sarah eve kelly

… or art for history’s sake?

On This Spot, I have provided deservedly derisive reviews of the brainchildren of writer Michael Hirst and director Shekhar Kapur, Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. I hated the 1998 film, hated it not only as a scholar (and I was only a scholar in the very meanest sense of the term back then) but as a sentient human being, that others might think to trick me into thinking that Elizabeth represented the truth, or even a fiction that was more captivating than the truth.

The Golden Age got decidedly worse reviews, oddly, because I thought it was better. Indefensible for the most part but sensorily better, a marginally superior screencap of that time and that court.

I remember directing right-thinking people to Elizabeth R, the 1971 BBC masterpiece starring Glenda Jackson. After having seen the first season of The Tudors (also a Michael Hirst accomplishment), I similarly pointed everyone I could find to Elizabeth R’s predecessor, the BBC’s 1969 six-hour production The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Caught in the knot between repacing my novel (about the destruction of Anne Boleyn, found in magnificently erroneous technicolor on Showtime this past spring) and culling together sources for my dissertation (about the spectacle of pregnancy in early modern England - two subjects not terribly far apart), I don’t know if I could now as earnestly ask anyone to watch the flourescent-lit and badly-fit BBC productions over the salacity and car-crashery of The Tudors.

Part of this shift in opinion is scholarly - historiography has entered a post-Eltonian age, and many of the truths espoused in the 1969 and 1971 productions are now being called into question. But that’s not the whole reason, or even the real one: it’s a fig leaf I hide behind because in two years I’m going to be Dr Sarah, if all goes well. The real reason is that art serves history just as history serves art - anyone who doesn’t believe this is ignorant or delusional - and, whatever I might say about Michael Hirst (and I have a lot to say), The Tudors is art.

There are a few different kinds of people who are drawn to history through the medium of film, television, or novels, and there are a few different stages they go through.

1. Wow, history is exciting! Look at all that blood! Look at those tans! I wish I could eat by candlelight and wear pretty dresses (or pretty breeches, as the case may be).

2. Hey, that doesn’t seem to be what really happened, but Natalie Dormer’s still pretty hot.

3. Wow, that’s really not what happened.

4. I can’t believe this fraud is being perpetuated on the people! I’m going to write a book to set the record straight.

5. Hey, how did I get interested in this in the first place?

OK, so it’s not the Five Stages of Grief. It’s not even applicable to the vast majority of people who are attracted to historical fiction. All right, fine, it’s just me. And I only reached Stage Five about a month ago.

I first became interested in early modern English history because of a 1986 movie starring Helena Bonham Carter and Cary Elwes called Lady Jane. It was about Jane Grey, and man, was it a barnburner, and man, was it ever wild, wild fiction. I was fourteen (not in 1986 - I watched the movie in a friend’s basement in 1993). When I reached Stage Three above, I denounced the film high and low, claimed that my historical interest was piqued in some book or other, and tried to develop a reputation for myself as a Serious Person. I later managed to maintain the facade of Serious whilst still getting my flashy movie fix: watching The Tudors, I yelled at the television whenever something wrong or simply incomprehensible happened - friends claim to have enjoyed my ex tempore annotations.

I still hate Elizabeth, mind, because it’s so jumpy and arbitrary as to be completely unenjoyable even on a sensory level.

There are now three days between me and my thirtieth birthday. The time has come to face some Inconvenient Truths. If I get to be Dr Sarah, it will be because a friend made me watch Lady Jane in 1993. I don’t care that Guildford Dudley was, in fact, a whiny little bitch constantly hiding behind his mother’s skirts; I don’t care that Jane Grey was about as bigoted and short-sighted a Puritan as existed in the sixteenth century (although, really, poor girl). Admit it, admit it, admit it: the movie was well done. It took the fragile skein of a love story and turned it into a bona fide love story, which is what all good historical fiction can do: it shapes the boundaries of what might have been possible. It sparks interest. It turns history into a story - you can catch up on the facts later.

I’ve discovered that what I truly object to is this refashioning being badly or sloppily done. Elizabeth was hopelessly slipshod, and it is only amongst the worst of a whole pantheon of shitty movies exploiting the preconception of bygone gore to ratchet up box office returns. It failed entirely to consult the boundaries of the possible.

People forget that most of history is not written down (believe me, when you’re trying to gather sources for something as nebulous as pregnancy, you remember this in a hurry). History is never finished: historical study is constant salvos of interpretation and anyone with any talent can take the possibilities of a given historical situation and imbue it with flash and modern meaning, exploiting history’s twin powers of continuity and change to hold a mirror up to who we really are. The Lion in Winter is not a study of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, not a treatise on the Angevin succession crisis: it’s a wickedly tragicomic rendering of a dysfunctional family. Do we have those now, or is that strictly a 12th-century thing? And yet, although history tells us that there was no Christmas gathering at Chinon in 1183, what James Goldman (older, horribly-overlooked brother of William, of The Princess Bride fame) has written is a perfect rendering of the political and familial mise-en-scene of that time. Was it historically accurate in every particular? Certainly not (dudes, it had a Christmas tree). Does that matter? Not really.

When my agent told me that I was writing historical fiction, not history, and that I’d better start thinking that way in a hurry, my first reaction was fear: didn’t she understand? Doesn’t she know that I want to wrest this ersatz, shiteous “truth” that other authors have been throwing around about Anne Boleyn for centuries and set the record straight? After some thought I realized I was thinking like a zealot, like an evangelical, and started looking again to the boundaries of the possible, to shaping what is historically real and meaningful into something that could move my twenty-first-century compatriots and make them think about the world we live in. I told myself: it is OK to have a historical imagination. In fact, it’s the first requirement of any historical novelist - or any historian, for that matter.

I think Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is pretty boring as Henry VIII, but you won’t hear me objecting to The Tudors again (although really, Gabrielle Anwar’s tan is a bit much). It fiddles with dates and amalgamates sisters and invents uncles and posits a Puritan ascendancy at least twenty years before it actually happened, but it’s good TV. It gets people interested - maybe in 15 years, some 29-year-old having an existential crisis will be hopelessly mired in a doctorate degree because of it.

Besides, who’s to say that The Tudors is wrong? Or Elizabeth R? Or The Fidelity Trial, for that matter? History is never finished: no one version of events is ever going to be irrefutably right.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

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Related posts:

1. corners
2. drawing a line for historical fiction
3. measure for measure
5. ‘congratulating the present’