Historical Accuracy

A black actress, Jodie Turner-Smith, is to play Anne Boleyn in a new drama series to be aired later this year on Channel 5. Quite predictably, the Daily Mail Readers, who are noted for their reverence toward historical accuracy, are triggered.

The same level of historical accuracy is, however, reviled by the very same people when it apples to Edward Colston's statue and the historical fact he was a slaver and that this should have been noted on his statue. 

The common theme is that Anne Boleyn was white, and therefore a white actress should be used in the production. She was also a Catholic - I don't think they'd be as vocal in calling for the actress to be both white and Catholic. Lord Olivier famously played Othello, but Olivier wasn't black. He did black up though, so that's fine for the DM Reader. There again, Othello was not an historical character.

Anne Boleyn's whiteness was not central to her story or how events unfolded - it's incidental. It's immaterial, therefore, whether she's played by a white woman, a black woman, or even an Asian woman, so long as she's recognisable as a woman and can act convincingly. Martin Luther King being a black man was, however, central to his story.

Should Shylock be played only by a Jew? Not that I think many Jews would relish playing Shylock. There were no Jews in Shakespeare's England - they had been expelled 300 years previously and, despite many productions being sympathetic to Shylock, Elizabethan England was anti-Semitic and it's inconceivable that an Elizabethan audience would have been sympathetic toward him.

However, back to the argument of historical accuracy. Cleopatra was an Egyptian of Greek stock - famously played by Liz Taylor who, as far as I know, was neither Egyptian or Greek. How about Yul Brynner playing the King of Siam? To bring it more up-to-date, how about Angelina Jolie playing dark skinned, Afro-Cuban Mariane Pearl, Ben Kingsley playing Gandhi or Johnny Depp as Tonto? OK, Tonto wasn't an historical character - I'll let you off that one.

Should it matter as to the colour of the actor or actress in an historical drama? Historical dramas aren't exactly noted for their accuracy anyway - they're embroidered for dramatic effect. I somehow suspect that the DM Tendency would have similar reservations about literary characters too, but only when it came to other races portraying white Brits. Their selective espousal of historical accuracy appears to be merely a cloak.