Most genre fans who know about the 2012 BBC television film series The Hollow Crown know it because of its big name cast: Jeremy Irons, Tom Hiddleston, John Hurt, Patrick Stewart, Ben Whishaw (Cloud Atlas and Skyfall Bond’s new Q) and Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey). And now that series 2 has signed Benedict Cumberbatch and Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville, the fan squeal almost threatens to drown out the writer credit: Shakespeare.
There have been many discussions of how Netflix, Tivo and their ilk have transformed TV consumption, production and money flow, but I spent the last year watching a pile of different (filmed and live) versions of Shakespeare’s Richard/Henry sequence in order to focus in on how the Netflix era has directly impacted, of all things, our interpretations of Shakespeare, and what that tells us about historical and fantasy TV in general.
More than once I’ve heard a friend answer “What is The Hollow Crown?” by saying, “The BBC wanted to capitalize on Game of Thrones so did Game of Thrones-style versions of the Shakespeare Henry sequence, since GoT is basically the Wars of the Roses anyway.” This is only half true, since The Hollow Crown was already contracted in 2010, before Season 1 of Game of Thrones aired in 2011 and demonstrated just how big a hit fractious feudal infighting could be. Rather, both the Game of Thrones TV adaptation and The Hollow Crown are, like the two Borgia TV series that came out in 2012, reactions to the previous successes of big historical dramas like The Tudors and HBO’s Rome. TV audiences have long loved historical pieces, but this particular recipe of the long, ongoing grand political drama with corrupt monarchs, rival noble houses, doom for the virtuous, and a hefty dose of war and sex is new, or at least newly practical, for two key reasons.

The first enabling factor is budget. In recent years, a combination of special effects getting cheaper and profits growing (as the streamlining of international rebroadcasting means shows can reliably count on foreign sales to help make back costs) means that today’s historical dramas can depict epic vistas, long rows of fully-costumed soldiers, and even grand battling hordes undreamt of by their predecessors like I Claudius (1976), which, for all its brilliance, had to do the grand gladiatorial displays entirely off-screen by just showing the faces of actors pretending to watch them.

The other big change is the new wave of consumption tools: Netflix, TiVo, on-demand, DVD boxsets, streaming services; these make it easier than ever to binge an entire show in a short time span, and eliminate the risk of missing an episode and having no way to catch up. This has made it infinitely more practical for studios to abandon the episodic reset button and produce long, ongoing plotlines, since they don’t have to worry about losing viewers who miss one installment. While this has culminated with direct-to-Netflix series like the American House of Cards remake, designed to be binge-watched without any serialization, the changeover has been developing for a long time—its first rumblings appeared in the era of VHS home recording, when Twin Peaks set records for being recorded en mass by its fans, demonstrating how new technology could give audiences new power over the when of watching.
We can see the direct effects of all this change by focusing on Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Henriad is his sequence of consecutive historical plays, which, if performed together, tell a continuous narrative from about 1397 to 1485, starting with the drama around the overthrow of Richard II, then running through exciting rebellions in Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, then Henry V’s invasion of France taking us to 1420, and if you add on the three parts of Henry VI you gain the Wars of the Roses, Joan of Arc, witchcraft, and, as the cherry on top, the juicy villainy of Shakespeare’s version of Richard III. The period and events are perfect for our current style of historical drama, complete with the frequent dramatic deaths of major characters, and Shakespeare provides about 18 hours of prefabricated scripts to work from, complete with guaranteed excellent dialog and efficient exposition. Shakespeare’s ability to feed the modern TV appetite for crowns and thrones had already been proved by The Tudors which mixed the best selections from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII with lots of original material, filling in the juicy parts which Shakespeare was too cautious to mention in front of said Henry’s successors. Using the eight Henriad plays provided The Hollow Crown series with even more plot and even less need to supplement it.

But this is not the first time the BBC has filmed Shakespeare’s Henriad for TV serialization, it’s actually the third, and that’s what makes it such a great opportunity to look at how the Netflix era has changed TV historical dramas. In 1960 the BBC produced An Age of Kings, which, over thirteen hour-long episodes, covers precisely the same sequence, Richard II to Richard III with all the Henry action in between, featuring stars of the day including Robert Hardy, Tom Fleming, Mary Morris and a very young Sean Connery.

Then from 1978 to 1985, in the wake of such exciting advances as color, the BBC Shakespeare Collection project filmed every surviving Shakespeare play, and once again linked the Henriad together with a continuous cast and relevant clips of flashbacks from later plays to earlier, and stars including Anthony Quayle and Derek Jacobi. Screening all three versions side-by-side provides a mini-history of historical TV dramas and the evolving viewer tastes they aim to satisfy. And adding in other versions—the Henry Vs done by Laurence Olivier (1944) and Kenneth Branagh (1989) and the recent on-stage productions of Henry IV done by the Globe (available on DVD) and Royal Shakespeare Company (still playing live)—provides even more snapshots.

Aesthetic differences are perhaps the most obvious. The earlier filmed and current staged versions went with traditional brightly colored livery, especially in the battle sequences where recognizing coats of arms makes it easier to tell armored nobles apart, while The Hollow Crown opted instead for lots of leather, dark colors and visible armor, the sorts of costumes we’re used to from action flicks and fantasy covers.

Dark, quasi-fantasy costuming is a choice that flirts complexly with the term ‘anachronism’ since every garment depicted is ‘period’ in that would plausibly have existed at the time, but the costumers have opted for all the ones that fit our post-Matrix-movies cool aesthetic and against other more plausible designs which don’t. Certainly any given noble in Henry IV might choose to leave off his brightly colored tunic in battle, or wear all black at Court, but putting them all in bare plate and black is an active choice, like a director making every single businessman at a board meeting wear the same color necktie. Anyone watching the History Channel’s Vikings series is similarly enjoying the costumers’ decision to have everyone in iron and leather instead of the bright orange cloaks and stripey trousers that are more probable for the period, but just don’t feel cool.

It’s taste. We get weirded out when we see ancient Roman white marble statues and temples painted garish colors—the way research now tells us they once were—and we want the Middle Ages to be brown and black and deep blood red, rather than the brilliant saturated colors that medieval people loved. And frankly, I sympathize with both impulses. After all, it’s delightful seeing really well-researched costumes, but I also get a thrill down my spine when a crew of fantastic-looking medieval warriors strides over a hill.
Here, then, compare the BBC Shakespeare and Hollow Crown costumes for kings Henry IV and Henry V, and think about how both versions feel period and awesome in totally different ways. The BBC Shakespeare is all costly princely fabrics, elaborate sleeves and regal jewelry, while the Hollow Crown gives us black and blood red, grim medieval furs, cool fingerless gloves and lots of leather. (Keep in mind that the BBC Shakespeare images are faded, so would look much brighter if they were cleaned up; Hollow Crown is dark on purpose.)




Did wide, studded leather belts and tightly-tailored leather shirts like that exist at the time? Sure. Would Henry have worn one instead of showing off his wealth with gold and giant fur-lined brocade sleeves? Probably not, but the leather tunic is still effective in a different, successful and immersive way.
Another big difference over time is in how much screen time is given to non-dialog. The battle scenes and duels have always been a thrilling centerpiece of Shakespeare’s historicals. In both the films and the live stage versions, rendering of the battle scenes have gotten more ambitious over time, with long elaborate duels and stunts like dual-wielding swords, and the more recent the production the more the director tends to carve out space for action sequences, often at the expense of cutting dialog. When the magic of film makes it possible, movies add impressive sets, roaring crowds and real explosions, and The Hollow Crown also takes its time with setting scenes, vistas of countryside, watching characters travel by horseback, pulling the ultimate “show don’t tell” by giving the viewer everything Shakespeare couldn’t give those seated in the Globe. And what film can do, high-tech modern stages can often approximate. Below, the magic of stagecraft as mist and shadow make Hotspur’s charge in Henry IV Part 1 cinematically extravagant even live on stage at the Royal Shakespeare Company performance in Stratford (about to play in London too). Note again how not-colorful it is:
The addition of long, scene-setting visuals in the Hollow Crown makes the whole thing feel much more like an historical epic than any of the earlier filmed versions, despite having literally the same content. While the earlier TV versions jumped as quickly as possible from scene to scene in order to cram every syllable of dialog they could into limited air time (and working in an era when every inch of film shot was a bite out of the BBC’s budget) the modern big budget digital production has the leisure to establish a scene, and make it genuinely easier to keep events and places straight. For example, in The Hollow Crown version of Richard II we actually see the banished Henry Bolingbroke return to England and be received by Northumberland, an event which Shakespeare has happen off-stage, but remains a giant plot point throughout Henry IV 1 & 2, so the whole long-term plot of the sequence is easier to follow and feels better set up when we see this dialog-free extra scene.
Another happy change is that The Hollow Crown version has done an extraordinary job treating the homosexual undertones which have always been present in Richard II, but which were hidden as much as possible by many earlier directors, including the 1960 and 1980s versions. Richard through the Hollow Crown is costumed in gold or white, a brightness which at once feels appropriately opulent and effeminate, and in contrast makes the literally black days of his usurping successor Henry feel extra stark and grim. Even his crown is more colorful and ornamented, with gems and floral decoration. In addition to being less homophobic than most of its predecessors, The Hollow Crown, like all the recent adaptions, tones down the racist elements of Shakespeare’s period humor, making the Irish, Welsh and French characters more positive (though in Henry V it was surreally ironic to see The Hollow Crown replace Shakespeare’s period racism by killing off the only black guy).
But there is a more central challenge in turning Shakespeare’s Henriad into something which will genuinely please modern Netflix audiences—a broad, structural challenge most clearly visible if we narrow in on Henry IV Parts 1 and 2.
What is Henry IV Actually About?
Even with the same text, editing and direction can change these stories more than you might imagine. If you showed different versions of Henry IV to people who’d never seen it and asked them to write plot summaries you’d think they’d seen completely different plays. A look at the DVD covers makes this crystal clear:
What are these plays about, the prince, the tavern or the king? The structure of Henry IV makes it particularly easy for the director to change the answer, since for much of both plays the action literally alternates between funny scenes at the tavern, with Prince Hal and his old friend Falstaff playing drunken pranks, and scenes of war and politics with King Henry IV facing bold rebels. The two halves are united by the process of the young prince gradually facing up to his political destiny, but the director can completely change which half seems to be the thrust of it by deciding which scenes to do quickly and which to do slowly, which to trim and which to extend with music or dance or horse chases or battle drama.
We know that in Shakespeare’s day the big hit was Prince Hal’s funny friend Falstaff, who was so popular in Part 1 that Shakespeare added a ton more (completely gratuitous) scenes with him in Part 2 plus wrote the entire comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor just to give us more Falstaff—pandering to one’s fans is not a modern invention! But the modern audience of The Hollow Crown is in this for the high politics dynastic warfare epic, so the director has made the shockingly radical decision to give us a version of Henry IV which actually seems to be about King Henry IV.
Below on the left, Prince Hal smirks at Falstaff’s antics in the Globe production of Henry IV (portrayed by Jamie Parker and Roger Allam) while on the right, Hal is being told off by his father, King Henry IV in The Hollow Crown (Tom Hiddleston and Jeremy Irons). Both scenes appear in both versions of the play, but guess which is extended and which trimmed?
Only part of this shift comes from directors actually cutting lines, though The Hollow Crown, like its 1960 Age of Kings predecessor, does trim the silly scenes and extend the serious. What makes focus feel so different is the emotion and body language behind an actor’s delivery, which can make a line have a completely different meaning. For anyone who wants an amazing quick demo of this, check out two short videos Mercator A and Mercator B, created by an NEH Workshop on Roman Comedy, demonstrating how the same short scene from Plautus’s ancient play feels completely different without changing a word—the jealous wife’s body language is altered. (The hard-core can also watch the scene in Latin where body language alone tells all).
For me, in Henry IV, the centerpiece issue is how any given director chooses to present Falstaff, the vice-ridden, drunken, witty, thieving, lecherous, eloquent old knight with whom our young trickster Prince Hal plays away his youthful hours. The crux of this is the finale of Henry IV part 2 when (415-year-old spoiler warning) Prince Hal becomes King Henry V and, rather than taking Falstaff to court as one of his favorites, suddenly banishes Falstaff and all the immoral companions of his youth. This decision wins Henry the respect of his nobles and subjects, but breaks Falstaff’s heart and hopes, resulting in the old knight’s death. How Falstaff and Henry’s nobles react is locked in by Shakespeare’s script, but it’s up to the director and the actors to determine how the audience will react—by deciding how to present Falstaff, Prince Hal and their relationship to the audience throughout the four-plus hours leading up to Hal’s decision.
And here I must introduce the great invisible adversary faced by all these adaptations, film and stage alike: John Locke. What does John Locke have to do with how much we like Falstaff? The answer is that his 1689 essay on human understanding radically changed how we think about human psychology, and in turn how we think about character progression, and plausibility.
Everyone gets thrown out of a story when something we consider deeply implausible happens. It could be an unsuccessful deus ex machina (just when all hope was lost a volcano suddenly opened up under the villain’s feet!), or a glaring anachronism (and then Cleopatra pulled out her musket…), but often it’s an implausible character action, a point at which the reader simply doesn’t feel it’s in character for Character X to make Decision Y. At best it is something we can shrug off, but at worst it can throw us completely, or feel like a betrayal by the character or the author.
This issue of what decisions are “in character” or plausible gets trickier when we look at material written in earlier historical periods because, in the past, people had different ideas about human psychology. What actions were plausible and implausible were different. This is not just a question of customs and cultural differences—we are all aware that different eras had different cultural mores, and we’re ready for it, even if we might be a bit thrown by when characters in classic works voice period sexist, racist, or other alienatingly un-modern cultural views.
I’m discussing something different, a fundamental difference in how we think human minds work, and, above all, how we think they develop. For example, the anti-love-at-first-sight messages of Disney’s Brave and Frozen, represent (among other things) the broader social attitude that we don’t find it plausible anymore for the prince and princess fall in love after knowing each other for five minutes (also a tricky issue for modern performances of the princess-wooing scene in Henry V). And this is where the real barrier between us and contentedly enjoying Shakespeare is John Locke’s 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
When you look at pre-Locke European literature, and also at a lot of pre-Locke scientific literature about the human mind and psyche, the big focus tends to be on inborn character and character flaws, and attempts to overcome them. The model is that a human is born with a prefab character or set of propensities, and a prefab palette of virtues and vices, which will either make the person fail or be triumphantly overcome. We see this all over: Plato’s claim that the majority of human souls are irredeemably dominated by base appetites or passions but a few have the ability to work hard and put Reason in charge; the “science” of physiognomy which strove for centuries to figure out the personality from the inborn structure of a person’s face and head; philosophers from Aristotle and Seneca to Augustine to Aquinas talking about how the best way to become virtuous is to identify your flaws and overcome them through rote repetition. We also see it all over pre-modern fiction, from the Iliad where we watch Achilles wrestle with his great flaw anger, to noble Lancelot marred by his weakness to love, to the Inferno where Dante’s journey helps him overcome his tendency toward sins of the she-wolf, to Shakespeare.

John Locke, then, was one linchpin moment in a big change in how we think about psychology (aided by others like Descartes on one end and Rousseau and Freud on the other). This transformation led to a rejection of old ideas of inborn character and character flaws, and replaced them with Locke’s famous tabula rasa idea, that people are born inherently blank, and growing up is a process of forming and creating one’s character based on experiences rather than watching a prefabricated inborn personality working forward to its conclusion. This new idea became extremely widespread in Europe with amazing speed (thanks to the printing press and the Enlightenment) and resulted in a remarkably quick change in how people thought people thought.
This was in turn reflected in fiction, and created a new sense of how character progression should work. The post-Locke audience (whether reading Austen, Dickens, Asimov or Marvel Comics) expects to watch a character develop and acquire a personality over time, gaining new attributes, growing and transforming with new experiences. If the character has deep flaws, we expect them to be the result of experiences, traumas, betrayals, disasters, a spoiled childhood, something. We generally aren’t satisfied if the villain is evil because she or he was born that way, and we love it when an author successfully sets up a beloved character’s great moment of failure or weakness by showing us the earlier experience which led to it. This is an oversimplification, of course, but the gist of it gets at the issues as they relate to Shakespeare’s reception today.
Writing circa 1600, Shakespeare is about as modern as a European author gets while still writing pre-Locke. This puts him in a particularly difficult position when it comes to getting modern audiences to accept his characters’ actions as plausible. Even in Romeo and Juliet directors hard work to get the modern reader to accept love so intense and so instant, and Hamlet’s psychology is an endless and elaborate puzzle. Hal’s betrayal of Falstaff is one of the very hardest cases of this. The audience has just spent five hours bonding with the hilarious Falstaff, and now Hal is going to betray and destroy him. But we then have to spend another entire play watching Hal, so we need to still like Hal after he casts out Falstaff. Thus, the performance needs to show us motivations for Hal’s action which we can understand, sympathize with, respect, and generally accept.

Shakespeare offers us plenty of forewarning of Hal’s choice, but, unfortunately for the modern director, it’s forewarning that fits very well with the pre-Locke fixed-personality-with-character-flaw idea of psychological plausibility, but much less well with the post-Locke developmental model. At the beginning of Henry IV Part 1, just after our first fun tavern scene, Hal gives a speech in which he point blank states that he is being raucous and disreputable on purpose to make people think he will be a bad king, so that when later on he changes and is good and virtuous his virtues will seem brighter and more amazing given the low expectations everyone had, and he will thus command obedience and awe more easily. His intention to throw away Falstaff and his other friends is set from the beginning.
Later in the same play, when Hal and Falstaff are playing around imitating Hal’s father King Henry, Hal-as-Henry hears Falstaff make a speech begging not to be banished, and Hal says to his face “I will” making his ultimate intent clear to the audience if not necessarily to Falstaff. And in both Part 1 and Part 2 Hal’s interactions with Falstaff are mixed with occasional criticisms of Falstaff, and self-reproachful comments that he should not be wasting his time at taverns, while Falstaff too sometimes complains of his own vices and says he intends to repent.
The pre-Locke psychological model makes all this fit together very neatly: Hal was born good and virtuous but with a weakness for playfulness and trickery, but he manages to turn that inborn vice into a virtue by using it to enhance his own reputation, unite his people, and later (in Henry V) to expose traitors. His rejection of Falstaff is nobility’s triumph over vice, and the good Shakespearian audience member, who has sat through umpteen Lenten sermons and passion plays, knows to respect it as the mark of a good king, who may not be as fun as a drunken prince, but will do England good. This did not prevent Henry V from being much less popular in its opening run than the earlier Falstaff-infused installments of the Henriad, but it did make sense.

The developmental model makes all this much trickier. If Hal really has decided from the very beginning to string Falstaff along and then betray and destroy him without any word of warning, it’s hard for Hal not to come across as cruel and manipulative, and it’s also hard for a modern audience to accept a prince who was upright and virtuous the whole time but ran around being raucous in taverns for years just because… of… what? It is here that the individual actors’ and directors’ choices make an enormous difference, both in how they present Hal’s decision and how appealing they make Falstaff.
Falstaff can be (as he is in the recent Globe and Royal Shakespeare Company productions) show-stoppingly, stage-stealingly hilarious, delivering all his absurd and nonsensical jests with brilliant comic timing, so you’re almost eager for the battles to be over so you can have more Falstaff. Or he can be (as he is in the 1960 Age of Kings) a conversational tool for Prince Hal designed to show off our beloved prince’s wit and delightfulness, cutting many of Falstaff’s lines to minimize how much the audience bonds with him and make as much room as possible for the long-term protagonist. Or, as in The Hollow Crown, he can be portrayed as a remarkably unappealing and lecherous old man who mutters and rambles nonsense jokes that are too obscure to even be funny, so you spend your time wondering why Hal is wasting his time with this guy. This is not a difference of acting skill but of deliberate choice, highlighting the moments at which Hal is critical of Falstaff (or Falstaff is critical of himself) and racing through the jests instead of stringing them out, focusing the play (and the audience’s attention) more on Hal’s choices and less on Falstaff’s jokes.
All these productions are struggling with the same problem, how to make Henry’s actions plausible and acceptable to audiences who are judging him developmentally instead of as a fixed character struggling to make a virtue out of his inborn flaw. The hardest part is his speech at the beginning about how he is delaying his reformation deliberately. Without that we could easily see him growing gradually more disillusioned with Falstaff, especially if we lengthen the time spent on the critical sections more as the plays advance to make it seem as if he’s gradually coming to see Falstaff’s flaws (though he does in fact criticize Falstaff throughout). But that isn’t possible after the opening statement “I’ll so offend to make offense a skill/ redeeming time when men think least I will.”
All take different approaches to the dismissal scene, exposing their different long-term strategies.
The 1960 Age of Kings version starts from the very beginning with Hal seeming annoyed and cranky at Falstaff, wincing at his stink and suffering a headache talking to him, while Falstaff’s lines are funny but fast and babbled with more camera time on Hal’s silent reactions than on Falstaff’s wit. Thus when the speech comes we are content to see this fun and charming young prince criticize and propose to throw aside his unpleasant companions, and if his declaration that he intends to “falsify men’s hopes” make us uncomfortable, the director helps by making exciting war drums and battle trumpets start up when he gets toward the phrase “make offense a skill,” reminding us that we won’t get England’s triumph at Agincourt without Hal’s good planning now.
The 1970s BBC Shakespeare Collection version is less confident in our willingness to accept a manipulative Hal. It very cleverly has him deliver the speech slowly with a sense of awe and discovery, to himself rather than to the audience, as if his wildness was genuine until this moment and he has only just now thought of how to “make offense a skill” and turn his flaw into a virtue. This works very well for the developmental model, as if Falstaff’s grossness in the preceding scene was a turning point, and we’ve just seen the first step of Hal’s progression toward the great king he will become. This Hal will be consistent with his later playful tricksterish impulses in Henry V, but won’t seem two-faced or cruel for how he used Falstaff.

The Hollow Crown takes an even heavier hand in reshaping this scene and its meaning entirely. It presents an even more unappealing Falstaff, cutting almost all his jokes, instead showing him lying beside (and being mean to) a prostitute, pissing in a pot, and struggling to put on his own boots since he’s so lazy, fat, and out of shape (the fat jokes are original to the text and also awkward to handle in the modern day). Visual cuts are also used to alter the scene more. Rather than having us watch a lengthy scene of Hal at the tavern, we cut actively back-and-forth between the tavern and the council scene with King Henry IV which normally precedes it, juxtaposing prince and king, peace and war.
The tavern scene is also framed, on the front end and back, with grand establishing shots undreamt of by earlier or stage budgets, in which we see the town streets outside the inn, occupied dozens of filthy peasants and goats, with blood from the butcher’s stall mixing in the mud. Hal’s speech, then, is delivered as a melancholy voice-over as he surveys the wretched state of his future subjects, and its beginning “I know you all, and will a while uphold/ the unyoked humor of your idleness…” isn’t about Falstaff and company at all, but the general filthy and squalor-dwelling population of London.

Thinking of the plays as a continuous series now, it was these people’s wickedness, ingratitude, and scorn that caused the overthrow of Richard II and the rebellions which threaten Henry IV. It is they whom Hal must win over if he is to ensure any peace for England when he becomes king. The viewer’s sympathy is entirely with Hal, seeing the tattered and war-torn state of England and endorsing his albeit tricksterly plan for its recovery, and we have not a jot of regret at the overthrow of Falstaff who is an unappealing and unrepentant old degenerate whom we are glad to see Henry use as a tool for England’s salvation. The tavern scenes are now about politics too, and the modern TV consumer, who probably popped in the DVD hoping for war and politics rather than clowns, may well prefer it that way.

The Hollow Crown’s solution to the Falstaff problem, which we could also call the Hal’s development problem, is only possible thanks to how thoroughly the director has stepped back from the text to concentrate on the overall historical epic. As someone who loves a good Shakespearean clown, I quite missed the lively Falstaff I was used to when I first watched this version, but it certainly made the war easier to understand than usual, and it also made me care more about Henry IV than I ever had before. Thus, while funnier productions of the Henriad will remain my favorites, I quite look forward to seeing what the Hollow Crown team will do with the three parts of Henry VI, which have always been ranked among Shakespeare’s weakest plays, but have so many battles and council scenes that direction oriented toward epic will likely make them shine.
Both earlier TV versions of the Henriad were, like the stage productions and stand-alone films, still more about presenting Shakespeare’s text than they were about the histories surrounding England’s wars and kings. The Hollow Crown seems to use Shakespeare’s script as a tool, with the battles and overall narrative as its focus—this different mode of production creates characters that are more comfortable and “plausible” in the eyes of modern TV viewers, especially those used to watching any number of historical and historical-fantasy dramas like The Tudors, The Borgias, Rome, and Game of Thrones. Such an adaptation of Shakespeare has new and interesting potential.
In fact, this points us at one of the great assets that the Game of Thrones TV series enjoys compared to the non-fantasy historicals: its characters’ actions and motivations were plotted by someone influenced by a modern sense of developmental psychology and character consistency. George R.R. Martin’s books have the leisure of exposition and character point-of-view to directly highlight character’s thoughts and motives. Even the TV series, which has stripped away any inner monologuing, is still relateable because the audience shares the author’s general understanding of character and human behavior.
Conversely, when we look at Rome or The Borgias or I Claudius, the surviving primary sources were all written by people who do not share our views on human development and personality, so their accounts of why Henry VIII executed Anne Boelyn, or why Emperor Claudius married the obviously wicked Agrippinill won’t satisfy modern assumptions about what is plausible. Directors of these historical dramas have had to create their own original interpretations of historical figures’ actions, working to make them feel relatable and realistic to today’s audiences.
So while these Netflix binges and big budgets are bringing us more long, ongoing historical dramas (where we actually get to see the battle scenes!), they are also making it harder for modern TV audiences to accept watching Shakespeare straight. We are now used to historical dramas that include modern psychology and character motivations, ones we can accept as plausible and familiar if not sympathetic, just as we’re used to seeing kings and Vikings in black and leather instead of puffy sleeves and stripes. Shakespeare’s text doesn’t give us comfortable motivations like that, not without the extreme directorial intervention seen in The Hollow Crown.
If we want to play the Henriad straight, as the recent live Globe Theater and Royal Shakespeare Company productions did, letting the audience fall in love with a charming and lively Falstaff will lead to shock and grief at his fall. The live stage productions make the audience feel a little better by having Falstaff come back for his curtain call all smiling and safe, but TV versions can’t offer such a consolation if they choose to let us face the full brunt of the shock a modern person faces when we give ourselves into the power of pre-modern writers. (If you ever want to experience true historico-mental whiplash I dare you to watch to the end of the courageously authentic new Globe Taming of the Shrew.)
In 1960 and 1980, when comparatively few long, continuous historical shows were on, and more of them were heavily based on historical sources with less addition of innovative new motives, perhaps it was easier for the original audiences of Age of Kings and the BBC Shakespeare Collection to accept what Hal does to Falstaff, just as it was easier for them to accept Henry IV’s froofy hat and Livia pretending to watch off-screen gladiators—something audiences now would definitely not put up with if the BBC tried it again in their new I Claudius remake.
And, of course, our models of psychology themselves have changed since 1960. John Locke’s model of psychology has not reigned unaltered since the seventeenth century, and Freud deserves his due as a large influence on how we think characters should plausibly behave (especially given how common ‘trauma’ and ‘repressed urges’ are as motivations in modern fiction). In addition, discoveries about brain structure and development, our greater understanding of many psychological disorders, and the greater visibility of psychological issues are also more rapidly entering public discourse, which is reflected in the media we consume.
The Henriad productions I’ve talked about provide just a few examples of this changing media landscape. As we continue to talk about technology’s evolving affects on how we create, consume, market, and structure fiction, we should also keep in mind medical, psychological, and philosophical advancements similarly transform how we watch and read, as well as how we shape or reshape stories to suit a modern audience.
Ada Palmer is an historian, who studies primarily the Renaissance, Italy, and the history of philosophy, heresy and freethought. She also studies manga, anime and Japanese pop culture, and has consulted for numerous anime/manga publishers. She writes the blog ExUrbe.com, and composes SF & Mythology-themed music for the a cappella group Sassafrass. Her first novel is forthcoming from Tor in 2015.
Such a long, insightful, and well written blog piece -ah, it’s Ada Palmer. Well, there you go then. I’d urge anyone who enjoyed this to read Ada’s own blog, perhaps starting with her excellent articles about Machiavelli.
Over the summer I saw an excellent version of Henry IV as part of Bard in the Botanics at the botanic gardens in Glasgow. It was pared down to just three actors – one playing Falstaff and the King, one playing Hal, and one who played Hotspur and the king’s councillor and Ned. I loved it, and I was genuinely moved at the end when Falstaff said “I shall be sent for”. He’s a rogue and a coward and a sot and when he’s tasked to raise a company of men he enriches himself by getting the absolute worst rabble imaginable then leads them to their doom and abandons them, but you can’t help but love the dissolute old bugger anyway – at least if he gets a remotely sympathetic director; as Ada’s piece points out there are ways to make him a lot less likeable.
The RSC production makes the psychologically valid choice to have the moment at the end of Part 1, where Falstaff falsely claims to have killed Hotspur, and Hal’s acceptance of that, be total absolute and utter payment for all debt Hal owes Falstaff such that anything he asks for after that is underserved. And that completely worked for me without making me dislike Hal for his repudiation at the end of Part 2.
Age of Kings’s tricky manipulative Hal also works for me — he’s not necessarily likeable, but he’s real and consistent across all three plays, from tricking people into thinking he’s worse than he is, to disguising himself and tricking people into glove-trades on the night before Agincourt.
Great essay, thank you.
Changing aesthetics over time is fascinating — I’ve seen it happen in historical recreation groups, where people are ostensibly recreating fixed historical examples. But there’s still a sense of fashion, of things coming in and out of style, and modern aesthetics playing a role in what people wear.
“When the magic of film makes it possible, movies add impressive sets, roaring crowds and real explosions…”
So essentially now this cockpit can hold the vasty fields of France?
Wow, what a brilliant article. The most intelligent and enjoyable I’ve read in a long time. While reading about John Locke’s influence on the way character development is handled I actually learned something from the internet other than movie release dates!
Hey Tor! Ask Ada to do a series reviewing Shakespeare film adaptations! Throne of Blood! Ran! Scotland, PA! Prospero’s Books! Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing! Fiennes’ Coriolanus (which I’m reading right now)! I would love to read more of her insights into the interpretation of Shakespeare’s text to film. PLEASE!
I actually didn’t find Simon Russell Beale’s Falstaff unsympathetic at all, I found him quite tragic. The scene in the tavern where Hal makes clear that he intends to banish Falstaff had me near tears. I’m not quite sure what the author found so offensive about him.
The downside of the fantasy influence on the Hollow Crown was that, when the time came to do the Battle of Agincourt, they turned it into a generic fantasy slugfest in which the outnumbered English charge out onto open ground to meet the French (on foot!?) who are charging the other way to meet them, with not an archer in sight.
The Olivier Henry may have been a piece of World War II propaganda, but the battle was more historically accurate.
This article made my day. I second the request for Shakespeare reviews. These crossover interests are what make Tor.com worth reading daily.
Interesting analysis! I was glad to see an article about Shakespeare and hope to see the rest of The Hollow Crown series analyzed here.
It was fun to see pics of actors seen in other shows, including people from Cranford (Judi Dench and Tom Hiddleston), the Potter films (Robert Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, and Julie Walters), and Paul Freeman (The Hollow Crown: Henry V and Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Although Richard III starts out mwa-ha-ha from the starting monologue, it does seem to me to imply he might have got that way from a life of exclusion for his disability, rather than from innate character set before birth.
Scavenger Monk, yes, the Prologue to Henry V is absolutely Shakespeare lamenting the lack of a proper budget.
For those who’d like to see more Shakespeare talk critiquing recent media productions, I can recommend YouTube video blogger Cassius614 and her series “The Lean and Hungry Look”, together with her contributions to the group blog ExeuntPursuedByABear.
PS I’d be grateful for any advice how I can recover my original account, when I–foolishly, I know–didn’t update the password recovery email address when the email address stopped being mine.
@@@@@ 9 – Moderator here. Please email webmaster@@@@@tor.com and we’ll try to help you out.
Wonderful essay! It gave me a lot to think about, esp. concerning the Shakespearean vs. modern interpretation of character motivations.
I was also quite interested in the comments costume in modern adaptations. I’d always thought of the gritty leather-n-steel depictions as being most accurate — but I can see how that reflects our modern notions of what life was like “back then” coupled with our modern sensibility for what is masculine, bad-ass, hero-wear.
Then there’s that business of just how these last Plantagenets can be presented on a stage during the reigns of Tudors.
One of the things Shakespeare does with the history plays is make a great propaganda case in favor of Tudors taking over. OTOH, if he wished to get paid, and maybe even keep working, or — even — keep out of prison while keeping his head — it’s the Tudors all the way. As Ben Jonson was effectively taught.
Fascinating article! I had never realized how something so seemingly basic as character arcs rely on the predominant ideas about how humans work. This was all amazing.
Excellent essay! One of the things I find so fascinating about Shakespeare is that his works are open to infinite interpretation & none of them is wrong.
More posts like this please.
Thank you all for your enthusiasm! It means a lot to hear that people enjoyed it, especially when I worked on a piece for so long.
@1 – That three-person Henry IV sounds incredible! I’m curious: how did they handle Bardolf? The Hostess? Doll? Silence & Shallow? Much could be cut, of course, if it’s compressed.
@5 – Apologies if I made it seem as if I disliked Simon Russell Beale’s Falstaff. I thought it was a powerful performance, but I think the director intended him to be much less sympathetic than was intended by the other presentations. For example, the director made the choice to focus a lot more on grungy aspects of Falstaff’s physicality, such as seeing him semi-dressed in bed, showing the filthyness of his undershirt, or having Hal react to his smell (having on-stage reactions to smell is usually used to cue grossness to the audience, a trick which, for example, the Globe production reserved for Bardolf.) Possibly most telling for me was that both the Globe and THC productions have Falstaff urinate in front of the audience, but in very different ways, THC veiling it in shadow and having Hal reacting as if grossed out throughout while the Globe version has it right in center stage playfully and cleanly with Falstaff being silly about stopping and starting. Amazingly different moods created by the same crude gesture, and fascinating examples of the impact of directoral choice.
@3 – Yes, it’s certainly fascinating how fashions come in and move through in reenactment groups as well as film and stage. I remember reading a great discussion of how SCA costumes often evolve to have more and more accessories to show off handicraft, until women wearing Viking costume started customarily draping a dozen or so bead strings from their brooches, to show different strings they’d made, whereas historically we think Vikings would have had one or few.
And you see it in other historical creations – I remember being shown some mid-20th-century fake Renaissance paintings, like a fake Botticelli from the 1950s, and it looks like a Botticelli but it also obviously, to the modern eye, looks like a 1950s aesthetic in terms of hairstyle and ideas of beauty, color on the cheeks, the way the hair falls. And yet it sold when it was made. It looked Renaissance to people in the ’50s, who were blind to their contemporary aesthetics, but no one from the 2000s would fall for it for a moment. Similarly I’m sure fakes being made now (and historical films being made now) have invisible aesthetics which will scream 20-teens to people in the 2050s.
For other examples of the “gritty leather-n-steel depictions” (great phrase @11!) I recommend comparing the costuming of the Vikings in the Vikings TV series with the costumes reenactors create based on the fabrics found in digs. We’ve created a grey-brown leather & steel Middle Ages to go with our white marble antiquity. Examples:
VIKINGS TV SERIES IMAGE 1
VIKINGS TV SERIES IMAGE 2
VIKINGS TV SERIES IMAGE 3
REENACTORS IMAGE 1
REENACTORS IMAGE 2
REENACTORS IMAGE 3
@12 – Yes, so much mandatory Tudor propaganda all over the plays. There’s a new Globe DVD of Henry VIII, which is particularly good at the whiplash effect of having a perfectly sensible play going along just fine and then BOOM baby Elisabeth is born and now we’re going to abandon the play and have 15 straight minutes of abject fawning followed by mandatory applause. Fascinating.
An enjoyable essay. Thank you very much. I’d love to see more like this!
Excellent article, thanks for your insight ! It helps put into some perspective why I found several of Shakespeare’s works… implausible.
Great to see this on Tor.com
Excellent! Possibly the best essay I’ve ever read on the site.
Excellent post. The pre and post Locke views of characterization is a very astute insight. I wonder if we are on the verge of another such revolution as modern neuroscience continues to enlighten us with the basis for behavior.
Wow ! Thank you for this excellent article. Earlier in the year I found myself mesmerized by The Hollow Crown Richard II –
I have always enjoyed “Shakespeare” movies from Kenneth Branagh etc. but this had me unmoving and totally lost in it.. Wonderful and well done article – thanks again ….
@Ada They were cut – it was parts 1 and 2 cut down to a single play. Staged in the entrance to the Kibble Palace in the botanic gardens, with a small audience in two rows of seats either side of the corridor where a lot of the action took place, and a bench in the open area at one end that mostly stood in for the tavern, and a throne at the other for the “King stuff”. I’m not sure Silence and Shallow are necessary; the director did make sure to give Falstaff his speech about having misused the King’s press damnably, so I’m not sure we actually need to see him getting bribed and signing up the dregs in front of Silence and Shallow.
If you’re ever in Glasgow towards the end of the summer, keep an eye out for Bard in the Botanics shows, they tend to be excellent and the unusual setting makes them memorable too.
Very interesting article. Thank you.
One thought, I wonder to what degree Shakespeare intended us to look at Henry V as an admirable character. Olivier’s version does as that was a propaganda film and it cut or played down some of the character’s ruthlessness. Let us consider what Shakespeare has Henry do. We first see him desperately trying to find an excuse, any excuse, to invade France and start a war. We then see him coldly end an attempted rebellion with curt orders for the conspirator’s death. Once in France he has Bardolph, another Cheapside friend, executed for looting and orders the massacre of all the French prisoners his army has taken. I suspect we are meant to see Henry as a good King who in order to be so, he must be a cold, calculating and remorseless man. Shakespeare’s audience and today’s viewers are invited to admire him as a great King, but not to like him as a person.
As to The Hollow Crown, I thought it was excellent apart from Simon Russell Beale’s Falstaff which I cordially disliked and so your theory that this was a deliberate way to soften Tom Hiddlestone’s Hal/Henry holds water for me.
Oh, and a note for anyone watching whose knowledge of mediaeval English history is wobbly, despite him being played by two very physically dissimalar actors (Toby Young in Richard II and Jeremy Irons in Henry IV – former short and stocky, latter tall and lanky) Bolinbroke and Henry IV were the same person. I found that an odd casting decision though thought both actors performed excellently.
Bolingbroke was played by Rory Kinnear in Richard II.
I think Shakespeare was trying for “admirable” for Henry V, because I think he was trying for parallels to Henry VIII, and I assume he was trying for flattery of Elizabeth I’s father, rather than criticism.
(son of a father also called Henry; father was a usurper, young but not underage on inheriting the throne; athletic and popular, with ambitions toward France; has Plantagenet Henry claim to be “Welsh”, like a Tudor Henry might)
I don’t think it’s right to call Henry VIII Tudor propaganda exactly, as Shakespeare and Fletcher wrote it well into Stuart times, and James I was no fan of Elizabeth I, his mother’s executioner. It’s just that Elizabeth was remembered fondly in the memory of the audience; it’s more playing to the customers than any royal patron.
The problem is that Locke was no more right (or wrong) than the Greeks. The fetishization of tabula rasa in literature (long after being largely discredited in psychology) has gotten to the point where we would sooner accept the most absurd and farcical of explanations for behavior than admit “there’s no cure for being a c***.”
del@24
Whoops. Thanks for the correction and apologies to both actors.
Herb9338@16
I’m inclined to agree.
My own favorite version of the Henriad is Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, in part because it confronts the Falstaff problem head-on and makes it a tragedy (it ends with Mistress Quickly’s eulogy from Henry V). Welles himself was a Falstaffian figure in real life, and it’s the part of a lifetime for him.
Stunning essay, Ms. Palmer. I will be using it in my classes (theatre and English).
Besides the clothes, something that’s very hard to ignore in different decades’ takes on Shakespeare is the actors’ hairstyles. Sometimes the lead will submit to the haircut seen in old portraits of Henry V, but the rest of the cast might still be wearing 70s or 80s hair.
Unsurprisingly, Thea Sharrock, the director who put Henry in a leather shirt in The Hollow Crown, also rejected the usual hairstyle: “I’ve got Tom Hiddleston playing Henry V. I don’t want a bowl haircut, I want him looking good,” she said. But I wonder how that will look to the viewers of 2040.
Speaking of the directors, in this article the director of Henry IV claims that with the intercutting of the throne room and the tavern, he’s only using the same effect Shakespeare intended, only more obviously, because as a film maker he doesn’t suffer Shakespeare’s limitations with respect to scene changes on a stage.
@23 – I do think that Shakespeare is doing complex things with Hal and wants us to see him as a king making difficult choices which would be difficult or impossible for ordinary people to make, like the execution of Bardolf, I don’t think it makes sense in period to read the play as being at all negative about Henry’s French campain. We have to remember that Shakespeare is writing in an era when attitudes toward war were much more positive, as people expected their governments to be grand and glory-seeking, and Henry V was one of the most venerated of all English kings precisely becuase of great enthusiasm for his French campaigns and glorious victory, and the curt dealing with the conspirators was, I think, also written to be positive, as was the execution of the prisoners in retaliation for the French violating the “rules of war”. I do agree 100% that Hal is being shown in ways intended to be alienating, making the viewer feel as if we could/would never do what he does as king, but I don’t think Shakespeare intended to criticize these things, rather I see it, in the light of other period discussions of kingship, as intending to argue for his nearly-superhuman superiority, i.e. look at the impossible moral decisions this great king can do, like instantly reforming and giving up drink, rejecting Falstaff, and executing Bardolf; you, ordinary Globe viewer, could never do these things and that is why you and kings are different. I think, though, that when viewed from our modern perspective in which both warfare and summary executions are much more negative, we can read into it a different and more ambiguous complexity–rich for examination of ourselves and our ideas of executive power–which wasn’t part of what Shakespeare had in mind.
@31 – I agree it’s fascinating to consider what Shakespeare might have done had he had the modern directoral ability to cut instantly without the messy delay of scene changes. I agree that it’s a trick he might have used a lot, and in ways much like that.
@29 – Hooray! Always delighted to contribute to any classroom!
@@@@@ 28 – I didn’t know Orson Welles had done the Henriad. Now it’s the top of my to-watch list as soon as I run out of my new cache of Globe DVDs…
@@@@@30 – Yes, the hair is conspicuous, in science fiction and fantasy TV as well as historicals, and is one of the things that dates pieces most quickly. I’m already conscious of how often women in every time period are now depicted with the layered haircuts and dark roots that are so ubiquitous now, and I’m sure in ten or twenty years that will stand out on re-watch as much as 1980s poofy hair does now.
Very occasionally, it happens in reverse. I remember a brief vogue in England for boys to shave the backs of their heads after the Branagh Henry V came out.
I don’t disagree with your observations, but I think I disagree with the conclusions the article reaches. My conclusions come under 3 broad catagories, so rather than post one long comment, I post three shorter ones.
Point the First: the progression from the Poppinjay to the Raven
The article just kind of glosses over this by labelling it “changing tastes”, with no real analysis of *why* the tastes have changed.
I think this misses out a sizable shift in our perception of masculinity (at least in the UK and America). I blame two things: Oscar Wilde and the rifle.
Keep with me.
Oscar Wilde was a flamboyant society figure who made the mistake of suing someone who had made nasty accusations about him engaging in homosexual acts (which were illegal back then). The problem was that he had done the things he was accused of doing, so failed in the libel trial so badly he ended up doing hard labour in jail. Worse than that the trial so vilified the mere suggestion of being gay that it changed Victorian society almost overnight. Before, straight men were comfortable dressing flamboyantly, seeking to outdo the women with how fabulous they looked. They walked close together, even walking arm in arm or hand in hand. After the trial men suddenly stood at least 3 feet from another man, dressing dourly and were only permitted short handshakes. Anything more risked being labelled a homosexual and being ostracized from society (as Oscar Wilde was, dying a lonely death in Paris).
Meanwhile the appearence of the soldier was changing. Combat during medieval times was within the mud of the melee. While it was possible to kill a man at a distance, it was unlikely, especially if you were a noble – the richer you were, the better your armour! When armies clashed, order was lost where they met. In the chaos, you needed to know at a glance who to hit and who *not* to hit. More importantly, you wanted to make sure your own side didn’t hit you. So you wore at least a ribbon with the your side’s colour on it (For instance, in the English Civil War the Cavaliers claimed the Purple and the Roundheads wore Red). The brighter the better to show through the mud (and other stuff).
If you were a noble it was even more important to be as bling as possible. The knight in shining armour. First, you were more likely to survive if you were a clearly visable point around which your men could rally in the confusion. But if things did go badly wrong for you, a common soldier would probably be stabbed if they tried to surrender. If you looked like you were worth something, you could surrender and be ransomed. It was in your best interests to stand out, and the common soldier tried their best to copy you.
Then came the rifle. Suddenly you could reliably kill someone at a distance – their armour wasn’t as effective at stopping ranged attacks. The common soldier realised they had a choice: risk a melee attack (with the likelihood that a load of you will die) to capture and ransom the bloke with the bling, or kill the bloke giving the orders first, throwing the enemy into confusion (which makes it more likely you’ll survive) and loot the corpses. Less money but more likely to survive.
So the officers started dressing a lot like their men.
But then came the Napoleonlic Wars. Armies still dressed in bright colours (i.e. the English in Red, the French in Blue) but the English had started using Riflemen dressed in green. They showed how effective soldiers that couldn’t be spotted could be.
A hundred years later and World War One has uniforms that area subdued colour, but still one solid colour. World War Two and the soldier is starting to wear camo and trying to hide. Fast forward to now and the modern soldier is as far from the knight in shining armour as can be. The modern front line soldier is depicted as alomst a shadow warrior. You are only effective if you don’t get noticed. You still wear a uniform, but it’s designed to hide you.
In short, if you stand out, you’re dead.
So the modern masculine appearence, both civilian and military, is defined with dark subdued colours and the urge not to be the flamboyant.
And have you noticed how the fantasy hero has gone from being the noble knight rallying the troops on the battlefield to being more likely to be a assassin in the shadows?
And yes, I’ve perhaps oversimplified things, but I think I’ve shown why tastes have changed.
Interesting thoughts, and I certainly am familiar with how rifle distance shooting transformed officers’ dress circa WW1. But I was discussing changes between 1960 and 2014, the period during which the filmed adaptations were made, rather than the changes you’re discussing which are late 19th century through early 20th. It is interesting to note how much more willing studios were to costume their actors in flamboyant, modern-feminine costume in 1960 and even in 1980 in contrast with productions from the 1990s through 2014. The Hollow Crown does use flamboyant costume specifically and excusively for Richard II, and there it is explicitly intended to go with the homosexual elements they stress in their portrayal of Richard, yet as late as 1980 the BBC was still willing to costume Hal and Henry IV the same way; no longer. One possible reading–building on your ideas about Oscar Wilde–would be to say that since homosexuality has become so much more acceptable and visible in the last few decades, and feminized male fashions are returning and being used precisly to cue homosexuality, the directors are selecting hypermasculine costume to stress the heterosexuality of their characters in a situation in which ambiguity and flamboyance might read as gay. But I would want to do a lot more looking and thinking before I would be confident in such a reading, and many other details of fashion have changed between 1980 and today.
It will be fascinating to see how this continues to evolve, and whether in 15 years we see yet another new trend visible in historical costuming. The gender tagging will be particularly important to watch, I think, as gender politics continues to evlove.
Another factor to consider in the design choices for these productions over time is the changing television technology. You go from low resolution black and white to low resolution color, both of which would be on a small screen by today’s standards, to high resolution color on much larger screens.
So what will be noticable to the viewer changes.
In the black and white pictures, there is a lot of use of having the edges of sleeves, collars and capes cut in decorative patterns with a contrasting black edging. This really makes the design stand out, when the main colors of the different garments are shades of grey.
The images from the middle time have big blocks of bright and contrasting colors, which would show up well on a smaller and lower resolution television. But they might well be overwhelming on a modern, large screen, high resolution televison.
The most recent costumes have a lot of detail that relies on the quality of contemporary televisions. Textured patterns in different shades of the same color, and delicate detailing that would be lost on a lower-resolution screen.
@37–Yes, very good observations. Accounts for a lot in terms of the fabric choices. I find it interesting, though, how the decrease of “feminine” elements in male clothing also extends to jewelry, which is a fairly small and low-resolution and optically challenging since it catches the light oddly. Though most of the older costume pieces had very large jewelry, of course, as you say, to show up on smaller screens.
Ursula @37, Ada @38 — and crowns. Apart from Richard’s crown in Hollow Crown, the physical crowns, which are lingered over in all three TV productions, get noticeably plainer and more masculine over time.
The Globe’s Henry IV – Part 1 and Part 2 just came in the mail (early Christmas present for myself).
Looking forward to seeing Roger Allam’s Falstaff. I only know him as the ultrasleezy villains in V for Vendetta and Speed Racer.
Jo @39 – Yes, I had thought about the stark design of the later crowns as well. “Age of Kings” has different elaborate crowns for each dynesty as part of its opening credits. It’s an interesting choice to have a different physical crown for each king in “The Hollow Crown” instead of having the actual physical crown prop being passed down be a continuity. I am reminded now of one of my very favorite Shakespeare posters, the Globe’s advertisement poster for a “Richard III” which shows Richard in the prop room trying on crowns, disdainfully dropping the latest reject onto a big heap of crowns as a prop assistant hands him another to try.
@40 – I hope you enjoy them!
In over 60 years of living, I find myself more with Shakespeare than Locke on this issue of character found at birth.
We had twins, fraternal, whose characters for the last 35 years were evident a half-hour after they were born.
Each has worked hard to overcome the faults inherent in their births (and, by implication, are aware of those deficiencies). Each has gone to college, and majored in wildly divergent subjects. each is successful in their field of endeavour.
Nevertheless, I am able to foretell with fair accuracy what each one will react to any social stimuli.
On another matter, I have seen Hiddleston’s Henry V, and the Crispin speech gives a whole different twist to the story. Branaugh’s is bombastic, and rallying. Hiddleston’s is more of , “Well, friends, we are all probably going to die, so let us do it like Englishmen.” Which has its own bravura.
Just thought you might enjoy knowing that this essay precipitated a squee cascade. See comment over on Making Light‘s The joy of continuity comment thread.
Oh, delightful! Very glad to have made such a difference opening things up for you! And yes, Richard II is so much more powerful if you see it after the Henrys.
Oh! Thank you. That’s a very useful tip.
The Henrys are also more powerful when you’ve seen Richard II already, though, so both ways are great.
Given my lack of familiarity with Shakespeare, I predict I’m going to have to iterate. But, hey! Bujold, right? (Read in pub order, then go back and read in story order; more chewey goodness all around.)
BTW, I had to laugh when Shakespeare Uncovered got to Nahum Tate: so obviously fanfic!
Shakespeare could do character development very well – Macbeth is a testament to that, which is one of the reasons why it is my favorite Shakespeare play. It sets the blueprint for a tragic villain-protagonist figure, since the central character is no mu-ha-ha villain, but someone who arguably started out as a relatively decent, if very ambitious, guy, who is tempted by the promise of power but genuinely tormented about committing crimes to get the crown, and who, ironically partially because of his conscience tormenting him, descends more and more into paranoia, emotional instability, increasing cruelty and hopelessness, becoming dead inside to the point of seeing life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (a speech delivered right after his numb response at the news of the death of his once-beloved wife), but still clinging desperately to his crown and ready to kill anyone to keep it. Lady Macbeth gets less scenes and speeches (as you’d expect from a character played by a young actor rather than the star of the show), but she also has a very interesting character development that’s opposite to her husband’s – she starts out convinced that ruthlessness is the right to go and secure their future, urging Macbeth and herself to be ruthless, but later learns that murder has consequences and that she was wrong to believe that everything would be fine for them once he got the crown, and falls apart in a different way than Macbeth, into despair, guilt, madness and suicide, while her husband is getting more and more monstruous. It’s a brilliant play about the descent into darkness.
The titular character of Othello also has dramatic negative character development, as Iago poisons his mind more and more – there’s a great analysis of how the language Othello is using indicates the deterioration of his state of mind. Shakespeare is good with negative character development.
@24: I’m not so sure about that. Will Shakespeare was a tricky, crafty fellow. There are layers and layers to his plays – you often can’t be sure if the surface, politically correct (s0 to speak) interpretation is the one you should go; there are often too many subversive elements. It’s very easy to read Henry V as a play that’s jingoistic and all about Henry the Hero on the surface, but subtly subversive beneath the surface, basically indicating that Henry V is an asshole. There’s one scene that’s not even subtle – but it’s a prose comedy scene with a Welsh character who has a funny way of speaking – poor dude can’t tell the difference between “great” and “big”, you see, and he pronounces his “Bs” as “Ps”, which is used for comedy… but the discussion he’s having with another character is actually quite serious – they comment on some of Henry’s problematic actions and discuss whether he’s a “great” man, and the funny Welsh character compares Henry to “Alexander the Pig”, who killed his best friend, saying how this is what great men do. So, this is just a minor scene or silly ethnic comedy for the lowborn masses, right? And that’s what allows Shakespeare to sneak in some biting commentary on “great men”, conquerors/mass murderers like Alexander the Great or Henry V – which is not surprising, knowing it’s the same guy who wrote Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida.
Furthermore, Shakespeare’s plays may have contained veiled political references to contemporary events – Richard II is thought to have been an allusion to queen Elizabeth, and there’s a theory that Richard III was an attack on Robert Cecil (certainly, Shakespeare’s list of Richard’s physical deformities goes much further than even the Thomas More/Cardinal Morton description of him – the hunchback instead of “crooked back”, the limp… all his inventions). The Merchant of Venice is a particularly interesting example – it is thought to have been inspired by the trial and execution of the unfortunate Rodrigo Lopez, and it seems to reflect the antisemitism of the times, with Shylock as a vengeful villain ultimately defeated by the good and merciful Christians who allow him to live if he “just” converts to Christianity… but it’s far more complicated than that. He gives Shylock some very sympathetic moments – and no, I don’t believe it’s something that can appeal just to the modern audiences. Shylock may be a villain, because he goes too far with his revenge, but he is not a greedy monster, he’s an angry man who wants revenge for being mistreated and looked down on all his life. And his famous speech is not the only sympathetic moment. He is betrayed by his daughter, who runs away with a Christian (sympathetic motivation for her, and we can see Shylock as standing in the way of young love… however…) – and she steals from him. Shakespeare could have easily portrayed Shylock there as a greedy Jew who resents that a precious ring has been stolen from him, but instead, he is most hurt because this was a ring that was a present from his late wife early in their relationship. And the “Quality of mercy” speech becomes deeply ironic when you know the historical context and what happened to poor Lopez – as far from mercy as it gets.
I appreciate the very intelligent discussion here of changes in the representation and reception of the Shakespeare canon on television. Your analysis is not concerned to be evaluative, except for a notable exception when you praise The Hollow Crown’s treatment of homosexuality in its version of Richard II. This dimension of the play has been clear at least since Walter Pater, and you are right that we are now free to deal with it more forthrightly. However, I came away from this version feeling that the pendulum has now been pushed too far the other way. This production transforms Richard II into a queer text, which is, I think, a reduction. It may be a welcome reduction as a corrective, but it diminishes the play by narrowing it. Uncharitably, I could describe the deposition scene in this production as “Richard coming out,” which tends to reduce the realpolitik persecutions of Northumberland and Bolingbroke to a kind of gay bashing. Given the limits of his interpretation, Whishaw does a brilliant job, and he wrests tremendous pathos from the role, but I felt I was seeing the trauma of a gay man rather than the annihilation of a king. In other words, a brilliant anachronism. Shakespeare complicates the sexual dynamics of the play in his representation of the relationship between Richard and Queen Isabel, which is loving and tender, and which the THC production deliberately elides. This is Richard II not Marlowe’s Edward II, and Shakespeare does not commit himself unambiguously on the sexuality of Richard . That is probably because he intended it to be ambiguous. Foucault has taught us that our essentializing sexual identity historically is an anachronism. The Elizabethans would have seen a broader range of possibilities. Representing Richard as overtly gay narrows the resonance of his character and shifts emphasis for us from a concern with the problem of kingship to sexual identity. I felt this was especially heavy-handed in the gratuitous introduction of gay iconography — St. Sebastian images and allusions. However, accepting this interpretation on its own terms as deliberate anachronism, I thought Whishaw painfully effective and affecting. The play in this version might be renamed Queen Richard II, which may sound dismissive, but is not.
@49 (William Hamilton) Yes, I think you’ve described very well a tension I had with the production myself. The homosexual elements of the text were moved to the forefront in a way which I found interesting and effective and achieved a specific effect which is what I think the production was going for and which mostly worked for me. But, if we are thinking about it in a more period and historical way, I agree with you that it is too forefronted to give an optimum reading of the play, and in a very particular way. When we adapt period depictions of homosexuality for our modern audience it’s very easy (almost universal) for the adaptation to come to be about contemporary cultural issues around homosexuality and homoeroticism, reading in contemporary discourse about “gayness” and anti-gay and homophobic issues. This version of Richard II felt “gay” in a contemporary 21st century sense, and the narrative invited us to feel pathos toward him as someone who is hated and persecuted partly because of intolerance of that. I remember as I watched it coming to the scene where he had the emotional parting from his wife, and it ringing false in this particular production since the narrative had made so much of his homosexual relationships so it was odd being suddenly asked to believe that this heterosexual relationship was also impassioned and romantic. But I do think it was the echoing 21st century ideas about homosexuality in that particular production which created that disconnect for me, since, of course, in the Renaissance ideas about relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual, were completely different and modern ideas of “gayness” vs. bisexuality vs. other categories really shouldn’t be applied to a culture which had radically different constructions of what relationship, love, and sexuality were (see on this subject the brilliant book Forbidden Friendships, by Michael Roche). Thus, on that front, I would call this a successful,Richard II, and an enjoyable Richard II, but not, in my historian’s opinion, an optimal Richard II, and it seems like you had a similar feeling.
@48 (Annara Snow) Thank you for sharing such rich reflections on the topic. I’d like to continue the discussion, which is a rich one, y pushing back a bit using the same examples you raised, and I think that clarifying a bit what I mean by “character development” in the Lochean sense will help. Othello and Macbeth are, as you say, wonderful examples of complex and dynamic characters who do undergo substantial change over the course of their stories. The degeneration of Othello’s language is a perfect example of this, and there are others as well in Shakespeare’s corpus, from Hamlet to Prince Hal himself. But I argue that these characters do not have post-Lochean character development. They have something else instead: the kind of wrestling with tragic internal character flaw or unstable internal character makeup which was characteristic of pre-17th century European literature. The character flaw model also does have change over time, as the character wrestles with the internal tension and events bring it to a head, but that isn’t the same as modern character development which posits a character who begins in a less complex and simpler state (Lochean tabula rassa) and develops nad grows into a more complicated and multi-faceted person over time, gaining attributes instead of just having pre-set attributes work out to their natural conclusions. Macbeth has an internal tension between villainous ambition and conscience which fight within him over the course of the play, leading to his ruin. Othello–uncomfortably from the perspective of a progressive modern reader–is presented by Shakespeare as having an inborn propensity for savagery and giving in to the passions which is battling against and suppressed by his civility (a turn-of-the-17th-century racial stereotype), and Iago’s manipulation strengthens and feeds those barbarian passions until they overwhelm Othello (rather easily in Shakespeare’s model). Both of these “arcs” can be read as “character development” but genuinely depend on us accepting that the people already had these flaws before the play began, which is why a first-time young viewer of Othello will often come away saying something like, “Othello was dumb, why did he become so jealous over such a small thing so fast?” or a viewer of Macbeth might come away asking, “Why didn’t he go all-in when he decided to go for the throne?” and similarly you sometimes get reactions such as “Why doesn’t Hamlet just kill Claudius already? Or get over it?!” Such feelings are common and born of modern ideas about how people should behave combined with the more basic feeling of “The events of this play by themselves are not enough to explain to me why this character doesn’t take the sensible action in this situation.” The explanation being that we are supposed to accept–in fact expect–that these characters have morality-play-type inborn flaws exposed which are their undoing. And this is true broadly as well, whe nwe read Homer nad see Achilles wrestle with inborn flaws, or Virgil nd Aeneas in whom we see the battle to adhere to piety work itself out over the course of the epic.
The distinction between Lochean tabula rassa character development and pre-Lochean character flaws working out to their logical conclusion is… I was going to say “subtle” but in fact it’s not that it’s subtle, it’s that it’s hard for us to see because we are so accustomed to expecting character development that we see it everywhere, even places where it manifestly isn’t. This is one of the fun and exciting tools of the modern imagination which has let us make so many great modern adaptations of simplistic pre-modern tales, like all the modern adaptations of Fairy Tales which expand their complexity and characterization largely by rereading Snow White or Rapunzel or whatever and asking ourselves” What s she thinking? How does she feel? Why did she make that choice?” and using modern ideas about psychology to speculate about the interiority of characters who had no interiority in the originals. Macbeth and Prince Hal have lots of interiority in the originals, but still not enough that, when we read it, we aren’t spending a lot of time asking oruselves” What is he really thinking here? Why did he really choose this? What is shakespeare really getting at in this beautifully difficult passage?” And we get exciting answers using modern psychology. But if you make yourself reread the Aeneid and possibly something even stricter like some medieval miracle plays and then reread Macbeth or Othello I bet you’ll see how reading them as “character flaw” instead of “Character development” stories does work. Lear is a good example here, since Lear goes gradually mad due to many horrible experiences, and sometimes modern productions do very powerful things with this (like making it be about Altzheimers) but if you reread the Aeneaid right before it you can instead focus in on a reading where Lear was flawed from the beginning–the same flaw which makes him reject his only truly loving daughter–and the various things which happen to him allow that flaw to work through to its inexorable finale. The feeling of arbitrariness in how quickly his evil daughters destroy themselves also flows more naturally out of a tragic flaw than out of any plausible modern human psychology.
In one sense using “character development” for what Locke is doing and not for what Shakespeare is confusing since both types of story have change for the character over time, one gaining attributes, the other working through to a pre-fated tragic finale. But I mean “development” in contrast with “growth” in a strong (Aristotelian) sense here: development means something changing, not just in size and completeness, but in complexity and form. When a vine grows longer, or a fruit grows larger and ripens, those are (for Aristotle) cases of “growth” of something actualizing its extant structure. But when a flower turns into a fruit, or a larva changes into a wasp or butterfly, that is “development” i.e. changing, not just in size and maturity, but in fundamental structure. The pre-Locke character flaw model has characters change as their internal flaws work out to their conclusions. The post-Locke development model has characters grow and gain new attributes through their actions and experiences. Both have change over time, but in radically different ways, and the pre-Locke model has a much more circumscribed range of what a given character can become as (s)he progresses, and of what is likely to happen by the story’s end.
Thinking on this and on your comments led me to a new (to me) thought: I bet the character progression model is also why Shakespeare’s audiences are so much more content (in fact eager) than us to know the ending of the play in advance, that is to know coming in whether it is a tragedy or a comedy. The character flaw narrative is one in which there is much less range of possibility of what might happen to a character inside – either (s)he will be destroyed by the tragic flaw, or overcome it, two basic outcomes. The possibility of getting killed before either can happen makes it three, but we know this won’t happen for the main character(s) because that wouldn’t be satisfying. The label “tragedy” or “comedy” lets the audience know in advance which of the two tracks the character is on, so we can watch out for it and say, “Ah, there is the flaw starting to destroy him” vs. “Ah, there she is starting to triumph over the flaw.” Separating all story arcs into two buckets, comedy and tragedy, works pre-Locke. In the post-Locke palette, however, anything could happen to a character, or at least a vastly richer range of possible futures lie before someone who will gain new shades of personality and new character attributes with every new experience. The simple division of “comedy” v. “tragedy” now is just a spoiler of the events of the ending, instead of telling us what character cues we should be watching as the story flows. In a world with only two roads, the comedy/tragedy label showed Shakespeare’s audiences which we were on; in a post-Locke world without roads we prefer to wander more freely. Just a raw thought.
And once again, overall, Annara Snow and everyone, thank you for continuing this rich discussion!
I want those colourful liverys and banners gaadddammitt!
W. H. Auden convincingly argues Falstaff is Christ in an essay from the 1940s. The only Hal that ever made sense to me appears in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Not only is Hal without Falstaff a cardboard bore in Henry V, Falstaff without Hal in The Merry Wives of Windsor is a single-minded buffoon. They’re obviously in love and cannot live without each other. Any other interpretation has to corrupt the text.