The Alphabet Challenge: G is for Gregory

It was the lunch hour of the autumn term of 1989, and I was at school, sitting in the middle of a little knot of my closest friends in the cobbled courtyard where we liked to spend our free time. Since vanished in the course of redevelopment, the little courtyard had a vending machine dispensing cups of hot chocolate for 10 pence each.  We sat in a row on the wide Victorian doorstep, drinking the scalding, watery brew from cream-coloured plastic cups and chatting.  Reading, with us, never excluded an individual from the conversation and at any time, at least one of our number would be buried in the latest gold-embossed blockbuster, which would eventually be passed round the rest of us.  On this occasion, the reader was regaling us with a snippet from the sex scene she had just reached.  We’d grown up on episodes of Dallas and Dynasty, so we weren’t easily shocked, but the plotline of this book – sibling incest, and not the soap opera version where it only happens because the participants don’t know they are related –  took even us aback.  The title? Wideacre by Philippa Gregory.

The Alphabet in Historical Fiction: D is for Dialogue

For this letter I decided to do things a little differently…instead of writing about one book or a series of books I would write about something that causes controversy among writers and readers of historical fiction – dialogue.

Different writers have different approaches – and also, the way dialogue is written has changed over the years, with older books more likely to historicise speech.  I decided to compare five different scenes from five different writers, all set in the Tudor period.

WARNING: Later in this post Anne Boleyn will use some very strong language!

Anne Boleyn: Venus or witch?

The movie tie-in cover

It was the original cover of The Other Boleyn Girl which famously started the trend for ‘headless women’ covers for historical novels.  I may be in the minority in not liking that original cover.  It was the colours: I just found them drab and boring.  I far prefer the vibrant emerald green of the movie tie-in cover.  This was the first copy of the book which I bought, and the green helped sell it to me (rather than the Photoshopping, which I’ve seen better done).

The question I want to answer is: why green?  Why not blue, red or yellow?  Why associate Anne Boleyn with the colour green?

Personally, the first thing that comes to mind is the idea of envy and jealousy: the ‘green-eyed jealousy’ and ‘green-eyed monster’ Shakespeare wrote about in The Merchant of Venice.  That’s pretty appropriate to the storyline of TOBG, which is chock full of envy and jealousy in the form of rivalry between Anne and her sister Mary.  Both envy the other at different times, but it is Anne who is portrayed as devoured by envy, consumed by ambition and determination to shove her sister out of the way and get to the top.

The second thing Anne’s green dress made me think of is another woman who dresses in green – a character in one of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, The Silver Chair.  When Jill and Eustace meet The Lady of the Green Kirtle on their journey to the land of the giants, they think she is lovely.  But their companion and guide, Puddleglum, is suspicious, and rightly so.  The Lady is a witch, with the power to transform into a serpent, ‘shining, and as green as poison.’

Well, Anne Boleyn doesn’t transform into a serpent in the pages of TOBG (don’t want to disappoint anyone who hasn’t read it) but she is shown to resort to witchcraft on more than one occasion.  She also attempts to poison an enemy.  Whether she was really guilty of this or not, it was something of which she was accused.   So again the green dress seems appropriate.

Or at least that’s how a 21st century audience sees it.  Jane Ashelford, discussing the language of colours in the sixteenth century, says that green was then known as ‘the colour of love and joy’ (The Art of Dress: Clothes and Society 1500-1914, London: The National Trust, 1996, revised ed. 2000, p.32).  Why love and joy?  Green was associated with Venus, the goddess of love, who was portrayed rising from green waves, as in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.  This association continued right through the early modern period (about 1500-1800) and was the reason why women’s bedchambers were so often decorated in green.  One of the best examples is the Green Velvet Bedchamber at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, England.  In 1732 William Kent designed a bed for this room with a gilded double shell against the headcloth (which you can just about glimpse through the curtains in the image below) to represent the shell in which Venus was borne to the shore.  There’s another green-upholstered bedchamber (although the colour has faded badly) at Osterley Park on the outskirts of London.  For this, the State Bedchamber, Robert Adam designed an eight-poster bed as a Temple of Venus in 1775-6 – click through the slide show to see it.

So although the ‘green’ Other Boleyn Girl cover may have been designed with the intention of portraying Anne as less than angelic, I like to think that she and her contemporaries would have seen it quite differently – as a tribute to her beauty and desirability.