Secret lives of others

[Sunite]

Secret lives of others
Bette Davis and Errol Flynn
Bette Davis plays Elizabeth to Errol Flynn's Essex

A POINT OF VIEW
By Lisa Jardine

It doesn't matter if films play fast and loose with historical facts. What matters is to convey the spirit of the age - and its players.

Is the urge to recover the inner life of great figures from the past a purely modern tendency?

I certainly find myself reflecting regularly upon how the author of a work I am reading might have felt at the time he or she was writing. The merest trace of emotion in a long-unread letter or a marginal note in a book produces a surge of excitement as I try to reconstruct their original state of mind.

   
Lisa Jardine
This thirst for the real-life sentiments of the person behind the celebrity makes me a fan of Hollywood movies about English history

Hear Radio 4's A Point of View
Here's one that happened to me this week. Among the treasures to be found in the Library of the Royal Society in London, where I currently work, is a handwritten copy of Sir Isaac Newton's groundbreaking work, the Principia, with Newton's own marginal corrections, along with his additional calculations and further annotations added on facing pages.

In the Principia - or to give it its full name in English, the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy - Newton brilliantly laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force and motion that have underpinned developments in the modern physical sciences ever since, at least until Einstein's theory of relativity further refined the picture.

It's a work of mathematical and conceptual virtuosity which, however, reveals little about the man behind the ideas.

Last Monday, however, as I was leafing through the Royal Society's manuscript Principia I noticed for the first time a doodle by Newton in the section on "the motion of bodies in moveable orbits". Upside down on a blank page he had scribbled in English, "James the 2d by the grease [grace] of god King of ..."

Inner life

My heart leapt when I saw it. What had been Newton's state of mind as he wrote those words? He was correcting his manuscript less than a year after the unexpected death of Charles II from complications brought on by a stroke, and the hasty coronation of his brother James II.

   
Newton
James the 2d by the grease [grace] of god King of ...
Note jotted by Sir Isaac Newton
Newton, like many of his devoutly Protestant contemporaries, deeply disapproved of James's Catholic beliefs and practices, yet the Principia, when published in 1687, would carry a title page celebration of him as reigning monarch.

Might I have discovered evidence that the great mathematician was worrying about his future and the future of his country, as he wrestled with the final details of his three laws of motion, and perfected the theory of gravitational attraction?

Alas, comb the pages as I might, there was no further clue to be found anywhere else in the volume. Nor did contemporary letters from Newton to his devoted editor Edmund Halley, also preserved in the Royal Society strong room, shed any further light on the matter. As is so often the case, the paper trail of historical evidence simply ran out.

It must be this thirst for the real-life sentiments of the person behind the celebrity that makes me a serious fan of romantic Hollywood movies about English history. When Bette Davis slaps Errol Flynn's face in the 1939 classic, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex - "You dare turn your back on Elizabeth of England, you dare?" - the historian in me is prepared to overlook the glaring anachronisms in the film simply because the screen version allows me genuinely to feel a surge of pride for the Virgin Queen.

Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I
Pomp and circumstance
And I confess the same was true last week when I saw the historical movie of the moment, Shekhar Kapoor's Elizabeth: The Golden Age. In this latest glorious celebration of one of history's great iconic women, Cate Blanchett reprises her widely-acclaimed 1998 role as Queen Elizabeth I, Geoffrey Rush is once again the passionately loyal, if ruthless, Lord Walsingham, while Clive Owen plays a gallantly seductive Sir Walter Raleigh - Errol Flynn-style.

Critical reception of Elizabeth: The Golden Age in the British media has not matched the chorus of approval from the American critics.

Spirit captured

There have been murmurings of reproach over the film's breaches in historical authenticity, with commentators expressing their anxiety at its tampering with the facts, and the liberties taken in the plot, in terms of what can only be described as moral dismay. Ought I as an historian to share the critics' disapproval? The fact is, I simply don't.

Olivier as Henry V
Stirring stuff: Olivier as Henry V
Because after a career spent poring over the surviving documents from the 16th and 17th centuries, clutching at any emotional straw in the form of an overlooked manuscript jotting or a recently-discovered folio of contemporary eye-witness observations, I find the heroic confidence of Blanchett's portrayal of Elizabeth I positively exhilarating.

Magnificently decked out in breathtaking outfits, topped by a sequence of elaborately eye-catching hairstyles, her riposte to the Spanish Ambassador's threat to send an Armada against our little islands has the ring of Joan of Arc about it: "I too can command the wind, sir! I have a hurricane in me that will strip Spain bare if you dare to try me!"

And on her rearing white horse in a glittering suit of armour, she is Henry V at the siege of Honfleur (or at least Kenneth Branagh's version of him in his remake of Laurence Olivier's classic film), as she urges on her troops: "Let them come with the armies of hell, they will not pass!"

The skill of the film director lies in introducing the emotional texture and pulse of history by means of vivid tableaux and screen images, to prompt in us the rush of feeling I have just described. In Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Shekhar Kapoor - a former Bollywood director - deliberately recapitulates the over-heated encounters between Bette Davis and Errol Flynn in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, just as he does that iconic moment on the rearing white horse in Shakespeare's Henry V.

Bard words

Indeed, consider the way in which William Shakespeare himself heightened the emotional atmosphere in his play, to allow an anxious England - worrying about the succession as their unmarried, childless queen grew old - to conjure up the glory days of her forebear Henry V and find reassurance.

   
And in the words of Henry V at Agincourt - 'He that hath no stomach for the fight, let him depart'
Kenneth Baker, Tory chairman in 1989
The romantic courtship between Henry and France's Princess Katherine in the play substitutes for a more prosaic reality - Henry actually won his bride as spoils of war. And does the documentary record tell us that Henry really uttered the words, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead." Of course not.

Yet these are the ringing words which, time and again, have been used to engender in the British the strong emotions of national pride which we associate with key moments in our real or imagined history.

I remember being startled, in 1989, when listening to the 5pm news on my car radio, I heard the then Chairman of the Conservatives, Kenneth Baker, at the party conference, urging the faithful to stiffen their resolve in the face of a proposed increase in mortgage lending rates, to extraordinary rhetorical effect: "And in the words of Henry V at Agincourt - 'He that hath no stomach for the fight, let him depart'."

The rest of Baker's speech was drowned in an emotional roar of audience approval.

Silver screen

To censure the efforts of generations of screen-writers and movie directors because they fail to stick to the truth is, in my opinion, to miss the point. Where they succeed, as in my view Elizabeth: The Golden Age does, they tap into that yearning I have described in myself.

They allow us to connect the events of the past with the threads of emotion and feeling which make that past meaningful for us in the present. They rediscover, in a way the documents generally cannot, the humanity of those who were agents of our history.

We might reflect, too, that it is a movie by an Indian director, with an Australian star, from a British studio and an American distributor. How extraordinary that around the world there should be enough fascination with this quintessentially English story to make a movie based upon it a box office success.

The silver screen has once again exuberantly travestied a glorious moment in our history - as it has since talkies began. Rather than cavilling at the obvious elisions and anachronisms, ought we not self-confidently to revel in the universal appeal of the story of an underdog nation triumphing against the odds, and the creative retellings it continues to inspire?