Leave our period dramas alone!
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any article about Jane Austen must begin with a mangled, platitudinous variation on her most famous line. Irritating though this is, it's rather a good metaphor for the state of the wider treatment of Austen – and her near contemporaries – by popular culture. When it comes to adaptations of novels from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian periods, and even longer ago, we find ourselves in a deep trough. If you want mangled, platitudinous variations, you now need look no further than today's costume dramas. And this year being the 250th anniversary of Austen's birth, we should brace ourselves for a barrage of them.
Many of those behind the upcoming slough of modern takes on Austen et al hardly inspire confidence. Jane Tranter, the producer of a new adaptation of Janice Hadlow's The Other Bennet Sister – a Pride and Prejudice spin-off – complained the other day that 'the other thing with period costumes is, you start speaking posh and not everybody spoke posh in those days… So sometimes it's about a loosening around the fetishisation of a period.' This only ever works one way, of course. There aren't many characters in EastEnders who sound like the Duke of Kent. Yet, if everyone 'speaking posh' is as Ms Tranter says, then it has merely been replaced by other fetish-isations, ones even less rooted in historical reality or even creative believability.
Perhaps the most egregious example of contemporary obsessions overtaking historical dramas is the recent Disney+ adaptation of the late C.J. Sansom's Matthew Shardlake series of Tudor mysteries.
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