Historical Drama for Autumn Nights by Katherine Clements

For as long as I can remember I’ve loved watching anything with a period setting. Escaping into the past has always been one of my favourite ways to unwind. Watching history – whether original drama or literary adaptation – allows me to witness someone else’s version, and someone else’s vision of history. It’s influenced my writing too. My novels have been described as ‘cinematic’ and ‘visual’. When I write, I see the scene unfolding in my mind’s eye, exactly as if I were watching onscreen.

One of the compensations for October’s colder days and darker evenings is that autumn has become synonymous with the roll out of new big budget costume dramas (BBC’s Poldark and ITV’s Victoria are the best examples this year). There have been some fantastic series over the last few years, such as Wolf Hall, Peaky Blinders and Ripper Street, but when it comes to comfort telly, nothing beats the old favourites. I’ve decided to share mine with you this month – those that still make it into the DVD player whenever I need a fix. So, turn up the heating, settle down with a cup of something hot and escape…

Jane Eyre (BBC TV series, 2006)
There have been many adaptations of this Brontë classic, with many merits, but this is my favourite. The two leads, Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens, bring Jane and Rochester to life with wit, chemistry and just enough menacing darkness to capture the gothic mood of the book without sliding into clichéd melodrama.

A Room with a View (Film, 1985)
This is the film that got me hooked on costume drama and I’ve watched it countless times. The acting is occasionally questionable, but that doesn’t matter. There’s something spellbinding about this adaptation of the E.M Forster novel. Twenty years ago I travelled to Florence, alone and by train, because of this film. I couldn’t afford a room with a view – that one is still on my bucket list.

Pride and Prejudice (BBC TV series, 1995)
Because it rightly deserves its place on just about every ‘best costume drama’ list you’ll find on the Internet. This classic, with Colin Firth as Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennett, stands repeated watching and I go back to it regularly, like an old comfort blanket. The definitive adaptation.

The Devil’s Whore (Channel 4 TV series 2008)
This stunning whirlwind tour of the English Civil War has a special place in my heart. The impressive cast is what puts this above others – Peter Capaldi’s Charles I is my favorite portrayal ever – along with dark, gritty production design that suits the story. It’s rich in depth and detail and, for me, improved on second watching. An entertaining romp through the complicated politics of the period.

Sense and Sensibility (Film, 1995)

1995 was clearly the year for Austen adaptations. Emma Thompson’s Oscar winning script and star turns from Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman and others result in a perfectly pitched adaptation. This one wins when I need cheering up. While the BBC series penned by Andrew Davies (2008) is also extremely good, and probably more true to the book, this movie version pips it at the post, but only just.

Brideshead Revisited (Granada TV series, 1981)
Back in the days when TV producers were allowed to make long, meandering series this was a huge ratings hit, and rightly so. With time and space to do justice to Waugh’s languid, sweeping novel, this is one to get lost in.

North and South (BBC TV series, 2004)
Brooding Northern mills. Brooding Richard Armitage. There’s plenty of brooding going on in this adaptation of the Gaskell classic. A forerunner of more recent ‘it’s grim up North’ series like The Village and The Mill, this adaptation is notable for understated performances and strikes a good balance between gritty realism and sentiment.

Bleak House (BBC TV series, 2005)

Another BBC adaptation and another Andrew Davies script. I don’t always get on with Dickens but this one is pure class. An impressive cast makes light work of great dialogue, with memorable performances from the leads (this is where I fell for Gillian Anderson). And the whole is lifted further by stunning production design.

Remains of the Day (Film, 1993)
Another Merchant Ivory classic, based on the Ishiguro novel, it’s the performances from Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson that make this. One for melancholy days under the duvet with a mug of hot chocolate. Pure, heartbreaking quality.

Gosford Park (Film, 2001)
Before Downton Abbey, there was Gosford Park. This sumptuous murder mystery has multi-layered depth, plenty of heart, and a clever, dry wit that Downton lacks. And it looks stunning too. Julian Fellows at his best.

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In Conversation with Alma Alexander, by Gillian Polack

Today I have a guest. Alma Alexander is a US fantasy writer. She has a deep and abiding love of history. I thought it might be interesting to have a conversation with her instead of the regular kind of post.

Alma Alexander, from her author page

Gillian: I've been working on how writers use history in their fiction recently. In your new novel, Empress, you use your historical knowledge in quite a particular way. Maybe we could start off our discussion with what you do and how you do it.

Alma: There is alternative history, historical fantasy, and historical fiction. While the first two are obviously fantasy, you might argue that "straight" historical fiction, the kind that literally takes an event or an era that actually TRANSPIRED in our real-life timeline, is the "true" one out of that pack of otherwise gilded lies.

But is it?

Isn't history always told from the point of view of the victors, isn't it always remembered from what has been told, isn't there a dark and dusty back room where the untold stories go to molder into ashes in silence and solitude? And if you tell THOSE stories - even if you're telling an otherwise absolutely "straight" historical narrative...aren't you already wading into fantasy?

So let's split this into "living memory" and "ancient tales".

With things that might have happened in living memory, you're telling a story which will be remembered by people who were there. Or by their children to whom the stories were told. There are histories that people hide from outsiders simply because the pain is still – will ALWAYS be - too close, too real, too much to share. Should a story be banned, then?

What if it is too important to hide?

I hit a wall similar to this with Embers of Heaven, a novel that takes place some 400 years after its predecessor, Secrets of Jin-shei. That first book was based on an Imperial China, but Embers... took place during the equivalent what we knew as the Cultural Revolution. And one of the characters in my fantasy tale was at the heart of that 'real-world' revolution. I treated that book of living memory history gently. I took the characters whose story I was telling and I focused on them. Without coming out with things that rationalized or justified anything that was ever done by anyone during that time, I had to find a way to tell the story. Tell it straight. Find a way to simply be the messenger, and to let the recent history take care of itself.

And then there's a book like Empress, a story based on a glittering moment in the Byzantine Empire. There was a real love story to end all love stories out there - Emperor Justinian, and his love and soulmate, the Empress Theodora. I grew up with these stories, I cut my teeth on tales of Theodora.

But I didn't want the "historical" Theodora. I wanted the woman underneath the history. And I did not want to tell the straight "historical" story because Justinian was a bookish little clerk who wasn't romantic or manly, nothing like the emperor I called Maxentius. He was all mine. My creation. Someone I wrought so lovingly – flaws and all - that I fell a little in love with him myself. Heh.

My version of the Empress Callidora was likewise grown in the story oyster from the piece of grit that was the historical Theodora. Some of the things Theodora did my girl did too. Other things she did without much input by me. She always knew her own mind.

The world my Maxentius and my Callidora inhabit is NOT the historical Byzantium. It is a place called Visant, which shares some of the same historical touchstones. But my absolute joy in writing these fat historical fantasies is that I can take those touchstones and make them mean something else in my world. I can write the stories I want to write, even those dusty abandoned ones from the forgotten back rooms.

This is what historical fantasy does - it frees me to look at history from above, a high-flying goddess on golden wings, and create a world that is both utterly real and historically grounded, and something rich and strange that I alone had the weaving of.

Gillian: For me, as someone who looks into how writers use history, it seems that you're putting up three categories so that you can argue about inner truth. We can talk about the categories of alternative history, historical fantasy, and historical fiction, however, they're not at the heart of what you're arguing. This is an excellent opening to the sort of fiction you write. Describing people in terms of their relationship to historical counterparts shows the depth of emotion you bring to your fiction and to the history behind it. For me, however, fiction can't actually show us the person behind the story. What it can do (brilliantly) is lead us into different stories from different approaches. It can expand our understanding about the world around us and give us more narratives about history. Most of the time, story is story, and the path you follow to create your characters was purely your path: history in fiction is always a construction by the writer, for the writer and the reader. It's always shaped by our narratives.

Stories are at the core of novels for me, not reality. However, I'm a historian (always and ever) and I always need a bridge from what I see and argue as a historian and the stories I tell as a fiction writer. This is why, in my fiction, I always have one character who sees the story. This is clearest in Langue[dot]doc 1305 and in Illuminations, where I have characters who argue the way historians argue. Artemisia and Rose are both concerned with what's happening in their lives (and, in Illuminations, in the manuscript Rose has found)  and their doubts mean that if there's a reader like me, who sees history as narratives we construct to understand our past and ourselves, that reader has something to hang onto. In my other novels, these characters are less obvious. I always give them a moment, however, and they look at what's happening and say "This can't be real" and often explain why. One of those moments for Ms Cellophane has been quoted by a few people: a character points out that they can't be in a horror novel, and gives reasons. Readers often ask me which character am I in my fiction. I'm none of them. That moment of clarity about narrative, however, that's me peeking in and saying "Boo!" to the reader.

Alma: I remember talking about the writing of battles with someone and what took shape is simply that you cannot WRITE A BATTLE if you've got a POV character in the middle of one. That's because the POV character in question is simply not in a position of knowing what the battle is doing. (S)he isn't IN the whole battle. The only concern of such a character is what is going on *right around them* in the heat of the moment. Their concern - their story - is their own survival. If a battle is won or lost - well, that is a larger question, and one that is decided cumulatively, and not by any single moment. But while a straightforward history might describe such a battle from the perspective of hindsight and of God, looking at it from a dizzy height and discerning tactics (if any) and the shape of the whole battle... if you're in the thick of it you don't see any of that. You're living the battle, not observing it. And it is so with a story, too.

A character can tell their own story - a story that might be nested inside a larger one, to be sure, as all personal stories in the end are because we all live in a shared larger world. But it is the individual story that we can see through the prism of any individual person's life, and it is through their eyes that the bigger story is seen, and shaped, and told.

I don't think enough is ever said about the very real fact that we are all, right now, LIVING IN HISTORY. It just hasn't become history yet, but with every passing moment it is closer to the past than it is to our present or to the future. Minute by minute our own stories drip off the ends of our lives and merge into that larger, shared, historical background that is the tapestry of human existence.

And writing a historical tale (they're all pretty much historical, except proudly futuristic science fiction) is essentially the distilled art of fiction. You're weaving a single golden thread in and out of a larger picture, and making that single thread meaningful within the context of a wider and more encompassing history...

Gillian: My inner historian argues that , using that approach, you can never write a battle. We see different things from the scrum to those we see from a nearby mountainside or from a chronicle written afterwards, but each of the things we see contains inherent bias. We bring ourselves to our writing and colour the scene with our thoughts. The difference between historical non-fiction and historical fiction include the boundaries (things like how far we may colour, what we may colour, which colours we have at our disposal) and whether or not the reader expects to be able to critically evaluate the text by retracing the research that went into it (scholarly apparatus).

As a reader, I expect to be drawn into the story if it's fiction and to be able to critically evaluate it if it's a historical study, but there is significant overlap and our humanity shows in every word we write.

Alma: You can write *A*battle, with any battle you choose to write. But could you write *THE*battle, something specific, something that pertains directly and in-tight-focus to a particular combatant within that battle? You correctly say that our humanity shows in every word we write - how could it be otherwise? We put so much of ourselves into everything we do, every story we tell, or at least we should, and it's the mark of the very best storytelling that the humanity of the writer has to shine through somehow (without being pedantic and preachy about anything, of course). And when fiction touches history it's so easy to slide into the accepted history pageant and forget (as always) the humanity of the under-history, the one never written, the one lived by the "losers" in any given conflict. And telling the untold story... isn't that what every writer dreams of doing...?

I try to do it, at least, with every tale that I tell. I like to think of fiction as a light, something that chases away the shadows from the dark places of the world, and I never forget the power and the privilege of being the hand that wields the torch...

Gillian: And on that note, I will leave Alma to her torch and me to my rather different light. I love it that there are so many choices for narratives and that we can all have valid views. It adds a richness to fiction, not knowing how far that we are going to agree or disagree as readers with the story that unrolls before us.

Oliver Cromwell's Ely by Katherine Clements

Writing historical fiction involves a lot of research and time spent in libraries, museums and archives. It’s part of the job that I love. But when I’m working on a book, creating a sense of place is an important part of the process. Readers often ask how I research locations, how I find out what real places would have been like at a specific point in history.

My first novel, The Crimson Ribbon, is set mostly in London and Abingdon, but it begins in Ely, in the home of one of the town’s most famous residents, Oliver Cromwell. It was during my first research trip there that I learned the importance of visiting real settings, wherever possible.

The book is set during the years of the English Civil Wars when Cromwell was a man of influence in the town. He moved there in 1636, became Governor in 1643 and relocated his family to London towards the end of 1646.

Oliver Cromwell's House

Luckily, the family house still stands and is now a museum. I’d spent a lot of time learning about the man himself and walking around the house was quite emotive. On a practical level, it allowed me to understand the layout of the rooms and the positioning of the house both geographically and socially. Some of the interiors still have their original paneling and the inclusion of seventeenth century furniture gives it atmosphere, despite this somewhat creepy addition of an Oliver waxwork!

As soon as I decided to open the book in Ely, I knew the cathedral would feature in some way. It’s a spectacular building, made more so by the surrounding landscape. Ely isn’t a built up town even today, so it’s easy to imagine how impressive the cathedral would have been when Ely was just a village, and what a presence it must have been in people’s lives.

By the seventeenth century, many of the old medieval cathedrals had fallen into disuse and were beginning to crumble to ruin. They were used as meeting places, or markets and in some cases, such as St Paul’s in London, became hotbeds of sedition and debauchery. But Ely remained partly in use throughout. The structure overshadows Cromwell’s house and St Mary’s church where the Cromwell family worshipped; as a strict Puritan, Cromwell would not have welcomed this ever-present symbol of the old faith and all its associations.

The reputation of Cromwell as an iconoclast is well known but there’s no evidence that he was personally responsible for any damage to Ely Cathedral. It’s been claimed that he oversaw the demolition of the fallen tower and transept but in fact, this fell in the fourteenth century and most of the damage we see today was a result of Reformation zeal a hundred years before. A later Parliamentary campaign to demolish such buildings, never came to fruition.

Climbing the cathedral tower is a memorable experience. The fenland landscape falls away and a huge cloud-filled sky stretches out above. It gives a real sense of scale, quite different from on the ground. I couldn’t help wonder about the atmosphere of awe and superstition that might have surrounded these buildings and what it would have meant to the ordinary people that lived in the cathedral’s shadow during those tumultuous years.

The landscape surrounding Ely would have been quite different then too. By the mid-seventeenth century the Fens were being drained but the Isle of Ely was still surrounded by floodwaters at certain times of year. These days, there’s virtually nothing of the old fenland landscape left, but a visit to Wicken Fen gave me a good idea of how it might have looked. This National Trust nature reserve is doing great conservation work and is very evocative.

And what of the town itself? I began by studying old maps and images, plotting seventeenth century streets onto modern plans, to get a sense of layout and distances. Google maps can be a great help here, but nothing beats an actual visit. Ely is packed with history and walking the streets it’s not difficult to trace the old town seen in this 1610 map.

John Speed's map of Ely, 1610

I’ve also found that local museums, visitor centres and tourist information offices can house a wealth of information. I’ve discovered pamphlets and books written by local historians that give the kind of detail you can’t find elsewhere and lend a bit of colour – great for things like local myths and legends (and, significantly, the names of seventeenth century taverns!).

Turns out Oliver Cromwell’s Ely can still be found, just beneath the modern veneer. All that’s missing is the stink and clamour of seventeenth century England, and for that, we have imagination.


For more about Ely and its history, see these posts by fellow History Girls Adele Geras and Karen Maitland.


Oliver Cromwell's House

Ely Cathedral

Toppings Bookshop (for local history books and much more)


www.katherineclements.co.uk

Review: Paul Scott's The Chinese Love Pavilion, by Y S Lee

Hello, friends. This month, I’d like to talk about a novel by Paul Scott called The Chinese Love Pavilion. I know, I know: SKETCHY TITLE ALERT! Don't worry: I understand that this is a PG-rated blog.

I picked up the novel as part of the research for my work-in-progress (which is set in Malaya during the Second World War). Since The Chinese Love Pavilion takes place largely in Malaya just after the war, I was eager to experience another writer's vision of the place. Also, while I’ve never read Scott's best-known work, the Raj Quartet, his reputation goes before him. However, I’m going to warn you now: if you’re a rabid fan of The Jewel in the Crown, brace yourself. This will get ugly.

Cover of the 2013 edition, published by the University of Chicago Press. The building pictured looks slightly like the pavilion described in the novel.

The Chinese Love Pavilion, published in 1960, is about a friendship between two Englishmen in the colonies. The narrator, Tom Brent, is young and in search of a shape for his life. He meets the unconventional, charismatic Brian Saxby in 1930s Bombay and, over the course of a whiskey-soaked evening, falls under his spell. This sets up the men for long conversations about the soul, fate, and the meaning of life. I have a limited tolerance for cod philosophy at the best of times, and that limit plummets when the "exotic" East is used as a picturesque backdrop for these kinds of musings. However, I stuck with it.

The story then skips over the Second World War and picks up in 1946 or so, when a war-injured Brent is brought to Malaya and instructed to find Saxby. Apparently, Saxby is hiding out the Malayan jungle and might be responsible for the revenge-slayings of some Chinese civilians. The metaphysical novel morphs into a kind of homage to Heart of Darkness, with Brent travelling deeper into jungle-dark territory to find his legendary but tortured friend. Promising, right?

An early edition

Actually, I can't remember the last time I was this appalled by a well-reviewed novel. The self-indulgent metaphysical musings drove me berserk, but I understand that this is a question of taste and personal bias. I am happy to report that the pacing of the novel's second half is excellent. Also, Scott is gifted with an extraordinary sense of place. His descriptions of the Malayan landscape are vivid and entirely convincing, and his eye for natural detail is impeccable.

However, there's one massive problem with the novel that taints everything else it attempts: the way it uses prostitution. Women - specifically, the sexual services of young Indian and Chinese girls - are the common currency of this novel. I'm not exaggerating in the least. Here are three conversations from the novel, in the order they occur:

At a restaurant in Bombay, where Brent and Saxby have just dined:

"[The girls are] clean. Clean now, you understand, not later. Later the bloom goes. Disease enters."

"Does he sell them too?"

"To us first. Honoured guests. Then to others.

When Brent visits Saxby after a three-year gap:

"The little one holding the curtain so patiently, is for you. She is an untouchable, and, I am told, a virgin."

I looked from Saxby to the girl and back to Saxby. "That was very thoughtful of you."

He smiled. He said, "I have always been accommodating to my friends."

In small-town Malaya, where the officer-in-charge offers Brent the use of "his" designated prostitute:

"Did you like her?"

"Yes, I liked her."

..."Well while you're here she's yours. It all comes under the contract but you'll probably like to give her the occasional present."

"It's very hospitable of you. What about you?"

"I'll manage, I expect."

Do you see the progression here? Prostitution is first an economic fact, and then a gesture of welcome between friends, and finally a common courtesy, like a cigarette or a cup of tea. I wondered, at first, if Scott’s obsessive attention to prostitution could be read as a kind of critique of colonialism, or a comment on the moral effects of the British imperial project. I also considered the possibility that Scott’s irony was so subtle as to be undetected by this reader. Sadly, no.

In a still-later scene, Brent describes a British soldier cuddling a prostitute named Suki "who by European standards was no more than a child and looked absurdly fragile in his beefy arms". This is an isolated moment of light-hearted physical contrast in a novel that otherwise takes itself extremely seriously. Significantly, it features a young woman who, if she was "European" - that is, worthy of civilized treatment - would be "no more than a child". I don't think the word "beefy" is an accident, here. It's an evocation of what's familiarly, essentially English. And the "beefy" Englishman who holds Suki - a loud-mouthed but fundamentally loyal and reliable soldier - has the approval of all characters. Could the subtext be any clearer? Child prostitution is a harmless joke, so long as the women are brown and the men are white.

Could it get any worse? Why, yes, it can!

The second, thriller-esque half of the novel turns on the fate of Teena, an enigmatic prostitute of Eurasian descent with whom Brent falls in love. Of course, a “woman of the world” (Scott’s euphemism) cannot be rewarded with a fairy-tale ending. She was always going to be punished for her sins. Teena’s clumsily foreshadowed death is never fully resolved: she might have been murdered, or she might have committed suicide. Brent can’t decide, and nobody else cares. And ultimately, in the schema of The Chinese Love Pavilion, the question matters not. Brent concludes, “Sometimes, I think she was doomed in that few seconds it took me to unbolt and open the door of the hostel in Bombay to which Saxby had come to find shelter…” That is, Teena’s fate was decided by the initial meeting between Brent and Saxby some ten years earlier, in a different country, when Teena herself was a small child. This is perhaps more illogical to a person who’s read the novel even than to somebody who’s never heard of Paul Scott.

The primary relationship of the novel isn’t that between Brent and Teena, or Brent and the Far East, or spirituality and war; it’s the bond holding together Brent and Saxby, and their fumbling attempts to understand their own importance in the world. India and Malaya are only picturesque backdrops, Teena merely a useful symbol, the Second World War but a minor interruption.

When I mentioned these criticisms to a friend (who is a huge fan of the Raj Quartet), she half-heartedly defended the novel as “an accurate representation of how white men viewed native women at that time, as much as it repulsive to us now”. I believe that it’s certainly an accurate representation of how Paul Scott viewed women of colour, both in 1946 when the story takes place, and in 1960 when it was published. But is that sufficient to excuse the novel? I think not.

A metaphysical novel about homosocial friendship and spiritual destiny could happen at any time, in any setting. Using the “exotic” East to lend sexual intrigue and distract credulous readers is a lazy narrative trick. Those who love Scott’s other work deserve better. We all do.

---
Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn mysteries (Walker Books). She blogs every Wednesday at www.yslee.com. 

It's Wolf hall - again!

I know it's been over for some time and we've probably all watched Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell since then. But I wanted to consider what a TV series does differently from a play, from a book. It doesn't have to be historical fiction but perhaps it illustrates the point best when it comes to visualising the scene.

I've read both Hilary Mantel's books about Thomas Cromwell twice, seen both the plays twice and seen the TV series twice (the last two episodes three times). I can't get enough of Hilary Mantel's creation but it does make me ponder on what the different media do for it.

First on TV the setting, costumes and props - these were all utterly convincing: the interior lighting by candles or fires, mullioned windows, all goods in chests, an illuminated prayer book dazzling in its colours because new. There was great attention to detail. (But see Liz Fremantle's February post for more on that and some reservations).

It's obvious that TV can do some things the stage plays couldn't do, giving us flashbacks to the boy Thomas Cromwell's brutal beating  by his thug of a blacksmith father - the motive to run away to the continent, with which the first book opens.

The TV series opened with the splendidly cast Bernard Hill as the Duke of Norfolk telling Cardinal Wolsey he is done for. The trouble with this excellent start was that we then had to go back to a period when Wolsey was still in the ascendant and could order Harry Percy and Thomas Boleyn around and tell them that Anne Boleyn had to go and marry someone in Ireland.

There was a bit too much of this "non-linear" narrative going on: the captions would have been more useful if they'd had actual dates rather than 'Four years before Wolsey's fall" and suchlike. No such problems with the books or the stage plays.

Wolsey himself was superb. Jonathan Pryce was not an obvious piece of casting: one thinks of him as tall and cadaverous rather than fat and jowly like a cleric who indulged too much in earthly pleasures. But he was very good indeed.

Then so was Paul Jesson on stage. But this is not an argument about who gives the better representation, pitting Mark Rylance against Ben Miles or Damien Lewis against Nathaniel Parker (the last another example of successful casting against type).

What interests me is what the different media can do with the same story. To take just one example - the masque pillorying Wolsey after his death. Hilary Mantel has taken "Cardinal Wolsey Going down to Hell," performed at the house of Thomas Boleyn (Anne's father) and transposed it to Hampton Court. The farce, presumably commissioned by Boleyn, was put on as an entertainment in January 1531, for the new French Ambassador, Claude de la Guiche. "The Duke," whom Mantel reasonably takes to be Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, called for it to be printed.

The Ambassador was evidently not amused and according to Eustache Chapuys, the Imperial Ambassador, "much blamed the earl, and still more the Duke for ordering this fare to be printed." (quoted in Greg Walker's Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry Vlll (Cambridge University Press 1991)). Not surprisingly, since it portrayed a Cardinal tormented by devils and burning in hell.

Hilary Mantel takes this reasonably well known fact and makes of it something crucial to the plot of both her novels and one that offers an explanation for Cromwell's implacable persecution of the five men executed with Anne Boleyn. Each of the four "devils" is a nobleman (somewhat unlikely as actors in a farce, perhaps, but no matter). Cromwell watches them unmask and reveal themselves to be George Boleyn (Anne's brother), Henry Norris, Francis Weston and William Brereton.

In the novel of Wolf Hall this scene comes less than halfway through and the person taking the part of Wolsey himself is Master Patch, the jester whom the Cardinal gave to the king. In the play it's Mark Smeaton, neatly linking all five executed men to the farce.  Here in the novel  Mantel describes the reactions of the audience to the farce:

"Anne sits laughing, pointing, applauding. He has never seen her like this before: lit up, glowing. Henry sits frozen by her side. Sometimes he laughs, but he thinks if you could get close you would see that his eyes are afraid."

Crucially there is one dissenting voice at the "entertainment" - "Someone calls out 'Shame on you, Thomas Howard, you'd have sold your own soul to see Wolsey down.' Heads turn, and his head turns, and nobody knows who had spoken; but he thinks it might be, could it be, Thomas Wyatt?"

In Mike Poulton's playscript it is definitively Wyatt, who cries, "Shame! Shame on you, Norfolk! Shame!" But Wyatt is a major linking character in the plays and gets a more prominent role than in the books.

In the TV version, no-one cries "Shame!" at all. And that's a shame. It seems no-one at court is brave enough to stand up for the Cardinal, to whom Cromwell's intense loyalty is a constant motif, explanation and motive. In fact it turns into a bit of a Revenge drama, with Cromwell avenging his father-figure Wolsey, who was more benevolent to him than his own flesh and blood parent.

There is a scene where Cromwell watches the four "devils" take off their masks but it is somewhat wasted because of the casting. George Boleyn looks too like Brereton - or is it Weston? The point gets lost and has to be brought out in a later episode where Cromwell is interrogating the accused men in the Tower. If you hadn't read the books, I don't know if you would have "got" it. The whole scene is very brief on TV and there is no sign of Mark Smeaton.

But now we have three ways of "knowing" that at least four of the five men executed before Anne Boleyn took part in the Wolsey farce, does it matter that Hilary Mantel made this up? Surely, only if we come to believe this really is what happened?

Which brings us to the question of how we know our history; is it thorough reading historians or historical fiction. Do we believe that Elizabeth Woodville saved her son from Richard the Third, as Philippa Gregory tells us she did?

As Hilary Mantel says in the Author's Note to Bring up the Bodies, " I am not claiming authority for my version; I am making the reader a proposal, an offer."

As you may have gathered, although I enjoyed it, I liked the TV version less than the other two manifestations of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell stories. It may not be surprising that for me the books come first. There were a couple of show-offy moments on Tv which I positively disliked: Thomas stroking Anne Boleyn's breasts in a scene it took a moment or two to realise was in his imagination and the ridiculous dragging of her body along his dining-table with him about to stick the knife in. It was evidently too much of a temptation to make a metaphor literal.

And it lost a lot of the humour of the books and the plays; in the theatre everyone laughed when Leah Brotherhead said, "Oh, I'm nobody. I'm only Jane Seymour." There were many such touches, replaced on TV by Cromwell's sardonic remarks and occasional swearing.

Still, there was much to enjoy in the minor performances, such as Charity Wakefield's spirited and saucy Mary Boleyn - though it was hard to believe this one would have let Henry walk over her so. And one of my favourite characters, Eustache Chapuys was perfectly rendered by Matthieu Almaric. There was even an effort at his "startling hat" with which Hilary Mantel had such fun in Bring up the Bodies. Sadly, I could not find a picture of him wearing it.

I can't wait for the third book, The Mirror and the Light; the third play, with, please, Ben Miles and Nathaniel Parker, the third TV series, with Mark Rylance and Damien Lewis. I like Hilary Mantel's "offer" very much, in whatever form it comes. But best of all in the books.

What do you all think?

Historical Sources for Historical Fiction - Gillian Polack

Last month I made a rash promise. I promised I’d talk about sources. Now that my mind is on other things, I’ll still talk about sources, but not in the way I originally intended. I’m writing a book on the relationship that fiction writers enjoy with history, and that’s colouring everything I do. It definitely colours this post.

Compared with modern history, there are so few sources for the Middle Ages. ‘Compared with modern history’ are tricky words, however. There are a lot of sources. A vast number and range. They’re not always obvious, however, nor are they easy to interpret. And the reason we look at them shapes how we interpret them. Some of this I talked about last month.

Last month I focussed on cosmetics. 

Our main sources for cosmetics right now are a very small number of key manuscripts. These manuscripts talk about what cosmetics women used, they prescribe how women should behave, and they that give recipes for them. We’re not talking about that many documents, in total, and they cover the whole of Western Europe. This means that, from them, we don’t know what cosmetics a given woman would use. Big statements like “All women wore lead paint” are based on a tiny number of sources. A pale face in a picture doesn't mean the woman in the picture is depicted as wearing lead paint. I found you an example of this:

There are also some rather wonderful archaeological remains. Combs are my personal favourite, but they aren’t the only archaeological survival, by any means. One of the big lessons I learned when I worked on The Middle Ages Unlocked, was that on some subjects Katrin (my archaeologist co-writer) knew many things that I did not. My archaeology was a mere two years at university and was a very long time ago. The knowledge differential between me and someone who works in a particular field and knows their stuff is vast and full of chasms. 

Even the stuff Katrin only half-knows is more than what I know in her field. I hope that the same applies to mine and that she was sufficiently awed by my historical understanding for the world to be balanced, but that’s somewhat irrelevant here. What’s relevant is that archaeology is constantly growing and changing and dipping into a popular work won’t give you nearly as much information as learning how to interpret reports of digs or analyses of types of finds. Those finds won’t tell you how someone wore make-up, but they will give you more information about the devices used to make oneself beautiful, and that information helps us flesh out those rare mentions in manuscripts.

The trick is, then, not just knowing what kind of sources are out there, but gaining access to them and putting them in their wider cultural perspective.

One of my favourite websites for small archaeological finds is finds.org. It’s an online database of the small things found by various people in the UK. Each find has a description, but you’ll not get detailed analysis of how it fits in with other finds. Whether this brooch is typical or this tool is normal for a time and place isn’t something you’ll find out without checking what the experts have to say. Sources speak, but they speak much better when they’re interpreted by those with vast amounts of knowledge and experience.

What I do, when I’m researching for a novel is use a mixture of primary sources and the studies of them by those who know more than me. In the happy (but small) areas where I’ve done my own research and I am the researcher, I can bask in the sunshine of actually knowing what I’m doing, but most of the time I argue with myself and try to expand my understanding of the place and time I’m writing about, so that I can use studies critically and not misinterpret the sources too badly.

How does this relate to historical sources for fiction? Intimately. A source is as only as good as the person who looks at it. If you look at a beautiful manuscript and have no idea of the language it’s in or that it’s in a script that predates your period by five hundred years or that it was written by the exact person you want to star in your amazing tale, then it’s a huge waste. 

Sources are only as good as the person using them and are always biased at our (the user’s) end and at the original (writer’s) end. Interpretations are only as good as the brain and thought and understanding of the person using them. And that person needs to remember (I write notes to myself, for it’s a continual reminder, not a once-off) that people in the past were real and had private lives and were grumpy in the morning or tired at night and had to go and milk the cows when they’d rather be writing and… Sometimes we get annotations or comments in the manuscripts that tell us these things, and those notes are writing gold. Most of the time we have to look very carefully at a list or a letter and work out who the writer was from what they didn’t say as much as from what they do say.

That’s why I decided against giving a list of sources in this post. I thought it might be more useful to talk about the most important factor in someone’s research: how they think and discover and interpret.

So many writers want to cut research corners. They ask me for digests of what I know. “Summarise twenty years of your work in three minutes, please, for that’s all the time I can spare this subject.” This is not a wise approach for a writer. The trick with sources is not accessing them: it’s understanding them.

My research (for the ‘I’m-not-a-fiction-writer’ side of me) is generally text-based. Medievally speaking, for me, this mostly means literature. There are bunches of non-literary Medieval written sources, hidden away in archives, staring us in the face as the charters for towns and the underpinning of various family histories. I tend not to work with these for my academic side, for I am addicted to stories.

What I do as a novelist, is read general works on the subject until I understand where current research is going, how it interprets that place and time and what spin it gives to sources. I collect primary sources and then read them myself wherever I can. All of this recent experience comes from me working on a period so alien to me that I’ve had to start from first principles – I can’t trust my common sense, because my common sense will be trumped by my preconceived assumptions at every point, and preconceived assumptions tend to make a rather predictable work of fiction. Also a shallow one.

So, I’ve read a bunch of works by historians and archaeologists and have a fair general knowledge about the setting for this novel I’m working on. I’ve started reading primary sources and taking notes about particular tidbits that’d be handy for the novel. This is my actual beginning. From here I’m working on turning my new adventure into understanding of a deep enough sort that it can inform my novel.

It’s the difference between looking at a source and looking intoa source and understanding it. 

I keep using the word ‘understanding’ because that’s the way to get the sources to talk back, to reveal their information and to let them help you bring the novel to life. It’s the difference between giving a reader flat information about a place and a time and giving a reader a lively story where the time and place is integral to the story.