Costume Drama - getting it right.

In London Fashion Week I have been watching two television dramas where fashion is all important - a re-run of the BBC's "The House of Elliot" about a 1920s London fashion house and the current series of "Downton Abbey".  The hats alone are worth the price of admission.  I have a personal weakness for 1920s cloche hats and "The House of Elliot" is stuffed with superb examples. Attention to detail in the costume department is apparent in both series.  Sadly the characters are thinly drawn and the drama weak to insipid and so slow.  The clothes are fabulous but just as the best actors can fail to shine without a good script the same can be said for costumes.  

Then there is the authenticity of the dialogue which must match the costumes if a historical drama is to have any credibility.  Now as a writer of historical fiction I am aware that this is a tricky area.  Do you stick faithfully to the language of the period and run the risk that the audience will not understand a word of it or chance the occasional anachronism in the interests of clarity? 

I am inclined to go with the latter provided it does not stick out like a sore thumb.  For one thing perceived anachronisms often turn out on close inspection not to be anachronistic at all. In Jane Austen dramas for instance adaptors faithfully follow the books making the characters speak in perfectly grammatical complete sentences but Jane Austen is following a literary convention.  No-one actually spoke like that.  If you check out late 18th and early 19th century afterpieces, short playscripts which record the language as it was spoken, all classes uses the same contracts - can't, won't, didn't etc - as we do. 

I have two historical films currently in progress. "The Lady in Grey" based on the life of French writer Guy de Maupassant is set in 19th century France but fortunately the characters all speak English so the problem of precise idiom is neatly side-stepped.  The second period piece "Master Merryman" is set in 1497 when English was drifting somewhere between Chaucer and Shakespeare and  yet to be fully formed.  The language would be so unfamiliar to a modern audience they would miss all the jokes so both the original Medwall play which lies at the heart of the story and the swashbuckling adventure around it will be in modern English so the comedy will work for modern film-goers.  If it doesn't - well there's always the costumes which will be gorgeous.  And the hats! Oh the hats!

The Lady in Grey and Master Merryman are both available as novels either in Kindle or paperback editions.