i demand historicity dammit Archives

Posts Tagged ‘i demand historicity dammit’

Information Density, or, cramming a fifty-pound sausage into a five-pound sack

alecaustin recently had a thought-provoking post on his LJ, riffing off some recent discussions about the people and issues that are “invisible” in fiction to talk about information density and how you can’t fit everything into a story. In particular, there are certain kinds of topics that fit very badly indeed. He has a few examples of his own, but since I want to dig into this issue more deeply, I’m going to use one I know fairly well, which is the English Civil War.

One of the books I read when doing research for In Ashes Lie was called Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642. As the title suggests, its argument is that the wars of the mid-seventeenth century had their roots in the sixteenth — which is exactly the kind of thing that’s hard to convey in fiction, when the cause in question isn’t a simple case of “this person was assassinated five generations ago, and we still bear a grudge for that.” In particular, I’m going to tease out one economic strand for the purposes of our discussion here. If you’re not interested in reading about that sort of thing (if you aren’t, I can’t blame you), then scroll on down; I’ll get back to my point in a moment.

(Fair Warning: my point is long. And digresses along the way.)

***

Causes of the English Revolution, The Nutshell Version.

Locus Podcast on, um, everything?

I thought I had linked to this here before, but if so, I can’t find it.

During World Fantasy, Karen Burnham of Locus sat me and Kari Sperring (la_marquise_de_) down in front of a microphone to talk about a topic of our choosing. We chose Kari’s “history is not a theme park” rant, and went from there, to, uh, everywhere. Subjects touched on included: The Three Musketeers, Aztecs and cultural relativism, Biblical archaeology, hemming clothing, stew, Mongolian steppe ponies, Minoan murals, authenticity in history, hippie elves, late medieval English blacksmithing guild laws, the Great London Plague of 1665, trousers and pigs, Biblical archaeology, kicking postmodernism in the head, seventeenth-century Parisian mud, telepathic wombats, and “the answer to almost everything is turnips.”

All these things and more await you on the Locus website. You can listen to the file there or download it for later hearing. We ramble on for about an hour and twelve minutes; Karen said afterward that normally she waits for a lull in the conversation, then steps in to say “well, that about wraps things up.” With us, she had to go in with a crowbar, or we would have kept rolling for another hour. We enjoyed it a lot — well, certainly I did — and I hope you do, too.

I think I’d prefer a Marlovian film.

It had to happen eventually, I suppose.

SCENE: The inside of swan_tower‘s head

SWAN: Let’s go look at movie trailers. Anonymous — what, like the group?

PAGE: <loads>

SWAN: No, it’s something set in Elizabethan England! With Derek Jacobi and other cool people! <reads further in synopsis> . . . oh, shit. It’s a “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays” story.

TRAILER: <plays>

SWAN: Old London Bridge! <swoons in a fit of historical geekery>

DIRECTOR: <is Roland Emmerich>

SWAN: grk.

IMDb: This movie’s theory is apparently Oxfordian, since Rhys Ifans has top billing, and he’s playing Edward de Vere.

SWAN: <sigh> But . . . London Bridge . . . Elizabethan geekery . . . but Roland Emmerich. And Oxfordianism. <more sigh> Well, at least it seems I’m over my knee-jerk “please god no more” reaction to the sixteenth century. And that’s something. Whether or not I can bring myself to watch this movie . . . we’ll have to see.

so how accurate is it?

With Elizabeth: The Golden Age opening today, I have decided that now is a good time to post about Shekhar Kapur’s first installment, the 1998 film Elizabeth. Researching Midnight Never Come gave me an interesting perspective on it; I can now recognize what is and is not historically accurate in it. (Short form is: much of what happens is true, but not in that order and at that time.)

So for the curious, I offer up this glossing of the film’s historical accuracy, with footnotes and educational precepts for the wise.

(I shouldn’t have to say it, but I will: here be spoilers aplenty. Don’t read on if you don’t want to see them.)

First, a note on the visuals. Kapur’s commentary track on the DVD is very interesting, and chock-full of information on such things. He recognizes that the Elizabethans did not in fact live in bare stone rooms (they preferred wood well-padded with tapestries and rush matting), and also that fashion did not follow precisely that trajectory. Those elements are as they are for thematic reasons.

Now, going more or less sequentially through the film:

Cut for stupidly long length; don’t say I didn’t warn you about that, either