King and Conqueror. Taking the History out of Historical Fiction.

This article first appeared in the June 2026 issue of The Brazen Head. 

https://brazen-head.org/2026/06/15/king-and-conqueror-taking-the-history-out-of-historical-fiction/ 

Warning. Opinionating in progress.

The dust has settled and King and Conqueror has faded away to wherever TV series go to be forgotten. Nominally based on the events leading up to the Norman Conquest, it attracted criticism for its many historical inaccuracies. The history was wrong; the changes to chronology dizzying; characterisation was preposterous; the costumes and the armour were bad; men said fuckalot and everyone and everything was permanently dirty. Some of its defenders pointed out that it was not a documentary but ‘historical fiction’, a sensible defence undermined by repeated claims by those involved with the series that it was historically accurate.

 

If the history was so inaccurate it can’t be called ‘historical’, the fiction was the latest instalment in a collective infantilisation of the Middle Ages. Instead of the rich strangeness of the past appearing in historical dramas, film makers insist on confusing history with fantasy while erasing the differences between past and present. By leaning on the tropes of modern film, and fantasy films in particular, they present an adolescent version of the past which is rarely as dramatic as the reality it pretends to dramatize.

 

There’s a probably apocryphal story about the screening of the film, Titanic. Someone in the audience started to object, loudly, because the pattern of the rivets on the ship’s hull was not historically accurate. 

 

Every historical film brings out the Rivet Counters. Harold’s cloak is fastened incorrectly. The armour is wrong. The hairstyles are wrong. It gives people with specialised knowledge the opportunity to air their expertise. King and Conqueror has given the Rivet Counters many reasons to object. You will find their objections on YouTube. 

 

Not all historical objections are rivet counting and more is at stake than the lack of colour in the clothing or the preposterous attempts at ‘armour’, especially in this case because those involved with the production have repeatedly claimed their version is historically accurate.

 

A consulting company called SceneSpan claim on their website: 

 

‘King And Conqueror.

In this project, history was the script.

Brought in during early development, we advised across the script to ensure historical authenticity from the ground up: story arcs, character motivations, political dynamics, and cultural detail. Set during the Norman Conquest, the series required careful navigation of both Anglo-Saxon and Norman worldviews. Our role helped ground the drama in the lived realities of 11th-century power and identity.[emphasis is theirs]’[i]  

 

What grounds a story in the ‘lived realities’ of the past is a question: in this place and time, would a character of this rank say this, or act in this way?[ii] The failure to consider this ruins King and Conqueror and almost every other film set in and around this period. 

 

In the first episode characters are ignorant of their own history. When William and Matilda are arguing with the king of France, the latter scornfully suggests that only a fool would try to sail an army across the channel. It’s meant as dramatic irony, given that we all know that’s what William will do, but the historical king of France would have known armies had been sailing back and forth across the Channel and the North Sea for centuries. How else did he think Sweyn Forkbeard conquered England or the ‘Normans’ got to ‘Normandy’?

 

At other times characters act with no knowledge of the lived reality of their world. 

 

William rides away from the coronation on his own. He’s a Duke. In a culture where public display was essential, there should be a retinue and all the other signs and symbols of his wealth and status. He’s also a royal guest, which meant the king was responsible for his safety and would have provided guides and an escort. He had been ambushed on the way there, but apparently this doesn’t make him cautious on the return journey. How was he going to find his way to Pevensey on his own? Did the writer imagine a modern road with signposts?[iii]

 

The changes to chronology are dizzying. William was born in 1028. Even if he had attended the coronation (he didn’t) you can work out his age. In King and Conqueror an adult William leaves the pregnant wife he didn’t marry until the 1050s to attend the coronation in 1043, where he is introduced as the victor of Val es Dunes, a battle he didn’t fight until 1047. The events at Dover, which are being plotted at the coronation, and which will lead to Godwin being banished, happened in 1051.

 

If time is treated loosely, characters are melded together, their names are changed, or they are left out. The Evil Earl of Mercia is called Morcar. At the time of Edward’s coronation, Leofric, was earl of Mercia. His grandson, Morcar, became earl of Northumbria when the locals rose against Tostig and deposed him in 1065. Making him earl in 1043 means the devious goings on of 1065, which potentially reveal so much about Harold’s character, have been erased[iv].

 

The defence against these objections, and even in the first episode there is so much more to object to, is that this is not a documentary, but historical fiction. It’s a sound defence. Some historical inaccuracies need not ruin a film, and accuracy does not guarantee a film will be entertaining. 

 

If you take the history out of historical fiction the characters are left flapping in the wind. In the complex context of their time, their choices and actions defined them. Remove that context and the characters are just names. Remove the history as context, and something must replace it. In King and Conqueror, the replacement is always so much less than what it replaces. 

 

The period between the coronations of Edward the Confessor and William 1^st is covered by well-written, historically accurate books aimed at a non-specialist audience. Without learning Old English, Anglo-Norman and Latin, it’s easy to stack a shelf and be up to date with the current knowledge of the time and the characters. It is depressing to think that the writer and producers of King and Conqueror didn’t bother. It is even more depressing to think that they did and then decided to throw out the history because they thought their version was better.

 

Godwin was banished in 1051 because of an incident in Dover. 

 

The facts are murky. Different versions of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle give slightly different versions of the events. Returning to the continent, Eustace of Boulogne and his men were involved in an altercation with the inhabitants of the town. There were deaths on both sides. Eustace seems to have raced to the king and given his version of the story. Without waiting to ask Godwin to investigate, Edward called on him, as the relevant earl, to reestablish the king’s justice by punishing the town[v].

 

When Godwin refused, and according to some versions demanded Eustace’s men be punished, he was called on to answer charges of treason. Turning up to court without guarantees of safe conduct, including the formal exchange of hostages, was never a good idea. Godwin was old enough to remember at least one culling of the earls. He refused to appear and called out his armed supporters. The king was expected to keep the peace and punish wrongdoing. Edward could not withdraw the order without losing face. Edward and the Witan found Godwin guilty of treason. The other earls sided with Edward. Godwin fled and his family scattered into exile. [vi]

 

Earls were not kings, they were the king’s appointed officers, and their job was to enforce the king’s rule. When Godwin refused the order to ravage Dover he was challenging the king’s authority. For nearly ten years he had been the most powerful man in the country. His daughter was the queen. He must have thought he was secure enough to ignore a royal order.

 

Why did Godwin refuse a direct order from his king: arrogant self-confidence that reveals his own bad judgement and his poor opinion of Edward? Or was he feeling his influence slide, his advice ignored, his proteges passed over and trying to assert himself? Did he have a personal dislike of Eustace, or of the ‘foreigners’ who Edward seemed to be favouring? 

 

Was Edward overconfident? Not thinking clearly? Desperate to please a foreign relative? Was he looking for an excuse to break Godwin’s hold over him. Did he expect Godwin to protest and then back down and was taken by surprise when he didn’t?  

 

No ‘personal’ records survive from this period. We don’t know what the characters were thinking. The writer of historical fiction is free to explore the possibilities within the framework of the historical events and to offer an interpretation.  

 

King and Conqueror replaces this with simplistic nonsense about Godwin being accused of ‘breaking The Treaty’. It’s clear to the audience that whatever happened in Dover was due to the machinations of the Evil Mercian Morcar and the Wicked Queen Mother. Godwin becomes the ‘Good Guy’ done over by ‘The Baddies’. It’s childish in the most derogatory sense of that term. 

 

Fictional characters don’t have to be ‘realistic’, but they need a coherent story world in which to operate. Mangle the history, and the possibilities of coherence become increasingly small. The fashion for presenting characters in ‘the past’ as though they were modern people with the approved attitudes and fashionable responses adds to the mess[vii].

 

In the first episode, Sweyn has sex with a bride on her wedding night as it’s his ‘right as her lord’^[viii]. His brothers are disgusted, and he has to threaten Tostig to prevent him from telling their father. Their disgust is a modern reaction. If it were his right, legal and customary (which to be clear, it wasn’t) why would they have been disgusted? They would have normalized the behaviour. 

 

Harold promises his mistress he’ll never let his father force him into a ‘church marriage’ with anyone else. This is the romantic, individualistic modern lover of popular fiction speaking. If Harold Godwinson ever said that to Edith Swanneck, they would have both known that he was lying[ix].  

 

Without the historical context, King and Conqueror settles for importing the adolescent tropes of modern fantasy. The result is fiction as bad as the history. 

 

Emma, the queen mother, is the only woman in history to have married two kings of England and had two sons, by different fathers, who ruled the country. She survived the reigns of five kings before Edward, her son by her first marriage, was crowned. Matilda alludes to all this before William leaves for England. Yet the writers do not have Emma behave with the subtlety of a survivor and successful political operator. She is a strident pantomime witch. Harold is a tousled haired womble with daddy issues. He likes to bite noses during combat. He’s dominated by his mistress and portrayed as an untrustworthy liar. You’d think twice about following him to the pub.

 

The characters are juvenile, leaning heavily on the tropes of popular film. We know these are hard men because they say fuckalot. Both William and Godwin have wandered in from a film about gangland struggles for control of the neighbourhood. Godwin seems to be the last survivor of the Kray Brothers gang. And there’s the ‘Bromance’[x].

 

The film industry has a long record of treating the Middle Ages as a vague backdrop and mangling history in the process. In the general slop of cheap art chasing money at a time of rising historical ignorance, it would be surprising if King and Conqueror wasn’t the mess it was. 

 

Does it matter that King and Conqueror is less true to the 11^th century than House was to a modern American Hospital? 

 

We knew House was fiction. But King and Conqueror has been presented as history. This is not a story about fictional characters in a vaguely rendered past. The distinction seems important. It uses the names of historical persons in a way that suggests this is a representation of those people in their specific historical setting. Publicity for the series made repeated claims for its accuracy as history. 

 

Responding to criticisms about historical inaccuracies, James Norton, the actor who plays Harold, stated: 

 

The truth was, they were friends. They met at the coronation, we know that William invited Harold over to Normandy to fight against the Baron of Brittany, he did swear, he acknowledged William’s rightful claim to the crown over the relics – whether he meant it or not, we don’t know. But so much of what we tell, in terms of their relationship and friendship, is true.[xi] 

 

It is not the truth. They were not friends. They did not meet at the coronation. They probably didn’t meet in person until 1065 when Harold was (possibly shipwrecked) on the continent [xii].We don’t know why he was on that ship but none of the suggested reasons include an invitation from William ‘to fight against the baron of Britanny’. We do know Harold was in William’s custody. We do not know what oath Harold made, if he made an oath, over relics while he was there. William had no ‘rightful claim’ to the crown of England. 

 

Whether this is ignorance or indifference, the insidious lie; ‘This is true’, is where the damage is done. One can guarantee that there are now people who believe this is ‘the real story’ because James Norton said so, and for them an actor is a more reliable source of information than any historian. There are people who believe Clive Owen’s King Arthur revealed the identity of the real king Arthur because the film was advertised as ‘The untold true story that became the legend’[xiii]. No amount of fact-based refutation is going to change their minds. They saw it on the screen.  

 

Perhaps it’s a minority view, but King and Conqueror turns a period of unusual historical importance into a pantomime. It would be naïve to expect any film maker to treat the past with respect or have any respect for people who do. Art chasing money doesn’t have a conscience. The idea art should, or could, be responsible, seems quaintly, almost embarrassingly, old fashioned. The period between the coronations of Edward and William I is crucial in the history of the British Isles. Old fashioned as it seems, it’s possible to believe it deserves better than to be presented as a second-rate episode of Game of Thrones or Bored of the Rings without the attempted humour. 

 

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[i] https://scenespan.com/our-work/ Their emphasis in bold. The kindest thing to say about this quote is that perhaps they worked on a different King and Conqueror to the one we all watched.

[ii] To be very clear I don’t mean they should be speaking Old English or a faked version of it. 

[iii] William never learnt to speak English, so he couldn’t ask for directions either. 

[iv] Tostig, was unpopular as Earl of Northumbria. In October 1065, while he was away at the royal court, the locals killed his followers, and marched south. They were joined by the Mercians under their earl, Edwin (Eadwine). The Northumbrians then offered the earldom to Morcar, Edwin’s brother. King Edward wanted to call out the army and crush the rebellion. The army refused to muster. Harold acted as mediator, and Morcar became earl and Tostig was banished. The date is not known but either before or after the uprising Harold married the sister of Edwin and Morcar. Harold swore he was not involved in planning the uprising. Tostig was probably not the only person who didn’t believe him.

[v] Ravaging towns that broke the King’s peace was not unusual. Godwin, Leofric and Seward ravaged Worcester for three days under the previous king after two of the king’s men had been killed in the town.

[vi]  King and Conqueror begins by stating that England is emerging from decades of ‘bloody civil war’.  This is historically wrong. Cnut had ruled from 1016-1035, and while there was disagreement over the succession, it didn’t lead to ‘a civil war’. Despite the popular idea that medieval people went to war at the drop of hat, there is evidence to suggest that those in power in England at the time preferred to avoid armed conflict. This might explain why the Earls first sided with Edward, and then the ease with which Godwin was allowed to return. 

[vii] For an extreme example, see ‘The King’ (2019) in which Henry V is presented as a pacifist who is shocked to discover his courtiers are making money from the war against France. 

[viii] The idea of ‘Premier Noce’ or ‘Droit de seigneur’ or ‘jus primae noce’ has been shown to be a myth invented by much later writers. The historical Sweyn was banished after eloping with an Abbess and murdering his cousin. 

[ix] Calling Edith his mistress is unavoidably and unintentionally derogatory. She was his wife ‘after the Danish fashion’.  This was a marriage that was not sanctioned by the church but regarded by everybody else as a marriage. It allowed aristocratic men to choose a wife, knowing that when the time came and they entered into a church marriage for political reasons, (and all aristocratic marriages were political), they would not be entering into a bigamous relationship. 

[x] I dislike this term as it cheapens friendship but it’s exactly what is presented in King and Conqueror. 

[xi] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/king-conqueror-stars-address-criticism-nikolaj-coster-waldau-james-norton_uk_68b034efe4b0bbcc3f8e4d8a For similar claims see https://www.televisual.com/news/james-norton-on-king-conqueror/

[xii] There is not only disagreement about what happened but about when it happened. Edward’s most recent biographer puts it in 1065. William’s opts for 1064. 

[xiii] This phrase appeared on the poster for the film, popularising the candidature of L. Artorius Castus for the role as ‘the real king Arthur’. However, King Arthur is a good example of a film that is both entertaining and historically inaccurate. 

Carmilla 2020 or 'The Governess was Repressed'

Carmilla 2020

 

In 1970 Hammer released a film called ‘The Vampire Lovers’. It was their version of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s iconic 19^th century vampire story, Carmilla.  It played with the narrative’s sequence, making Marcella/Carmilla’s vampiric character too obvious from the start.  While its casting was undoubtedly strange, and Carmilla is far more predatory in an indiscriminate way than she is in the story, it stuck reasonably closely to the plot and can be watched as a reading of the story. Hammer did make the obvious mistake of thinking two topless women in a room with no men was box office gold. 

 

This 2020 film version claims to be based on Le Fanu’s story, it also seems to think that two young women kissing each other is art house gold, but it has so little in common with what Le Fanu wrote that it’s difficult to see why they bothered to call it Carmilla.

 

If you know Le Fanu’s little masterpiece, a plot summary of the 2020 film is all you need. (You can use the Carmilla/Le fanu links in the side bar or below to read about both Le Fanu and Hammer's version.)

 

Laura is a disconnected fifteen year old living in a big house in a generic somewhere, with only her father, a governess who likes to strap up her arm to stop her using her left hand, and a generic (I’m guessing) west Indian maid. She is looking forward to a visit from a friend. She hears the friend is ill and can’t come. The Governess is creepy and lingers a little too closely over her charge when she’s in bed.

 

A carriage crashes. The driver is killed but a young girl is saved and brought into the house. She has lost her memory. Laura is fascinated and the two girls are physically attracted to each other. The governess interrupts them rolling passionately on the floor. 

 

The governess, having given Carmilla a good beating, convinces the local doctor that Carmilla is a Vampire. Her evidence is so flimsy it’s laughable. She found a book about vampires in the wreckage of the carriage, no one knows who the girl is and girls are getting sick . Oh and a dog barked at her….it sounds like we’ve strayed into The Turn of the Screw. Her attempts to convince the doctor includes an awkward sexual encounter, but whether this is just repression breaking loose or her way of making him take her side against Carmilla is hard to tell. Neither of them seem to be having any fun. 

 

The girls escape and drift away from the house, but not too far. The Governess, the doctor and a random estate worker easily track them down. They slam a stake through Carmilla’s heart. The father turns up and carries Laura away. He does this for a very long time. Then we see Laura standing by a pond throwing stones in the water for a very long time and that’s the end of the very long, very slow story. 

 

The film makers have stripped out everything that makes Le Fanu’s story what it is. Whatever was subtle and ambiguous has gone; it was gone from the Hammer film too, but in this film they have replaced it with close up shots of insects and pictures of Laura wandering in the grounds, or Laura running in the grounds with Carmilla. 

 

What’s most surprising is that Carmilla is not a vampire in this film. Why you’d do this to the story is baffling. In both Hammer’s version and this one, the sexual aspect is amplified at the cost of the story. More effort goes in to building sexual tension between the two girls than to telling any kind of story. And on and on. 

 

If they had called this Laura and the Stranger…or The Lovers or The Governess was Repressed it would at least have been honest and would have stood or fallen on its own merits as a story about repression and adolescent fantasy. It wouldn’t have been all that interesting or convincing. 

But as a version of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, it’s just crass.

 

It’s an art house movie without art. 

Nightfall, Pilgrimage and filming the middle ages

Filming the Middle Ages: Nightfall and Pilgrimage.

Warning, opinionating in progress yer honour

Both Nightfall and Pilgrimage are set roughly around about the same time. Both are set in historical contexts. Both revolve around a sacred relic. The difference lies not in ‘historical accuracy’ whatever that might mean, but in the attempt by Pilgrimage to capture a different way of thinking about the world, and the total failure of Nightfall to even make the attempt.

 What interests me about films or tv series set in 'the middle ages' or 'the dark ages' is their attempt, successful or other wise, to evoke a different world. You may not be interested in this aspect of films set in the past, and if not, its presence or absence should not affect your attitude towards them. 

Exactly what Nightfall is supposed to be is a problem in itself. Although from the history channel it’s obviously not ‘history’ in the sense of documentary history or reenactment. It’s fictional entertainment. But it’s pseudo historical entertainment, containing names that occur in the historical record.  And so, the question is why didn’t the writers create their own fantasy world, why did they hang their characters on real names, and place the action in real places, when they’re obviously not interested in how those characters would have acted. It’s possible they are simply shirt tailing the words Templar and grail, exploiting what people think they know about Templars or the grail in order to establish an intial audience base.

The rivet counters can complain about the fire bombs and the exploding ships and castles, the holy grail, the fact that some of the knights are called Gawain and Percival, and that there seems to be some confusion between Knights of the Temple and the Knights of the Round table. (It would take a far more subtle approach to pull this one off; the Templars were a religious order, the Knights of the Round Table were not.) A queen of France who wanders the streets of Paris alone and unattended? Mounted Knights who dismount to fight superior numbers?

I have no objections to any of this as entertainment: the minute the word Grail appears we’re in the land of fiction.

What put me off the story from the first episode is the idea of a ‘Master of the Temple’ having an affair with the Queen of France.

What most versions of the middle ages on film fail to take into account is how different these people were in the way they thought.  They were not you and me in fancy dress. The Bold and The Beautiful in medieval costume doesn’t work except as pastiche or parody.

We’ve become inured to sex as an essential part of narrative, especially as part of historical fiction.  Everyone it seems was dropping their clothes at the drop of a hat. But the morality of an American soap opera doesn’t translate into the European middle ages.

In the story world of Nightfall, our central character does not believe God exists. He Knows God exists. He has touched the relic of the Last Supper.  For him Jesus is an historical character and he has seen the evidence. He wants to reclaim the Holy Land for the Christian church and is willing to die fighting for it because of this faith. It motivates him powerfully.

This man has sworn to this God a vow of chastity and poverty when he joined the order.  He knows adultery is a sin. He also knows that adultery with the queen is treason. And his sensuality will undermine everything his order stands for, if it’s found out it will hand his enemies a weapon he cannot fight against.  He cannot play the games soap opera characters play; I’m sorry, it didn’t really mean anything, it was just sex, a bit of fun. I won’t do it again.

Nor is it a matter of whether or not they can get away with it. He cannot ‘get away with it’ because his God is watching everything he does.  And in the crowded world of Paris, it’s unlikely that someone isn’t going to notice him climbing a wall and wonder where he’s going.

So this man is a lying, adulterous treasonous hypocrite. And a fool. If he’s not caught he’s going straight to a hell that he believes in. Even if he believes he can find absolution for his sins, when he is caught his death is going to be horrific and will damage his order irrevocably.

It’s this failure to understand that sex is out of bounds, and  the queen is simply off the planet that suggests the writers have not bothered to consider their material. There’s no attempt to understand the difference between now and then, and that reduces this to farce.

It’s interesting to compare Nightfall to the film The Pilgrimage (2017). Again your average rivet counter could probably find fault with the monks’ habits, their belts, their tonsures. I’m fairly sure a weapons expert might have something to say about some of the weapons on show. And the graphic violence might be off putting to some.

But what the film does is catch at something alien: a profound belief in the reality of relics. As someone says, ‘it’s a rock some dead saint bled on’, but for the monks, it is manifest holiness, and terrible in the precise meaning of that term. For the Cistercian and his masters, it is a thing of power that will aid them in their plans. For the Normans in Ireland, it is a piece that can be used to secure their future by giving it to a King struggling with the Pope.

There is an immanent violence all through the film. It’s not glamourized or sexualized, there’s nothing heroic or sexy about it, but it is there and the casual brutality and indifference to suffering that explodes sometimes unpredictability add a menace to the story which is missing from Nightfall.  In Pilgrimage faith exists in the face of such ugliness. And there are different types of faith, shades of belief and devotion, and in the case of the Cistercian, it is an ugly and unattractive faith.

The characters: the Monks, the Cistercian, and the Norman, Raymond, all feel like they belong in a different time. Raymond is by far a better character than the central Templar in Nightfall as an imaginative attempt to answer ‘what would someone in that time and place be like’? He is proud, brutalized, seething with contempt, worried that this family’s position is jeopardized by John’s unpredictability but still not ready to get rid of an aging father. And his ferocity simmers beneath a barely controlled frustration with the world. The Norman invasion of Ireland was not pretty, and the Irish resistance was not a matter of knights meeting in the open field. It was an encounter that brutalized both sides.  Just as the crusades did.

When, searching for the relic, Raymond says ‘I will find another rock and pretend it is the relic’ or words to that effect, he is not expressing a modern skepticism about relics, but a profound disillusionment and consequent lack of faith that defines him as a character against the believers in the film.

He would not have sex with the queen. Even if Isabella of Angouleme was the stunning beauty she is rumored to have been.  But if he’d lived, you can imagine him a few years down the track, having run out of patience, joining the baronial revolt against John and meeting the cruelty of John’s mercenaries head on.

My reaction to these two films is probably clouded by the fact I’m currently working my way through translations of the Works of Gerald of Wales, who was still alive at the time of Pilgrimage, who described the Norman Invasion of Ireland and the English and French attempts to subdue Wales. I admit I’d rather read Gerald than watch either, but Pilgrimage seems to resonate with his writing. Nightfall doesn’t.

End of opinionating.

Macbeth 2015

Macbeth 2015

Warning. From time to time one is guilty of opinionating in public. This is one of them. It’s long and bad tempered because I’m so tired of paying for films that are adaptations of ‘premodern’ texts which take my money and then insult my intelligence.

Another film adaptation of a Shakespearian play. The play Macbeth has been around for 400 years. There’s a library about it, and there have been numerous attempts to put that play on stage or on film and some have been creative, some have been misguided and some have been downright weird. 

There are versions: there is no ‘right’ version.  But why do so many modern adaptations require the audience to leave its brain at the door? Why are so many versions of early modern or pre-modern texts so often reductive to the point where you’d be forgiven for wondering if the filmmakers had ever bothered to think about the original. Why are they so unimaginative? There are exceptions. Brilliant exceptions, but they are so rare.

There’s probably two ways at looking at Macbeth (2015).

Does it live on its own, free of the original? Yes it does. As a film it looks beautiful, the acting is good, the story rocks along and it’s an entertaining ride. If you knew nothing about Macbeth, or ‘Macbeth’ this is an entertaining film as long as you leave your brain at the door.  They could have called it Macca the Slasher and no one would have cared: Macca goes Ape.

As an adaptation it’s a reading of the source, so it’s possible to ask what it does with the original, or what is suggests as a reading of the original? Answer: it’s awful.  It’s yet another mediocre piece dressed up with the usual marketing bullshit and cinema trickery which seems to miss the fact that 400 years ago Shakespeare didn’t insult the intelligence of his audience.

Think of that initial audience. They didn’t know the heart circulated the blood. Your average high school student who has being paying attention knows more astronomy and geography than they did. To find out what was wrong with you the doctor was just as liable to taste your urine or cast your horoscope.  America was a vague rumour to the west and Australia hadn’t been invented. Newton and his physics were over a century in the future.

But that original audience wasn’t stupid. In Macbeth Shakespeare made something that was a spectacle: even the stage version has weird sisters and sword fights and apparitions,  but the story works at whatever level you want to take it.  It works as spectacle and profound meditation. You can't exceed it or sum it up neatly. Whatever meaning or theme you find is always opening outwards into new possibilities. He also created a linguistic space where it was possible to think through and in language.  It’s not that Shakespeare wrote some memorable lines. His characters think through the language they use. Macbeth’s tortured syntax in the lead up to the murder, the way images cluster and echo each other, the way characters use their own particular sets of symbolism.  You can hear these things in a production. Duncan’s ornate syntax, the rhythm of the witches which sets them apart, Lady Madcbeth’s habitual use of the first person plural etc.etc.etc. So claiming that they respected the dialogue, without paying attention to how that dialogue works, is indicative of the problem.

Yes, it’s a play about an ambitious Scottish couple and the consequences of their ambition, but ambition is just the specific example: every one in that audience, at some stage of their life would stand where Macbeth did, in act one scene seven, knowing that the thing he or she most wanted was the one thing all sane reasoning and social conditioning said was wrong.  

The tragedy lies in the way he has to face the consequences of his decision, and the unraveling of the Macbeths’ relationship; they start joined at the hip and they both die alone regretting their actions. As Marjorie Garber pointed out, in the kind of easily available discussion in her book Shakespeare After All which should be the starting point for anyone thinking about twiddling with one of the plays: this is not about doing an act, but being done by it.

In the ‘making of the film’ on my Blue ray version the director says two things that are indicative of what’s wrong. The first is that he was more interested in the 11^th century Macbeth than in Shakespeare’s. It’s a great idea. Though why you’d still use Will’s words is a good question.

At which point the person behind the camera should have stopped him and said, and what did you do with that information? Did you make a film about someone called Macbeth set in the 11^th century?

A quick review of the History, which was not known to Shakespeare and is still very patchy:

Eleventh century Scotland was not a united kingdom but a number of smaller, competing ones. 9 of the ten ‘kings’ who ruled before Macbeth were murdered or killed in battle by the people who took over from them. Hereditary Kingship was not a feature of the time.

Duncan was not regarded as a Good King. He was seen as weak and his attempts at gaining military glory were disastrous. Macbeth’s claim to the throne was as good as Duncan’s and he could also claim that his wife was the granddaughter of a King.

Macbeth and the Scottish “earls”, including Banquo, rose against Duncan after his disastrous campaign in England. There is no sense that what Macbeth did was wrong or unusual. At the time of the Killing, Malcolm was nine years old. By law a King had to be at least 17. He and his mother and brother didn’t leave Scotland for two years.

Lady Macbeth was called Gruach. Her first husband was called Gillecomgain, a son of Duncan. Gillcomegain and Duncan’s Grandfather had killed Macbeth’s father. Lady Macbeth and Gillecomgain had a child, called Lulach. Gillecomgain was burnt to death in his fortress, possibly by Macbeth.  Macbeth married Gruach, who was also his cousin. He was twenty-eight when they married.

Macbeth ruled a united Scotland for 17 years. He was so secure of his position that he went on a pilgrimage to Rome

The first attempt by Siward to defeat him was unsuccessful. He was defeated in battle by Malcolm and Siward in July 1054.  Malcolm became King after the victory, but Macbeth continued to rule the northern part of Scotland until his death in battle against Malcolm in 1057.

Shakespeare did not know much, if any, of this.  

Think about what a leap of the imagination it would take to try and get inside that story. How strange and alien it must be to a modern audience. How thought provoking. And then imagine a couple with that kind of family history. How did they negotiate their relationship?  Or what it might be like to live in that world:  imagine what it might be like to ‘love’ someone knowing their chances of dying in their sleep were almost non existent, that there is no point in the day or night when you could simply relax and not fear an assassin. Where every time they left there was a fifty-fifty chance they might not make it back.

But part of the problem with so many film adaptations is a basic failure to imagine.

At the level of ‘History’ this film is botched.

At times they seemed to have played with the idea of it being about that 11^th century King.  Macbeth’s ‘castle’ where he kills Duncan is nothing but a large barn, which is probably about right, although it’s a barn with no wall or fence around it.  But then, abruptly heaving into the distance, there’s a much later medieval castle with cathedral like interiors. It’s a bit like a film about Drake leading the English Navy against the Spanish Armada in 1588 with RAF Spitfires appearing  to strafe the Spanish galleys.

Battles are ridiculously stylized and silly. They seem to happen in fog or with drifting smoke. There’s knowledge, readily available, about how 11^th century battles were fought and the weapons used in them. But here we have a Scottish 11^th Century Army in which everyone can afford a sword but not one shield or helmet is in evidence, even amongst the Norwegians.  

This does at least lead to one amusing moment when Macbeth says, ‘Before my body/ I throw my warlike shield’.  He doesn’t have one and neither does anyone else.

The idea of a teenage boy being out of place in an 11^th century army is just daft.  The idea of Macbeth being upset by this is even dafter.  Siward’s reaction to his son’s death at the end of the play should signal this.  When the ‘last reserves’ arrive, there’s not a farm implement amongst them.  

In one of the stranger moments of the film there’s a blink and you’ll miss it execution of the first Thane of Cawdor, by archers. But there are no archers in the battles.  The battles are random melees.  The English/Northumbrian army under Siward looks suspiciously like a group of monks on horseback. They should look like the English army in the Bayeux tapestry.  They should fight like the armies did less than ten years later at Fulford Gate and Stamford Bridge and Senlac.  If you want to ‘do’ the 11^th century do it.

Being pedantic again? No. Why do I have to leave my brain at the door?  So much time and technological know how went into this why couldn’t they get these things right?

The second thing I heard on the 'making of' was that Macbeth has PTSD. I’m not quoting directly. Because at that point my brain stalled …..

Why bother calling this film Macbeth?  

Shakespeare’s working method was to multiply or remove the motivations and causes he found in his sources.  This opens up his plays. It allows the audience room to move and it does not dictate meaning. You’re an adult it says: you make up your own mind. It’s rare to find modern films that do this.

The film begins with the Macbeths at the funeral of a child. So that ‘explains’ Mrs Macbeth. She’s lost a child. That’s why she does what she does. Simple.

As for Macbeth, well, apparently he has PTSD. And that explains everything too, so it’s all good and neat.  And you don’t have to think or feel, just watch the pretty film.

Ignore the dodgy practice of analyzing people who have been dead for ten centuries using modern categories that probably don’t make sense when applied to the past.  The distinction between soldier and civilian in the 11^th century was meaningless. Ignore the desire to ‘explain’. Freud was guilty of this, he wanted to “solve the problem of Hamlet” and the dead child explanation for Lady M’s actions  turns up in a 1916 essay of his.

Instead ask why didn’t someone stop and consider what happens when you make a reductive  interpretation of the play that isn’t in the play and impose it on the material.

 Macbeth has PTSD. Therefore he does what he does.  The story now takes place ‘over there’ at several removes from the audience.  Not only are we not about to be drafted into an 11^th century battle, most of us don’t have PTSD.  We might sympathise with those that do, but the universal claims of the original, the sense of choices and their consequences that everyone has to face, the limitations of morality, the way wishful thinking can misinterpret or misread (something both Duncan and Macbeth are guilty of), all this has been vaporized and replaced by what?

MacBeth is on the battlefield killing, Afterwards doing stuff with dead and wounded bodies you’d expect other people to be doing.  Then he’s screwing his wife on what seems to be an altar in a chapel, then he’s butchering Duncan in a pointless frenzy and then he’s going weird in a room. People die. Lady Macbeth rides across the countryside and cries. Then she dies. Then Macbeth dies.

There is no possibility of sympathy or horror.  He’s no longer a believable or interesting person; he’s a virtual character in yet another silly hack fest.  It’s a terrible waste of the actors and the director

There’s no initial nobility, there’s no choice made consciously leading to horrific personal and social consequences.  There’s no distinction between the Macbeths in their reactions to what they’ve done. It seems that Lady M is distraught because Macca’s gone nuts. There’s no sense of her terrible slow realization of her guilt.

Another thing Polanski did well in comparison was to show the way Macbeth rots Scotland out from the centre. There’s no noble Duncan: Duncan has basically disappeared. Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking has gone, the Hubble bubble scene has gone. The banquet scene is botched and the death of Lady Macduff and her family changed from the menace and horror of the original (which even Polanski got right, despite the fact it has one of Shakespeare’s most cringe worthy lines) to some twisted and unbelievable piece of brutal nonsense in which they are tied to stakes and burnt with lady Macbeth looking on.  

It says something about the film that perhaps the most memorable scene is the one where MacDuff is told his wife and children are dead.  The actors are given space to act, the lines work, they’ve  worked for four hundred years and it suddenly becomes believable. And then its back to nonsense:

Burnham Wood becomes burning wood.

So why then, to wrap up this overlong grumble, given all the brilliant technical skill available, given the fine actors and the budgets and the skill of the director can’t we have a pre modern story told with intelligence and imagination which credits an audience with imagination and encourages it to use it?