January Meme: Favourite Historical Dramas
Jan. 3rd, 2025 10:02 amFor the purpose of this reply, I shall understand the question to mean specifically theatre plays, not "drama" in a wider sense including tv shows, or not-stageplay based movies. This being said, here are some of mine, in no particular order:
Friedrich Schiller: Don Carlos
Good old Schiller wrote many a historical drama, and his Wallenstein trilogy is somewhat closer to actual history than Don Carlos, the titular hero of which has little to nothing to do with the historical Carlos, and the actual hero of which is an OC. (Which makes Don Carlos still more historical than, say, Maria Stuart, which in addition to the famously not occuring meeting between Elizabeth and Mary also includes invented Leicester/Mary invented backstory, and another OC in the form of Mortimer - not nearly as cool as Posa. And let's not even talk about Schiller's take on Jeanne D'Arc wherein she falls for a sexy Englishman and dies on the battlefield.) But Don Carlos just works as a drama. It has it all: a tragic villain in Philip of Spain (seriously, Schiller's Philip is all the more remarkable because he's written at a time when not just Philip but Catholic Spaniards in general showed up only as moustache twirling villains when a Protestant author was doing the writing - whereas Schiller's Philip is so much of a tragic villain that "is Philip the true tragic (antihero) of the play?" is a favourite school essay writing topic, and the role is one of THE big roles for German actors to tackle once they've passed out of the youthful hero stage), the most famous bromantic (do we still say that? Or slashy?) relationship in German fictional literature in Carlos/Posa, while Posa also has tension of Carlos' Dad Philip, and not one but two more dimensional and actually interesting women in Queen Elisabeth and the Princess Eboli. The big OC of the play, Posa, is that rarity in fiction, a hardcore idealist who is at the same time manipulative and hasn't met a complicated plan he didn't like when a simple one would have done better (basically, he's Roj Blake without an Avon, because Carlos definitely isn't Avon, and nor is Philip), and the Inquisitor puts all other creepy Inquisitors to shame in his relentlessless, passionless inhumanity (think post reveal O'Brien in 1984. And it has some of the best dialogues and rethoric ever written in a stage play. "Sire, geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit!"
(Alas, there isn't a good translation in English that I'm aware of. The one available for free online is some flowery Victorian 19th century thing which isn't up to Schiller's 18th century cutting edge German.)
(Some guy named Verdi did a pretty nice musical version in both French and Italian with universal accessability, though. (*veg at![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cahn)
William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar
Speaking of plays with some of the best dialogues and rethoric written for the stage... Never mind clocks on towers strike in Shakespeare's ancient Rome, this one is a tense political thriller in its first half, and then presents us with the fallout. It's another one of those where the title character isn't actually the main character or hero, though while Brutus is the closest thing the play has to a hero said second half is also an illustration of "why you should never let Brutus do the planning, and actually, Cassius does care". The small "Cinna the Poet" scene is one of the best and disturbing illustrations of what mob violence means. And it's a play without neat answers - no matter how it's produced, you're neither cheering for the victorious triumvirate at the end, nor can you see Brutus winning. And there hasn't been a depiction of the running up to Caesar's death, the assassination itself and the aftermath since that hasn't been influenced by it or argueing with it. I've yet to see a production which doesn't captivate me.
George Bernhard Shaw: Saint Joan
Of the many, many depiction of Jeanne d'Arc, this is still my favourite, and I think you can make an argument that it's Shaw's greatest play. I've watched it on stage, I've seen it filmed, I've heard it in audio form, and I never, ever, had enough of it. Historically speaking, it's also the first one that takes the by then publicly available trial records into account, and of course said trial was one of the reasons why Shaw went for Joan as a heroine to begin with. The dialogues are all brilliant - Shaw at his best there - but the play also has heart, which isn't always the case in his oeuvre. Notably in contrast to almost every other depiction (that is, where she is the heroine, not counting Shakespeare's villainess), Shaw doesn't present her opponents as evil, but as earnestly convinced of their own righteousness (Cauchon) or simply being practical (the Earl of Warwick), and by using Stogumber's English patriotism as a comic foil of Joan's French one, he even avoids letting the play be abused for propaganda value (as happens to poor Jeanne by the French extreme right these days). The fact that no one twirls his moustache has been led to the play being described as not having a villain, which is and isn't true. I think it has one, and that's why you really need the epilogue, with its "Woe to me if all man praise me", and Joan upon learning she has been declared a saint asking whether she should do a miracle and return, upon which every single one of the characters who just praised her being horrified. Also the earlier question to Stogumber, who through the shock of watching Joan's gruesome death in the fire had a change of heart, being asked whether he couldn't have known already, as a Christian, that painfully killing someone is horrible, whereupon he says he'd known in theory, but seeing it was a very different thing. The villain is the state of the world, both in Joan's time and Shaw's (our) own, which keeps demanding human sacrifice. And thus the play doesn't end on a triumphant "she died, but she won!" note but with this: "O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?"
(BTW, for a fascinating discussion of Saint Joan at the time of its publication, see the letters of T.E. Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw - wife of GBS - about it. Not only did he identify with Joan but he drew a line from the scene where she signs the confession to his night in Deraa. I'm quoting from said letters here. )
Michael Frayn: Copenhagen and Heiner Kipphardt In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer: listed together because the question of ethics in scientific research, the unreliability and subjectivity of memory, and the different types of responsibility are all themes both plays have in common. Along with the nuclear bomb and WWII as a backdrop. Frayn's play is set when all three main characters - Werner Heisenberg, Nils Bohr and Margarethe, Bohr's wife - are dead and while it circles around the question as to what exactly Heisenberg said to Bohr during his visit in Copenhagen mid war and what Bohr replied as a read thread, it is also uses the fact Margarethe is a third main character to question both of the physicists in their assumptions, to being out the complicated emotional dynamics between them, and to keep the scientific language understandable for an audience which mostly wouldn't have been able to follow a rl Heisenberg and Bohr discussion. There's also a chamber play intimacy achieved with the three characters as the only appearing characters which isn't there in the second play, which uses the 1950s Oppenheimer hearings as its basis (though while it quotes from the actual hearings, it also dramatizes and reorders etc.), meaning you have plenty of characters (though Kipphardt did cut down the number of witnesses from RL). As with Frayn's play and Heisenberg, here it's Oppenheimer being asked what he truly intended, what his responsibility is (and to whom - country in war time, humanity?), and whether or not he betrayed someone and in which sense. Again, as with Margarethe Bohr, the fact that several participants in the hearing aren't scientists is used as a device by the dramatist to use "comprehensible" language. And both Heisenberg and Oppenheimer start their respective plays with one idea about the past and what they did and leave with another. Kipphardt's play is not well known in the English speaking world, but it often ends up as part of the German curriculum, and is one reason why when Nolan's movie Oppenheimer used the 1950s hearings as a framing device this did not surprise or trouble me (as opposed to many a critic who wondered why it couldn't have been solely set in the 1940s). Anyway, both plays ask questions about scientists and their responsibilities without giving an easy answer and use some of the key events of the 20th century as their background without trivalizing them. Kudos.
Lastly, in case long term readers are wondering: Goethe's Faust (either Faust I or Faust II or the Urfaust) isn't on this list because while it's one of my all time favourites, I wouldn't call it a historical play, vaguely medieval setting and the fact there was an actual Faust not withstanding. Goethe went out of his way to avoid tying his version of Faust to a particular era in German history. I mean, the Gretchen plot in I has to happen at a point before the Enlightenment, but that's about it.
The other days
Friedrich Schiller: Don Carlos
Good old Schiller wrote many a historical drama, and his Wallenstein trilogy is somewhat closer to actual history than Don Carlos, the titular hero of which has little to nothing to do with the historical Carlos, and the actual hero of which is an OC. (Which makes Don Carlos still more historical than, say, Maria Stuart, which in addition to the famously not occuring meeting between Elizabeth and Mary also includes invented Leicester/Mary invented backstory, and another OC in the form of Mortimer - not nearly as cool as Posa. And let's not even talk about Schiller's take on Jeanne D'Arc wherein she falls for a sexy Englishman and dies on the battlefield.) But Don Carlos just works as a drama. It has it all: a tragic villain in Philip of Spain (seriously, Schiller's Philip is all the more remarkable because he's written at a time when not just Philip but Catholic Spaniards in general showed up only as moustache twirling villains when a Protestant author was doing the writing - whereas Schiller's Philip is so much of a tragic villain that "is Philip the true tragic (antihero) of the play?" is a favourite school essay writing topic, and the role is one of THE big roles for German actors to tackle once they've passed out of the youthful hero stage), the most famous bromantic (do we still say that? Or slashy?) relationship in German fictional literature in Carlos/Posa, while Posa also has tension of Carlos' Dad Philip, and not one but two more dimensional and actually interesting women in Queen Elisabeth and the Princess Eboli. The big OC of the play, Posa, is that rarity in fiction, a hardcore idealist who is at the same time manipulative and hasn't met a complicated plan he didn't like when a simple one would have done better (basically, he's Roj Blake without an Avon, because Carlos definitely isn't Avon, and nor is Philip), and the Inquisitor puts all other creepy Inquisitors to shame in his relentlessless, passionless inhumanity (think post reveal O'Brien in 1984. And it has some of the best dialogues and rethoric ever written in a stage play. "Sire, geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit!"
(Alas, there isn't a good translation in English that I'm aware of. The one available for free online is some flowery Victorian 19th century thing which isn't up to Schiller's 18th century cutting edge German.)
(Some guy named Verdi did a pretty nice musical version in both French and Italian with universal accessability, though. (*veg at
cahn) William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar
Speaking of plays with some of the best dialogues and rethoric written for the stage... Never mind clocks on towers strike in Shakespeare's ancient Rome, this one is a tense political thriller in its first half, and then presents us with the fallout. It's another one of those where the title character isn't actually the main character or hero, though while Brutus is the closest thing the play has to a hero said second half is also an illustration of "why you should never let Brutus do the planning, and actually, Cassius does care". The small "Cinna the Poet" scene is one of the best and disturbing illustrations of what mob violence means. And it's a play without neat answers - no matter how it's produced, you're neither cheering for the victorious triumvirate at the end, nor can you see Brutus winning. And there hasn't been a depiction of the running up to Caesar's death, the assassination itself and the aftermath since that hasn't been influenced by it or argueing with it. I've yet to see a production which doesn't captivate me.
George Bernhard Shaw: Saint Joan
Of the many, many depiction of Jeanne d'Arc, this is still my favourite, and I think you can make an argument that it's Shaw's greatest play. I've watched it on stage, I've seen it filmed, I've heard it in audio form, and I never, ever, had enough of it. Historically speaking, it's also the first one that takes the by then publicly available trial records into account, and of course said trial was one of the reasons why Shaw went for Joan as a heroine to begin with. The dialogues are all brilliant - Shaw at his best there - but the play also has heart, which isn't always the case in his oeuvre. Notably in contrast to almost every other depiction (that is, where she is the heroine, not counting Shakespeare's villainess), Shaw doesn't present her opponents as evil, but as earnestly convinced of their own righteousness (Cauchon) or simply being practical (the Earl of Warwick), and by using Stogumber's English patriotism as a comic foil of Joan's French one, he even avoids letting the play be abused for propaganda value (as happens to poor Jeanne by the French extreme right these days). The fact that no one twirls his moustache has been led to the play being described as not having a villain, which is and isn't true. I think it has one, and that's why you really need the epilogue, with its "Woe to me if all man praise me", and Joan upon learning she has been declared a saint asking whether she should do a miracle and return, upon which every single one of the characters who just praised her being horrified. Also the earlier question to Stogumber, who through the shock of watching Joan's gruesome death in the fire had a change of heart, being asked whether he couldn't have known already, as a Christian, that painfully killing someone is horrible, whereupon he says he'd known in theory, but seeing it was a very different thing. The villain is the state of the world, both in Joan's time and Shaw's (our) own, which keeps demanding human sacrifice. And thus the play doesn't end on a triumphant "she died, but she won!" note but with this: "O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?"
(BTW, for a fascinating discussion of Saint Joan at the time of its publication, see the letters of T.E. Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw - wife of GBS - about it. Not only did he identify with Joan but he drew a line from the scene where she signs the confession to his night in Deraa. I'm quoting from said letters here. )
Michael Frayn: Copenhagen and Heiner Kipphardt In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer: listed together because the question of ethics in scientific research, the unreliability and subjectivity of memory, and the different types of responsibility are all themes both plays have in common. Along with the nuclear bomb and WWII as a backdrop. Frayn's play is set when all three main characters - Werner Heisenberg, Nils Bohr and Margarethe, Bohr's wife - are dead and while it circles around the question as to what exactly Heisenberg said to Bohr during his visit in Copenhagen mid war and what Bohr replied as a read thread, it is also uses the fact Margarethe is a third main character to question both of the physicists in their assumptions, to being out the complicated emotional dynamics between them, and to keep the scientific language understandable for an audience which mostly wouldn't have been able to follow a rl Heisenberg and Bohr discussion. There's also a chamber play intimacy achieved with the three characters as the only appearing characters which isn't there in the second play, which uses the 1950s Oppenheimer hearings as its basis (though while it quotes from the actual hearings, it also dramatizes and reorders etc.), meaning you have plenty of characters (though Kipphardt did cut down the number of witnesses from RL). As with Frayn's play and Heisenberg, here it's Oppenheimer being asked what he truly intended, what his responsibility is (and to whom - country in war time, humanity?), and whether or not he betrayed someone and in which sense. Again, as with Margarethe Bohr, the fact that several participants in the hearing aren't scientists is used as a device by the dramatist to use "comprehensible" language. And both Heisenberg and Oppenheimer start their respective plays with one idea about the past and what they did and leave with another. Kipphardt's play is not well known in the English speaking world, but it often ends up as part of the German curriculum, and is one reason why when Nolan's movie Oppenheimer used the 1950s hearings as a framing device this did not surprise or trouble me (as opposed to many a critic who wondered why it couldn't have been solely set in the 1940s). Anyway, both plays ask questions about scientists and their responsibilities without giving an easy answer and use some of the key events of the 20th century as their background without trivalizing them. Kudos.
Lastly, in case long term readers are wondering: Goethe's Faust (either Faust I or Faust II or the Urfaust) isn't on this list because while it's one of my all time favourites, I wouldn't call it a historical play, vaguely medieval setting and the fact there was an actual Faust not withstanding. Goethe went out of his way to avoid tying his version of Faust to a particular era in German history. I mean, the Gretchen plot in I has to happen at a point before the Enlightenment, but that's about it.
The other days
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