Abstract
As Hermione Lee has observed, “biography is actually a quest for lives that speak to us.” What makes biography and biopics so enduringly popular a genre is that we can connect with someone else’s life and historical age so as to better understand ourselves and our times. The questioning of this postulate is precisely what is at the core of Tony Palmer’s England, My England (1995). It is partly set at the end of the 1960s when a weary actor starts investigating Purcell’s life—of which so little is known. Although Purcell himself remains a shadowy figure, his music proves the driving force of an investigative mise en abyme that ultimately pays tribute to his contribution to English culture.
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Notes
- 1.
“Henry Purcell: Towards a Tercentenary” (cited in Burden 1996: 1).
- 2.
As Rebecca Herissone explains, “the first substantial investigation of Purcell’s posthumous fortunes, an essay that remains central to any assessment of his reception today, was Richard Luckett’s ‘Or rather Our Musical Shakespeare’: Charles Burney’s Purcell” of 1983 (Hogwood and Luckett: 59–77). Rebecca Herissone also quotes from Charles Burney’s History of Music (1776–1789), one of the first published monuments of music history produced in Britain, who compares Purcell’s legacy with other famous British artists or thinkers: “who is as much the pride of an Englishman in Music , as Shakspeare [sic] in productions for the stage, Milton in epic poetry, Lock in metaphysics, or Sir Isaac Newton in philosophy and mathematics” (Herissone 2012: 305, 331).
- 3.
For example, Bruce Wood starts his biography with the following: “The young Henry Purcell is a shadowy figure. Nearly all traces of his life during childhood have been obliterated by the passage of centuries since, and the first surviving documents to mention him by name date from 1673, when he was already a teenager. We do not even know exactly when he was born, for no record survives of either his birth or his baptism, and the only hard fact we have—from his memorial stone in Westminster Abbey—is that when he died, on November 21, 1695, he was in his thirty-seventh year” (Wood 2009: 1).
- 4.
“The self-reflexive imperative in current biography underlies both the stream of first-person reflection on what to make of evidence and silence and the increasing tendency to include discussion of—and implicit dialogue with the reader about—authorial judgment and intention within a biography ” (Walter 2004: 335).
- 5.
“The act of imaginative recreation that allows the spectator to imagine they are ‘witnessing again’ the events of the past” (Burgoyne 2008: 7).
- 6.
A first clue may be given as the close-up of the King’s face shows some amused conniving concern when the ritual question is being asked “Any who may show good reason why Charles Stuart shall not be king of England, let him come forth and speak.”
- 7.
The mise en abyme is made clear with the insert of the bill including the filmmaker’s name as director of the play.
- 8.
“A statistical survey of the health of the late seventeenth century reveals that from every 100 births only one in three lived beyond the age of six. […] Only one in ten lived until they were 70. The most common disease was rickets, resulting in deformed limbs and scrofula while spotted fever, pleurisy, pneumonia and above all smallpox killed two out of every five of the population.”
- 9.
Some music scholars account for the melancholy and introvert tone of his music by stressing the recurrent bereavements Purcell had to face throughout his life, from the untimely death of his father when he was only five, soon followed by the plague, to the loss of four of his newly born children; but, there are also many celebratory, sanguine, or even ribald pieces.
- 10.
Dryden’s voiceover: “From this blessed man, music just seems to flow: motets, anthems, songs, all manner of music for all manner of occasions.”
- 11.
The parallel is set from the start as the voiceover relates: “At the end of Cromwell’s time, in and around the year of our Lord 1660, two things miraculous came about which, as I shall relate, gave us great hope for the future of this island, this England. The first, the restoration of Charles Stuart to his throne of England after many long years of exile in Holland […] and the second, the birth of Henry Purcell organist, composer of the Chapel Royal in the Great Abbey at Westminster. […] together they changed our history for ever.”
- 12.
One major exception is the inclusion of The Symphony of the Air by William Walton, which he composed in 1969 in tribute to World War II air fighters. The “Battle in the Air” is used during the long scene of the Great Fire of London, whose chaos is conveyed by the dissonant chords of the musical piece.
- 13.
Purcell only appears briefly and episodically as a baby and a child until his first apparition as adult after 1 hour 8 minutes.
- 14.
In addition, the Abdelazer rondeau is played during court dancing, some catches are sung in taverns, and his dramatic work is performed in a large part of King Arthur.
- 15.
Barbara Palmer, 1st Duchess of Cleveland, Countess of Castlemaine, also known as Lady Castlemaine (1640–1709) was one of the most notorious of the many mistresses of King Charles II of England, who fathered her five children, all acknowledged and subsequently ennobled.
- 16.
“It will not serve. […] it has within it subversion and religion! And mention of the King’s defeat at Mons which is not politic—nor is it true. Nor may you say he has a mistress.” When Purcell argues “I say none of this. I simply set it. It is a work for the theatre, an opera!” he is answered “Opera is a danger you will do your best to avoid.”
- 17.
“I, Titus Oates, tell you Lords there is a Popish plot in the land for the destruction of His Majesty King Charles… and that man, he, Lord Stafford, he took from me a commission that I was by Jesuits that he should act as Paymaster General of the Pope’s army to ravage this land.”
- 18.
During his visit at Westminster the actor rudely ignores a young foreigner who asks him with a strong Germanic accent if the tomb behind is Vellington’s. When his ex-wife Barbara visits him to ask for money, she also mentions she has heard he was writing a play and asks whether there is “anything in it for me.” She is answered: “I wouldn’t think so. It’s about genius.”
- 19.
The heydays are 1956–1979. Osborne started working there as a jobbing actor in 1955.
- 20.
Another similar diatribe later on goes: “What Charles wanted was for the Crowd itself to be extraordinary. Not like today when the monarchy isn’t even the tarnished gold fillings in a mouthful of decay.”
- 21.
The letter can be read at the following link: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/a-letter-to-my-fellow-countrymen-in-august-1961-the-cold-war-escalated-with-the-building-of-the-berlin-wall-and-the-proliferation-of-nuclear-weapons-seemed-certain-1367810.html (from Tribune, August 18, 1961).
- 22.
How skewed this retrospective interpretation is can be seen in the fact that at the time Purcell was learning music , England was eager, after 12 years of Puritan rule, to embrace any cultural novelty coming from the Continent and his own music was as much shaped by foreign influences (mostly Italian and French) as by the old contrapuntal English tradition that he was taught by his master John Blow.
- 23.
Among the major English composers of the English Renaissance are Hubert Parry, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. A little later, Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett also explicitly cited Purcell as a major influence on their works. See Rebecca Herissone “Performance History and Reception” (Herissone 341).
- 24.
“Little danger of people feeling too much: not in England, not today, encircled as we are with a Cromwellian army of prigs, knighthood seekers and grubby timeservers.”
- 25.
Just before the ending coda the narrator concludes: “He was a Colossus the boy. It flew up from him. Notes, everything—they’ll not find the half of it. Did he not give to the Englishman his glorious, unquenchable music ? There’ll be none like him.”
- 26.
Review by Allan Fish, July 24, 2012. https://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/england-my-england-1995-tv-tony-palmer/, accessed on March 2, 2017.
- 27.
English Music is the title of Peter Ackroyd’s sixth novel, first published in 1992 by Hamish Hamilton, and which reviewer John Barrell described as “partly a narrative, partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors” (Barrell 1992: 7).
- 28.
Another musical legacy is the electronic version of Queen’s Mary’s Funeral March arranged by Walter Carlos and used in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange that accompanies the eerie slow-motion shadow effects of the pageantry that follows Mary’s death.
- 29.
Tony Palmer realized a portrait of John Osborne himself a decade after his death. John Osborne and the Gift of Friendship (2006) includes many interviews of Osborne, his relatives, his collaborators, and friends as well as extracts of original stage performances of his most famous play. It is also worth noting that England, My England was Tony Palmer ’s second collaboration with Osborne after God Rot Tunbridge Wells! (1985) which is about German-born English composer George Frederick Handel who is introduced in old age, disgruntled, ranting and cursing, and looking back at his life. As Luc Gilleman remarks, “what this scene develops into is not docu-drama, however––no attempt to capture what the historic Handel might have been like, but, once more, a portrait of the loneliness of the artist—and that the artist, in the final instance, is always Osborne himself” (Osborne 1961: 175). Although the two films have many structural and formal echoes (including the quote “England, My England”) and share the same cinematographer, the main difference is that Handel’s voiceover is nearly omnipresent, sometimes even reducing scenes to pantomimes and characters to puppets. The overall aesthetics is more satirical and verging on the grotesque, using distorted wide angles, zooms, and fast forward in scenes recalling Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963).
Works Cited
Ackroyd, Peter. English Music. London: Penguin, 1992.
Barrell, John. “Make the Music Mute.” London Review of Books, vol. 14, no. 13 (July 9, 1992): 7. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v14/n13/john-barrell/make-the-music-mute. Accessed on March 5, 2015.
Burden, Michael (ed.). Performing the Music of Henry Purcell. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
Burgoyne, Robert. The Hollywood Historical Film. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.
Fish, Allan. “Review.” July 24, 2012. https://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/england-my-england-1995-tv-tony-palmer/. Accessed on March 2, 2015.
Gilleman, Luc. John Osborne, Vituperative Artist: A Reading of His Life and Work. New York and London: Routledge, 2002.
Herissone, Rebecca. “Introduction.” In Rebecca Herissone (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Henry Purcell. Farnham, UK and Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2012, 1–11.
Herissone, Rebecca (ed.). The Ashgate Research Companion to Henry Purcell. Farnham, UK and Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2012.
Osborne, John. “Letter to My Fellow Countrymen.” Tribune, August 18, 1961. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/a-letter-to-my-fellow-countrymen-in-august-1961-the-cold-war-escalated-with-the-building-of-the-berlin-wall-and-the-proliferation-of-nuclear-weapons-seemed-certain-1367810.html. Accessed on March 2, 2015.
Walter, James. “‘The Solace of Doubt?’ Biographical Methodology After the Short Twentieth Century.” In Peter France and William St Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 321–335.
Weber, William. The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
Wood, Bruce. Purcell: An Extraordinary Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Cloarec, N. (2018). In Search of Purcell’s Legacy: Tony Palmer’s England, My England (1995). In: Letort, D., Lebdai, B. (eds) Women Activists and Civil Rights Leaders in Auto/Biographical Literature and Films. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77081-9_13
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