'I AM THE F***ING KING'

The new Tudor drama 'Becoming Elizabeth' plays an interesting game with language

For one reason and another I spent too much of my time today going down a wormhole into dystopian projections about Artificial General Intelligence. This was compelling, but it was not exactly fun. So when teatime rolled around I ventured back to the sixteenth century for some light relief.

More specifically, I watched the first episode of Becoming Elizabeth, the new eight-part Tudor drama from Starz, which was released yesterday on streaming platforms including Amazon Prime. It follows the future Elizabeth I from the death of her father in 1547 to (I suppose) her accession as Queen in 1558.

There has been widespread coverage of the show in the UK press, and reviews have been broadly positive. Many reviews have likened it to an early-modern Succession - the HBO show about a Murdoch-like clan of overprivileged and ruthless media oligarchs. Of course, Succession is loosely based on King Lear, which was written just after Elizabeth I died. What that means I have no idea, except to say that maybe the critics have got everything ass-backward. It wouldn’t be the first time. But it’s also possible I’m overthinking things.

Anyway. That’s not what I popped up in your inbox to say.

What I popped up to say was that Becoming Elizabeth does a few interesting things in a genre of television where it is hard to do interesting things.

On the surface, it is a conventional early twenty-first century, upper-mid-budget TV Tudor romp. To wit:

• The lighting is all candles in the dark, as everything after Wolf Hall has had to be.

• The casting tends towards lookie-likies: Alicia von Ritter is a perfectly viable porcelain-and-strawberry young Elizabeth; Oliver Zetterström as Edward VI could almost have stepped out of the National Portrait Gallery’s NPG 5511.

• The camerawork is so whippy, handheld and wobbly that you wonder if the whole thing was shot in an earthquake by a drying-out alcoholic with the shakes.

• There’s a lot of shagging, mostly butt-naked and on top of the covers, despite the fact it’s January and Tudor palaces be like, central heating lolol

• There are a number of thickly bearded and well-honed hunks with sexy stares - most notably my old pal Tom Cullen (Landry from Knightfall, if you can remember that far back), playing Thomas Seymour.

• The incidental/atmospheric sound design (there’s a proper word for this and I can’t remember what it is) is mostly hooves clattering on cobbles and the fire crackling.

None of these are criticisms. They are simply conventions of a genre, and a good rule of making genre television is that if you screw around with too many conventions, you quickly lose the goodwill of people who like that genre.

But where - on my first viewing of the first episode - Becoming Elizabeth has done better than most Tudor (and indeed medieval) period pieces is in the subtle pitch of the dialogue. This is something that is very hard to get right, whether in a screenplay or on the page of a novel.

I’m not talking here about matters of pacing, the craftiness of the historical exposition, the general zip of the repartee. I’m referring to the balance that the show finds between cod-archaic ye-olde ‘where go ye, my liege’ formulations, which many historical screenwriters slip into because they feel that it creates period authenticity, and snappy modern idiom, in which it is easier to develop character but which can jar if it sounds too modern.

What am I actually saying? Basically, that I think Becoming Elizabeth is easy on the ear in a way that is surprisingly difficult to achieve in a period drama.

And my measure of this is in the way the characters curse.

‘Oh for f***’s sake!’

So says Cullen as Thomas Seymour very near the beginning of episode 1.

‘No f***ing Henry!’

That’s his brother, Edward Seymour (John Heffernan), a bit later.

‘Who the f*** is this Thomas?’

My notes from watching say ‘some bloke in the shadows??? couldn’t work out who it was’ (See above on lighting.)

But the bit of cursing that lights up the whole episode comes from young Edward VI, who starts off as a drippy milksop, but very quickly gets it into his head that he can throw his weight around. Getting annoyed with some shenanigans on his council, the shrill blighter suddenly squeaks:

‘I am the f***ing king!’

Shock! But fun. And so it goes on as the episode unfolds.

Needless to say, all of this is period-inauthentic bad language. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern era, cursing relied not on scatology and sexual references (as it largely does today), but on blasphemies. God’s wounds. Christ’s nails. Etc.

What we call swearing today is radically different from what passed for swearing five hundred-ish years ago. Our norms and taboos are significantly different from our ancestors’; transgressing them in speech or print - which is the point of swearing - is therefore a different ball-game.

For a diligent historical dramatist, however, this presents a specific problem. And that specific problem articulates a general problem. How do you strike the balance between respecting a degree of historical authenticity in dialogue and making a show that people will watch without becoming confused or enraged?

There are many possible solutions to this.

One radical approach would be to write dialogue in as close to ‘period’ English as possible. I have never seen this done on screen - on the page I have only seen it rarely, in books like James Meek’s To Calais In Ordinary Time (set in 1348) and Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (set in 1066). Both of these books lean into period vocabulary and syntax, although both are really in what you might call ‘hybrid’ English, with modern sentence structures and idiomatic concepts holding together something that is suggestive rather than truly imitative of a period.

Both books would be, I think, unfilmable.

Another approach would be simply not to bother trying to suggest period English at all, and write your historical piece as though it were an episode of Line of Duty or The Shield, using modern vocubulary and structure, or even the jargon and idiom of a particular subculture completely removed from your source material. You see this sometimes: I think maybe Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton probably falls into this category. That, however, can easily be off-putting and (see above on ‘conventions’) is likely to alienate the traditionalist/conservative base of your audience.

What most period screenwriters do, therefore, is try and patch together a hokey sort of generic-olde Englishhe in which sentences are rendered in an elliptical, passive form, relying on a formal kind of phrasemaking that, if it ever really existed at all, died out with Edward Gibbon. (‘I think not’/’if it so please your grace’/’we shall go there on the morrow, by God’ etc etc).

This, I think, is the worst kind of bullshit, since it not only sounds laboured and dull, and makes it very hard to tease out character through dialogue, but also feigns historical verisimilitude or even accuracy when it is in fact attempting no such thing. It is nothing more than a trope of cinema and screen, behind which lies only ‘stuff the writer has seen before, and lacks the wit or imagination to escape’.

Anyway, the good news is that by and large Becoming Elizabeth seems to have avoided that trap. Creator Anya Reiss has pitched the script in plain rather than phoney, roundabout English; the show adopts modern cursing and idiom early on and has the confidence to stick with it; it is easy to listen to, but manages by virtue of the cleanliness and crispness of the rest of the writing not to feel incongruously modern. The words let the actors go to work, which is really what every good script ought to do. And the end result left this viewer, at least, much happier than he was when he was reading about why Artificial Intelligence is probably going to kill us all. One day. But that’s a different screen genre. That’s Terminator 2.

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Oh, by the way - the reason I have been thinking about all this stuff is because of Essex Dogs, my debut novel, which comes out in the UK on September 15th. It took my some time to find a viable style of English in which to write the dialogue, and since I have written about a platoon of soldiers on the tear around France in 1346, I wanted to evoke both the Middle Ages, and the mood of a different style of war novel - the WW2/Vietnam war-is-hell-and-you’re-going-to-love-it book.

That meant finding a way to have people curse and argue and roister and mourn in a way that was both of and not of the time. I think I got it in the end. But you’ll have to read the book to find out.