History on the Stage: The Queenmaker Trilogy and Historical Authenticity

Yeah, that’s right. It’s a trilogy of posts.

Two blog posts ago, I spoke about the power of the tv show The Tudors and the accessibility of the period it depicted to wider audiences. While the series leaned heavily into the flashier elements, arguably to the detriment of the history it was depicting, it proved that there was something among the political plots, backstabbing, and romance that continues to speak to modern audiences. There was something about the Tudor dynasty that people just keep coming back to.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that some of the best modern theatre I’ve seen in years drew on that exact topic.

Kate Hennig’s Queenmaker trilogy is a masterclass in historical authenticity. Unlike a good Austen drama, period-accurate language is completely thrown out the window in favour of accessibility to three stories of Tudors that media tends not to cover.

The Last Wife is the story of Katherine Parr and the way she navigates her newfound power (and the tenuous position it puts her in) during her marriage to Henry VIII.

Joseph Ziegler and Maeve Beaty

The Virgin Trial showcases Elizabeth Tudor during the reign of her brother Edward VI. It takes place during an episode where Elizabeth is being held in the Tower of London and is being interrogated on her involvement in a plot to overthrow Edward.

Bahia Watson

Mother’s Daughter is the final installment and is the story of Mary Tudor after her ascension to the crown. It focuses primarily on the emotional turmoil Mary undergoes as she is haunted by the women who have shaped her and is rejected by a court that doesn’t want her.

Irene Poole, Shannon Taylor, and Jessica B. Hill

If you are interested in seeing Hennig herself introduce her places you can watch that here.

Each play focuses on a different woman but they are connected by the same themes, their modern parlance, and the casual way in which each character is referred to. Elizabeth is not Elizabeth I. Instead she is Bess, accessible, relatable, and yet somehow more terrifying in how human she is. They are also connected by the developing relationship between Bess and Mary. They are the only two characters who are in all three shows.

What Hennig does is choose to tell the stories of her characters in a time in their lives that is completely removed from the experience of the audience. It is very unlikely that someone in the room watching would have ever had to make the call on executing a pretender to their throne or lie to interrogators about attempting to overthrow their younger brother. These scenarios are not immediately relatable, though they do make for great dramatic tension because of the stakes involved. They are also very politically complex moments in the women’s lives that likely would have been too dense to clearly explain if Hennig had chosen to use period-accurate language.

Instead, Hennig has Mary swear in frustration, has Katherine negotiate an argument between Bess and Mary, and has Bess go to her older sister for advice. These are shared experiences. This is what helps the history on stage come to life and move the audience. The emotions the characters experience in their entangled relationships is the core of the story. We can all understand and empathize with a story about a character’s relationship with power, even if the particular permutation that power takes is sort of beyond our grasp.

It helps that these plays debuted from 2015-2019.

The Virgin Trial had its Stratford debut in the same fall that the #MeToo movement was gaining steam. One of the major plot points of the play is a sexual assault, so it felt very timely to be exploring that in the political climate of the time. There was something powerful about watching a show that focused on consent and victim shaming whose plot was so directly tied to events of the past. It made the history on display feel that much more alive and visceral.

It also drove home an important point about the historical experiences of women.

It didn’t matter that the specific power relationships between the characters no longer exists in most spaces. Titles aside, audiences are familiar with the fear a wife could feel toward her unwanted husband. Or a sister could feel toward a sibling that outshone her. The Queenmaker Trilogy epitomizes an understanding of historical authenticity that has nothing to do with getting hung up on the details but rather making an audience connect with a moment in history and understand it in a new way.

While the heavy nature of many of the themes may make it less accessible to some viewers than Bridgerton or Austen, I think its fearlessness in broaching topics that have long been considered to be taboo no matter the era sets it apart from other kinds of historical fiction. Not only is the material authentic, but it’s unapologetically honest.

I don’t want to spoil all of the plots of these fabulous shows should you ever get the opportunity to watch them, but I highly recommend checking them out. You won’t regret learning what they’ll teach you.

Jane Austen and the Curious Case of Adaptation

Well, here it is folks! You didn’t ask for it, you might not have even wanted it, but you are sure getting it: The Austen Experience.

I don’t really attempt to hide my love for Jane Austen.

I will argue until my dying days that I think her work remains the gold standard for romance in fiction, mostly because her writing isn’t really about romance. I know, all the Darcy lovers are crying blasphemy at me.

Here’s the thing, it’s very unfair to compare the work of Jane Austen to the work of Phillippa Gregory or Julia Quinn. This is primarily because Jane Austen is a writer who writes about the period she is living in, which I think any reasonable person would realize is an unfair advantage.

While romance is a central tenet of all the novels, they are often more about the way in which young women are experiencing the world in the Regency period and will often comment on other social issues. Persuasion is just as much about Anne Elliott’s insecurities and personal growth over the course of the novel as it is about second chances in love. Mansfield Park shows the ways in which Fanny is used and abused by her relatives, but Austen also uses the setting to comment on slavery and emancipation.

But I do feel it is of some worth to explore the comparison because Jane Austen’s work is often branded by the media who consume it as being historical romance.

Most of Austen’s legacy has been defined by how relatable and engaging her characters, and the stories they inhabit, are. Her protagonists are generally witty, with rich inner lives, and are surrounded by a cast of characters who are endlessly entertaining. She always seems to strike the line perfectly between writing people who leap off the page with how real they are while still remaining true to the era she was writing for.

Elizabeth Bennett remains one of the most enduring female leads in literature because she is both very much a young woman in Georgian England while displaying a sort of eternal relatability no matter what generation you are from. I think it’s this balance that has made faithfulness to Austen’s text one of the key features of what has traditionally consisted of a good Austen adaptation. Coincidentally, loyalty to the subject matter, by definition, means attention to historical accuracy

For many years, fans of Pride & Prejudice have upheld the 1995 BBC series starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth as the epitome of adaptation. Much of the dialogue was lifted straight from the novel, there was considerable time and effort put into the costumes and set to be as accurate as possible, and all of the actors were drilled on etiquette training so they could eat, sleep, and breathe like the gentry from the Regency period. Even the choreography was lifted from The Apted Book of Country Dances (1966) by W.S. Porter to try and get as close as possible to how the social circles being depicted would have moved.

This adaptation spurred a wave of other Austinian film and miniseries adaptations. For a time in the late 90s and early 00s, one could not turn on a tv without tripping over a Sense and Sensibility, a Mansfield Park, or an Emma. It was completely reasonable that this slew of adaptation would be varying in quality and style, but their discourse was often unified by a call to be true to the subject matter. To be true to the experiences of Austen.

There was certainly a place for adaptations the eschewed the Regency setting entirely, but those usually came out after there had been a faithful first adaptation in this period. The exception to this rule was Emma. Clueless was a smash hit the same year of Firth and Ehle’s miniseries, but the setting and dialogue were so removed from Austen’s original work that many didn’t make the connection to its source material. Furthermore, the character of Emma Woodhouse is a bit of an oddity anyway in Austen’s menagerie of female leads.

As mentioned earlier, Emma differentiates herself from an Elizabeth Bennett or Fanny Price in that she is attractive, wealthy, and well-liked. The trials and tribulations Emma faces in the course of the novel are ones of her own devising due to her vanity and ill-thought-out meddling. While Emma is still subject to some of the constraints of women in her time (like when she can’t be friends with Jane Fairfax as they are, by necessity, rivals for the same small pool of eligible men), but she does not suffer from the same life or death consequences. It’s also what makes her, in some ways, less likeable than many of Austen’s other leads.

All this really just boils down to the fact that an Emma adaptation relies less on its accuracy in depicting female life in Regency England in order to be successful.

This is in contrast to adaptions of all of her other work.

When the 2005 movie adaption of Pride and Prejudice starring Kiera Knightley and Matthew Macfayden hit theatres, it was met with cautious applause but was still found wanting when compared to the 1995 miniseries. It strove for realism but in a different manner. More authentic to some of the realities of Regency living than to the way Austen tends to dress it up in her work. As Joanna Briscoe points out in her 2005 review of the film, everyone has muddy hems, the Bennett sisters scramble past chickens to tumble out onto the unmanicured Georgian landscape, and many kinds of makeup were banned on set. I think she is right to note that at many points in the film, it seems to be evoking more of a feel for Wuthering Heights than it does Austen’s work.

So true to the period, but maybe not completely to the author.

The reaction to 2005’s Pride and Prejudice seems to highlight the other side of the accuracy to Austen debate. While some adaptations are just not up to snuff in getting the intricacies of the Regency period down the way 1995’s adaptation does, others are at risk of not capturing it in the way Austen saw it.

The bottom line is that while Austen is a beloved writer with a very specific style, there is a different weight to adaptations of her work that a Bridgerton just doesn’t have. While it is certainly possible to accurately capture Georgian England without leaning in too heavily to the conventions of Austen, I think you risk losing some of the key thematic features of her work.

At the end of the day, Austen’s characters are bound to the restraints put on them. Whether that be because of their social circle, their gender, or the colour of their skin, her characters are constantly testing and pushing the boundaries that they have enforced on each other. In many ways, her oeuvre is a showcase in balancing relevant social themes and information while still allowing room for entertaining storytelling.

And doing history right is all about telling stories.

Also, go watch the 2020 adaptation of Emma.

Here’s proof that it might just be the most relatable adaptation of Austen yet:

Winter in Canada be like

Historical Romance: As Misleading as Video Games?

I have long held the belief that historical romance fiction is to women what Assassin’s Creed or Civilization is to men.

Does this play on sexist tropes in the worst way? Yes.

Does it also seem to be a belief held by the entertainment industry? Double yes.

It seems like for every piece of media that’s half-Band of Brothers, half-Call of Duty inspired that gets trotted along by the video game industry, there’s another Bridgerton novel to satiate the other half.

Different form; similar purpose.

I don’t mean to suggest that men can’t enjoy historical romantic fiction or that women can’t be entertained by media inspired by the World Wars. In fact, I’m a big supporter of everyone watching what they want to watch and pooh-poohing whatever general society tells them what’s meant for them.

But I’d be blind, deaf, or dumb not to see who the target audience of each of the markets is. And they share a similar problem when it comes to a lack of accuracy in their content.

When speaking on the importance of historical accuracy of content in video games, Degroot argued that “the vagueness of the audience’s historical knowledge— and the attraction of various general historical archetypes rather than specific location and events- impact on and shape this game-playing community.”

For him, part of the appeal of history in video games was its lack of investment in genuinely teaching its audience anything. This is a problem that is shared with the genre of historical romance. While these two mediums can be gateways that get people interested in the periods they discuss, the audience would have to seek out more academic material to learn anything of value.

I know many young women who first became interested in history because they read the work of Philippa Gregory (The Other Boleyn Girl, The White Queen) which kickstarted an obsession with the Tudor period. And I don’t think this is an unusual tale.

The stories these books tell are compelling. In the case of Gregory, her protagonists are historically significant and their romantic relationships are key to why history cares about them. Marriage really could be a life-or-death sentence in England’s court in the 15^th and 16^th centuries.

There is also something endlessly watchable or readable about historical romance. The Showtime series The Tudors was not just a smash success because of its lush costumes and political maneuvering. Every promotional poster featured Jonathan Rhys Meyers smouldering at the camera, surrounded by an array of his various wives depending on the season.

Poster for The Tudors as shown on IMDB

But the series long came under fire for its lack of historical accuracy. There’s the old adage that sex sells, and then there’s taking complete liberties with history. Michael Hirst, the show’s writer, argued “My first duty is to write a show that’s entertaining. I wasn’t commissioned by Showtime to write a historical documentary.”

And that’s fair. Historical romance is first and foremost meant to entertain.

But issues erupt when it begins to claim to be authentic, or when its consumers believe it to be so.

Philippa Gregory famously claimed that her “commitment to historical accuracy” was a hallmark of her writing which many historians took issue with. Susan Bordo responded to Gregory’s assertions by saying they were “self-deceptive and self-promoting chutzpah.” In fact, she saw Gregory’s insistence on her work being accurate as being the most dangerous thing about her. Especially because of her most famous work’s (The Other Boleyn Girl’s) depiction of Anne.

Gregory’s Anne is just as vicious and cruel as the accusations of her actual historical arrest made her out to be. Gregory also implies that Anne committed incest with her brother, a charge that most historians agree she was innocent of.

So what are Gregory’s readers actually getting out of her books? Did they learn anything of value about this period in history?

Shonda Rhimes’ Bridgerton was the word on everyone’s lips last December, but it really has more in common with Grey’s Anatomy than it does with the work of Jane Austen. The drama of the series is fueled by the conventions of romance as a genre, rather than by complications that arose out of genuine Regency etiquette. This is to say, that the conflict the characters face is mostly contrived nonsense.

Entertaining nonsense, sure, but they spend very little time behaving like the upper class would have in the Regency Period. They do behave, however, perfectly in line with any of the protagonists in Harlequin’s lineup.

I knew something was very wrong when one of my friends from undergrad told me she had “learned so much about the Victorian Era by watching Bridgerton!”

I didn’t even know where to begin with that.

I understand that entertainment is meant to entertain. I don’t blame Shonda Rhimes for my friend’s ignorant comment.

I think DeGroot is right in that history is more evoked to establish the atmosphere of a setting, rather than to educate viewers on it. This lack of commitment to content is just something that people consuming this media need to be cognizant of.

If accessibility means that all people want is a couple of pretty dresses, a vague excuse to be holding a ball, and some dithering about marriage prospects, then sure. I guess Bridgerton is helping the masses learn a bit about the British upper class in the early 19th century.

But I refuse to believe that people can’t be entertained by historically accurate romantic fiction.

And I will write a whole second blog post on Jane Austen to prove it.

Historical Authenticity and Deepfakes

The first time I remember feeling a genuine sense of dread about advancing technology’s effects on the preservation of authentic historical records, Twitter was on fire.

This was not unusual. I’m not an avid Twitter user, but even I know that Twitter having weekly meltdowns was pretty much the norm in 2019. It was more of a cause for concern if several weeks went by without some verified person being locked out of their account than not.

But this time it felt unique. Mostly it was because the President of the United States had tweeted out a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a large swath of people thought it was real.

Fox news said it was real.

It was not.

But it also sort of was.

And I suppose that that was what I found so unsettling.

The doctored video of Pelosi was one that was edited to pitch-shift and slow down her speech, an effect which made her sound inebriated. It spread like wildfire on right-wing news sites in the United States. While technically not a deepfake, it re-sparked the debate in the mainstream about deepfakes and the spread of not just misinformation, but disinformation in the media.

Deepfakes are synthetic media that use machine learning and AI technology to impose the image from one photo or video into another. May of 2019 was hardly the first time they had made the news, the year previous they were in headlines for their usage in revenge pornography and their banning from Reddit, but the Pelosi video was the first edited video featuring a significant political figure that was convincing.

It was the first time I had seen technology progress far enough that more people found a doctored video more convincing than the original.

Maybe my ignorance on the topic belies my age, but before then, when I thought of the way in which documents or digital media could be altered, my brain went to poorly rendered photoshops or Stalin’s erasure campaign.

Erasure was obvious; Photoshop in my youth meant that something was obviously altered; the Pelosi video was near seamless.

Obviously, discussions erupted about all the things this technology could make political figures do or say. And while the immediate consequences of this technology were, without question, very concerning, I was more focused on how much more significant being able to differentiate between real and fake just became for people in historical professions.

It already felt like archivists, particularly those in assessment, would have to have a level of digital savviness many would not stereotype to the profession. But to be able to identify footage doctored to this level? Was that possible?

Microsoft made it public in September of last year that they are developing a deepfake detection tool. And much of the academic literature on the topic is focused on detection over creation, but there is pushback on that focus as one can feed into the other.

The more sophisticated the technology for detection, the more those creating the footage can learn from those tools and fill in the cracks in their systems. All the while, those of us who are interested in preserving the digital space are left more at a loss at the increasing gap between the technology and our knowledge.

This is, of course, the worst-case scenario for how deepfakes will affect the GLAM sector, though the most immediately relevant. Preservation is already up against the sheer deluge of content in the digital space. To expect historians, archivists, and other preservation enthusiasts to also become experts in detecting minute signs of manipulation in that content is an exercise in futility.

There is also a case to be made that this technology could ‘bring history to life’ in a way never seen before. As many people transition to telling more personal, grounded histories in an effort to connect more with our audiences, couldn’t deepfakes open the door to making our subjects come off the page even more?

There’s certainly an ethical conversation to be had about ‘raising the dead’ and applying deepfake technology to subjects that exhibits are being designed around, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that people care more about historical narratives when they feel personal.

So should we embrace it then? Or should we pool our efforts into resisting the technology that could seriously poison the authenticity of archives?

It’s not a question I have the answer to. But I do know that’s I’ll be watching Trotsky and Stalin sing Video Killed the Radio Star while I ponder it.

The First of Many

This is an introductory post. It is also a leap of faith, an attempt at a new beginning, and a school project. Make of that what you will.

I was a timorous child.

I was very much the type to purposely look in the opposite direction of the sun just in case. Or actively avoid cracks on sidewalks just in case. Or, on one particularly memorable occasion, cling to the top of a 10 m diving platform for what felt like 2 hours, but in reality was probably more like 3 minutes, in a failed effort to push myself on a school-sanctioned swimming trip. I still remember the dizzying feeling of walking back down from the top and assuring myself that I had made the right choice; ten year old pride be damned.

Luckily, I’ve shed a lot of that anxiety as I’ve grown up. I wear sunglasses, I’ve preemptively apologized to my mother for her back, and while I still don’t like heights, I instead chuckle fondly at diving platforms when I go for my weekly swim. However, that doesn’t make trying new things suddenly easy.

I get a lot of echoes of that childish “fear of something new” when I consider doing history in the digital space. I would never describe myself as “tech savvy”. Unlike many in my age group, I’ve never found navigating online to be intuitive. Coding? What is that? How does one code?

But now, I think that fear is tempered with a sense of excitement. While I know I’m not good at it yet, I’m excited to get better! I’m genuinely jazzed to learn skills that seem so practical and applicable to the field I love so dearly. While there will always be part of me that is scared of failure, learning about digital history seems like such a no-brainer when looking at the future of public history. Also, there’s very little chance of my body hitting the water and exploding into pink matter. Which I find very encouraging.

So while I find the medium of digital history to be the most nerve racking thing about taking History 9808, I also feel assured that everything is going to turn out alright. There will be stumbles, but that’s why we ask questions. And if I didn’t know how to ask a question at this point, then what was my entire undergraduate degree for?

At this point, I find myself mostly inspired by projects such as Borealia or Puppet History. Borealia really pushes to connect historians in the academic field to a wider audience and I think does so very effectively. Its blog posts are always comprehensive without feeling exclusionary to audiences not educated in the study of history. It’s Teach My Research series does a particularly great job of creating material that would be useful to educators.

On the other hand, I aspire to the accessibility and tone of Puppet History as a show. While a blog can never capture the diversity of the showmanship present in the series (and I have more than a few questions about how the research is conducted for the show), I think it’s popularity alone has helped open minds. The lessons I have learned from it about using humour as a persuasive tool have stuck with me.

If nothing else, I aim to strike a balance with this blog. To write about history that interests me, and hopefully you, but to do so in a way that does justice to the absurdity of life.

And the absurdity of 10 m diving platforms.