Private Lives and Public Conflicts: The English Renaissance on Film, 1998–2010

Abstract

The spectator of a film set in the Renaissance period is like a time-traveller, ceaselessly flitting between past and present. Temporality is both unfixed and carefully delineated. The cast and crew of the film play a complex game, one that must both underline the different temporalities of past and present, the distinctiveness of past and present, and blur temporal boundaries so that they become indistinct to the spectator, and past and present can be experienced as one and the same. This time-shifting is negotiated through the materiality of the filmic process. In one time zone is the spectator, perhaps sitting in an audience of contemporaries, in a modern cinema, the film itself competing with a range of other consumer goods, from the popcorn in the spectator’s hand to the attractions described in the advertisements that precede the film. In another time zone are the characters that play out the drama that unfolds on the screen, surrounded by material objects that are intended to confirm this is a sixteenth-century world.