).
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 explana-

tions 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 sig-
nature 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, sub-
missive, 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].
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 peo-
ple 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 symboli-

cally 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).
John O’Brien 59
of the film, male knowledge seeks Bertrande in her place, a place outside
legal regulation and representation. Similarly, Bertrande’s comparative
volubility in the earlier scene with Coras is counterbalanced by her reti-
cence in the later scene. In the first scene, her speech covers the silence
of her complicity: she hides the knowledge she has. In the second scene
her silence is brought to words by the knowledge Coras has or intuits.
And this later episode is pure orality: it is what falls outside the scene of
writing, it is what is absent from written discourse but without which
the record cannot make sense and is destined to remain incomplete and
enigmatic. What completes the story is the question of female desire;
this is what structures the Arnaud–Bertrande relationship but is missing
from the account of the imposture given up to this point in the film.
The materiality of desire is linked to the specificity of a female body and
a body that survives when Arnaud’s body disappears (he is hanged and
his body burnt to ashes). That female bodily desire is indeed the first
element mentioned by Coras before he questions Bertrande about her
emotional bond with Arnaud and the plot to which it then gave rise.
It is, moreover, only at the point when Coras mentions the love bond
between them that Bertrande decides to speak. Yet notice how the film
portrays her admission of desire. It does not, by any means, license free
female expression. It tries to maintain historical plausibility not only
by her posture and demeanour, but also by the hierarchical authority
of Coras, ordering her to fetch him water, and by the patriarchal dis-
course of his opening remarks to her: ‘Bertrande, your audacity has been
very great and your fear of God very small. The court long hesitated
before declaring you innocent. First of all, you have been only too will-
ing to receive this stranger into your bed. Then when I questioned you
the first time, you ought to have confessed everything to me. At once.’
There is thus a deliberate tension between Bertrande’s admission and
the constricting social and legal framework in which it is made. While
acknowledging the constraints on female speech in the sixteenth cen-
tury and thus respecting historical verisimilitude, the film nonetheless
attempts to show the fleeting presence of the oral, female subject who
is not part of the literate elite (unlike Renaissance female writers), how
her emotional and sexual identity is constructed and played out, and
how her story emerges from amid the interstices of the trial. An elegant
trick played by the film is to create the expectation that its climax will
coincide with Arnaud’s confession, as in the contemporary sixteenth-
century accounts; the truth of imposture will be revealed in the place
dedicated to truth-seeking, the court of law. Yet the truth of female
desire is not revealed there, but somewhere outside of the official sphere,
somewhere as mundane as a domestic setting, in an insignificant vil-

lage 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 concep-
tual implications of this film, especially in the first instance in relation
to notions of authenticity and truth. From the depiction of a histori-
cally 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 pub-
lisher’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 voice-
over) 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 under-
score 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 specif-
ically 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 histo-
rians feel uneasy.21 White contends that their misgivings about both
stem from the possibility that they raise ‘the specter of the “fiction-
ality” 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 representa-
tion of historical events should not be as analytical and realistic as any
written account.’ White’s radical line of thinking extends and quali-
fies 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” representa-
tion 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 con-
ceived 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 produc-

tion 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 histor-
ical 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 con-
stituted 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 subjectiv-
ities 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 Per-
sons 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 imag-
ined.’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 ‘mul-
tiple 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 coun-
terpart 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
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 possi-
ble 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 unoffi-
cial 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.
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).
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 prin-
cipum 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
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).
rr0499/hwrr6c.htm (accessed 8 January 2010).
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.
25. 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.
26. Davis, ‘Any Resemblance’, p. 458.
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 ‘May-
game; 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 care-
full in his action, which was so well performed, that it was much
commended.
But the Cavaliers they minded drinking and roaring, and disorder,
and would bee still playing with the women, and compasse them in,
and quarrel, and were exceedingly disorderly.
And these had several skirmishes one with the other, and took
divers prisoners one from the other, and gave content to the
Countrey people, and satisfied them as well as if they had gone a
65
66 ‘Welcome to Babylon’
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 re-
enactment as an immediate representation of wars that are still continu-
ing. 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 representa-
tionally 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 enter-
tainment 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 con-
flict 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 re-
enactment 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 asso-
ciated with re-enactment – the celebration of destruction and warfare
(‘just twentieth-century men playing a particularly nasty game’, he calls
it later).7 His comment about theatricality also seeks to undermine the
account of re-enactment that suggests it is merely performance. There
is something actively authentic about the war games, he suggests, and
this is seen in the behaviour of the villagers who become aggressive and
bloodthirsty. Re-enactment is not something to be taken lightly, sug-
gests the Doctor: it is not a game, but the reassertion of violence and the
reinscription of historical trauma. He also places his finger on a repre-
sentational nexus. What are the virtues and the values of memorializing
such a bloody and fracturing event? Hutchinson dismisses the Doctor’s
concerns with an argument that is resonant both for its address to the
ownership of history through the re-representation of a past which may
be traumatic – Why shouldn’t we celebrate and own what happened? –
and which also demonstrates the ethical dissimulation involved in re-
enactment and in performance of the past more generally: as it is
something that actually happened, there can surely be no harm in
replaying it. As the programme demonstrates, however, there can be.
The ‘war games’ send Hutchinson mad, and attract malign forces that
attempt to harness their chaotic energies. The re-enactment is creating,
through fear and anger, great psychic energy which is feeding the devel-
opment of the Malus, an alien creature engineered as a weapon. The
energy is creating a schism in time which allows movement between
1643 and the present. The Malus creates visual projections of Cavalier
and Parliamentary soldiers throughout the programme to effect its
ends, and also sends the local squire mad. In the final battle, a ‘real’
man performing as a Royalist soldier fights three psychically projected
Roundheads, ending in his death. The lunatic villain, Hutchinson, plans
that the re-enactment will be real, insofar as the village will once again
be destroyed. This will effect a change in history. The villagers’ perfor-
mance begins to convert into the real thing. Hutchinson plans to use the
traditional Queen of the May celebration to provoke the time rupture
he seeks – knowingly or not acting the Royalist patrician upholding
the traditions of popular country culture to sustain further his dubi-
ous legitimacy. Whilst the programme does not attempt to read the civil
war in any way other than to suggest its horror and chaos, there are
echoes and resonances in its representation and articulation of pastness
that demonstrate the popular manifestation of the civil wars in pastoral
Englishness, patrician loathing of disorder, and a fundamental fractur-
ing conflict at the heart of the nation. The episode demonstrates the
various ways in which the revolutionary period lives in the contem-
porary historical imagination, not least through its articulation in the
present through re-enactment and war gaming.
What The Awakening and the Blunt event show is that popular appre-
ciation of the civil conflicts of the mid-seventeenth century has often
been concerned with the re-enactment and performance of particular
events rather than fictional narratives. They show how this engagement
has regularly been at the level of performance, and through a kind of
theatrical event which is outside of the mainstream performance loci
although controlled by a central authority. Evidently remembering a
war period necessitates a reinscribing of the conflict itself and either
an attempt at drawing its subversive sting or a gesture towards demon-
strating how the act of memory itself can engender new conflict and
chaos. The representational strategies deployed by those who would
remember the wars in popular conflict have to navigate between these
poles, understanding the innate bloodiness of the events whilst simi-
larly appreciating their compelling political and ideological valency. It
is this balancing act which means that most representation of the wars,
whilst addressing particular stereotypes, retains vibrancy and a signif-
icant, defining ambiguity that much other historical programming or
costume drama lacks. The Awakening’s 1984 presentation of a corrupt
patrician Royalist villain visiting horror from the past/future onto his
innocent countrymen through the deployment and enactment of an
idealized but politically suspect ‘heritage’ event is resonant and recalls
Jerome de Groot 69
the 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 cos-
tume 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 him-
self, 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 repro-
ducible, and attractively consumable, connotative style. The films
turn away from modernity toward a traditional conservative pastoral
Englishness; they turn away, too, from the hi-tech, special-effects
dominated aesthetics of mainstream popular cinema.9
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 poten-
tial 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 coun-
try 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
television, and whilst those representations often accrue around famil-

iar 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 engage-
ment 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 seem-
ingly 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 educa-
tional 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 manifes-
tation 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 repre-
sentation 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 his-
toriography during the early part of the twentieth century, influencing
writers from Christopher Hill to Raphael Samuel. Yet there is very lit-
tle 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 tril-
ogy of Miltonic books (1995–2000), or several novels relating to the
plague or the fire of London. The latter part of the seventeenth cen-
tury 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
sake. The fact that these stereotypes – behavioural and visual – are
so strong despite the lack of popular cultural representation of this
period is meaningful, and implies that the binaries of the war (both
Roundhead/Cavalier but also often Cromwell/Charles) have permeated
popular culture, yet are not somehow articulated within it.
Apart from The Moonraker, a semi-fictionalized account of Charles II’s
escape from Worcester in 1651, the action of the wars has been mainly
ignored by film and television until Witchfinder General and Cromwell.
The gravitas with which this latter film approaches the subject sug-
gests that the period demanded to be treated seriously. The film makes
a relatively compelling, wordy account of the advance to war and the
events twinned effectively by the binary dynamic between Charles and
Cromwell. In the performances of Richard Harris and Alec Guinness,
the film also delivers a heavyweight account of the war. A key early
exchange figures the conflict as being for common rights and liberties:
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 last-
ing demotic significance of the conflict is regularly inferred by accounts
of Cromwell’s interest in personal political liberty. In the 2003 film, To
Kill a King, after the execution of Charles, Tim Roth’s Cromwell shouts
to the watching crowd: ‘With this you are subjects no more but citizens,
free men. You do not have to kneel to any other man. You are your own
masters commanding your own fate.’15 This sense of the conflict engen-
dering individuated rights and signifying a shift from subjecthood to
citizenship is still a strong part of the mythos of the conflict and of
Cromwell himself.16
Jerome de Groot 73
Furthermore, Cromwell actively undermines the idealization of con-

flict. 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 play-
ing 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 wan-
dering 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 law-
less, pioneer land with no justice and little authority. Hopkins himself
argues that the law has become something the individual institutes –
‘It’s justice. It’s my justice’ – but also that it is God’s work.20 He takes
depositions, condemns and then summarily executes his victims. The
narrative dramatizes a journey of vengeance, and the descent into mad-
ness of good people in a situation that is undermining their sense of
selfhood. There are scenes of torture, rape and physical interrogation –
the violence and horror and chaos associated with the period. Hopkins is
an expression of evil, rather than that of any particular side – his victims
are witches and popish priests, but the hero is a Cromwellian soldier.
The film demonstrates that it is possible to make a dynamic, impressive
thriller about the seventeenth century, and that there is something par-
ticularly bleak and lawless in the period that might be mobilized for the
purposes of a horror narrative. There is still little attempt to engage with
the broader issues, and the grimness of the times is expressed through
violence suffered on a domestic, personal level. The wars and the social
confusion they engendered are visited upon the people and expressed
on the bodies of the subjects. Witchfinder General is the gory popular
cultural other of Cromwell’s high-minded address to the realities of what
happened, but both demonstrate that the 1640s and 1650s engender
complex and problematic representation on film.
Kevin Brownlow’s Winstanley has been cited by documentary and
docu-drama film-makers as a key work in developing a model of authen-
ticity for the form. Brownlow himself argued in 1997 that ‘We made
the film to see if it is possible to make an absolutely authentic historical
film.’21 He links this authenticity explicitly with the political investment
of the film’s representation of the radical past:
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 Dig-
gers 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 differ-

ence 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 tran-
scripts 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 mani-
festation 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 spec-
ulation 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 organi-
zation 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
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 his-
torical 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 out-
set, 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 refer-
ring to the incomprehensibility of the times; others, though approv-
ing, 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 com-
mon 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 develop-
ment 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 mur-
dered 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 real-
ity 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 popu-
lar 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 poli-
tics, 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 sim-
plicity, 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.
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 res-
onances are in the background of the series, and some of the problems
of tone relate to a lack of moral clarity on the issues of armed resistance
and politicized combat. There has been much scholarly debate regard-
ing the appropriate response to extremist poetry of the war period, and
at times The Devil’s Whore explicitly displays the vocabulary of religious
violence without shirking its responsibility to authenticity.36 The scenes
in Ireland, particularly, do not turn from accusing the soldiers of geno-
cide and pillage. This serious consideration of the violence of the state
becomes subsumed into a more inchoate representation of the mul-
titudinous sects and organizations. The series’ celebration of religious
and political radicalism – its presentation of the Family of Love and the
Digger communities, for instance – loses its sting as it becomes a mere
performance of difference rather than a possible new way of living. How-
ever, it does allow for debate relating to the correct way to live and the
responsibility of the state to govern personal identity.
The second episode includes a discussion in prison between
Rainsborough, Cromwell (Dominic West) and Lilburne about the purg-
ing of Parliament to reform it. Lilburne repeatedly asks the question,
Jerome de Groot 79
‘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 increas-
ingly 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 com-
rades.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 charac-
ters constantly use his adopted nickname, ‘Free-born John’, and there is
a clear echo of the modern inalienability of human rights in this termi-
nological 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 representa-
tion 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 ear-
lier episodes and demonstrates the Cromwellian-created death of radical
possibility (and the nation’s implacable move to compromise and sta-
bility). 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
the radical thinker, it was never a mainstream release, and has only
recently been accessible on DVD. The manifestation of such extreme
ideas in The Devil’s Whore, then, demonstrates a new interest in the rad-
ical and complex ideas of the time – and a concern with investigating, in
particular, details of the new expressions of personal and political liberty
that those two figures were most concerned with. This in itself reflects
the revisionist and restitutive historiography of the past few decades.
In this context, The Devil’s Whore, and its foregrounding of Lilburne,
is, however incoherent, an important moment in the history of history
on television and the manifestation of radicalism in British popular cul-
ture. The war years demand a complexity of response, simply to present
the political machinations and the actual events, but The Devil’s Whore
demonstrates a new move to looking beyond the narrative actuality
and attempting to consider the conceptual shifts and innovations that
occurred during the 1640s.
The wars of the 1640s contain within them such contradiction that
their visual representation in the later twentieth century has been com-
plex and uncertain. It is a period that is so familiar that it can easily
be satirized and mocked; one that lends itself to clear and easy binary
representation at the same time that it invokes moral, political, cultural
and religious confusion; one that might allow television to investigate
deep and significant issues relating to the modern nation but, at the
same time, opens up the possibility of death, witch-hunting and dis-
ease; a conceptually challenging period which nonetheless has clearly
demarcated battle lines; a place we might begin to trace a radical lineage
from; the cradle of parliamentary democracy and the beginning of a very
British tyranny and autocracy; a time in which the public was writ upon
the domestic and personal (as in the family epic, By The Sword Divided),
and individual conscience was created, but where big political concepts
were discussed by men who, as in Cromwell, thought nothing of them-
selves but sought the greater good. In short, the 1640s are rich and
challenging and provoking; they refuse to allow film-makers to relax,
and as a consequence the work that they have inspired is thoroughly
restless and uneasy.
Notes
1. The 20th. Weeke. Perfect Occurences of Parliament And Chief Collections of Letters
from the Armie (London: printed for Andrew Coe, 9–16 May 1645), sig. V1r
(Thomason E: 260 (37), Friday 9 May 1645). I owe this reference to Rachel
Willie.
2. Perfect Occurences, sig. V1r .
Jerome de Groot 81
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/last-
nights-television-the-devils-whore-channel-4br-dangerous-adventures-for-
boys-five-1026133.html (accessed 6 October 2008).
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.
38. The Devil’s Whore, Episode 1; Episode 2.
41. The Devil’s Whore, Episode 4, Channel Four (10 December 2008), 9 p.m.
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 tele-
vision 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 the-
matically, 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 mod-
ern 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 both-
ered. 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 Con-
versely, there is an abiding public interest in witchcraft. And, thirdly,
witchcraft seems to offer a means of dividing an early modern them
from a modern, or even postmodern, us. To the general public, witch-
hunting constitutes a metaphor for the ignorance, bigotry and barbarity
of past ages: it is easy, therefore, to see the belief in witchcraft as
something evil and stupid which progress has allowed us to leave
behind.
The aim of this chapter is to present a preliminary discussion of the
representation of early modern witchcraft through film. There are, of
course, numerous films that touch on this subject, but we shall concen-
trate on three that have the advantage of being widely separated in their
date of production, their quality and intent.5
The first, and by far the most complex, is Häxan, also known as The
Witch in History, released in 1922. Before 1914 the Danish film indus-
try was one of the most vibrant in Europe, and Häxan was directed by a
major contributor to that vibrancy, Benjamin Christensen (1879–1959).6
Christensen’s story is a long and complex one which unfortunately can-
not be rehearsed here. Suffice to say that after a number of career false
starts, he became involved in the movie industry, and in 1913 directed
a very successful movie, The Mysterious X, which made his reputation.
But, on his own account, he wanted to make a more ambitious film than
the generality of the Danish movies of the period, and, apparently after
coming across a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum in Germany in 1914, he
became obsessed with the history of witchcraft, acquired a trunk full of
books on the subject, and began to work up a film around it. No Danish
company was willing to support Christensen’s enterprise, but in 1919
he signed a contract with Svensk Filmindustri after a Swedish producer,
Charles Magnussen, took up the challenge. Filming began early in 1921,
and was completed by October. The film eventually achieved a budget
of between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 kroner, earning it the distinction
of being the most expensive silent film made in Scandinavia. There was
an extensive cast, and Christensen’s vision depended on very advanced
special effects and hence the equipment to create them. Although the
film was made by a Swedish company, the cast and crew were for the
most part Danish, with Christensen himself appearing (he was an actor
as well as a director) as the devil. Häxan opened in Stockholm on 17
September 1922, and at Copenhagen on 7 November of that year, with
Christensen prefacing this latter performance with a lecture on the film’s
sources.7
James Sharpe 85
Häxan begins in didactic form with what is in fact essentially an on-

screen 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 sus-
picion 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, inter-
rogated 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 confes-
sion 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 remark-
able 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
uncomfortably with the rest of the film, but it does raise the question of
how society had really progressed since the Middle Ages, and which of
our practices, particularly towards the mentally ill, will look odd to our
descendants. Thus the simplistic notion that witch-hunting can be used
as a symbol of a bigoted and barbarous past is neatly challenged. The
film also suggests that, in the Scandinavia of the early 1920s, the sort of
old woman who would have been regarded as a witch in former times
was being cared for by ‘pious trusts and old people’s homes’.
Häxan had a considerable impact in its early showings. Christensen,
however, encountered massive censorship problems, not least in the US,
where public distribution of the film proved impossible. As well as the
graphic depiction of the sabbath, there is considerable nudity in the
film, there is one sequence where two old women bewitch a household
by urinating into bowls outside the dwelling house and then throwing
the contents over the front door, in the possessed convent sequence a
possessed nun spits on a statuette of the infant Jesus, and the theme
of torture is pervasive. Perhaps the overall effect is, as a recent study
has put it, that the film ‘unflinchingly presents the squalor, cruelty and
superstition of the Middle Ages’. But there is more than that in Häxan.
As the same commentator points out, ‘this sometimes surreal gem was
ahead of its time in its technical achievements and its treatment of the
macabre.’8 Its semi-documentary approach leaves audiences with a clear
idea of what people thought witchcraft was about, from Karna making
potions to the excesses of the sabbath, and it suggests how these ideas
were fitted into some sort of continuum. And its depiction of how a
household, and by implication a community, could be torn apart by a
chain of witch accusations retains a real power even ninety years after
the film was conceived.
The second film under consideration, Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag), first
released in 1943, is a very different piece of work.9 Firstly, it is the work
of a more substantial director, again a Dane, Carl Theodor Dreyer, prob-
ably best known for his The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).10 Secondly,
it is based on a play that was itself founded on a real historical per-
sonage, Anna (or Anne) Pedersdotter, living at Bergen in Norway, the
widow of the Danish Lutheran theologian, Absalon Pedersen Beyer.11
She was accused and acquitted of witchcraft in 1575, the year follow-
ing her husband’s death, but tried again for witchcraft and executed
in 1590. The initial accusations were, apparently, the by-product of the
stresses caused by the Reformation in the town: conservatives resented
the reforming efforts of Absalon and his fellow Lutheran clerics, and,
since the reforming clergy had powerful patrons, directed accusations
James Sharpe 87
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 elu-
sive 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 relation-
ship 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 witch-
hunting. 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 interro-
gated and tortured, but essentially we see the end of this process – after
a long panning shot of her judges she is revealed from behind, half-
naked, 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.
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 lit-
tle 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 conversa-
tion 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 back-
ground 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 mother-
in-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, sec-
ondly, 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 cer-

tain 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 witch-
hunt, 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 writ-
ten 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 atmo-
sphere 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 concentrat-
ing 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
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 mak-
ing).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 previ-
ous 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 vio-
lence 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 gen-
tility, 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, sadis-
tic 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 loca-
tions where Hopkins had operated: one is left with a sense of the horrors
of the witch-hunt working itself out against an English pastoral back-
ground, 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 lim-
ited. 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 cat-
alysts, were operating with the active support and approval of many
of the inhabitants of parishes where witches were suspected, a sym-
biosis 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 sol-
diers: 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 unex-
pectedly, 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
between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries; it would consider

medieval scholasticism, Aristotelian science, Neoplatonism and the sci-
entific revolution; it would also take on board the rise of agrarian
capitalism, pressures on local communities, early modern state forma-
tion 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 aware-
ness 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 con-
struct 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 ben-
efits from reading into adaptation theory, a branch of film theory that
is concerned with the representation of novels and other literary works
in film.30 Much as the historian is concerned with how far a film is his-
torically accurate, so a central concern of adaptation theory is an issue
signalled in the introduction to this book, ‘fidelity’. Most film theorists
seem to regard fidelity to an original novel as being of secondary impor-
tance – film is a creative medium which can, it is argued, legitimately
adopt a new take on a work of literature and refashion its content.31
This position may offer little succour to the historian concerned with
the historical accuracy of a movie, but the debate around this issue does
serve to open up a more informed framework for discussion.32
Authenticity can of course be conjured up by props and costumes,
and film can be very good at that.33 Yet an obvious constraint here is
finance: the quality of this aspect of ‘accuracy’ was very much enhanced
by Christensen’s decision to go way over budget with Häxan, while the
costumes and many other aspects of Witchfinder General were almost
compromised by Michael Reeves having to work on a shoestring.34 But
as well as props, there is the issue of the ‘feel’ of the period. Again, let us
turn to Natalie Zemon Davis:
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 loca-
tions 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 orig-
inality, that the theme of witchcraft, possibly like all historical topics,
can best be made comprehensible through the reconstructed or imag-

ined 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 work-
ing 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 sug-
gested, 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 sto-
ries 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 begin-
ning 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 mod-
ern 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 compre-
hensible 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 95
history – scholarly, scientific, measured – fulfils the need for that larger His-
tory, that web of connections to the past that holds a culture together,
that tells us not only where we have been but also suggests where we are
going.’ See his Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to our Idea of History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 23.
2. For a statement of my views on this issue, see James Sharpe, ‘History from
Below’, in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1991), pp. 28–36.
3. The first twenty years or so of this activity is synthesized admirably by
one of its leading exponents, Keith Wrightson, in English Society 1580–1680
(London: Hutchinson, 1982).
4. There has been so much excellent work published on the topic that selecting
representative titles is almost invidious, but some idea of the quality and
diversity of these publications can be gained from: Stuart Clark, Thinking
with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996); Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and
Cultural Contexts of European Witchcraft (London: Harper Collins, 1996); and
Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2004).
5. For a broader discussion, see James Sharpe, ‘Film (Cinema)’, in Richard M.
Golden, ed., Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, 4 vols (Santa
Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006), II, pp. 369–72.
6. This is confirmed by Ron Mottram, The Danish Cinema Before Dreyer
(Metuchen, NJ, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1988); see also Ebbe Neegaard,
The Story of Danish Film (Copenhagen: The Danish Institute, 1963).
7. The making and subsequent fortunes of Häxan are described in Jack
Stevenson, Witchcraft through the Ages: The Story of ‘Häxan’, the World’s
Strangest Film, and the Man who Made It (Godalming: FAB Press, 2006). As
the title suggests, this book also supplies useful biographical material on
Benjamin Christensen.
8. Kevin J. Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: Films about Medieval Europe (Jefferson
and London: McFarland, 1999), p. 227.
9. It is worth pointing out, however, that a print of the supposedly lost Häxan
was discovered in storage in Stockholm in 1940, which led to its being re-
released in Denmark in the following year. Possibly Dreyer, who we know
had admired Christensen’s film on its first showing, saw it again and had
his interest in witchcraft themes roused by the experience. See Stevenson,
Witchcraft through the Ages, p. 97; Claude Perrin, Carl Theodore Dreyer (Paris:
Editions Seghers, 1969), pp. 123–5.
10. Perhaps the fullest discussion of Dreyer’s work is David Bordwell, The Films
of Carl Theodore Dreyer (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 1981), which has a detailed discussion of Day of Wrath at
pp. 117–43; see also Perrin, Carl Theodore Dreyer, and the interview with
Dreyer published in Andrew Sarris, Interviews with Film Directors (New York:
Avon Books, 1970), pp. 140–64.
11. The play was also adapted into an opera in 1971 by the Norwegian composer
and conductor, Edvard Fliflet Braein, and had served as the basis of an ear-
lier opera, La Fiamma, dating from 1934, by the Italian composer Ottorino
Respighi.
12. On Peddersdotter, see the entry by Brian P. Levack in Golden, ed., Encyclope-
dia of Witchcraft, III, pp. 887–8; for witch trials in Norway more generally,
see Gunnar W. Knutsen, ‘Norwegian Witchcraft Trials: A Reassessment’,
Continuity and Change, 18 (2003), pp. 185–200.
13. This attracted hostile reactions from its Danish audience and a number of
reviewers when it was first screened: see Bordwell, Films of Carl Theodore
Dreyer, p. 140.
14. The evidence here is, however, equivocal. Post-war, Dreyer himself denied
that he intended the film to draw any parallels with the Nazi occupation,
while his leaving Denmark for Sweden in 1943 has been attributed to his
desire to try his fortunes there after the lukewarm audience reaction in
Denmark to Day of Wrath rather than to any hostile reaction to the film
from the occupying German authorities: see Bordwell, Films of Carl Theodore
Dreyer, p. 193; Två Människor, ‘Two People’, in Tytti Soila, ed., The Cinema
of Scandinavia (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 82–3.
15. The making and fortunes of Witchfinder General figure prominently in the
biography of its director: see Benjamin Halligan, Michael Reeves (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2003). The film is discussed in a num-
ber of other works, notably those on British horror films, for example,
Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 144–51.
16. For a recent analysis of this episode, see Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders:
A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (London: John Murray, 2005); for
an earlier statement of the significance of the East Anglian witch-hunts,
see James Sharpe, ‘The Devil in East Anglia: The Matthew Hopkins Trials
Reconsidered’, in Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts, eds,
Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 237–56.
17. Ronald Bassett, Witchfinder General (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1966; London:
Pan Books, 1968).
18. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and
Comparative Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970).
19. Gaskill, Witchfinders, pp. 138–43.
20. As is noted in Halligan, Michael Reeves, pp. 135–7.
21. Halligan, Michael Reeves, pp. 195–202; John Trevelyan, What the Censor Saw
(London: Michael Joseph, 1973), pp. 162–3. For a review deploring the vio-
lence in Witchfinder General, see Alan Bennett, ‘Views’, The Listener, 23 May
1968, pp. 657–8.
22. John Stearne, The Confirmation and Discovery of Witch-craft (London, 1648;
Wing S5365).
23. On the filming of this scene, from which Gillian Aldam, the stuntwoman
playing Clarke, was lucky to emerge with only minor burns, see Halligan,
Michael Reeves, pp. 140–1.
24. Lakeland’s fate is described in The Laws Against Witches, and Coniuration
(London, 1645; Wing L694aA), pp. 7–8.
25. Gaskill, Witchfinders, p. 3.
26. There is an extensive, and growing, literature on the presentation of his-
tory in film: for a useful introduction, which spells out most of the relevant
tensions and difficulties, see Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the
James Sharpe 97
Movies: Studying History on Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
There are a number of journals in this field, of which perhaps the best estab-
lished is Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television, while
the entry of the theme of film and history into the academic mainstream is
symbolized by the regular inclusion of film reviews in The American Historical
Review.
27. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘ “Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead”: Film
and the Challenge of Authenticity’, The Yale Review, 86 (1986–7), p. 470.
28. Problems around historical accuracy and film figure prominently in Mark
C. Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (London: Cassell,
1996).
29. A comprehensive, if perhaps somewhat uncritical, introduction to the vari-
ous pathways to the past currently available is provided by Jerome de Groot,
Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture
(London and New York: Routledge, 2009). See also the various essays in
David Cannadine, ed., History and the Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).
30. There is a sizeable literature on adaptation, which, among other things,
demonstrates a variety of attitudes to the subject. I benefitted particularly
from reading Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From ‘Gone
with the Wind’ to ‘The Passion of Christ’ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 2007); Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York
and London: Routledge, 2006); Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film
Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); James Naremore, ed.,
Film Adaptation (London: Athlone Press, 2000); Robert Stam and Alessandra
Raengo, eds, Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of
Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); and Robert Stam and Alessandra
Raengo, eds, A Companion to Literature and Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
Most authors working in this field acknowledge the importance of a sem-
inal pioneering work: George Bluestone, Novels into Film (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1957).
31. See, for example, Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adapta-
tion’, in Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation, pp. 54–76.
32. See, for example, Dudley Andrew, ‘Adapting Cinema to History: A Revolu-
tion in the Making’, in Stam and Raengo, eds, A Companion, pp. 189–204,
which recreates the context of the making of Jean Renoir’s 1939 movie, La
Marseillaise.
33. Indeed, one feels that for many movie-makers historical authenticity is a
matter of getting the props rather than the facts right: hence, Peter Lamont,
the designer for the movie Titanic (dir. James Cameron, 1997), commented
that the film displayed ‘a Titanic as close as possible to the real thing, down
to the exact shade of green in the leather chairs in the smoking lounge’:
see Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies, p. 103. It is interesting
to compare this with Kamilla Elliott’s observation, in relation to the adapta-
tion of literary works into film, that ‘quite inconsistently, while adaptations
pursue a hyperfidelity to nineteenth-century material culture, they reject
and correct Victorian psychology, ethics and politics. When filmmakers set
modern politically correct views against historically correct backdrops, the
effect is to authorize these modern ideologies as historically authentic.’ See
Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 177.
34. Halligan, Michael Reeves, p. 140, reveals that the four hundred extras assem-
bled for the climactic witch-burning scene at Framlingham were costumed in
grain sacks purchased from a local farmer which were dyed red, blue, green
and yellow and worn over ‘discreet clothing’.
35. Davis, ‘ “Any Resemblance” ’, p. 475.
36. James Sharpe, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of
Football, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England (London: Profile Books,
1999).
37. The film, discussed by John O’Brien in this book, was directed by Daniel
Vigne and released in 1982. As Hughes-Warrington, Going to the Movies,
points out, this film benefitted massively from the input of the distin-
guished historian of early modern France, Natalie Zemon Davis, who acted
as historical advisor during its production (p. 18).
6
The Golem, or the Communist
‘What You Will’
Martin Procházka
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, Císařův pekař a Pekařův císař/The Emperor’s Baker and the
Golem.1 In the grim times of the Cold War, which were marked by com-
pulsory 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: Jiří Voskovec
(1905–81), his fellow-actor and co-author; Jaroslav Ježek (1906–42), a
leading Czech jazz composer; and Jindřich 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 Frič – 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 syna-
gogue 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 con-
vinced that the finding of the golem may solve the crisis, which he
perceives as the dissolution of his own identity and authority.7 This
is more or less based on historical facts: since the early years of his
reign Rudolph had suffered from severe depression (termed ‘melan-
choly’ by his contemporaries) and later was also seriously afflicted with
syphilis (which drove him to attempt suicide). In 1606, the Habsburgs
decided that he should be substituted on the imperial throne by his
brother, Matthias (1557–1619), and in 1608 the empire was partitioned
between the two monarchs. In 1611, Rudolph was forced to abdicate,
and the Kingdom of Bohemia was torn apart by the conflicts between
Catholics and Protestants, which had not been quelled by the previously
issued Maiestas Rudolphus (1609), an imperial edict instituting religious
tolerance.
Rudolph’s manic moods are represented in the film as frequently
repeating spectacular bursts of rage during which the monarch smashes
vases handed to him by his servants. He shouts, ‘We want the golem,
we need the golem, we must have the golem!’, adding, ‘We cannot trust
anyone but ourselves.’8 However, soon it becomes clear that Rudolph’s
self-identification poses a real problem. Watching his image in the mir-
ror, he does not recognize himself, and is convinced of his identity only
after comparing two mirror-images of his face. Rudolph’s ‘virtual’ iden-
tity is not confirmed by art either: he knows that his latest portrait was
painted when he was fifteen years younger and becomes acutely aware
of his bodily deterioration: ‘At night, when everything is silent, we can
distinctly hear the sclerosis in our arteries.’
In these circumstances, the identification of Rudolph’s empirical and
symbolic bodies can hardly increase his royal authority.9 On the con-
trary, it subverts not only the political power of monarchy but also the
intellectual and spiritual power of art. Although Rudolph is a passion-
ate art collector, he cannot tell the difference between the original and
the copy.10 Or, to be more precise, he interprets this difference as that
between the true copy and the simulacrum, which, according to Gilles
Deleuze, is not primarily the matter of resemblance or representation,
but the question of power, subversion and the ‘twilight of idols’.11 In
the imperial gallery, there are twelve copies of the Mona Lisa: ‘If we knew
which of them was original,’ says Rudolph, ‘we would sell the others as
originals and keep only the authentic one. But what if the original were
Martin Procházka 101
a fake? Therefore we keep all the paintings whether fake or not. One can
never tell.’
Together with the authority of the original, mimesis is subverted, and
with it also the doctrine of realism. Rudolph mentions the latter term in
connection with his planned erotic adventure with a miller’s daughter,
whose drawing is shown to him by a court artist. To justify his design,
he says that ‘life requires life size’ and adds ‘Realism’, making a gesture
resembling that of the cross. Although this scene undermines the rul-
ing ideology of socialist realism, it has also an opposite aim: to identify
the crisis of imperial authority with a general decay of bourgeois val-
ues manifested in the deliberate blurring of the distinctions between
aesthetic object and object of sexual desire and also between art and
kitsch.12
Instead of exploring the subversive potential of simulacra, the film
shows imperial politics and economy suffering from the confusion of
simulacra with true copies. Having commented on the forged copies of
the Mona Lisa, Rudolph comes to deal with the matters of state: ‘Tell us
only what is not necessary to decide’, he asks his chamberlain Lang.13
‘What is necessary is unnecessary’, he adds. This statement disrupts
diplomatic negotiations with the Emperor’s brother Matthias and leads
to a conspiracy hatched by Rudolph’s principal courtiers with the aim of
dethroning him and offering the crown to his brother. Expressed here,
too, is Rudolph’s refusal to solve the grave economic situation of the
country afflicted with famine and the bankruptcy of the court. Instead
of opening imperial granaries, Rudolph buys another fake Mona Lisa.
In spite of these catastrophic consequences, Rudolph’s nonsensical
remarks articulate the logic of arbitrariness ruling the representation
of history in the film.14 When the court alchemist Alessandro Scotta
invents a floor polish instead of the elixir of youth, the event first leads
to a series of gags marking a farcical inversion of hierarchies: courtiers
(and even the Emperor) slip and fall when trying to walk over the pol-
ished floor.15 Much later, the golem, symbolizing the destructive energy
of matter, is efficiently stopped by the same polish on which he slips
and falls down.
The same logic of arbitrariness rules the story of the golem. The golem
is discovered hiding on the Gallows Hill only when the Emperor stabs
the bottom of his alchemist instead of a little dog (whose blood was
necessary for the magic invocation). Later on, a device for reviving
the golem, called the ‘shem’, is found by chance by a drunken Gen-
eral Russworm, but shortly after it is swallowed by the same little dog
intended as a scapegoat in the Emperor’s magic experiment.16 However,
this story full of unexpected comical reversals soon grows serious. In the
second part of the film, the fight for the ‘shem’ resembles the nuclear
armament race, and Russworm is finally incinerated by the flames blaz-
ing from the golem’s eyeholes. To quote Deleuze, this series of gags
establishes a specific art of humour marked by the ‘co-extensiveness of
sense with nonsense’, the art of ‘surfaces and doubles . . . and the always
displaced aleatory point’, represented in this case by the ‘shem’.17
This quality of humour is also evident in the story of the Emperor
and his double, the baker Matthew (Matěj) who becomes Rudolph’s
substitute. The two characters are linked by a process of parodic inver-
sion, which generates the carnival scenes of the second part of the film.
Matthew, who decides to distribute the Emperor’s ‘especially well-baked
rolls’ to the starving populace, is arrested and thrown into a dungeon.
By sheer accident he gets to the imperial bathroom through a sewer and
hides in the foamy bath prepared for Rudolph. When discovered by the
barbers, he is taken for the Emperor, and his younger look is ascribed to
the effect of the elixir of life, which the monarch had drunk in order to
prepare himself for a love adventure with the maiden of the mill. When
meeting Rudolph, stupefied by the power of the ‘elixir’, a concoction of
rum, brandy and morphine, Matthew breaks a large looking-glass and
successfully poses as the Emperor’s mirror image. Since he responds to
Rudolph’s questions, the Emperor takes Matthew for his authentic self.
When Rudolph learns from Matthew that he is thirty-five years old, he
feels himself ready for the erotic adventure, and Matthew, taken for the
rejuvenated Rudolph, can start ruling instead of him. As a simulacrum,
Matthew ‘harbours a positive power which denies the original and the
copy, the model and the reproduction’ (original emphasis).18 Seeing the
copies of the Mona Lisa, now numbering thirteen, Matthew remarks:
‘Leave them here so that people might see how awful it was if all women
were the same.’ As Deleuze puts it, ‘no model can resist the vertigo of
simulacrum’.19
This becomes evident over lunch when the astronomer Tycho Brahe
demonstrates the movements of planets represented by goblets of wine,
one of which, originally meant for the Emperor, contains poison.20
When the courtiers conspiring against Rudolph are urged by Matthew
to drink, they pretend to sip wine and then run away confusedly. The
chaos of the court gives way to carnival scenes of popular revolt led by
Matthew who casts away his imperial disguise.
When Rudolph returns from his failed erotic adventure he asks
Matthew to rule the empire instead of him so that he might bet-
ter collect art and pursue alchemy. Matthew refuses Rudolph’s offer,
rendering, as any simulacrum does, ‘the order of participation, the fix-

ity 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 our-
selves 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 descrip-
tion 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 eter-
nal 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 commu-
nist 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 every-
body 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
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 liv-
ing 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 artifi-
cial woman called Sirael, who finally decided to prefer her own creator,
a young astrologer, Břeněk, to the rather clumsy and naive homuncu-
lus. This burlesque plot of the love of two artificial beings could even
have been a parody of the ending of Karel Čapek’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 (Kateřina), 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 fea-
tures of the ‘agent of imperialism’ who organizes a conspiracy of
courtiers against Rudolph and Matthew ‘in the name of the civiliza-
tion’ – 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
propaganda piece.28 Yet, at the same time, it must be said that the film
has kept its dominant position in Czech as well as international popu-
lar culture for more than half a century. It had great success in France in
the wake of Fanfan la Tulipe (dir. Christian-Jaque, 1952) and Scaramouche
(dir. George Sidney, 1952), won an award at the 1952 international film
festival in Edinburgh and in the US in 1955. What may attract view-
ers in the present time of new media is the affinity of the golem with
various monsters of contemporary popular culture, including Pokémon
and Astaroth in video games, or the zombie-like victim of the neo-Nazi
haunting the Hellblazer comic series. However, the movie is valued even
by more conservative audiences as a well-made spectacle (‘a big bud-
get . . . costume drama’) and as ‘a rambling comedy about an eccentric
Emperor who switches places with a baker’.29 Perhaps the humour of
the film is more powerful than its spectacular or ideological features: as
one blogger points out, it ‘comes from the dialogue’ and is efficient even
if mediated by ‘French subtitles’.30
Notes
1. In Prague, the film received its premiere on 28 December 1951. See Ondřej
Suchý, Werichův Golem a Golemův Werich/Werich’s Golem and Golem’s Werich
(Prague: Euromedia-Ikar, 2005), p. 162.
According to contemporary sources, the production costs reached
30 million Czech crowns (US$600,000). Compared with the US$1.6 million
budget of a contemporary Hollywood movie, the MGM musical comedy
Royal Wedding (dir. Stanley Doran, 1951), the cost was certainly not exor-
bitant but still the highest in the post-Second World War Czechoslovak
film industry. On contemporary criticism of the film’s costs, see Suchý,
Werichův Golem, p. 104, quoting a letter of the Czechoslovak Commu-
nist Party Secretary for Culture and Propaganda, Gustav Bareš (1910–79),
to the first communist president of Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald
(1896–1953), attacking the film as an expensive and ‘dubious Yankee
comedy’ whose production had deferred the making of ‘a patriotic film
about our western frontier’. On the exchange rates of the Czechoslovak
crown after the communist takeover in February 1948, see Miroslav Tuček,
‘Měnová reforma v mezinárodním kontextu’ (‘Currency Reform in Inter-
national Context’), Centrum pro ekonomiku a politiku, 28 February 2005,
http://www.cepin.cz/cze/prednaska.php?ID=457.
In the US, the film was distributed in 1954 with the title The Emperor and
the Golem.
2. A contemporary columnist complained that people coming to the box office
of one of the biggest cinemas in Prague were frustrated to find huge crowds
queuing for tickets for the next week (Suchý, Werichův Golem, p. 156).
3. Golem: Romantická revue o jedenácti obrazech/Golem: Romantic Extravaganza in
Eleven Scenes. The play provided the basis for a script to a film which Werich
and Voskovec planned to make at the A-B Studio in Prague. However, the
owner of the studio, Miloš Havel (1899–1968), the uncle of the playwright
and president Václav Havel, decided to invite a well-known French direc-
tor, Julien Duvivier (1896–1967), to produce the film. Duvivier turned down
Werich and Voskovec’s script because of its humorous treatment of the golem
legend and instead wrote a new scenario full of ‘violence and horror’ for the
French film star, Harry Baur (1880–1943), who took the role of the Emperor.
According to Werich, ‘several scenes’ in Duvivier’s film ‘had been stolen from
our script’ (Suchý, Werichův Golem, p. 51).
4. Originally, the movie was directed by Jiří Krejčík, a young, talented, but
demanding and ethically minded film-maker. Werich met him in 1949 at the
premiere of his third film, a psychological drama entitled Svědomí/Conscience.
However, after some months it became clear that the two artists were unable
to cooperate, mainly because of Werich’s workload and his bohemian way of
life. Not only communist apparatchiks, but also some artists, especially the
film’s director of photography Jan Stallich (1907–73), found Krejčík responsi-
ble for the delays and growing expenses associated with the film. Stallich had
even volunteered to direct the movie before the new director, Frič, signed his
contract. See Suchý, Werichův Golem, p. 109 onwards.
5. Two of these contemporary historical films – one about a Czech religious
reformer (Jan Hus) and another about the chief Hussite general (Jan Žižka) –
were made by Otokar Vávra in 1954 and 1955, respectively.
In contrast to this, the Emperor in the film’s precursor, the Golem play of
1931, is described much more sympathetically as an ‘old romantic, charm-
ingly neglecting the destiny of his lands, exhilarated with science which
he transmutes into poetry to the general chagrin of all positive scholars’
(Jan Werich and Jiří Voskovec, untitled prefatory note to Golem, in Hry
Osvobozeného divadla [Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1954–58], 4 vols,
II, p. 91). According to the authors’ comments, the main purpose of the
extravaganza was to display ‘all charms of exciting stage action’ in order to
‘cover up our efforts to produce a comical effect by the web of suspense, mys-
tery and picturesque adventure’ and, above all, to ‘show our love of comedy
and hatred of intellectualism’ (Werich and Voskovec, quoted in Josef Träger,
‘Od poetismu k politické satiře’ (‘From “Poetism” to Political Satire’), in Hry
Osvobozeného divadla, II, p. 416). All quotations from the Golem play and
prefatory texts are translated by the author of this chapter.
The film Psohlavci/The Folk of the Dog-Head Arms was also made (in 1955)
by Martin Frič, but backed by the Culture and Propaganda Office of the
Communist Party (CP). Based on a popular nineteenth-century nationalistic
historical novel by Alois Jirásek (1851–1930), the movie represented a rather
insignificant local rebellion of Czech yeomen against a German aristocrat as
a symbolic expression of the national emancipation movement and a precur-
sor to the working-class struggle against international imperialism. Early in
1951, the production of Císařův pekař was almost stopped as a result of a con-
flict between the ‘party’ and ‘government’ lobbies, the former prioritizing
Psohlavci as a crucial propaganda movie. In response to the claims of the CP
Culture and Propaganda Secretary, the Minister of Culture, Václav Kopecký
(1897–1961), and the director of the State Film Company (Československý
státní film), Oldřich Macháček (1902–90), argued that Císařův pekař would be
shown on US television and thus have a much wider propagandistic impact
than Psohlavci. Finally, the ‘government’ lobby won, not because of its more
pragmatic arguments, but because of purges in the Communist Party appa-
ratus which concluded in 1952 with the show trial of the members of the
alleged ‘anti-government conspiracy centre’ and its head, the CP Secretary
General, Rudolf Slánský (1901–52).
6. Contrary to the film, in the 1931 play the golem is already in Rudolph’s
possession but the chief villain and schemer, the alchemist Scotta, is hid-
ing the magic formula, the ‘shem’, from the Emperor. However, Rudolph’s
love of science and initial confidence in his alchemists make him believe
that the formula is ‘no privileged feature of the Jewish Kabbalah and can be
composed in my court laboratories’ (Werich and Voskovec, Golem, p. 105).
7. Compared to this, Rudolph’s authority in the Golem play is only briefly
shaken by the conspiracy of his courtiers and the raging of the golem. In the
end, Rudolph assumes the image of a ‘popular’ monarch, leading a lantern
procession (the climax of the carnival scenes) and singing a student drink-
ing song. The carnival atmosphere is also emphasized by dating the story
to the night of 6 January 1600, undoubtedly a Shakespearean reminiscence
(at 4.1 of the Golem play, Rudolph writes a letter to Elizabeth I, warns her
against Essex and asks her to tell Shakespeare to send him ‘another of his
fine pieces’). See Werich and Voskovec, Golem, p. 107. Unlike the events in
the extravaganza, the story in the film takes place later, at a time of crisis for
the monarchy, when Rudolph was pressured into abdicating.
8. Císařův pekař a Pekařův císař (dir. Martin Frič, 1951). The film was released on
DVD in 2008. All quotations are translated by the author of this chapter.
9. In contrast, Rudolph in the Golem play is a protean, composite character
whose ‘two bodies’ can neither be identified nor even distinguished: he is ‘at
the same time a wise fool and a mad poet, a ridiculous king and a dignified
individual, a ruthless judge and an amiable fellow’ (Werich and Voskovec,
Golem, p. 94).
10. Unlike the film, the first scene of the Golem play shows Rudolph as a real
connoisseur able to recognize a ‘base counterfeit’ recommended to him as a
masterpiece by his chamberlain, Lang (Werich and Voskovec, Golem, p. 100).
As Voskovec had indicated (Suchý, Werichův Golem, p. 41), the opening
scene was based on a nineteenth-century historical painting by Václav Brožík
(1851–1901) showing Rudolph II in the company of his two astronomers,
Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), who represent
the powers of the Emperor’s reason and poetic intuition.
11. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’, The Logic of Sense,
ed. Constantin V. Bounda, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 262: ‘The problem no longer has to
do with the distinction Essence-Appearance or Model-Copy. This distinc-
tion operates completely within the world of representation. Rather, it has
to do with undertaking the subversion of this world – “the twilight of the
idols” ’.
12. The joke might have been aimed at the film’s chief opponent, the Commu-
nist Party Culture and Propaganda Secretary, Bareš.
13. Philipp Lang of Langenfels came from a Jewish family from Prague. After
his early conversion to Christianity, he became a choirboy in the orches-
tra of Ferdinand, the Archduke of Tyrolia (1529–95). He married a maid
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 for-
given 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 promi-
nence 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 ‘het-
erotopia’ 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 vocif-
erating 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 ‘heteroglos-
sia’ which undermines both the contemporary intellectual views of reality,
influenced by quantum physics or structuralist linguistics, and the author-
itarian, 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 prob-
lem 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,
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 author-
ity 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 fifteenth-
century 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 Mysti-
cal Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid [Albany: SUNY Press, 1990], p. 172).
The creation, called also ‘the emanation of the world sefirot’, was made pos-
sible 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 oth-
ers, as a betrayed, jealous lover in a popular broadside ballad, the film shows
him, fully in keeping with communist propaganda, as a destructive mon-
ster 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 par-
ody 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
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 fam-
ily of Lobkowitz (blaming Russworm for the suicide of one of its members)
and possibly also the First Chamberlain, Philipp Lang. The Emperor sen-
tenced 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.
17. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 141.
20. From 1599 onwards the Danish scholar Tycho Brahe was the impe-
rial astronomer and astrologist. He tried to combine the Ptolemaic and
Copernican hypotheses of the geocentric and heliocentric universe.
23. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp. 263–4.
25. Werich and Voskovec, Golem, pp. 182–4.
26. Kabbalistic mysticism was aimed at ‘the elaboration of the theurgical mean-
ing of human activities’ (Idel, Golem, p. 277) and the anthropomorphic
understanding of God. Whereas in the Golem play this meaning is paro-
died 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.
27. 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 impris-
oned 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 Křivoklát 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 eso-
teric lore, making it a ruse of ‘international imperialism’. As an anonymous
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, Werichův 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 (Werichův 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-other-
golem.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-other-
golem.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 trans-
formed 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 partici-
pants 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 Histo-
ries series.1 Extremely popular with its target audience of children aged
approximately seven to twelve, this body of books and performance-
based material (including a stage adaptation and two TV series) is
produced by adults for consumption by children, in a context that com-
bines 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 eight-
to 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 play-
ground. 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 Renais-
sance history, by reflecting on a workshop production of an abbreviated
version of Macbeth staged with a group of ten- and eleven-year-old chil-
dren 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 his-
torical contexts. Both occupy distinctively liminal positions in relation
to formal educational structures and child-directed cultures of enter-
tainment. 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 cer-
tain cultural cachet based on the idea that they are somehow improving,
but are not usually self-consciously didactic – qualities which con-
tribute 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 perfor-
mances for children often presume a mixed-age audience, whether in a
theatre to which children will be escorted by parents or teachers, or in
the family living-room. This presumption leaves its mark both on the
formal choices made by the producers of the performance texts under
discussion here, and on the kinds of material selected for performance
to children and the ways in which they are adapted. For instance, while
a certain level of violence is acceptable – and, given the subject matter
of the versions of the Renaissance I am concerned with, this is prob-
ably inescapable – sexual content is generally considered much more
problematic in works produced for a young audience.
Violence is inescapably central to all the stories acted out in these
theatre performances and TV adaptations, and their creators clearly
know that violence can be very effective at engaging children’s inter-
est. Questions of how violence might best be represented to the young,
however, and the consequences of portraying it, are fraught with con-
troversy. Debates about this hotly contested issue have been anxiously
preoccupied with the nature of the child’s response to violent images
and language, but have also considered the meanings of violence in chil-
dren’s imaginative play.4 How violence is represented in these texts, how
it inflects the politics of their engagement with themes of historical con-
flict and crisis, how children respond to it and what the consequences
may be of foregrounding violence as a way of engaging children with
history are questions that will thread through this chapter.
These questions about the representation of violence and children’s
responses to it are debated internationally, but the present chapter
frames them within a specifically British context, one that is influenced
by the place of history in the national curriculum. Constituting detailed
guidance on both the content of the curriculum and ways of delivering
it, the national curriculum specifies the content and goals of education
in publicly funded schools in the UK and Northern Ireland. It is self-
consciously presented as a facet of national identity, claiming to embody
‘the learning that the nation has decided to set before its young’.5 My
case studies need to be read with an awareness of the influence of the
national curriculum over the way most children will have encountered
historical discourse in more formal settings. In addition, the Macbeth
workshops represent an approach to the use of drama in education that
is practised internationally, but is inflected in this instance not only by
its location in the UK, but by specific factors associated with the schools
Kate Chedgzoy 115
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 perfor-
mance 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 relation-
ship to the national past. However, the underlying issues – concerning
children’s learning in school and beyond, their engagement with repre-
sentations 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.
The approach that the Horrible Histories take to representing the past
is in fact remarkably congruent with that of the national curriculum.
When the Blackpool Grand Theatre hosted the Birmingham Stage Com-
pany’s touring production of The Terrible Tudors in the spring of 2008, it
tempted teachers with the promise that ‘A visit to Horrible Histories
at The Grand Theatre is bound to excite and inspire your Key Stage
2 pupils to want to know more about the Tudor or Victorian period . . . It
is a completely unique and hugely stimulating resource to enrich your
school’s delivery of the National Curriculum.’6 Just as adaptations of
Shakespeare for children have nearly always been identified as merito-
rious to the extent that they lead children on to the real thing, so the
onstage version of the Horrible Histories is touted not as an alternative
way of thinking about the past, but as a supplement to the national cur-
riculum. This is partly just a marketing strategy of course – school groups
are good business – but it also speaks to a larger anxiety about the rela-
tionship between education and entertainment that has been fostered
by British educational policy over the last couple of decades. Indeed, one
of the sample schemes of work on the Standards Site (a website of educa-
tional resources supported by the Department for Children, Schools and
Families and the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency)
asks ‘Why did Henry VIII marry six times?’ And, as I will demonstrate,
this is the key question posed about Henry in the stage and TV versions
of the Horrible Histories.
Described as ‘history with the nasty bits left in’, the Horrible Histo-
ries phenomenon began as a series of non-fiction books written by Terry
Deary and illustrated primarily by Martin Brown, with some contribu-
tions by other illustrators.7 The first books to appear were The Terrible
Tudors and The Awesome Egyptians, published in 1993, and at the cur-
rent time of writing, there are over fifty books in the series. Most of
them focus, as the two original volumes did, on a particular period in
history, but others take a thematic or geographical approach (there are,
for instance, books on witches, the Blitz, Scotland and Stratford-upon-
Avon). The vast majority of the books focus on British history, but a few
address prehistory or the pre-modern history of other countries: there
are several volumes on the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, as
well as the Angry Aztecs and Incredible Incas. Additional spin-off publica-
tions and products include interactive book forms such as sticker books,
activity books, quiz books, The Horribly Huge Press-Out-and-Build Book,
a set of Top Trumps cards and a pop-up volume about Tutankhamun.
Audiobooks read by Terry Deary have also been published. The series
as a whole has achieved global sales in excess of 20 million copies, and
books from it have been translated into thirty-one languages. This global
success has made of the Horrible Histories a transmedia phenomenon
exemplifying, in its travel across media, forms and genres, a process
described by Richard Burt in which ‘as literature and literary culture
are transposed, constructed, and framed in other rival media . . . the lines
between literature, comics, animation, film and so on are redrawn as
much as they are blurred.’8 Here, I discuss the stage production of The
Terrible Tudors (created by Birmingham Stage Company in 2006, it has
been touring ever since) and the TV adaptation produced by Lion Tele-
vision in 2009 for CBBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s channel
aimed at children aged seven and over.9
The Birmingham Stage Company’s (BSC) production of The Terrible
Tudors is unusual in that company’s body of work, and in children’s
theatre more generally, in so far as it purports to stage a narrative
account of sixteenth-century English history, rather than deriving from
a pre-existing work of historical fiction or drama. Run by actor-manager,
Neal Foster, the BSC has been the resident company at the famous Old
Rep Theatre in Birmingham since 1992. It has a strong commitment to
making high-quality popular theatre for a family audience: of thirty-one
recent productions, fifteen have been aimed at children and families,
and all of these were stage adaptations of popular books. In addition to
the Horrible Histories, which account for three of these shows, these
adaptations have drawn on classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Kate Chedgzoy 117
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 engage-
ment with history is being elicited from the youthful audiences at these
performances? With their emphasis on violence, disorder and excre-
ment, the Horrible Histories could in one sense be described as history
from below for children. Though this emphasis is fairly novel in the pre-
sentation 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 popu-
lar 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 his-
tory 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 acquir-
ing 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 demon-
strate 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 deal-
ing with British history is fundamentally monarchical. In the period
with which the present volume is concerned, the Terrible Tudors are fol-
lowed by the Slimy Stuarts. In the case of the Tudors, the focus in the
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 gos-
sip 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 some-
what 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 – peas-
ants 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 sur-
prised 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 peo-
ple 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 His-
tories 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 view-
ers 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 ver-
sion, 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 ques-
tioning, 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 under-
stand 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 empa-
thy and identification that often characterizes school-based approaches
to the study of the past; but at moments like this, historical distanc-
ing 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
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 dra-
matic 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 pro-
cesses that can lead to the presentation of complex realities as simple
historical facts. The relationship between fact and fiction was also con-
stantly 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 stag-
ing, 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 edu-
cation 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 disjunc-
tion 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 pri-

mary 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 socio-
economic backgrounds. Taking up the whole of a school day each week
for a period of six weeks, the workshops and the production that con-
cluded them – in which the children performed for family and teachers –
were facilitated by Chris Heckels, an experienced drama teacher, Equity
member and consultant on educational drama, who had previously run
a similar series of workshops on Richard III.
The children came to the workshops from very different starting-
points in relation to Shakespeare (and indeed to live theatre generally).
One child had already taken part in a youth theatre group’s performance
of Macbeth (there is a very strong tradition of amateur theatre in the
North East of England, and there are several flourishing youth theatres
in Newcastle, associated with both amateur and professional theatre
companies); a few had been to see a live performance; most knew of
Shakespeare through various cultural refractions that enter the home or
school by electronic means. These included in-school screenings of The
Animated Tales, an awareness of mainstream and frequently televised
films such as Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998) and familiarity
with the more-or-less parodic presence of Shakespeare in popular cul-
ture. For instance, many of the children mentioned an episode of Doctor
Who screened the previous spring, ‘The Shakespeare Code’, in which the
Doctor (played by David Tennant, who has since been a much-praised
Hamlet) and his companion Martha (Freema Agyeman) turn up in 1599
where, as a plot synopsis on IMDb (Internet Movie Database) engag-
ingly puts it, ‘the world is under threat from the evil Carronites, and
only history’s most notorious playwright William Shakespeare can help
to save [it].’15
What is striking for my purposes is that this broader cultural knowl-
edge tended strongly to construct a version of Shakespeare as a historical
figure embedded in a very old-fashioned vision of Elizabethan culture,
largely detaching him from his works. This was reflected in the first ses-
sion, where the children were assigned to small groups to pool their
knowledge and ideas about Shakespeare. They were asked to write down
what they knew on large pieces of paper, which were then displayed
and used by Chris Heckels as a stimulus both to draw out the children’s
knowledge and understanding of the playwright and his time, and to
augment this with her own input. Each group was at pains to point
out that Shakespeare is dead, and though this initially struck me as a
faintly comical emphasis, it can perhaps be helpfully understood as part
of their attempt to acknowledge the pastness of the past – a stumbling
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 run-
ning 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 Festi-
val 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 pri-
ority 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 acknowl-
edged 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 come-
dies 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, how-
ever, 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 mate-
rial 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 vio-
lence, 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 criti-
cal 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 knowl-
edge 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 accu-
rate 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
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. Macbeth wants to be king he meets witches

2. he kills loads of people to become king and his wife kills herself
3. he kills king kings heirs run away
4. he gets beaten by mc duff
5. He was a Scottish Lord
6. He kills his best friend and his best friends fammily
7. He starts seeing ghosts
8. 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 chil-

dren 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 ques-
tions 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 ver-

sion 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 chil-
dren, 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 youth-
ful 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 power-
fully, if obliquely, established by the Macbeth workshops, enabled by
the centrality to the performance process of the children’s own par-
ticipation 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 sophisti-
cated 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 vio-
lence in children’s play, see Penny Holland, We Don’t Play with Guns
Here: War Weapon and Superhero Play in the Early Years (Maidenhead and
Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003).
5. See http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk (accessed 30 December 2009).
6. See http://www.blackpoolgrand.co.uk/shows/1/1194/Horrible-Histories-THE-
TERRIBLE-TUDORS.htm (accessed 15 September 2008).
7. See http://www.horrible-histories.co.uk/index.tao?PageId=home (accessed
29 December 2009). Information about the publishing history of the series
is drawn from this site.
8. Richard Burt, ‘Shakespeare (’)tween Media and Markets in the 1990s and
Beyond’, in Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy,
eds, Shakespeare and Childhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), p. 220.
9. See http://www.liontv.com/London/Productions/Horrible-Histories; http://
www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc (accessed 30 December 2009). An animated version
produced by a US-based company, Mike Young Productions, ran on TV in
several countries for two seasons between 2001 and 2003.
10. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London: Methuen, 1930).
11. Terry Deary, ‘History Written by the Losers’, The Guardian, 3 October 2006,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/oct/03/buildingachildrenslibrary.
booksforchildrenandteenagers4 (accessed 29 December 2009).
12. For a still from the show illustrating this moment, see http://www.blackpool
grand.co.uk/media/6938_Tudors1.JPG (accessed 30 December 2009).
13. See, for example, Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two
Myths (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
14. See http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/giftedandtalented (accessed 30 Decem-
ber 2009).
15. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0974729/plotsummary (accessed 30 Decem-
ber 2009).
16. See http://www.ssf.uk.com.
17. Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy, eds, Shakespeare and Scotland (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005).
8
Mark Rylance, Henry V and
‘Original Practices’ at Shakespeare’s
Globe: History Refashioned
Christie Carson
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, star-
ring 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 all-
male 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 estab-
lished that was indeed the case. But I argue that audiences flock to the
experience offered by this reconstructed theatre as a result both of a
rebellion against the increasing atomization of the computer world and
a hunger in the real world for the participatory nature of the newly
democratized online environment. The physical discomfort of the Globe
space – its noises and smells, the rowdiness of its audience who want to
be seen and acknowledged by the performers and other audience mem-
bers – comes, I suggest, as a direct result of the increasing sense of the
significance of the individual but in an increasingly chaotic world. In
developing an environment where authority is negotiated and meaning-
making is shared, this new/old building has proved provocative. In its
opening season, this theatre forced recognition of just how passive audi-
ences had become, requiring its audience from the outset to participate
in piecing together the information presented in order to formulate an
understanding of the gap between the present and the past.2 In moving
from a focus on narrative direction in the twentieth century towards
a twenty-first-century environment, where involvement in the process
of understanding history is shared, audiences once again were given
the opportunity to embrace the possibility for debate and conflict that
Shakespeare’s plays not only allow but encourage.
Shakespeare’s Globe is a very real physical theatre created on the basis
of materialist ideas about what we can learn about history by recreating
its objects and also its working practices. This theoretical underpin-
ning was painstakingly pursued by the theatre artists who inhabited
the building, and especially by the artistic team that Mark Rylance
drew around him in Jenny Tiramani, head of design, and Claire van
Kampen, head of music. In order to understand the importance of this
production, it is essential to see its complex historical position at the
Christie Carson 129
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 view-
ing 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 atti-
tudes. Shakespeare is, after all, more than just the greatest creative
artist we, or perhaps humanity, has produced. He is also an embodi-
ment 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 atti-
tudes 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.
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 insti-
gate 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 the-
atrical 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 serious-
ness 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 charac-
teristic 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 excite-
ment 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 involve-
ment, 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 entertain-
ment expectations for a popular audience. Shakespeare’s Globe has
proved a provocation for actors and directors but also for reviewers,
audiences and academics. The critics at these first performances were
forced to expose both their expectations and their cultural prejudices in
fairly stark terms.
I concur with Prescott’s assessment that this theatre attracted a great
deal of critical and popular attention largely because it became a site of
contestation, a crucible of conflicting views.12 This aspect of the theatre’s
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 artis-
tic 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 archi-
tecture reflects an essential social unity.’15 But Peter also points out the
challenge that this theatre faced from the outset: ‘The task of the new
Globe is to recreate the spirit of Shakespearian theatre: its excitement, its
vigorous, classless appeal, and its stylistic and political audacity.’ 16 The
political nature of the changes that have occurred as a result of the cul-
tural power struggle instigated by this theatre, as demonstrated through
the critical reception of the theatre’s work since 1997, is therefore the
focus of this chapter.
In 1997, to present a production of Henry V on the London stage could
not be considered anything but an attempt to engage in both the the-
atrical and the political legacies that this play now carries with it. Mark
Rylance, in discussing his choice of repertoire, admits this involvement
with the world outside the theatre. In fact, he cites it as one of the key
features of his approach as artistic director:
Perhaps the first ‘original practice’ I tried to follow was my under-

standing 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 peo-
ple 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 connec-
tion between the events of the play and the events of the lives of his
present audience. But, as he points out, this stands at the centre of
Shakespeare’s own desire to refashion history in his own time for his
own purposes. So the political climate of the moment played its part.
But there was another factor at play which so far has been largely over-
looked. The experimental approach taken by Rylance in the early years
of the theatre led to the development, with his co-collaborators Jenny
Tiramani and Claire van Kampen, of an approach to the creation of
‘original practices’ productions that fits very well with the scholarly dis-
course of practice-based research that was developing at that time. Their
research project attempted, in the ten-year period of collaboration, to
provide a pragmatic approach that placed the practical exigencies of the
theatre of the period (as well as of today) above any purely aesthetic con-
siderations or literary theories. This shift towards a social science model
of research very much reflects scholarly practice at this time.
Turning, then, to the working methods in this theatre, I would argue
that, like the audience response, the theatre artists were as influenced by
dominant scholarly approaches as they were by any ‘original practices’.
Jenny Tiramani describes her approach to design in following way:
Using primary evidence from the past always requires an act of inter-
pretation to produce a possible reconstruction from it. There is not
enough evidence to definitively produce an ‘original practices’ pro-
duction of Henry V with the amount of medieval clothing used (or
not) in 1599, or one of Romeo and Juliet with the Italian flavour used
(or not) in 1595. There are many possible early modern interpreta-
tions of the design for each play and every O.P. production we did in
the first ten years at the Globe proposed a particular interpretation of
the evidence we have.18
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
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 conflict-
ing audiences and visions of the project’s purpose. The choice to open
the theatre with The Winter’s Tale was politically astute since this play
warns of the dangers of making too hasty a judgement. Henry V, by con-
trast, invokes a battle and a great victory based on rhetoric and theatrical
style. Given the critical reception the theatre had received in the lead-
up to its opening, it is hardly surprising that Rylance was well aware
that he had a fight on his hands to gain sympathy and credibility for
his approach to the representation of the Renaissance from both the
theatrical establishment and his scholarly audience.
Rylance, in looking back, in 2007, at this production and his time at
the Globe Theatre, is philosophical but also realistic about what took
place in those first few years: ‘In mainstream British theatre, I think
the Globe does upset some hierarchical concepts. Mostly I think it
challenges how we treat audiences in modern theatre architecture and
practice.’20 As a theatre practitioner, Rylance was forced to take greater
account of his audience, and of the active part that audience can and
must play, in the making of meaning in the Globe Theatre. He con-
sciously tried to engage the audience in a dialogue that went beyond
the subject and characters of the play. The plays, he discovered, aided
that process rather than hindering it, making it clear that something
Christie Carson 135
had been missing in the presentation of the plays for some time. ‘Even-
tually, in my last years, I really came to feel that it was not just about
speaking, it was about thinking of the audience as other actors.’21 The
developing knowledge and acceptance in the audience of this practical
experiment has allowed for a collective understanding of how it might
be possible to recreate the Renaissance in a productive way. Claire van
Kampen articulates this:
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 experimen-
tation, 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 per-
formance 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
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 car-
rying 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 tex-
tual 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, pro-
voked energetic hissing. Its eruption did not, I take it, mean that
the audience included a contingent of National Front supporters.
The hissers were themselves, in effect, playing a role. They had the
impression that this would have been the ‘Elizabethan response’ at
such a moment, and they obligingly supplied it.28
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 pro-
duction, 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 produc-
tions instigated another debate about cultural expectations. Susannah
Clap writing in The Observer addresses the issue of class and entertain-
ment styles head-on: ‘No production of a Shakespearean play will be
magnificent if it treats its lowlife characters as merely comic. This is
what is wrong with Richard Olivier’s spirited production of Henry V
at the new Globe.’31 She goes on to argue that: ‘These characters are
the groundlings’ representatives. Why, at a time when fine working-
class actresses such as Kathy Burke are at last getting recognition, is the
theatre so indulgent to cod cockney?’32 The idea that the presence of
the groundlings forces a new definition of theatre is supported by John
Peter who states in his review in The Sunday Times:
In fact, unless you see Richard Olivier’s production, you will not
know what popular theatre really is. The term itself is relatively new
and already quite debased. If you had described Henry V or, indeed,
any of his other plays to Shakespeare as popular theatre, he would not
have known what you were talking about. Theatre was by definition
popular.33
The fact that this first season produced a debate, first among reviewers
and then amongst scholars, about the current state of British theatre
and its class-based expectations is a testament to the significance of this
theatrical event.
Cynthia Marshall’s article, ‘Sight and Sound: Two Models of
Shakespearean Subjectivity on the British Stage’ (2000), however, finally
comes to grips with the full impact of this opening production. In this
article, Marshall acknowledges the fact that the audience has an entirely
different subjective position in the interactive environment of the Globe
Theatre than it does in the passive and, to her mind, filmic proscenium
arch stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) Festival Theatre.
Somewhat surprisingly, she points out a bias at the RSC for visual spec-
tacle which, she says, is contrasted in the Globe space by an emphasis
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 textual-
ity’.35 By addressing the audience’s subjectivity directly, Marshall moves
to the heart of what the Globe does that is different from other theatre
spaces (Figure 8.1).
Speaking specifically of Henry V, Marshall explains how Mark Rylance
makes the audience aware that the rules of engagement were to be quite
unconventional:
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 per-
spective 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. How-
ever, whatever the motivation, the outcome of such a response is depen-
dent 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 com-
plicity 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 anxi-
eties about national identity.’41 The introduction of irony to the space
adds a further layer of interpretive complexity since irony requires a

knowing audience, without which any response can undermine the per-
former’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 per-
former. The moment of hissing in the Globe space made it clear that,
as Silverstone suggests, the audience as a group had to negotiate anxi-
eties 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 con-
struction 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 impor-
tance 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 pro-
cesses of meaning-making that go towards creating our complex, inter-
nationally interdependent and culturally constructed world; however,
they also move away from the theatre, reducing the dramatic action in
the building at any one particular performance to just one small part of
a much larger theoretical picture.
By contrast, British critics like Prescott try to acknowledge and explain
how and why the Globe raises so many cultural problems for British
audiences and reviewers, drawing attention to the differences between
North American and British cultural expectations. Prescott, in his review
of the Globe’s reception, charts the increasing disenchantment with the
space by London critics, particularly those who initially came to the
theatre with a sense of excitement. He points out how, ‘In their con-
cern with audience response, national newspaper critics are positioning
themselves as critics of reception in addition to their more obvious
function as critics of Shakespearean performance.’45 Prescott also high-
lights the connection between reviewing practices and Shakespeare
scholarship:
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 litera-
ture 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 assump-
tions. 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 schol-
ars, 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
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 chal-

lenge 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 perfor-
mance 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 audi-
ence is not a new idea in the theatre – Henry V is testament to that. But,
in contemporary British theatre, as Purcell points out, ‘What was once
an aspiration of the theatrical avant-garde has, it seems, now passed into
the mainstream’ through the work of the Globe.51 Howard Brenton, the
political playwright whose play In Extremis was performed at the Globe
Theatre in 2006, goes a step further by suggesting that ‘by understand-
ing how the Globe works, a new theatre can be imagined’, one which
‘can rediscover public optimism’.52 Therefore, I would suggest that this
Christie Carson 143
theatre has not only altered the interpretive possibilities for Shakespeare
but has changed British theatrical practices and developed a new kind
of writing for the theatre.
In a surprising way, then, Shakespeare’s Globe has come to repre-
sent a place that stands between life and art, and encourages a public
debate about the role of the individual in interpreting current visions
of history and historical events. In forcing audiences and critics to
acknowledge their current preoccupations with both the Renaissance
period and the power and position of a member of a theatre audience,
the Globe Theatre has not only acted as ‘one of the key sites for the
cultural contestation of Shakespeare’ but it has opened up a dialogue
about how it might be possible to engage with this period of history
in a new way.53 Appleyard concludes his damning 1995 article on the
future of the Globe project by saying, ‘Wanamaker’s rebuke has certainly
worked, but not, perhaps, in the way that he intended.’54 In pointing
out both the possibilities and the limitations of a project that attempts
to recreate ‘original practices’, Mark Rylance and the artistic team at the
Globe Theatre have presented a serious provocation to theatrical and
cultural norms which I think would have made Sam Wanamaker proud.
As an intervention in the long-standing debate about how it might be
possible to move closer to Shakespeare’s original stagecraft, the ‘origi-
nal practices’ project helped to challenge the connection between the
plays and literary criticism, and also notions of high art. This approach
also successfully highlighted and interrogated the extraordinary passiv-
ity of modern audiences in response to the opportunity to engage in
public debate that these plays present. As Purcell comments, moving
away from conventional theatrical forms is essential for change in the
theatre to take place:
Conventional audience behaviour is intensely class-coded, particu-

larly in the Shakespearean theatre, and while fantasies of a ‘class-less’
theatre are impossible to realise, they can provide a site for cul-
tural 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. Fur-
thermore, 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
must negotiate an interpretive debate with the material available to us

to represent the Renaissance at a specific moment in time. The con-
stant 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 Indepen-
dent, 9 August 1995, p. 13.
4. W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 28.
5. Paul Prescott, ‘Inheriting the Globe: The Reception of Shakespearean Space
and Audience in Contemporary Reviewing’, in Barbara Hodgdon and
W. B Worthen, eds, A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005), pp. 359–75.
6. Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 6 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June
1997, p. 724.
7. Michael Billington, The Guardian, 7 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June
1997, p. 724.
8. Spencer, p. 724.
9. Robert Butler, Independent on Sunday, 8 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June
1997, p. 725.
10. Paul Taylor, The Independent, 9 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June 1997,
p. 726.
11. Taylor, p. 726.
12. Prescott, ‘Inheriting the Globe’, p. 359.
13. John Peter, The Sunday Times, 15 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June 1997,
p. 727.
14. Peter, p. 727.
15. Peter, p. 727.
16. Peter, p. 728.
17. Mark Rylance, ‘Discoveries from the Globe Stage’, in Carson and Karim-
Cooper, eds, Shakespeare’s Globe, p. 195.
18. Jenny Tiramani, ‘Exploring Early Modern Stage and Costume Design’, in
Carson and Karim-Cooper, eds, Shakespeare’s Globe, p. 57.
19. Tiramani, ‘Exploring’, p. 58.
20. Mark Rylance, ‘Research, Materials, Craft: Principles of Performance at
Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Carson and Karim-Cooper, eds, Shakespeare’s Globe,
p. 108.
21. Rylance, ‘Research, Materials, Craft’, p. 107.
Christie Carson 145
22. Claire van Kampen, ‘Music and Aural Texture at Shakespeare’s Globe’, in
Carson and Karim-Cooper, eds, Shakespeare’s Globe, p. 88.
23. Michael Cordner, ‘Repeopling the Globe: The Opening Season at
Shakespeare’s Globe, London 1997’, Shakespeare Survey, 51 (1998), pp. 211–2.
24. Cordner, ‘Repeopling the Globe’, p. 212.
29. Patrick Marmion, Evening Standard, 9 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June
1997, p. 730.
30. Alastair Macaulay, Financial Times, 10 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June
1997, p. 730.
31. Susannah Clap, The Observer, 15 June 1997, Theatre Record, 4–17 June 1997,
p. 726.
32. Clap, p. 726.
33. Peter, p. 728.
34. Cynthia Marshall, ‘Sight and Sound: Two Models of Shakespearean Subjec-
tivity on the British Stage’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51(3) (2000), p. 354.
35. Marshall, ‘Sight and Sound’, p. 357.
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.
48. Abigail Rokison, ‘Authenticity in the Twenty-First Century: Propeller and
Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson, eds,
Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2010), p. 140.
49. Stephen Purcell, Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern
Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), p. 88.
50. Purcell, Popular Shakespeare, p. 90.
52. Howard Brenton, ‘Playing the Crowd’, The Guardian, 12 May 2007.
54. Appleyard, ‘History Rebuilds Itself’, p. 13.
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 bom-
bardment 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 ongo-
ing 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’ under-
standings 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 indi-
vidually 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 Reforma-
tion within a historicity that privileges originality, and identifies within
the period the emergence of variously recognizable modern sensibili-
ties. 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 atten-
tive 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.
For Irving Pichel’s Martin Luther (1953), the posting of the Ninety-Five
Theses is, according to the opening background text, a ‘decisive moment
in human history’, but the worshippers of Luther’s parish seem hardly
to notice. The film’s representation of the moment at the Church Doors
emphasizes the act’s dramatic inadequacy: Luther (Niall MacGinnis),
cutting through the crowds awaiting the church service, unassumingly
posts the scroll. A peasant inspects the paper and dismisses it as ‘just
something in Latin’, before the doors open for Mass and crowds of
parishioners stream past the displayed document, unaware of its sig-
nificance. The film’s voice-over, reminding the viewer that the doors
148 ‘There is So Much to See in Rome’
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 histori-
cal 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 ‘renais-
sance’, if you will) which permanently breaks from this medieval anar-
chism 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 repre-
sents 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 institu-
tion 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 fas-
cism. It echoes clearly the romantic portrait of Luther adopted in Roland
Bainton’s celebratory biography, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther, pub-
lished in English in 1950. Bainton’s popular book, participating in a fur-
ther 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 bor-
rows 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 predomi-
nantly 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 dra-
matizes 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 civilisa-
tion’.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 voice-
over 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, formu-
lated in spiritual, psychological and physical terms. Luther defines his
personal development through the invocation of a continual and con-
stitutive 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
studies: when Spalatin, an old schoolmate, enquires if Luther has found

‘what he is looking for’, the protagonist admits that he has not. A pro-
fundity 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 fasci-
natingly corporeal terms. He articulates the pervasive sense of absence
behind the ‘decoration’ of his learning through a rhetoric of bodily par-
tition: 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 var-
ious 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 insti-
tutional 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 fit-
tings. 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 formula-
tion, an ideology of ‘representation [and] the perception of the subject’
Conor Smyth 151
has foregrounded the conditioned visual ethics of cinematic recep-

tion.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 sig-
nificatory function of the object: whether it is figurative of the person of
Christ to whom it gestures, or whether it has become unacceptably liter-
alized 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 evalu-
ation 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, includ-
ing 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 cross-
cutting, 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 pow-
erful 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 ambiva-
lent relationship with diegetic objects. Luther’s perceptual rejection of
the objects, and their contested habitation on the fringes of the frame,
is thus motivated by correspondent visual ideologies. In this context,

Martin Luther is a productive film for situating the contested theoreti-
cal 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 con-

sideration 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 pul-
pit, 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 ambiva-
lent 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 protago-
nist’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 sug-
gests 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 sub-
jective 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 Psycho-
analysis 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 sub-
jective fragmentation, in rhetoric of intense negativity: ‘Not! Me! I am
not!’ he screams in a violent fit. Articulating a desire for physical nul-
lification, 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 inter-
mittent 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 expression-
istic 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
The film, however, struggles adequately to visualize Osborne’s sym-

bolist aesthetic. The flexibility awarded to Osborne’s stage aesthetics
allowed him to conceive of a psychic landscape which the film, nec-
essarily 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 ambiva-
lence 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 com-
promised 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 revi-
sionist 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 Reforma-
tion 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 mani-
fested in the verbal challenges to the legacy of Luther, who is labelled
by the Knight a hypocrite and a coward unwilling to make personal sac-
rifices 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 com-
promised by the ambiguous nexus of the psychic personality.
The production’s presupposition of an ahistorical subjectivity trans-
lates 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 affin-
ity with a cultural romanticism towards the historical moment of the
theses is clear in the film’s dramatization of the event itself. It elides the
varying ambivalence of the moment (which the other films register) and
endorses a positivist, deterministic temporality.
The scene opens with the camera trailing a motivated Luther (Joseph
Fiennes), scroll in hand, moving through the crowds in his march
towards the doors: there is little of Osborne’s doubt in this Luther. As
heads in the crowd turn towards the fierce monk, the score’s rising
tempo emphasizes the momentous nature of his intentions, culminat-
ing in the placing of the scroll. As it is nailed to the wood, the camera’s
view shifts to the interior of the church, where the acoustic bangs of the
hammer echo through the devotional space and suggest a perhaps more
magisterial audience. After Luther leaves, two villagers rush up to the
document and read aloud one of the theses: one of the boys removes the
paper from the door and, when his companion protests that ‘Dr Luther
wanted everyone to see it’, promises that ‘they will’. His remark initiates
a montage that visualizes the document’s circulation amongst diverse
social locations: peasants assimilating an insurrectionary rhetoric, the
indulgences peddler John Tetzel (Alfred Molina) being dismissed by a
hostile public and the shock of the German authorities at Luther’s trans-
gression. In this sequence, the collapse of separate temporal points into
an impression of simultaneity suggests the theses’ immediate cultural
and political effects.
The framing of Luther depends on a familiar idiom of instantaneous
change and is further characterized by a trailer-friendly hyperbole com-
mon to contemporary historical film-making. The dialogue declares
that Luther is ‘tearing the world apart’; that ‘his damn ideas have
set the world on fire’; that he was sent ‘out so boldly to change the
world’. The ending, complicit in a temporality of initiation, extends
this in an assumption of unthreatening historical progression. At the
Augsburg trial, Protestant Electors defiantly refuse Charles V’s demands
for religious compromise, and a messenger greets Luther with the tri-
umphant exclamation, ‘We did it Martin! They can’t stop us now!’
Eliding the subsequent struggles of the Reformed movement, the film
presents the Protestants’ defiance as their final achievement, and sug-
gests an ancestral alliance between the Reformers and the modern
audience.
This history, however, is qualified through an insistence on the poli-
tics of the popular. Luther’s scroll has the power to enact change only
because of its endorsement and reception by the German citizenry at
large. History is, quite literally, put into the hands of the common man
by the physical removal of the scroll from the Church Doors by the
young men, and their control over the operations of print and transla-
tion which allowed the writings to be so influential. Aligned with the
endorsement of the value of popular appeal is the film’s translation
of Luther through contemporary ideologies of personality, which, typi-
cally, privilege hallmarks of likeability and accessibility. This is registered
in the casting of Joseph Fiennes as the reformer, the actor carrying
traces of his performances in earlier cinematic imaginings of the Renais-
sance, especially his title role in Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden,
1998).17 In both films, a canonical marker of the early modern is, gen-
tly but noticeably, stripped of historical idiosyncrasies and endowed
with a charisma appealing to a multiplex public that seeks aesthetically
pleasing and intellectually unthreatening personalities.
In aid of this rehabilitation, the film jettisons any historical esoteri-
cism and rehabilitates Luther as a man of the people. While delivering
Conor Smyth 157
a sermon against relics, he strolls around the pews, lounging on fur-

niture 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 cam-
era 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 dumb-
struck 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 audi-
ence 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’. Explain-
ing 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 por-
trayal 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 cin-
ema. 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 anx-
ieties 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 subjec-
tivity, as it is constituted primarily by personality. This is an important
point of distinction between this representation and the others dis-
cussed here: while paying lip service to the value of the immaterial
in his faith, Fiennes’ Luther is legitimized within the contours of the
materially present. The film’s desire for an uncomplicated accessibil-

ity 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 fawn-
ing over the lavish objects, and this is contrasted with a later visual
concentration on empty rooms. Luther may protest to his congrega-
tion that ‘Christ is not found in relics of pilgrimages but here, in our
faith’, but the film recognizes the hero’s compatibility with its cine-
matic 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 mate-
rials. 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 mes-
sage. 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 metamor-
phosis. 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 construc-
tion of the early modern deployed primarily is one which privileges the
embryonic presence of modern forms of subjective experience, charac-
terized 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 reali-
ties 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 presen-
tation. 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 devo-
tional 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
this context, the level of discomfort with which the films represent
the scroll myth is highly telling. The negotiated nature of the diegetic
engagement with the scroll, in its series of evasions and equivocations,
suggests an anxiety about the films’ own processes of representation and
communication.
It is not only that some aspects of historical truth escape its sub-
sequent invocations: this is taken as a truism for all acts of historical
representation. It is that the cinematic gaze itself, and its insistence on
specific qualities of perceptual accountability, may distort the kinds of
historical realities available to the viewer. The culturally alien quality
of particular aspects of the early modern experience confronts attempts
at their subsequent cinematic articulation within the format’s own set
of ideological and aesthetic prejudices. The rationalistic and literalis-
tic ideology that governs the visual experience of the modern subject,
and the modes in which he or she experiences the cinematic eye, forces
moments of disruption in the representation of subjective models which
revolve around a figurative, even combative, appreciation of the visu-
ally present. The disturbing implication is that the desire to cinematize
the early modern subject, and the Renaissance phenomenon which
it, in turn, animates, may actively compromise its own enterprise of
representation.
This important trinity of films suggests the benefits of a more theoreti-
cally sensitive appraisal of the subgenre of Reformation historical fiction
within broader studies of Renaissance film. Each offers explorations of
some of the most important questions for criticism of Renaissance film
and culture more generally: the possibilities of ethically efficacious rep-
resentations of the past, the difficulties of correlating historically alien
cultural priorities, and the potential disconnections between early mod-
ern and modern subjective presuppositions. The articulation of the early
modern, in these films at least, remains an incomplete and imperfect
project.
Notes
1. The Castle Church was originally the north-east wing of a four-winged cas-
tle. The construction was initiated by Prince Frederick the Wise in 1489. See
‘Schlosskirche Wittenberg’, http://www.schlosskirche-wittenberg.de/index_
eng.html (accessed 4 January 2010).
2. The bronze doors, inscribed with the text of the original theses, were
erected on the command of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia in 1815.
See ‘Schlosskirche Wittenberg’, http://www.schlosskirche-wittenberg.de/
index_eng.html (accessed 4 January 2010) and ‘Visit Wittenberg: Where
Conor Smyth 161
Martin Luther Posted the 95 Theses’, http://www.reformationtours.com/site/

490868/page/180550 (accessed 4 January 2010).
3. 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 abso-
lute 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 nail-
ing 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 methodolo-
gies 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, empha-
sizing 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 Dis-
course: 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
4. For cinema itself as a species of materiality, see the chapter by Andrew Higson
in this book.
5. Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: The Life of Martin Luther (New York: Abingdon
Press, 1950), p. 181.
6. This material is found in the various bonus features of the Martin Luther
DVD, Vision Video, 14 February 2008.
7. 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.
8. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Leo Braudy and
Marshall Cohen, eds, Film Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), pp. 833–4. Although psychoanalytic theories of film recep-
tion have been subject to the deconstruction and discrediting of succeeding
criticism, one does not have to accept their models, Freudian, Lacanian or
otherwise, to acknowledge that the process of subjectively perceiving and
comprehending images may involve considerable levels of ideological and
ethical conditioning.
9. While obviously we cannot collapse theories of perception and cognition
with five hundred years between them into each other, certain areas of over-
lap are suggested by the shared anxiety over the potentially hermeneutic
erroneous capacities of the human eye.
10. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, p. 76.
11. John Osborne, Luther (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), stage direction at 2.3.
12. Osborne, Luther, stage direction at 1.2.
13. Alan Carter, John Osborne (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969), p. 82.
14. Hamlet, of course, also desires ‘that this too, too solid flesh would melt/Thaw
and resolve itself into a dew!’ See Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E.
Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds, The Norton Shakespeare (New York:
Norton, 1997), 1.2.129–30.
15. Luc M. Gilleman, John Osborne, Vituperative Artist: A Reading of his Life and
Work (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 103.
16. Gilleman, John Osborne, p. 106.
17. Fiennes also starred as Robert Dudley, the love interest to Cate Blanchett’s
Elizabeth I in Elizabeth (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 1998). His Shakespearean dimen-
sion was accentuated by his playing Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice (dir.
Michael Radford, 2004).
18. ‘Hollywood Jesus Newsletter #58 – The Luther Film – How It Was Made’,
26 September 2003, http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/newsletter058.htm
(accessed 4 January 2010).
19. Two-thirds of the £30 million budget were provided by the German pro-
duction company that Clauss and his organization paired with to produce
the film. Allocated a 30 October release date and opening in two hundred
screens in the country alone (in comparison with three hundred in the US),
the film had to satisfy German expectations. In the end, this would be essen-
tial to recouping the funds initially invested: out of a worldwide box office
return of approximately £30 million, two-thirds came from German pock-
ets. Figures are taken from ‘ “Luther” Not Just For Lutherans – CBS News’, 26
August 2003, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/26/entertainment/
main570218.shtml (accessed 4 January 2010) and ‘Luther (2003): Box
Office/Business’, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0309820/business (accessed 4
January 2010).
10
The Pageant of History: Staging
the Local Past, 1905–39
Michael Dobson
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 his-
tory 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 cen-
tury, but has lived on, both for film-makers determined to make an
emblematic spectacle of the Renaissance, and especially for their imme-
diate 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 blos-
soming and passing into obsolescence of the spectacular communal
dramatic form that evolved there reveals much about the understand-
ing 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 out-
door 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 Cardi-
nal (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 edu-
cational outdoor revival of Greek tragedy, a form which for Parker and
other pageant-masters, as for Wagner, constituted an enabling prece-
dent.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 his-
toric 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 com-
munity. 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 juxtapo-
sition of potentially tragic important visiting metropolitans, often
monarchs, against mainly comic and perpetually enduring locals, both
yeomanry and gentry.11 The pageant, though, could offer something
that Shakespeare’s histories could not – even when they were staged by
H. Beerbohm Tree with immense processions designed by Parker him-
self in return for loans of stage armour for his pageants. That was, to
quote Parker’s American disciple Percy Mackaye, ‘drama of and by the
people, not merely for the people’: the site-specific reanimation of the
local past through collective amateur spectacle.12 That spectacle, with
the bulk of the audience sheltered and immobilized in a temporary
grandstand, inevitably consisted very largely of successive processions,
characteristically seen approaching across long distances. If castle ruins
weren’t available as a backdrop, Mary Kelly recommended using wood-

fringed spaces featuring reflective bodies of water, which might redouble
the visual effect (Figure 10.1). She was particularly keen on employ-
ing 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 drama-
tize, most pageant-masters shared a sense of the canon of recogniz-
able 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 spir-
its 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 promi-
nence 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
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 present-
ing 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 specif-
ically 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 quasi-
military 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.
Figure 10.3 The finale of the Greenwich Night Pageant, 1933; this photograph,
framed, was sent as a Christmas card that year by the man who commissioned
the pageant, Admiral Barry Domvile.
Courtesy of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London.
While not sharing quite this outlook – which made the Greenwich Night
Pageant, as Kevin Littlewood and Beverley Butler point out, ‘as close as
England came to fascist theatre’ – Mary Kelly similarly felt that it was
best ‘to end on a note of joy or hope’, since for her the pageant was com-
mitted to a post-Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress.24
The ultimate subject of any worthwhile pageant, she explained, was
‘the gradual growth of the human mind’, and hence the occasional
adaptability of the pageant to progressive causes, as in the case of
E. M. Forster’s liberal environmentalism, or Cicely Hamilton’s suffragette
play, A Pageant of Great Women (1910).25 That faith in improvement
and change, however, was always counterbalanced by a deeply con-
servative assertion of continuity. In practice, the implicit argument of
the English local pageant is that Pickering always has been Pickering
and always will be, forever peopled by the same townsfolk whatever
successive fancy dress costumes they may put on. Even the first, pre-
historic episode in Gilbert Hudson’s 1910 pageant, a sort of small-scale
rape of the Sabine women wordlessly enacted between ‘uplanders’ and
‘shore-dwellers’ beside a body of water which had ceased to exist long
before the town was founded, calls its location ‘Lake Pickering’.
Michael Dobson 171
Figure 10.4 The cover of the printed edition of Greenwich Night Pageant, 1933,
scripted by Arthur Bryant.
Courtesy of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London.
Mary Kelly, when not involved with pageants, devoted herself to the
rediscovery, or reinvention, of an English tradition of indigenous folk
drama, derived from the mummings and Whitsun pastorals fleetingly
mentioned by Shakespeare. Her own sense of how pageants should best
be cast was at times not just nativist but explicitly genetic. Arguing
against the custom of giving major, royal roles to local aristocrats, for
example, she suggests that ‘The best place for the County is in the rep-
resentation of its ancestors.’26 Whatever the script may suggest about
historical change, then, the performance of a historical pageant will
give the impression that the same lord of the manor has always been
the lord of the manor, even if, over the centuries, he has been some-
thing of a serial fashion-victim. To this extent the Edwardian pageant
suggests that human history is comparatively incidental, and its grand
finales – in which entire casts, in the costumes of all the periods their
shows have dramatized, mingle with present-day embodiments of the
community in a riot of anachronism – only reinforce the point. History
is full of gorgeous trappings, processing harmlessly past in sequence,
but ultimately – and perhaps consolingly – it alters nothing. Corona-
tions may come and civil wars may go, but the replication of the same
local families goes on forever.
Given this sense of genetic inheritance, it is appropriate that for
Parker, Kelly and their colleagues the major pre-Tudor events not predi-
gested by Shakespeare and Scott which a pageant might need to register
were invasions. Needing an example of crowd dialogue, for instance,
Kelly immediately reflects that ‘fugitives may cry the names of their pur-
suers, “The Norsemen! The Norsemen! The Black Danes are coming!”’27
(In this respect, as in others, these pageants also resemble Rudyard
Kipling’s popular children’s book, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), in which the
spirit-master-of-ceremonies who shows two children episodes of local
history involving their nation’s ancestors is Shakespeare’s Puck him-
self.) Bryant, in the notes for a speech rallying the Women’s Institutes
of Cambridgeshire to the task of pageant-making in 1924, suggests that
they might primarily display
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 tak-
ing 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 spec-
tacle, 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 com-
pressing 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
began not in 1588 but in 1776.30 The early Technicolor spectacular The
Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1939), admittedly,
begins in pure Parker mode, with a long procession, as Essex parades
through London after his victory at Cadiz, eager to be reunited with his
queen. But despite this public opening, the film’s Elizabeth, unlike Flora
Robson’s, is strictly an indoor person, always shown in court settings
within which the macho, outdoor Essex feels increasingly confined. She
is never granted any such antique tickertape parade as his, and ulti-
mately the film disowns Elizabeth, English history and pageantry alike.
Essex grows out of all that pomp, yearning for a sincere man-to-man
republic elsewhere, and in the end he chooses to accept execution qui-
etly and off screen rather than tolerate his subjection to an overdressed
royal mistress any longer. In Hollywood costume drama like this, it isn’t
the crowd that represents us but the juvenile leads (here Essex and the
young Penelope Rich, but not Elizabeth), who are usually as incongru-
ously ahead of their time as a Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s court.
Much the same point is made in Bette Davis’ second Tudor film, The Vir-
gin Queen (dir. Henry Koster, 1955). The film uses one canonical episode
incorporated into several of its pageant predecessors (the anecdote of
Ralegh laying down his cloak over a puddle for his queen), but its per-
spective is ultimately anti-court, on the side of a Ralegh, whose disregard
for his cloak is based not on supreme courtiership but on the contempt
for archaic frippery proper to a proto-American man of action. At the
end of the film, Ralegh, like Flynn’s Essex, leaves Elizabeth, sailing off to
found Virginia with Joan Collins.31
In the post-war period, as this Hollywood film suggests, the triumph
really belonged to American modernity rather than to English history,
and in Europe, too, approaches to the early modern past were chang-
ing. The definitive public events designed to assert a continuity with
the Renaissance were now no longer nationalistic processions but inter-
national arts festivals, often centred on the revival of Shakespeare: the
festivals at Edinburgh, Avignon, Verona, and so on, were all founded
in the 1940s and 1950s, and several of them, as Dennis Kennedy has
pointed out, were inaugurated with grand ceremonial productions of
Richard II.32 Similarly, the scholarly recovery of early modern court occa-
sions, which underwent another periodic renaissance of its own from
the 1960s onwards in the work of Stephen Orgel and others, now
concentrated less on the militant processions of Queen Elizabeth and
more on the court masques of her pacific successor, James I. In England
during the post-war ‘New Elizabethan’ period, it was the festivals of the
Renaissance rather than its triumphs that were to be revived, whether
Michael Dobson 175
as cod ‘Renaissance Fayres’ for the masses, May Day celebrations for
schoolchildren or as more arcane shows for the elite. When Princess
Elizabeth and her sailor husband Prince Philip visited Oxford in 1948,
for instance, they were entertained not with a pageant about the victo-
ries of Drake but with a pastiche of an Elizabethan court entertainment,
the rather strenuously optimistic Masque of Hope.33 The military tattoo
aspect of the historical pageant now survived mainly among specialist
clubs dedicated to re-enacting battles, such as the Sealed Knot. A few
pageants were still staged in small villages, particularly around the time
of the Festival of Britain, including one at Naphill in Buckinghamshire,
but it was hard for them to muster the sort of budgets enjoyed by Parker
in the glory days: this one was unable to afford more than Elizabeth’s
court and St George and the Dragon.34
But after the Blitz, in any case, as Woolf had already recognized in
Between the Acts, it seemed much harder for the English to go on think-
ing of history as a providential fancy dress procession that was all about
them but which they could simply sit back and savour as it passed by.
As the Empire visibly imploded, moreover, it became impossible to cel-
ebrate its inevitable long-term triumph, and in the decade that saw race
riots in Notting Hill, the days of a theatrical form that had believed that
the Tudors had permanently indemnified not just the English Chan-
nel but the English gene pool were clearly numbered. Other than for
Americans, who felt that it did not really apply to them anyway, his-
tory was no longer a pageant – except, perhaps, in the sense in which
Shakespeare had used the word all along. As Puck had put it, ‘Shall we
their fond pageant see?/Lord, what fools these mortals be!’35
Notes
1. On Kenilworth and John Gough Nichols, see especially Michael Dobson and
Nicola Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 111–5, 139–40.
2. On the influence of this revival, see Michael Dobson, ‘Shakespeare Exposed:
Outdoor Performance and Ideology, 1880–1940’, in Peter Holland, ed.,
Shakespeare, Memory and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), pp. 256–80.
3. Cecil B. Goodden, The Story of the Sherborne Pageant (Sherborne: Bennett,
1905); Louis Napoleon Parker, The Sherborne Pageant (Sherborne: Bennett,
1905).
4. Louis Napoleon Parker, The Warwick Pageant (Warwick: Evans, 1906) and The
Dover Pageant (Dover: Grigg & Son, 1908).
5. Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1918); Ayiko Yoshino, ‘The Edwardian Historical
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.
6. 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).
7. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 46–54.
8. Roger Simpson, ‘Arthurian Pageants in Twentieth-Century Britain’,
Arthuriana, 18(1) (2008), p. 63.
9. 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 para-
phrase 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.
10. Kelly, ‘Pageants’, p. 689.
11. For a case study of the local politics of all this, see Michael Woods, ‘Per-
forming Power: Local Politics and the Taunton Pageant of 1928’, Journal of
Historical Geography, 25(1) (1999), pp. 57–74.
12. Percy Mackaye, Caliban by the Yellow Sands (New York: Doubleday, 1916),
p. xviii.
13. Kelly, ‘Pageants’, pp. 786, 929.
14. 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).
15. 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.
16. Kelly, ‘Pageants’, pp. 930–1.
17. Louis Napoleon Parker, Drake: A Pageant Play (London: John Lane, 1912),
p. 67.
18. See the Bryant Papers preserved in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military
Archives, King’s College, London, file J/4.
19. See, for example, Kelly, ‘Pageants’, p. 931.
20. Given the widespread use of pageantry by subsequent totalitarian regimes of
both right and left, it is worth considering whether the form that Parker pio-
neered helped to encode and bequeath the megalomania inherent in high
British imperialism.
21. Punch, 21 June 1933, p. 681.
22. ‘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 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.
23. Arthur Bryant, Book of the Pageant, Greenwich, 1933 (London: Fleetway Press,
1933), n. p.
24. Kevin Littlewood and Beverley Butler, Of Ships and Stars (London: Athlone,
1998), p. 61. Admiral Barry Domvile, who commissioned this pageant, was
interned during the war as a fascist sympathizer. On Bryant’s career and
politics during his years as a pageant-master, see Andrew Roberts, Eminent
Churchillians (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), pp. 292–4.
25. Kelly, ‘Pageants’, pp. 691–2.
26. ‘[T]hey can wear lovely clothes, and heraldry, and so on, and feel themselves
as important as the principals’ (Kelly, ‘Pageants’, p. 930).
28. Bryant Papers, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College,
London, file J/4.
30. Goodden, Story, pp. 15–17, 27–8.
31. On these films, see Dobson and Watson, England’s Elizabeth, pp. 275–82. For
later films that represent Elizabeth I, see the chapter by Andrew Higson in
this book.
32. Dennis Kennedy, ‘Shakespeare and the Cold War’, in Angel-Luis Pujante and
Ton Hoenselaars, eds, Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2003), pp. 163–79.
33. Dobson and Watson, England’s Elizabeth, pp. 76–8, 231.
34. See http://apps.buckscc.gov.uk/modes/projects/SWOPimage/RHW50610.jpg
and http://apps.buckscc.gov.uk/modes/projects/SWOPimage/RHW50614.jpg.
On the later phases of the pageant-play, see especially Esty, Shrinking Island.
35. See A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean
E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds, The Norton Shakespeare (New
York: Norton, 1997), 3.2.114–5.
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in SEDERI, Spanish and Portugese
Society for English Renaissance Studies, 20 (2002), and I am grateful both to that
journal and to the organizers of the 2009 Sederi conference in València for
their kindness and encouragement.
11
Private Lives and Public Conflicts:
The English Renaissance on Film,
1998–2010
Andrew Higson
The spectator of a film set in the Renaissance period is like a

time-traveller, ceaselessly flitting between past and present. Temporal-
ity 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 spec-
tator, 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 con-
temporaries, 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 him-
self 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 cul-

ture 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 expe-
rience 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 cen-
turies.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 representa-
tion 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 char-
acters, 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 indus-
try 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 deal-
ing 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 suc-
cessful as films, doing exceptional business at the box office for the
kinds of films they were, and both were widely discussed. It is per-
haps 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 doc-
umentary front, there were Simon Schama’s A History of Britain (BBC,
2000); several series presented by David Starkey, including The Six Wives
of Henry VIII (Channel Four, 2001), Edward and Mary – The Unknown
Tudors (ITV, 2002) and Monarchy, with the Renaissance period covered
in the second season in 2005; Michael Wood’s In Search of Shakespeare
(BBC, 2003); The Secret Life of Elizabeth I (Five, 2006); and Adam Hart-
Davies’ What the Tudors Did for Us (BBC, 2002) and What the Stuarts Did
for Us (BBC, 2003). Fictional dramatizations of the Renaissance period on
British television in the 2000s included an earlier version of The Other
Boleyn Girl (BBC, 2003), which, like the film version, was adapted from
Philippa Gregory’s historical novel; Henry VIII (ITV, 2003); Gunpowder,
Treason and Plot (BBC, 2004); Elizabeth I (Channel Four, 2005); The Vir-
gin Queen (BBC, 2006); The Tudors (BBC, 2007–09); and The Devil’s Whore
(Channel Four, 2008).3
Again there are all sorts of interplays here that blur temporal bound-
aries. If To Kill a King was seen by some contemporary commentators
as following in the wake of Elizabeth, it was also discussed in relation
to Starkey’s series on the Tudors, and Schama’s The History of Britain.4
The highly successful television period drama serial The Tudors, mean-
while, comes from the same writer as the two Elizabeth films, Michael
Hirst, while Working Title, the production company for the films, was
Andrew Higson 181
also involved in the television series. Finally, the scriptwriter for the film
version of The Other Boleyn Girl, Peter Morgan, also wrote the script for
the ITV 2002 mini-series, Henry VIII.
The critical and commercial success of Elizabeth and Shakespeare in
Love undoubtedly helped prepare the ground for some of these televi-
sion productions, and there are some clear lines of influence across the
various films and television programmes. Even so, given the success of
those two films, it might still seem surprising that there weren’t more
English-language films, as opposed to television programmes, about
England and the English in the Renaissance period. Why didn’t they
trigger a boom in the production of such historical films? After all, we
had to wait nine years for the sequel to Elizabeth. In fact, as I demon-
strate, it doesn’t really make sense to see Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love
simply as films set in the Renaissance period, since they appeal to audi-
ences in so many other ways as well. Clearly, for some audiences and for
some in the film business, such films are, above all, time-specific histor-
ical dramas. But for others, they are about many other things besides.
Different audiences will make sense of the films in different ways, and
will read them as commentaries on a variety of issues besides the history
of the English Renaissance.
Films like Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love also work as tasteful
middlebrow cinema addressed to well-educated middle-class audiences;
as costume drama in a generic sense, regardless of the period setting; as
English romantic drama, again regardless of the temporal context; as
female-centred drama; and as star vehicles. It is also short-sighted to
think that historical drama set in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries
is the only way of addressing the issues that Elizabeth and Shakespeare
in Love address, or of reaching the audiences they reached – for at one
level, these are films about the present as much as they are about the
past. They are certainly very much commodities produced at a particular
moment in the development of the contemporary media economy.
All six of the films listed above are relatively small productions, from
independent companies or one of Hollywood’s mini-majors, as opposed
to big budget films from one of the major studios. Within the film busi-
ness, they were perceived and indeed promoted as relatively serious,
intelligent, literate films, which also had an eye on the possibility of
popular success. That is, they were in part conceived as crossover films,
designed to play both in the relatively upscale, niche art-house mar-
ket and in the mainstream multiplexes; middlebrow films that blur the
boundary between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’. The fact that they are set
in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries is a side issue from this point
of view; the important thing is that they work for their intended tar-
get audiences, across two slightly different markets. And of course there
have been plenty more such films made since 1998 – they’ve just not
been set in the early modern period. Films like Elizabeth, Shakespeare in
Love and The Other Boleyn Girl thus share much with films with quite
different settings, and from a range of production contexts, such as
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (dir. Ang Lee, 2000), Amelie (dir. Jean-
Pierre Jeunet, 2001), Gosford Park, Bend It Like Beckham (dir. Gurinder
Chadha, 2002), The House of Flying Daggers (dir. Yimou Zhang, 2005),
The Queen (dir. Stephen Frears, 2006) and Miss Potter (dir. Chris Noonan,
2006), all of which also played in both art houses and multiplexes, and
all of which, in their different ways, made their mark on the UK box
office.
Shakespeare in Love was in fact one of the great crossover successes of
the 1990s. Made for a budget of £15m, modest by Hollywood standards,
it went on to take an enormous $100.3m in the US and another $100m
worldwide, including a very impressive £20.8m in the UK.5 The film
was identified from the outset as much more accessible than most such
period dramas. Thus the leading British film trade paper, Screen Interna-
tional, proclaimed, quite rightly as it turned out, that ‘the picture is a
sure-fire crowd-pleaser which should break out of the specialised market
and become a crossover hit.’6 The tabloid newspaper News of the World
agreed, applauding
a movie that will have you shaking with laughter. For the stuffy old
period drama has been dusted off and polished until it sparkles in
Shakespeare in Love . . . With its hot performances and hilarious com-
edy, this movie has reinvented the big screen period drama – and we
should all be grateful for that.7
Or, as a journalist from the more upmarket Observer newspaper put it,
Shakespeare in Love ‘is to be celebrated as a costume drama that has noth-
ing to do with the heritage industry; it has too much life and wit for
that’.8
The implication is that museum culture, the period drama and espe-
cially the Shakespearean drama were generally considered to be of
limited appeal, too dry to be of real interest to a mass audience. The
cranking up of the romantic comedy in Shakespeare in Love, however,
enabled the film-makers to re-energize the genre, to create something
that would appeal to a wider audience. The crossover film must, by
definition, work in a range of markets and appeal to a range of
Andrew Higson 183
audiences; part of the success of Shakespeare in Love was that it could

work very effectively both for a highly educated and culturally dis-
cerning 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 histor-
ical 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 succes-
sors 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
star vehicles – so that one might look to other films with the same stars,
such as the 1940s’-set Charlotte Gray (dir. Gillian Armstrong, 2001), with
Cate Blanchett of Elizabeth fame playing another feisty heroine, or the
1950s’-set biopic about Sylvia Plath, Sylvia (dir. Christine Jeffs, 2003),
with Gwyneth Paltrow of Shakespeare in Love fame.
What all this tells us is that, as business commodities and cultural
products, Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love were many other things
besides being films about the English Renaissance. Indeed, in some ways,
to treat them as texts that offer some sort of commentary on the Renais-
sance period is to take the films out of the cultural context in which they
circulate – or at least, it is to put them in a very specific, niche context, a
specialist context that has little resonance for a large proportion of their
audiences. Even so, they and more recent films like the Elizabeth sequel
and The Other Boleyn Girl clearly do, at one level, work as historical
fictions, and I now want to look at them more closely in these terms.
First, it’s worth noting that, as relatively small-budget crossover films
designed to work with both art-house audiences and multiplex audi-
ences, these films had to tread a careful line. On the one hand, they had
to be full of drama and not too austerely historical, since they had to
appeal to the populist multiplex audience; on the other hand, they had
to engage relatively seriously with the historical subject matter, char-
acters and themes, and exhibit a sense of historical rigour, in order to
please the upscale niche market, the educated middle-class art-house
audience.
None of these films was made by a historian, however, even if most of
them were directed by people who had previous experience with his-
torical drama and/or employed some sort of historical consultant or
otherwise researched the period. Michael Hirst, who wrote the screen-
plays for the two Elizabeth films and the television series The Tudors, has
perhaps become a sixteenth-century specialist, but as those productions
make very clear, he is not at all averse to modifying the historical record
for dramatic purposes. John Madden, director of Shakespeare in Love, was
something of a costume drama specialist, having previously directed
Ethan Frome (1993, set in early twentieth-century America), Golden Gate
(1994, set in 1950s’ America) and Mrs Brown (Victorian England), but he
had also recently directed episodes of the contemporary-set police series
Prime Suspect (1991–2006) and Inspector Morse (1987–2000) on television.
Mike Barker, director of To Kill a King, was brought in to the project
because of his previous work on another historical television drama,
Lorna Doone (2000) – that is, as someone who had done interesting
costume drama work, rather than as a Renaissance specialist.
Andrew Higson 185
Kapur, the Indian director of the two Elizabeth films, prided himself
on not being steeped in, or committed patriotically to, English history:
indeed, with his Australian leading actors and other non-Brits involved
in the productions, Elizabeth was conceived, in part, as an ‘outsider’s
view of British history’, or, as Kapur put it, ‘the revenge of the colo-
nials’.11 The director of The Other Boleyn Girl, Justin Chadwick, had at
least directed some episodes of Shakespeare Shorts (1996) for BBC Schools
TV, which puts him roughly in the right time frame. Later, he directed
the award-winning BBC adaptation Bleak House (2005), and it was on
the strength of this that he was brought in to direct The Other Boleyn
Girl. In other words, he was regarded as a specialist in period drama,
rather than in Renaissance drama. But he had also directed episodes of
Eastenders (1985–), The Bill (1984–), Byker Grove (1989–2006) and Spooks
(2002–) for television – therefore he can be seen simply as an experi-
enced director, rather than as a period specialist. As Chadwick stated, in
an interview, ‘I’ll do anything . . . [I] just like a cracking story, no matter
what genre or period.’12
None of the six films I’ve listed as being set in the English Renais-
sance period is straightforwardly an English or British film either: they
all have some American or European money behind them. Shakespeare
in Love was a Miramax film, for instance, The Other Boleyn Girl involved
American companies Focus Features and Scott Rudin Productions, while
The New World was a wholly American production. On the part of several
of the production companies involved, then, there was no particular cul-
tural commitment to English history or to the representation of England
and Englishness. Rather, the concern was to produce entertaining and
commercially successful films, rather than ‘accurate’ histories; to create
compelling drama with the sort of ingredients that might help make
money at the box office and beyond. Hence the Australian stars of the
two Elizabeth films, Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush and Abbie Cornish,
as well as Eric Bana as Henry in The Other Boleyn Girl, and the American
stars of Shakespeare in Love (Gwyneth Paltrow) and The Other Boleyn Girl
(Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman).
To think about the films in these ways is to suggest that, for some audi-
ences and for some in the film industry, a period film is a period film:
that is to say, it doesn’t really matter in which period the film is set, since
the pleasures on offer tend to be the same. In this respect, we are bound
to find some sort of reworking of the historical record, whether it’s get-
ting the costumes ‘wrong’ or conflating characters or imagining events
differently. Of the six films about the English Renaissance that I’ve iden-
tified, the one perhaps that its production team were most concerned to
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, estab-
lishing 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 ‘dis-
course, ideas and dialogue [are] more important than visual effects’.14
Another suggested that the film was very much not ‘history in the her-
itage 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 his-
torical 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, cen-
tral 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 sanc-
tioned 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 vari-
ously as horror, as action-adventure, as comedy and as family drama.
Thus, in Elizabeth, we have the hooded figure of the Catholic stalking
the queen, like something out of a vampire film. In both the Elizabeth
films, the bulk of the action-adventure elements are about Protestants
and Catholics torturing and murdering one another. In Elizabeth: The
Golden Age, we have the comic caricature of Philip of Spain (Jordi Mollà)
as a Catholic zealot. And in The Other Boleyn Girl, religious reformation
turns out to be the offspring of a beautiful but petulant young woman
and a desperate but powerful man who will stop at nothing to achieve
their melodramatic goal.
The other key trait here is that of drawing parallels between past and
present, in terms of religious extremism and intolerance, where the par-
allel, the lesson to be drawn, is of more importance than adhering to
the historical record. If you know your ‘History’, you can piece together
much of the political background in these films – and perhaps feel
inspired to explore further in ‘proper’ history books after watching the
film. But if you don’t know your ‘History’, and aren’t too bothered by
that, the films still work: as spectacular costume films, as romantic dra-
mas, as action-adventure films, as serious, intelligent character studies
and so on.
As with any such historical fictions, there are in effect two narratives
at work, two ways of binding together the characters and events of the
drama, two relatively distinct causal chains interweaving and overlap-
ping, but also at times running free from one another. On the one hand,
there is the grand narrative of ‘History’, what is often referred to as the
historical record, the known and accepted facts. On the other hand,
there is the more intimate narrative of dramatic fiction, the narrative
that allows a film to work as a manageable and self-contained fiction.
‘History’ is in effect the backstory – although, as we have seen, the cre-
ators of historical dramas will often reorganize the backstory to suit the
requirements of the central fictional narrative.
The public crises, conflicts and power struggles around nationhood,
sovereignty and religious authority thus work as backdrops to the cen-
tral romantic drama – even in the least romantic of the films, To Kill a
King. At the same time, they are crucial to the narrative development
of the films: drama requires conflict in order to proceed. Occasionally, a
public conflict will occupy very much the foreground of the drama, as
with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
But, in effect, the scenes of the Armada emerge as swashbuckling
action and adventure. Of course, there has also been some prior political
and military debate – after all, this is an intelligent, thoughtful film too –
but, above all, the Armada sequence operates in the mould of the action-
adventure film. Thus the conflict in this instance comes to the fore as
Andrew Higson 189
a genre piece, and as the fulfilment of a known story (if we know any-
thing about the backstory, and the way it is usually presented as popular
history, we know that the Spanish Armada will need to appear). The nar-
rative motor of the film, however, is individual desire – Elizabeth’s desire
to fill the loss she experiences without a lover, her desire for Ralegh, her
displacement of that desire onto Bess and so on.
The same argument about individual desire as the narrative motor,
and history as the backstory, can be made for all the other films too, to a
greater or lesser extent. There are two layers of conflict in these films – in
the foreground, there are personal conflicts, the obstacles thrown in the
way of romantic fulfilment or the fulfilment of individual desire; in
the background, there are the public conflicts of ‘History proper’. Take
the character of Anne (Natalie Portman) in The Other Boleyn Girl, for
instance, and note how major historical developments turn out to be
the whim of this young woman seeking her destiny. The ending of a
narrative film will generally endeavour to resolve any remaining con-
flicts and allow characters to fulfil their destinies and in some way reach
a happy ending. With the historical drama, however, there are always
two narrative lines to endeavour to resolve: the intimate narrative in
the foreground and the backstory of ‘History proper’. Scriptwriters have
to work hard at these matters, and will often resort to the use of titles to
resolve the backstory – and just as often resort to a little more dramatic
licence in order to leave audiences with a sense of conclusion.
Dramatic licence or not, these films clearly do explore a series of
historical themes relating to crisis and nationhood in the Renaissance
period – but they are more likely to be promoted and discussed in terms
of their attention to the private lives of monarchs and other historical
personalities. Affairs of the heart thus take prominence over the public
crises and conflicts that tend to constitute the backdrop in these period
films. At the same time, it is worth noting the ways in which these films
construct the personal as irredeemably political. This focus on the per-
sonal is central to the way that the Renaissance currently figures on
screen. The Renaissance also figures more as a particular dramatic space
than as a particular historical moment. As such, the Renaissance is a
space for entertaining drama, for human drama; a space for exploring
characters and their relationships, especially their romantic and sexual
relationships, and the power struggles in which they are involved.
Films are also of course more than simply a string of narrative events;
those events need a space in which to take place, and the space must
be filled out with colour, texture and dimension, it must be fleshed out
with living characters – in other words, there needs to be a mise-en-scène
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 gen-
erally 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 pre-
modern, prelapsarian vision of England’s green and pleasant land. There
are three other raw mise-en-scènes that appear in these films: the battle-
field, 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 gen-
erally 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, the-
atrical 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. Contempo-
rary 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.
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
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 pro-
ductions 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, broad-
cast 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 him-
self 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 partici-
pants 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 prob-
lematized 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 pro-
gramming 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 dimen-
sions 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 inter-
pretive 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 doc-
umentary 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 mediat-
ing 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 accompany-
ing 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 superior-
ity, a state of affairs that the equivalently heroic raising of the ‘lost
guns’ from the seabed can only reinforce. Although the emphasis in
The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan falls on the complexities of the early
modern diet, this is conducted through generous helpings of colonially
laced nostalgia. ‘Pumpkins . . . made their way to England from our new
American territories in Virginia’, the voice-over intones, in a remark that
is as striking for its specification of the vegetable’s origins as it is for
the suggestion that part of the US is magically still in British posses-
sion. What this amounts to is a kind of adventure in and of itself, a
revisiting of primal myths that places the documentary form, and its
representatives, in the place of daring discoverers. Heston Blumenthal
in Heston’s Tudor Feast is a case in point: cast in an idealized mould, he
is linked to ‘Tudor . . . seafarers . . . spreading English influence across the
world’, particularly when he is filmed traversing New York’s Chinatown
in search of live frogs for one of his signature dishes. The mobility
of the chef is elaborated as a virtue: navigating ethnic interstices, he
is imagined as an explorer sampling the delicacies of other cultures,
only to bring them back and make them ‘English’. It is no accident,
in this connection, that New York is dubbed the ‘New World’. Living
with the Tudors nuances this thematic trajectory. Here, the implication
is that the period was worth living not because of its thrilling expan-
sionism but because of a quieter, homespun creativity. According to this
schema, it is the national rather than the international that is to be cul-
tivated, with a concept of the domus being elevated over and above a
projection into other environments. An ideological response to a more
populist envisioning of the Renaissance, this construction is, of course,
no less romantic, as the documentary’s celebration of forms of artis-
tic/productive activity makes clear. Thus, Living with the Tudors opens
by informing us that the director-participants, Karen Guthrie and Nina
Pope, enact the parts of ‘limners’ or artists, presumably as befits their
non-Tudor roles as recorders of the project. It is a self-conscious deci-
sion, one that recalls for viewers the labour involved in the film-making
process. For example, an early sequence reveals a speeded-up montage
of a day on the lawns, which is framed by images of the ‘limners’ bent
over their work: the effect is to focus attention on an expression of vir-
tuoso skill that is no less valuable for being of older extraction. Once
again, the Renaissance as a resource for affirmation is evidenced.
Technically, the documentaries deploy a variety of methods for bring-
ing alive their chosen subjects to contemporary audiences. Going
hand-in-hand with its positivist evocation of the Renaissance is the
reliance, in Living with the Tudors, on slowly investigative camerawork
and a leisurely paced score that function to offset the notion of a more
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. Match-
ing 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 blanc-
mange, 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 docu-
mentary’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, ani-
mation 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 documen-
tary’s nodes of connection are with monarchs rather than plebeians, and
the thrust of the narrative is towards seeing the banqueting practices
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 documen-
taries 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 inter-
pretations. 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 documen-
tary 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 treat-
ment 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
from her father’s shadow and as the ‘mother of British naval domi-
nance’: the latter formulation, in particular, is typically early modern in
its equation of maternity with political authority. Arguably, however, it
is only at the point where the ‘lost’ cannons are recreated and fired with
devastating results that the image of the Queen as extraordinarily potent
is given its clearest articulation. At least by proxy, Elizabeth I is the
entity behind this culminating explosive moment in a filmic manoeuvre
that grants her a phallic dominance. Here, metaphorically enacted and
resoundingly delivered is what the Tilbury speech promised – a male
woman vanquishing her enemies.
As this rehearsal of the documentaries’ engagement with the complex-
ions of class and gender might suggest, the ostensible subject of Heston’s
Tudor Feast, Living with the Tudors, The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan and
Timewatch: Queen Elizabeth’s Lost Guns is not really the past at all; rather,
as is testified to by the chapters in this book, it is the role the past might
play as a force in the present. Timewatch: Queen Elizabeth’s Guns, for
example, might be approached as a meditation on the forms of mod-
ern warfare, as an exploration into questions of national difference at a
time of global uncertainty. Harking back to a critical period when, the
documentary informs us, ‘the fate of . . . England hung in the balance’,
functions to mobilize current anxieties about borders, the economy and
relations with European neighbours. The contemporary preoccupation
of The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan is the ‘body beautiful’ and psychic
health. As Jerome de Groot argues, this genre of documentary ‘seems to
be moving towards an explicit concern with the consequences of bod-
ily affect on ways of defining subjectivity, both contemporaneously and
historically’.3 The result of the diet test – the presenters have lost weight
but are moody and unhealthy – is striking, bringing into play, as it does,
familiar considerations centred on social conduct, physical and men-
tal well-being, and achieving the correct ‘balance’. Heston’s Tudor Feast
makes a no less pertinent point. Its foregrounding of ‘extravagance’,
which is invariably performatively oriented (the feast, the chef remarks,
is his ‘curtain-raiser’), strikes a chord in an age of recession and cuts: in
this instance, the lure of history offers an antidote to what is deemed
lacking in the here-and-now.
But the documentary that is, to adopt a formulation of Stella Bruzzi,
most obviously ‘at heart, a performance’, is Living with the Tudors, not
least because of the consciousness of the participants that they are
acting out parts before a camera.4 Entering into fabrications of past
personae, it is suggested, permits a more productive relation with the
real world: to adopt the parlance of the documentary, the aim is to
recover a lost ‘way’. Shots of groups going through a dark tunnel and
into the sunshine establish this process as inherently ameliorative, the
implication being that living as a Tudor allows for enlightenment. ‘To
come [to Kentwell] was a sanctuary’, remarks one participant, adding,
‘It’s a way of washing out the old me.’ The ablution metaphor points
up the ways in which, as Mark Andrejevic contends, being watched can
operate therapeutically: ‘surveillance . . . serves to . . . facilitate self-growth
and self-knowledge’ and is of ‘educational and personal value’.5 Yet,
as the modern selves begin to percolate through towards the close, a
less rosy vision is offered. In a series of confessional moments, which
are woven into the fabric of the documentary in dialogic fashion, dis-
appointments and regrets surface (a job loss or a marriage break-up),
which suggests that present-day identifications are less secure and ful-
filled than their fictive historical equivalents. Scenes of divestiture and
the removal of make-up signal that not much remains after the perfor-
mance: the prospect of salvation and rescue fades, and the documentary
queries the rationale on which it has been based. It is a surprisingly
dystopian development, one that is of a piece with the ways in which
the directors, according to the voice-over, fell out with a number of the
participants during the course of film-making. The change in viewpoint
is crystallized in the final montage which, to the tune of a modern score,
combines scenes of packing up with speculation about the fate of the
enterprise: no successor to Kentwell, it emerges, has been appointed.
Notable is the suggestion of abandonment: the pageant dislimns, the
revels end and playacting – and its uses – are elaborated as insubstantial.
Thus far we have understood documentary reflections on the Renais-
sance by way of mainly English examples. Yet, as our introductory
invocation of Michel de Montaigne as a route from the early mod-
ern to the modern might suggest, and as the chapters in this book
point out, the Renaissance cannot belong to unitary or single-nation
categories. Complementing the documentaries discussed here is The
Flight of the Earls, a three-part work that unravelled the background
to, and the consequences of, the departure in 1607 of a company of
Gaelic lords, including Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, Rory O’Donnell,
Earl of Tyrconnell, and the Maguires of Fermanagh, from Ireland into
Europe. The Flight of the Earls is distinctive for reminding us of the
importance of acknowledging a pluralistic conception of the period;
it is also notable because it raises questions (these are formulated by
Paul Ward as ‘Who is telling this story? To whom? And why?’) ger-
mane to newer documentary formats.6 A key event in Irish history, the
moment when Hugh O’Neill and his distinguished company sailed out
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 sig-
nificance of its subject, The Flight of the Earls allows historian-presenter,
Antaine Ó Donnaíle, the full range of technical resources at the produc-
tion 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 propor-
tions. 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 ner-
vous’, and, crucially, except for the title, the term ‘flight’ is never used.
To do so could be to suggest a potential abnegation of local responsi-
bility 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 ‘remem-
ory’ or ‘the belatedness of traumatic memory’, a ‘point of intersection
between individual memory of personal experience and cultural or col-
lective 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 expe-
ditionary force at which the latter was ambushed and routed). And,
when we consider the presenter’s name, Antaine Ó Donnaíle, it is pos-
sible 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 rep-
resentation 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:
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 cul-
tural complexities of the modern-day island of Ireland, which aspires
to be collaboratively funded, intercommunicative and mutually govern-
mental. 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 pol-
itics’), a representational procedure that invites a host of questions
supplementary to those outlined above. Whom or what do we remem-
ber? 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 documen-
tary 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 cross-
border phenomenon, some of the notes struck in the commemoration
resonated more widely still. Theatre productions, and the archival mate-
rials 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 begin-
nings’ 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
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:
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 Benson, E. F., 168

Adamson, John, 76 Bergin, Joan, 20
Adventurers, 168 Berraondo, Xavier, 46
Agyeman, Freema, 121 Betteridge, Tom, 24, 28
Akass, Kim, 30 Between the Acts (Woolf), 164, 175
Albanese, Denise, 15 Bextor, Sophie Ellis, 197
Aldam, Gillian, 96 Beyer, Absalon Pedersen, 86–7
Almond, David, 117 The Bill, 185
Altman, Robert, 178 Billington, Michael, 130
Amelie, 182 Bingo, 44
Andrejevic, Mark, 199, 202 Birmingham Stage Company, 116
Andrew, Dudley, 97 Bishop, Louise, 31
Angry Aztecs (Deary), 116 Black, Cilla, 197
The Animated Tales, 121 Blackadder: The Cavalier Years, 71–2
Anne Pedersdotter, 87 Blackpool Grand Theatre, 115
An Apology for Raymond Sebond Blanchett, Cate, 184, 185
(Montaigne), 3–5, 7, 8 Bleak House, 185
Appleyard, Bryan, 129 Blumenthal, Heston, 193, 195, 196
Ardmore Studios, 18 Boëre, Catherine, 63
Armiño, Mauro, 42, 48 Bolger, Sarah, 25
Armstrong, Gillian, 184 Bond, Edward, 44
Armstrong, Nancy, 27 Bordwell, David, 95, 96
Atkinson, Rowan, 71 Borondo, Sara, 49
Auferheide, Pat, 64 Bounda, Constantin V., 107
The Awesome Egyptians (Deary), 116 Bradley, David, 27
Brahe, Tycho, 102, 107, 110
Bacon, Sir Francis, 46 Brant, Martine, 82
Bainton, Roland, 148–9 Brassley, Paul, 176
Bana, Eric, 185 Braudy, Leo, 162
Barker, Mike, 11, 71, 179, 184 Brenton, Howard, 142
Barnes, Kitty, 168 Brewster, Ben, 161
Barrie, J. M., 183 Briggs, Robin, 95
Barry, Jonathan, 96 Briner, Bob, 157
Bassett, Ronald, 89 Bristol, Michael, 6
BBC, 71, 180 Britton, Celia, 161
Bell, Erin, 202 British Board of Film Censors, 90
Belloch, Carmen, 34 Brown, Martin, 116
Bend It Like Beckham, 182 Brownlow, Kevin, 11, 71, 74, 75
Bennett, Ronan, 75, 76 Bruzzi, Stella, 198, 202
Bennett, Susan, 140 Bryant, Arthur, 165, 168, 171
Bennett, Tony, 3 Burchardt, Jeremy, 176
Benson, Edward, 64 Burgess, Anthony, 44
203
204 Index
Burnett, Mark Thornton, 1, 193 By The Sword Divided, 71

Burt, Richard, 116 Winstanley, 71, 74–5
Butler, Beverley, 170 Witchfinder General, 71, 72, 73–4
Butler, Robert, 130, 144 Clap, Susannah, 137
Byars, Jackie, 25 Clark, Stuart, 95
Byker Grove, 185 Clauss, Dennis, 157
By The Sword Divided, 71, 80 Clitheroe, Gordon, 176
Cohen, Giles, 197
Cameron, James, 97 Cohen, Marshall, 162
Campillo, Laura, 49 Cohen, Walter, 162, 177
Cannadine, David, 97 Collins, Joan, 174
Capek, Karel, 104 Comic Relief, 71
Cardeña, Chema, 33, 34 Compañía Nacional de Teatro
Cardenio, 34, 38, 40–1 Clásico, 42
The Cardinal, 164 Contemporary network
Carnes, Mark C., 97 programming, 18
Carson, Christie, 9, 12–13, 127 Cook, Hardy, 48
Carter, Alan, 162 Coras, Jean de, 50
Cave, Terence, 162 Cordner, Michael, 135–6, 139
Cavill, Henry, 22 Coren, Giles, 193
CBBC, 116 Cornish, Abbie, 185
CBS (Canada), 19 Costume drama, Thatcherism in, 68–9
Celenio, Inarco, 47 Cox, Claire, 157
Cellier, Peter, 155 Cromwell, 71, 72–3
Certeau, Michel de, 54, 63 Cromwell, Oliver, 179, 187
Cervantes, Miguel de, 33, 35, 40, 41, Croteau, Melissa, 6–7
42, 43–4 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 182
Cervantes Prize for Theatre, 42 Cue for Treason (Trease), 122
Chadha, Gurinder, 182 Culloden, 74
Chadwick, Justin, 180, 185 Curry, Tom, 47
The Chamber, 37, 38, 39–40, 44 Curtis, Richard, 183
Channel Four, 71, 75–6, 180 Curtiz, Michael, 173, 174
Charlotte Gray, 184
Chedgzoy, Kate, 12, 112 Daily Telegraph, 130
Chéreau, Patrice, 7 Daston, Lorraine, 63
Christensen, Benjamin, 11, 84, 85–6 David, Saul, 194
Christian-Jaque, 105 Davies, Serena, 81
Churchill, Caryl, 75 Davis, Bette, 174
Cineaste (magazine), 74 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 10, 61, 92, 93
Císařův pekař a Pekařův císař/The Davis, Tracy C., 145
Emperor’s Baker and the Golem, 99 Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag), 86–9
Civil wars, on screen representation Days of Hope, 75
of, 70–80 Deary, Terry, 112, 116, 118–20, 122,
Blackadder: The Cavalier Years, 71–2 125
Cromwell, 71, 72–3 De Certeau, Michel, 54
The Devil’s Whore, 71, 75–80 De Groot, Jerome, 11, 65
Dr Who: The Awakening, 66–70, 71 Deleuze, Gilles, 100, 103
To Kill a King, 71, 72 Dempster, Sarah, 81
The Moonraker, 71, 72 De Rols, Bertrande, 50, 51
Index 205
De Sevilla, José Manuel González English Revolution, performing and

Fernández, 47 screening, 65–80
The Devil’s Whore, 11, 71, 75–80, 180 civil wars, on screen representation
Dies Irae, 87, 88 of, 70–80
Dobson, Michael, 13, 163 Doctor Who: The Awakening, 66–70
Doctor Who, 112, 121 Perfect Occurences, 65–6
Documentary reflections, 193–202 Erikson, Erik, 153
Domvile, Barry, 170 Essays (Montaigne), 3
Donnelly, Ciarán, 22 Essential viewing, 17
Don Quixote, 37, 43 Estienne, Henri, 52
Doran, Stanley, 105 Esty, Jed, 176, 177
Drake: A Pageant Play in Three Acts, Ethan Frome, 184
167 Evening Standard, 136
Drake of England, 173 Event television, 17
Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 86, 88, 89 Eyre, Richard, 183
Dr Who: The Awakening, 66–70, 71
Dumas, Alexandre, 7 Fanfan la Tulipe, 105
Du Tilh, Arnaud, 50 Fassbender, Michael, 77
Duval, Alexandre, 36 Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe, 202
Duvivier, Julien, 106 Festival of Classical Theatre
Dyja, Eddie, 191 (Almagro), 42
Dymkowski, Christine, 145 Fiennes, Joseph, 39, 155, 156
The Financial Times, 137
Eastenders, 185 Finding Neverland, 183
Eccles, Mark, 48 Finlay, Robert, 62
Edward and Mary – The Unknown Fire over England (film), 173
Tudors, 180 Fire over England (Mason novel), 173
Edward Hall’s Propeller Theatre, 142 The First Post (blog), 76
Edward II, 44, 166 Flannery, Peter, 75–6
Elizabeth, 20, 83, 179, 180–2, 183–8 Fletcher, Bruce, 30
Elizabeth I, 180 Fliflet Braein, Edvard, 95
Elizabeth: The Golden Age, 178, 179–80, The Flight of the Earls, 193, 199–201
183, 188, 190 Focus Features, 185
Elley, Derek, 191 Foriers, Paul, 63
Elliott, Kamilla, 97 Forrest, Emma, 191
El Otro William/The Other William, Forster, E. M., 164, 170
33, 34 Forster, Marc, 183
Elton, Ben, 81 Foster, Neal, 116
EMMY awards, 17 Frain, James, 23
The Emperor’s Baker and the Golem, Franssen, Paul, 47
11, 12 Fraser, Robert, 46
England’s Pleasant Land, 164 Frears, Stephen, 182
English Renaissance on film, Freeman, David, 127
1998–2010, 178–91 Frič, Martin, 11–12, 99
connections between films, 180–1 Friedman, Lester D., 81
Elizabeth, 179, 180–2, 183–8 Frostrup, Mariella, 191
as historical fictions, 184–90 Fry, Stephen, 71
Shakespeare in Love, 179–83 Fuqua, Antoine, 178
206 Index
Galiana, Manuel, 46 Hart-Davies, Adam, 180

Gallic Wars, 166 Harty, Kevin J., 95
Gaskill, Malcolm, 96 Hattaway, Michael, 49
Gates, Anita, 192 Havoc in its Third Year (Bennett), 75
Gibson, Pamela Church, 31 Hawkes, Terence, 5
Gilleman, Luc M., 153 Häxan, 11, 84–6
Girona, 1–2 Heckels, Chris, 113, 115, 121, 122, 123
Glaessner, Verina, 81 Henry V, 127
Glover, Julian, 152 Henry VIII (Gregory novel), 180
Golden, Richard M., 95 Henry VIII (TV mini-series), 181
Golden Gate, 184 Henry VIII, re-creating for global
Golden Hind, 168 television audience, 16–30
Golem, 99–105 see also The Tudors
Gómez-Lara, Manuel J., 45 Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther
Goodden, Cecil P., 169 (Bainton), 148
Goodman-Hill, Tom, 76 Hester, Marianne, 96
Goodridge, Mike, 191 Heston’s Tudor Feast, 193, 195, 196
Gordon, C. M., 48, 176 Higson, Andrew, 9, 13–14, 69, 178
Gosford Park, 178, 182, 183 Hildreth, Mark, 24
Grady, Hugh, 5 Hill, Christopher, 70
Gray, Ann, 202 Hill, John, 31
Grazia, Margreta de, 15 Hirst, Michael, 19–20, 24, 29, 180,
Green, Guy, 146, 152, 159 184, 187
Greenblatt, Stephen, 122 His Dark Materials, 70
Greene, Robert, 37 The History of Britain, 83, 180
Greenhalgh, Susanne, 126 Hoberman, J., 191
Greenstreet, James, 46 Hodgdon, Barbara, 144
Greenwich Night Pageant, 168–71 Hoenselaars, Ton, 47, 177
Gregor, Keith, 45 Hoffman, Calvin, 46
Gregory, Philippa, 180 Hoffman, Michael, 70
The Guardian, 130 Hogan, Bosco, 28
Guerre, Martin, 10, 50–62 The Holiday, 183
Guerre, Pierre, 52 Holland, Penny, 125–6
Guillermo Shakespeare, 36 Holland, Peter, 175
Guinness, Alec, 72 Home Box Office, 16
Guneratne, Anthony, 64 Honigmann, E. A. J., 48
Gunpowder, Treason and Plot, 180 Honzl, Jindřich, 99
Guthrie, Karen, 193, 195 Hopkins, Matthew, 11
Guy, John, 16 Horrible Histories, 115–20
Guzzetti, Alfred, 161 Horrible Histories, 8, 112
The Horribly Huge Press-Out-and-Build
Hackett, Helen, 126 Book, 116
Halligan, Benjamin, 96, 98 The House of Flying Daggers, 182
Hamilton, Cicely, 170 Hough, Andrew, 30
Hamlet, 35 Howard, Jean E., 15, 31, 162, 177
Hardy, Robin, 73 Howard, William K., 173
Haro Tecglen, Eduardo, 48 Howell, William Dean, 47
Harris, Richard, 72 How to Make a Pageant (Kelly), 165
Harry Potter, 112 Hudson, Gilbert, 164, 170
Index 207
Hughes, Ken, 71, 81 Krejčík, Jiří, 106

Hughes-Warrington, Marnie, Kurosawa, Akira, 29
96–97, 98
Hunt, Nick, 191 La Estancia/The Chamber, 33, 34
Hunter, Allan, 191 Lamont, Peter, 97
Hutcheon, Linda, 97 Lanier, Douglas, 38
Hutchings, Peter, 96 La Reine Margot (Dumas), 7, 8
Hytner, Nicholas, 183 Lascelles, Frank, 165
Lee, Ang, 182
IMDb (Internet Movie Database), 121 Lefranc, Abel, 46
Incredible Incas (Deary), 116 Les Recherches de la France, 50
The Independent, 129, 131 Le Sueur, Guillaume, 52, 63
In Extremis, 142 Levack, Brian P., 96
In Search of Shakespeare, 180 Liebrecht, Torben, 157
Iserloh, Erwin, 161 Life of Shakespeare, or Will
Inspector Morse, 184 Shakespeare, 35
Ivanhoe, 166 Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, 75
Lion Television, 116
Jameson, Fredric, 196 Littlewood, Kevin, 170
Jancovich, Mark, 17 Living with the Tudors, 193, 194, 195–6
Ježek, Jaroslav, 99 Loader, Kevin, 186
Jeffs, Christine, 184 Longley, Edna, 2
Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 182 Lorna Doone, 184
Johansson, Scarlett, 185 Love Actually, 183
Jonson, Ben, 37 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 38
Johnson, Merri Lisa, 31 Luther (Green), 152–5, 159
Juliá Martínez, Eduardo, 47 Luther (Till), 155–8, 159
Luther, Martin, 13
Kapur, Shekhar, 20, 83, 178, 179, 183, Luther, modern cinematic biographies
185, 190 of, 146–60
Karim-Cooper, Farah, 144, 145 Luther (Green), 152–5
Keach, Stacey, 152 Luther (Till), 155–8
Kelly, Mary, 165–6, 167, 170, 171–2 Martin Luther (Pichel), 147–52
Kemp, Philip, 191 Lyons, James, 17
Kemp, Will, 39
Kenilworth, 167 Macaulay, Alastair, 137
Kennedy, Dennis, 174 Macbeth, 12, 113, 120–5
Kennedy, Maeve, 30 MacCauley, Claire, 25
Kennedy, Maria Doyle, 25–6 MacDonald, David, 71
Kidnapped (Stevenson), 117 Macfarlane, Alan, 89
To Kill a King, 11, 71, 72, 179, 180, MacGinnis, Niall, 147
183, 184, 186 Mackaye, Percy, 165
King, Nicola, 200 MacKenzie, Kelvin, 197
King Arthur, 178 Madden, John, 35, 36, 39, 121, 156,
Kipling, Rudyard, 172 179, 184
Knutsen, Gunnar W., 96 Madmen, 17
Korda, Alexander, 173 The Madness of King George, 183
Koster, Henry, 174 Magnussen, Charles, 84
Krämer, Peter, 25 Maley, Willy, 126
208 Index
Malick, Terence, 179 Mulvey, Laura, 150–1

Malleus Maleficarum, 84, 85 Munden, Marc, 11
Människor, Två, 96 Murphy, Andrew, 126
Mapp and Lucia, 168 Must see television, 17, 18
Marcus, Leah, 81 The Mysterious X, 84
Marikar, Sheila, 30
Marmion, Patrick, 136–7 Naremore, James, 97
Marshall, Cynthia, 137–9 Neegaard, Ebbe, 95
Marshall, Peter, 30 Neill, Sam, 28
Martin Luther (Pichel), 147–52, 159 Nelson, Robin, 30, 32
Masefield, John, 87 Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 113
Mason, A. E. W., 173 Newcomb, Horace, 31
Masque of Hope, 175 News of the World (newspaper),
Matheson, Hans, 28 182
Mauro, Antonio, 36 The New World, 179, 185, 190
Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 162, 177 Niche audience, 18
McBride, Ian, 15 Noonan, Chris, 182
McCabe, Janet, 30 Northam, Jeremy, 28
McCallion, M., 45 Nothing Like the Sun, 44
McCrisken, Trevor, 161 Notting Hill, 183
McLoone, Martin, 31
McMurria, John, 19 O’Brien, John, 10–11, 50
McSorley, Gerard, 25 Observer (newspaper), 137, 182
Meehan, Eileen R., 25 Ó Ciardha, Éamonn, 200
Memorable Verdict, 60 O’Connor, Marion F., 31
Merchant, Tamzin, 28 Ó Donnaíle, Antaine, 200–1
Metz, Christian, 150 O’Donnell, Rory, 200
Meyers, Nancy, 183 Olivier, Laurence, 29–30, 127
Michell, Roger, 183 Olivier, Richard, 127, 137
Miguel Will, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, O’Neill, Hugh, 199–200, 201
43, 44 Orduña, Juan de, 47
Miguel y William/Miguel and William, Orgel, Stephen, 174
33, 34–5, 36, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44 Osborne, John, 152–5
Miramax, 185 O’Sullivan, Maurice J. Jr., 47
Mise-en-scène, 13, 23, 26, 27, 150, 179, Osvobozené divadlo (Liberated
186, 189–90, 196 Theatre), 99
Miss Potter, 182, 183 Oswald, Peter, 142
Mohamed, Feisal G., 82 The Other Boleyn Girl, 180, 181, 182,
Molina, Alfred, 156 184, 185
Molins, Manuel, 33, 34, 43 The Other William, 38, 39–40, 42, 44
Mollà, Jordi, 188 O’Toole, Peter, 16, 17
Monarchy, 180 Our Friends in the North, 75
Montaigne, Michel de, 3–5, 7 Our Island Story, 168
The Moonraker, 71, 72 Owen, Alison, 180
Moratín, Leandro Fernández de, 35 Owen, Clive, 178–9
Morgan, Peter, 181
Mortimer, John, 47 Pageant, history of, 163–75
Mottram, Ron, 95 Barnes, Kitty, 168
Mrs Brown, 183, 184 Benson, E. F., 168
Index 209
Bryant, Arthur, 168–70 Pujante, Angel-Luis, 47, 49, 177

Kelly, Mary, 165–6, 167, 170, 171–2 Pullman, Philip, 70
Parker, Louis Napoleon, 163–8 Punch, 168
A Pageant of Great Women, 170 Purcell, Stephen, 142
Paltrow, Gwyneth, 184
Pan Books, 89 The Queen, 182, 183
Pancheva, Evgenia, 49
Par, Alfonso, 47 Radford, Michael, 162
París, Inés, 33, 34, 40, 43 Raengo, Alessandra, 97
Park, Katherine, 63 Rafter, Dennis, 46
Parker, Louis Napoleon, 163–8, 173 The Rape of Lucrece, 38
Pasquier, Estienne, 50, 52–3 Rayner, Jay, 197
The Passion of Joan of Arc, 86 Reeves, Michael, 11, 71, 90
Peace Arch Entertainment, 19 Renaissance, documenting, 1–14
Peake, Maxine, 79 issue of how, 9
Pearce, Susan, 1 Montaigne, Michel de and, 3–5, 7
Peckinpah, Sam, 73 presentism and, 5–8
Pedersdotter, Anna, 86–7 Renaissance, performing, for and with
Pepper, Andrew, 161 children, 112–25
Pérez, Jesús Tronch, 10, 33 Horrible Histories, 115–20
Perfect Occurences, 65–6 workshop production of Macbeth,
Perkins, Sue, 193, 197 120–5
Perrin, Claude, 95 Renaissance lawsuits, 50
Peter, John, 132 Renoir, Jean, 97
Phillips, Patrick, 197 Restoration (Tremain), 70
Pichel, Irving, 13, 146, 149, 159 The Return of Martin Guerre, 50–62
Planché, J. R., 163 Reveille Eire, 19
Plath, Sylvia, 184 Revenge of the Blood Beast, 90
Pope, Nina, 193, 195 Revisionist, as Renaissance
Portillo, Rafael, 45 depiction, 19
Portman, Natalie, 185, 189 Rhys Meyers, Jonathan, 16, 17, 19,
Potter, Beatrix, 183 20, 30
Prescott, Paul, 130 Rice, John, 41
Presentism, 5–8 Richard II, 174
Presentist Shakespeares, 5–6 Richard III workshops, 121, 122
Presumption, 51–2 Riseborough, Andrea, 79
of judge or man (iudicis or Roaring Lambs (Briner), 157
hominis), 51 Robert, Clemence, 36
of law (iuris), 51 Roberts, Gareth, 96
Price, Vincent, 73, 89, 90 Roberts, Geoffrey, 161
Pride and Prejudice, 183 Robinson, Tony, 71
Prime Suspect, 184 Robson, Flora, 173
Pringle, Eric, 66 Rodríguez, Encarna Vidal, 47
The Private Life of Henry the Eighth, Rokison, Abigail, 141–2
173 Román, Blanca López, 47
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Roper, D., 49
174 Roper, Lyndal, 95
Procházka, Martin, 11, 12, 99 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 75
Puck of Pook’s Hill (Kipling), 172 Rosenstone, Robert, 60
210 Index
Rossi, Ernesto, 47 Shakespeare the man, demystifying,

Roth, Tim, 72, 186 38–9
Rowe, Nicholas, 35 Shakespeare the writer,
Royal Academy of Music, 163 demystifying, 39–41
Royal Shakespeare Company, 128 Shakespeare in Love, 35–6, 39, 40, 43,
Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) 44, 121, 156, 179–83, 184
Festival Theatre, 137–8 Shakespeare in Stages, 141
Royal Television Society award, 76 Shakespeare Schools Festival (SSF), 122
Rudolf II, Emperor of Habsburg, 11–12 Shakespeare’s Globe
R.U.R., 104 audience members and, 128
Rush, Geoffrey, 185 Henry V and, 127–44
Ryan, Deborah Sugg, 176 opening reviews of, 129–32, 136–8
Rylance, Mark, 127, 128, 130, 132–3, Rylance, Mark and, 127, 128, 130,
134, 138–9, 143 132–3, 134, 138–9, 143
Tiramani, Jenny and, 133–4
Wanamaker, Sam and, 129
Salom, Jaime, 33, 34, 38, 41
Shakespeare (La Mujer Silenciada)/
Samuel, Raphael, 70, 75
Shakespeare (The Silenced Woman),
Sanders, Julie, 20
33, 34
Sarris, Andrew, 95
Shakespeare Shorts, 185
Sauro, Antonio, 48
Shakespeare Survey, 135
Scaramouche, 105
Sharp, Cecil, 163
Schama, Simon, 9, 83, 180
Sharpe, James, 9, 11, 83
Schimel, Lawrence, 48
Shaughnessy, Robert, 126
Schoenbaum, Samuel, 46
Sherwin, Adam, 191
School of Art and Design, Nottingham
Showtime, 16, 19
Trent University, 133–4
Sidney, George, 105
Scott, Dougray, 186 Sidonia, Medina, 1
Scott, Walter, 163, 166, 167 Sight and Sound: Two Models of
Scott Rudin Productions, 185 Shakespearean Subjectivity on the
Screen International, 182 British Stage, 137
The Sea Hawk, 173 The Silenced Woman, 37, 38, 39–40, 44
The Secret Life of Elizabeth I, 180 Silverstone, Catherine, 139–40
Sellar, W. C., 117 Simpson, J. A., 14
Semenza, Greg Colón, 194 Simpson, Roger, 164
Serjeantson, R. W., 63 Sindelar, Dave, 111
Shakespeare, William, 10, 33–45 The Six Wives of Henry VIII, 180
appropriating, 42–5 Skellig (Almond), 117
biographical legitimization of, 36–8 Skoták, Honza, 104
the man, demystifying, 38–9 Slater, Gilbert, 46
the writer, demystifying, 39–41 Smyth, Conor, 13, 146
Shakespeare Amoureaux, 36 Sokolova, Boika, 49
Shakespeare dramatizations, Spanish Somoza, J. C., 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 42
theatre and, 33–45 Sony Pictures, 19
appropriating Shakespeare, 42–5 The Sopranos, 17
biographical legitimization of, 36–8 The Sorcerers, 90
1828–1848 offerings of, 36 Sorge, Thomas, 31
Miguel and William, 34–5 Spencer, Charles, 130
1996–1998 offerings of, 33–4 Spooks, 185
Index 211
Stage Beauty, 183 Touring Tales Theatre Company, 117

Standards Site, 115 Träger, Josef, 106
Stanley, William, 37 Trease, Geoffrey, 122
Stallich, Jan, 106 Tree, H. Beerbohm, 165, 167
Stam, Robert, 97 Tremain, Rose, 70
Stearne, John, 89, 90, 91, 96 Trevelyan, John, 90
Starkey, David, 9, 16, 18, 83, 180 Tuček, Miroslav, 105
Stenuit, Robert, 1 The Tudors, 9, 10, 16–30, 180, 184
Stevenson, Jack, 95 audiences of, 18
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 116–17 casting, 17
Stone, Joss, 21 costuming in, 20–1
The Storm, 142 errors on, 16–17
Straw Dogs, 73 female roles in, 24–30
Streete, Adrian, 1, 193 historical accuracy of, 186–7
Suchý, Ondřej, 105, 106, 107, 111 hours of television vs. years of
Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, 85 history, 17–18
The Sunday Times, 132 Pilgrimage of Grace episodes, 22–3
The Supersizers Go . . . Elizabethan, 193, Renaissance depiction of, 19–24
195, 197
Susman, Gary, 191 Ulster Museum, 2–3
Sutcliffe, Tom, 81 Un Drama Nuevo/A New Play, 36
Svensk Filmindustri, 84 Ustinov, Peter, 157
Sylvia, 184
Vallée, Jean-Marc, 183
Taking our Time, 75 Vallejo, Javier, 49
Tamayo, Manuel y Baus, 36 Van Kampen, Claire, 128, 133, 135
Tannhauser, 168 Vávra, Otokar, 106
Taylor, Paul, 131 Vega, Ventura de la, 36
Teatro de la Comedia (Madrid), 42 Venus and Adonis, 37, 38
Temporality, early modern modes of, Vigne, Daniel, 10, 53
146–60 Villán, Javier, 48
see also Luther, modern cinematic The Virgin Queen, 174, 180
biographies of Voskovec, Jiří, 99
Tennant, David, 121
Tennenhouse, Leonard, 27 Wallace, Annabelle, 25
The Terrible Tudors (Deary), 115, Wallis, Mick, 176
116–19 Wanamaker, Sam, 129, 143
Thompson, C. J. S., 108 Ward, Paul, 199, 202
Thompson, Lynne, 176 Watkins, Peter, 74
Thorpe, Vanessa, 48 Watson, Nicola J., 31, 175, 177
1066 and All That (Sellar and Watson, Ruth, 197
Yeatman), 117 Weiner, E. S. C., 14
Tigon British Film Production, 90 Weir, Alison, 30
Till, Eric, 13, 146, 155, 158, 159 Wells, Robin Hedlam, 15
Timewatch: Queen Elizabeth’s Lost Werich, Jan, 99
Guns, 193, 194, 196 West, Dominic, 78
Tiramani, Jenny, 128, 133 The West Wing, 17
Titus Andronicus, 119 Whateley, Ann, 46
Toms, Katie, 191 What the Tudors Did for Us, 180
212 Index
White, Hayden, 10, 60, 61 Woods, Arthur B., 173

The Wicker Man, 73 Woodstock, 167
Wier-Jennsen, Hans, 87 Woolf, Virginia, 164
Williams, Annwyl, 161 Worden, Blair, 81
Williams, Ralph Vaughan, 163 Working Title Films, 19, 180–1
Willie, Rachel, 80 Worthen, W. B., 130, 140
Winstanley, 11, 71, 74–5, 79–80 Wray, Ramona, 10, 16
The Winter’s Tale, 127, 130, 134 Wright, Joe, 183
Witchfinder General, 11, 71, 72, 73–4, Wrightson, Keith, 95
89–91
The Witch in History, 84–6 Yeatman, R. J., 117
Witch trials, cinematic treatment of Young Man Luther: A Study in
early modern, 83–94 Psychoanalysis and History
Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag), 86–9 (Erikson), 153
Häxan, 84–6 Young Victoria, 183
Witchfinder General, 89–91
Withington, Robert, 175 Zabalbeascoa, J. A., 47
Women’s Institutes of Zane, Alex, 197
Cambridgeshire, 172 Zhang, Yimou, 182
Wood, Michael, 180 Ziegler, W. G., 46
Wood, Peter, 47 Zumel, Enrique, 36

Filming and Performing Renaissance History PDF

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Filming and Performing Renaissance History

Also by Mark Thornton Burnett

MASTERS AND SERVANTS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA AND CULTURE:

Also by Adrian Streete

PROTESTANTISM AND DRAMA IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND (Cambridge:

Mark Thornton Burnett

List of Figures vii

Notes on the Contributors ix

Introduction: Documenting the Renaissance 1

1 The Network King: Re-creating Henry VIII for a Global

2 Breaking Shakespeare’s Image in Late Spanish Drama

3 The Touch of Man on Woman: Dramatizing Identity in

4 ‘Welcome to Babylon’: Performing and Screening the

5 The Cinematic Treatment of Early Modern Witch Trials 83

6 The Golem, or the Communist ‘What You Will’ 99

7 Horrible Shakespearean Histories: Performing the

8 Mark Rylance, Henry V and ‘Original Practices’ at

9 ‘There is So Much to See in Rome’: The Cinematic

10 The Pageant of History: Staging the Local Past, 1905–39 163

11 Private Lives and Public Conflicts: The English

Epilogue: Documentary Reflections 193

3.1 Bertrande gives evidence to the judges in Artigat in The

We would like to thank, at Palgrave, Paula Kennedy, Catherine Mitchell,

Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen’s

Christie Carson is Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, Univer-

Kate Chedgzoy is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University

Jerome de Groot is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature and Cul-

Michael Dobson is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Birkbeck College,

Tragedies Today: The Actors’ Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

Andrew Higson is Professor of Film Studies at the University of York. He

John O’Brien is Professor of French Studies at Royal Holloway, Uni-

Jesús Tronch Pérez is an associate professor of English at the University

Martin Procházka is Professor of English, American and Comparative

James Sharpe is Professor of History at the University of York. He

Satirical Prints 1600–1832 (London: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986), Early Mod-

Conor Smyth is a Ph.D. student in English at Queen’s Univer-

Adrian Streete is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Queen’s Uni-

Ramona Wray is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Queen’s

Details of all of these discussions are available on our website at

At first sight, it is a museum exhibition like any other. Reproductions of

an essentialist function. A ring whose motto reads ‘I have nothing more

Spanish sides are re-created in an identical faux secretary hand suggests

He goes on to condemn the ‘horrifying impudence with which we

In such a shifting landscape, where Protestants and Catholics are mas-

there is no permanent existence either in our being or in that of

Because our perceptual faculties are impermanent and subject to change,

Montaigne therefore presents the modern scholar of the Renaissance

Presentism does not emerge from a desire to speak with, or even to

forcing us to rethink the relationship of past to present. For just as the

to this present moment.19 This realization applies as much to An Apology

period. For Andrew Higson, the Renaissance as historical object of study

consumption? Despite a range of views and some lively differences of

foster new and collective ways of thinking about Renaissance history,

films are in fact best understood as generic hybrids, as ‘middlebrow

3. Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study (Leicester

The Tudors is typical of most contemporary network programming in

Tudors was made by Peace Arch Entertainment for Showtime, in associ-

Henry is represented as articulating a prescient awareness of Renaissance

points to an escalation of kinds of disaster both of which are given, in

most precious baby in England’) and, in particular, the distinctive 360◦

One of the determining features of contemporary ‘quality television’

no one but myself,’ he warns Cromwell. At an immediate level, Jane

and temporal rupture. For, while Olivier’s audience accepted a battle