Martine Brant on The Devil's Whore
Lud, I'm obsessed - frankly Wednesday is just too far away. Anyway, I found this little article by Martine Brant (co-creator of The Devil's Whore) on theguardianonline about taking liberties with historical fact when it comes to writing a period drama. I thought she was absolutely spot on - good drama, even if the facts are touch and go will nearly always inspire viewers to go out and read about the real people behind the history.
Also interestingly, she says that a woman called Lady Ann Fanshawe and her memoirs inspired much of Angelica's character. A lot of people have been quoting 'The Wicked Lady' as sole inspiration for Angelica.
'I took liberties with the Devil's Whore...'
Co-creator Martine Brant says there's no harm in using a heart-throb to inspire a love of history (from The Guardian Online)
'Why are we doing the Russian Revolution and not our Civil War?' This was my teenage daughter Miranda, coming home from school the day after the first episode of our drama serial, The Devil's Whore. All her friends were raving about it, she said; they were downloading it on the internet, cancelling Saturday sleepovers to watch the repeat, even trying to locate battlefield sites - not easy since there are few memorials to this heroic and tragic struggle in which so many of this country's ideals were forged and liberties won.
Word came back from her sister Cressy of friends on Facebook gripped by pity and terror and rushing to google Cromwell, Sexby and Rainsborough. I began to realise that they were imbibing history while being swept along by a story of love and adventure. They were learning the history through living the story.
This came as a relief, for we'd had to take liberties with the history to make our drama and have raised questions as a result. When Peter Flannery and I set out to create a saga around this crucial moment in our nation's history - the social order thrown into turmoil, the great issues of honour, justice, truth and freedom from tyranny debated and fought over - we immediately confronted the tension between the demands of strict historical fact and the selectivity necessary to tell a compelling story.
Rigorous academic historians might resist any imaginative invention at all, but creative reconstruction is the essence of drama. Portrayal need not be betrayal. Stories can never precisely mimic actual life; they follow an imaginative arc that condenses or expands time and events. Those who look for unmediated authenticity in their drama should stick to reality TV.
Witnessing my children struggling with their history homework, I am often struck by the simple truth that we have lost the story in history. As Diane Purkiss argues in The English Civil War: A People's History, if the past is not to be dry, it must live.
Too many professional historians consider the focus on character and any tendency towards the human approach as amateurish, sidelining the notion that history should offer insight into human nature. But for history to come alive, it must be humanised and that means embracing character and narrative. And that is the very stuff of drama.
But for the drama to work, even a peopled history is not enough. We took the fabric of fact and wove fiction into it. The only purely invented character is our heroine, Angelica Fanshawe, partly inspired by her namesake, Lady Ann Fanshawe, a notable diarist of the period and our family ancestor. Airbrushed into events, Angelica can go everywhere, be Everywoman. Through her eyes, we see the world turned upside down and we feel and experience the tumult through her encounters with actual historical characters.
Her journey spans the court of Charles I and that of Oliver Cromwell, by way of Wytham Woods, Newgate jail and the gallows at Tyburn. But to make a taut and coherent narrative within the constraints of time and budget and to create a compelling and accessible story, we had to leave out many major figures and events, while trying to do justice to the very complex historical reality.
It seems to have worked. Amelia, my eldest daughter, said many of her friends were asking why, if this was the English Revolution, we don't mark it, why there's no public holiday on 30 January, the day when Parliament cut off Charles I's head?
Kids in America get the day off school on 4 July; the French and Russians celebrate their revolutions with public holidays and parades. In England, you'll perhaps see a handful collecting under Cromwell's statue outside Parliament on 3 September and a bunch of devotees gathering in Burford on Levellers Day.
The memory of our revolution is all but erased; after all, we live under a restored monarchy. Should it matter that we neglect this seminal period in our country's formation? We have only to consider the arrest of Damian Green to see how alive and relevant these issues are today. Is that not as tyrannical a breach of parliamentary privilege as when Charles I stormed into Parliament demanding the five 'traitors' be surrendered?
Sensing the excitement among my children's friends, I love the thought that our show is firing real interest in our forebears, the men and women who fought and died questioning authority, striving to make the world a better place and whose legacy of liberties and rights we enjoy today.
If dreams of going into the woods with John Simm (Sexby), or being swept away by Michael Fassbender (Rainsborough), or fighting for justice and liberty alongside Dominic West (Cromwell) manage to inspire any of them to become actively engaged in our politics or lift a book by Tristram Hunt or Blair Worden, then how right to cover the pill of history with the sugar of drama.
EDIT - Aha! I've found an interview with Peter Flannery and John Simm talking about the Devil's Whore on BBC Breakfast News, courtesy of Youtube :) Not much that we don't know already I think... they talk quite a bit about Sexby - thought someone might like to watch.
Also interestingly, she says that a woman called Lady Ann Fanshawe and her memoirs inspired much of Angelica's character. A lot of people have been quoting 'The Wicked Lady' as sole inspiration for Angelica.
'I took liberties with the Devil's Whore...'
Co-creator Martine Brant says there's no harm in using a heart-throb to inspire a love of history (from The Guardian Online)
'Why are we doing the Russian Revolution and not our Civil War?' This was my teenage daughter Miranda, coming home from school the day after the first episode of our drama serial, The Devil's Whore. All her friends were raving about it, she said; they were downloading it on the internet, cancelling Saturday sleepovers to watch the repeat, even trying to locate battlefield sites - not easy since there are few memorials to this heroic and tragic struggle in which so many of this country's ideals were forged and liberties won.
Word came back from her sister Cressy of friends on Facebook gripped by pity and terror and rushing to google Cromwell, Sexby and Rainsborough. I began to realise that they were imbibing history while being swept along by a story of love and adventure. They were learning the history through living the story.
This came as a relief, for we'd had to take liberties with the history to make our drama and have raised questions as a result. When Peter Flannery and I set out to create a saga around this crucial moment in our nation's history - the social order thrown into turmoil, the great issues of honour, justice, truth and freedom from tyranny debated and fought over - we immediately confronted the tension between the demands of strict historical fact and the selectivity necessary to tell a compelling story.
Rigorous academic historians might resist any imaginative invention at all, but creative reconstruction is the essence of drama. Portrayal need not be betrayal. Stories can never precisely mimic actual life; they follow an imaginative arc that condenses or expands time and events. Those who look for unmediated authenticity in their drama should stick to reality TV.
Witnessing my children struggling with their history homework, I am often struck by the simple truth that we have lost the story in history. As Diane Purkiss argues in The English Civil War: A People's History, if the past is not to be dry, it must live.
Too many professional historians consider the focus on character and any tendency towards the human approach as amateurish, sidelining the notion that history should offer insight into human nature. But for history to come alive, it must be humanised and that means embracing character and narrative. And that is the very stuff of drama.
But for the drama to work, even a peopled history is not enough. We took the fabric of fact and wove fiction into it. The only purely invented character is our heroine, Angelica Fanshawe, partly inspired by her namesake, Lady Ann Fanshawe, a notable diarist of the period and our family ancestor. Airbrushed into events, Angelica can go everywhere, be Everywoman. Through her eyes, we see the world turned upside down and we feel and experience the tumult through her encounters with actual historical characters.
Her journey spans the court of Charles I and that of Oliver Cromwell, by way of Wytham Woods, Newgate jail and the gallows at Tyburn. But to make a taut and coherent narrative within the constraints of time and budget and to create a compelling and accessible story, we had to leave out many major figures and events, while trying to do justice to the very complex historical reality.
It seems to have worked. Amelia, my eldest daughter, said many of her friends were asking why, if this was the English Revolution, we don't mark it, why there's no public holiday on 30 January, the day when Parliament cut off Charles I's head?
Kids in America get the day off school on 4 July; the French and Russians celebrate their revolutions with public holidays and parades. In England, you'll perhaps see a handful collecting under Cromwell's statue outside Parliament on 3 September and a bunch of devotees gathering in Burford on Levellers Day.
The memory of our revolution is all but erased; after all, we live under a restored monarchy. Should it matter that we neglect this seminal period in our country's formation? We have only to consider the arrest of Damian Green to see how alive and relevant these issues are today. Is that not as tyrannical a breach of parliamentary privilege as when Charles I stormed into Parliament demanding the five 'traitors' be surrendered?
Sensing the excitement among my children's friends, I love the thought that our show is firing real interest in our forebears, the men and women who fought and died questioning authority, striving to make the world a better place and whose legacy of liberties and rights we enjoy today.
If dreams of going into the woods with John Simm (Sexby), or being swept away by Michael Fassbender (Rainsborough), or fighting for justice and liberty alongside Dominic West (Cromwell) manage to inspire any of them to become actively engaged in our politics or lift a book by Tristram Hunt or Blair Worden, then how right to cover the pill of history with the sugar of drama.
EDIT - Aha! I've found an interview with Peter Flannery and John Simm talking about the Devil's Whore on BBC Breakfast News, courtesy of Youtube :) Not much that we don't know already I think... they talk quite a bit about Sexby - thought someone might like to watch.