1 - Introduction

Summary

Period drama recreates the spaces, people, society and politics of years past. The clothing and customs of these worlds are familiar yet strange, distant from those of the viewer at home. However, the genre is not a sealed time capsule; it draws the past close by constructing it, in part, in our image, tracing connections between the present and the past. As Pam Cook suggests, period drama ‘looks backwards and forwards at the same time’ (1996: 72). It is a genre shaped by expectations of authenticity and verisimilitude, particularly in terms of its mise-en-scène and costume. Press coverage frequently showcases the painstaking research and reconstruction involved in production teams’ world-building. Questions of accuracy and interpretation shape the genre's reception, as both historical drama and literary adaptation hold expectations of fidelity. However, rather than searching for an ultimately impossible ‘authentic’ reproduction, we must recognise the genre's essential hybridity, its ‘attempt to think historically and yet in the present tense’ (Vidal 2012a: 34). Period drama reconstructs a past we can never truly know, whose documentation and preservation has itself been highly selective and political, so it needs to be understood as a blend of realism and fantasy.

Period drama is sometimes called ‘costume drama’, indicating the central role of bodies, mise-en-scène and material cultures in its storytelling and pleasures. It can present a lavish, sweeping spectacle, displaying houses and landscapes, balls and factory floors. But it can also produce an intimate encounter, drawing the past close to inspect the texture of fabric or the touch of a hand. Period drama is invested in the bodily and emotional experience of the past, a past it presents as strange yet familiar. It looks back and looks inward, building connections with the contemporary audience through its characters’ emotional responses to historical, political and social dynamics, offering an affective experience of the past. As an introduction to the genre, this book challenges students to consider its expansive borders and contradictory ideologies and investments. Its thematic approach establishes key theories and emerging arguments, developing these through case studies that expand the genre's established ‘canon’. I argue that fantasy, affect and emotion should have equal weight alongside the previously dominant frames of heritage, nostalgia and ‘quality’.