Today was a red-letter day in my life as a writer. This morning the trailer for My Lady Jane (the Amazon Prime TV series, that is) dropped on the internet. It was an emotional moment for me, as it was the first time I've been able to see live-action footage of a project that started when I was sixteen-years-old, enrolled in a high school British history class, in which I first encountered the little-known story of Lady Jane Grey. Jane Grey was a precocious, bookish teenager, who somehow, through no fault of her own, found herself the Queen of England for nine-ish days in the year 1553. Then, again through no fault of her own, she was deposed, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and eventually beheaded. Sixteen-year-old me connected with the story of Jane Grey. I read everything about her I could get my hands on. I often thought about her mournfully (my version of the Roman Empire) like she was a distant friend who had come to the most tragic and unfair ending I could imagine. She just wanted to read her books and be left alone, I thought bitterly. But NO. The people around her had other plans. That's how art begins, I think, as a point of connection. It is that emotional tug inside you that whispers, This. This moves me. This feels TRUE. I still had that feeling about Jane Grey when I was thirty-six-years old and I asked my friends Jodi Meadows and Brodi Ashton to write a book with me about her. We could, in that magical way that storytellers can, make her story fantastical and romantic. We could give her character the agency over her own destiny that the real Jane was never allowed. We could give her a happy ending. And so we did. We connected even more deeply with Jane's story as we researched her. We traveled to England and held onto one another, choked by tears, as we stood near the place that she died. In the end, we wrote a version of her story where Jane escaped the Tower of London and kept her head, a story that made us laugh and cry and hope for a better world. Is My Lady Jane a history book? No, definitely not, but if you read it you will probably learn some fun facts about life in Tudor England and the royal family at that time. My Lady Jane is ART inspired by a person from history. Now, we don't have to be precious about using the word "art," like we writers all need to wear black berets and think ourselves as some kind of geniuses. Art can be entertaining and funny and fun. It can be silly. It can be thought-provoking. And it can connect us to essential truths about life and love and humanity, even if the art itself is not "true." Here's another piece of art inspired by Jane Grey: It is "Ejecucion de Lady Jane Grey" by Paul Delaroche, which I downloaded from The National Gallery online, This was painted in 1834, nearly 300 years after Jane's death. It depicts the moment before Jane was executed. Is this piece of art the Truth with a capital T? Uh, no. Delaroche did try to make the painting seem accurate to the time, but many of the details, the architecture, lighting, and clothing, for instance, are historically incorrect. What Delaroche is trying to depict here (at least in my humble opinion) is the feeling of this moment, his own point of connection. He pities Jane. He wants to highlight her innocence in her white dress. He wants to show the grief of her ladies in waiting, and the downcast, regretful look on the face of the executioner. He is trying to imagine a moment of kindness in which a man helps Jane locate the block. Sixteen-year-old me saw this painting in a book once and gasped at the sheer drama of it, the loveliness and terrible tragedy of this young woman my own age. When I look at this painting now, I can still appreciate the aesthetic beauty of it, but part of me also rails against how helpless this version of Jane looks, this sweet and passive child about to be slaughtered. I want more for Jane than that. Delaroche's work definitely inspired Trevor Nunn, who directed Lady Jane Grey, a film starring Helena Bonham Carter and Cary Elwes that was released in 1986, 152 years after the painting and 433 years after Jane's real-life execution. You can see her in this shot groping for the block, like in the painting, but this film also highlighted Jane's willfulness, her intelligence and education, and her fierce wit and humor. She and Guildford have a sweet and swoony romance in the film, which makes their untimely deaths all the more terrible at the end. (Uh, spoiler alert?) But was the romance "true?" Did Jane Grey fall in love with Guildford Dudley, this young man she was forced to marry as part of a plot to get her on the throne?
We asked this question to one of the Beefeaters at the Tower of London while we were there, and he was of the firm opinion that Guildford and Jane barely knew each other before life went sideways on them. He did show us where Guildford carved Jane's name in the wall of his room at the Tower of London, which felt to us like a pretty romantic gesture. But the truth is, we don't know. Probably not. But here's the thing: we don't have to be so up tight about history, either. History is also, in essence, a story that has been narrated over time. It doesn't do the real Jane Grey any good for people to be precious about her suffering. Our art doesn't affect her now. It affects us. This brings me back around to the show on Amazon Prime, and the out-of-body floatiness I felt when watching the trailer. Even in this two minute trailer I can see how the piece of art that is the show was inspired by my book (duh), by the Trevor Nunn film, and by the Delaroche painting. I can see it being inspired by other shows like Bridgerton and The Great, the song "Wild Thing," films like Clueless and Crocodile Dundee, and Baz Luhrmann's poster for Romeo and Juliet. And that's wonderful. It how art works best, building on and being inspired by and rejoicing in the art of others. Connecting to the parts of the story that resonate with each of us, and connecting us with one another, from sixteen-year-old me to you.
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ABOUT MEI've been doing the writer thing for a while now. I was a hardcore student of the writing craft for ten years. I've published poems and stories with literary journals, and several (12!) novels with a traditional publisher. I've taught more than thirty courses in creative writing at the college level. I have some thoughts about this business, but in other ways I still feel like a beginner, like I am continuing to figure out how writing works and how publishing operates. Let's talk about it. ArchivesCategories |