Is 'artistic licence' a dirty word?

Recently I have been ruminating on whether artistic licence has any place in heritage interpretation.

Hands up, my default position has usually been no. As a copywriter who has worked on numerous museum exhibitions I see it as my job to craft the often complex facts presented to me into engaging, inspiring, surprising but ultimately truthful narratives. (At least, as truthful as you can be when dealing with history). As a history nerd, I say why would you need to embellish? The truth is fascinating enough!

But it’s a question I found myself thinking about recently as I indulged in some good old period drama. Firstly I caught up with the 2023 film ‘Firebrand’, which tells the story of Queen Catherine Parr and her marriage to Henry VIII. The whole film was so wildly inaccurate that I found myself constantly distracted, furiously Googling and mumbling to myself “that didn’t happen, did it?”. By the time I reached the frankly ridiculous ending I had lost all sense of what the film was actually trying to say. 

Contrast that with the sublime ‘Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light’, which concluded on the BBC just before Christmas. Based on years of research, the story of the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell oozed class and had me hooked. And yet artistic licence was at play here too. From invented characters and scenes, to some critics arguing that the portrayal of Cromwell himself was too sympathetic, the lines between fact and fiction were extremely blurred. So, I asked myself, why did these inventions not jar with me in the way that ‘Firebrand’ did?

The answer, I think, is that everything in Wolf Hall felt like it could have happened. Perhaps even did happen, behind closed doors. The depth of research was such that to me the narrative never felt less than truly authentic, painting a picture of an ambitious man navigating his way through a backbiting court led by a capricious tyrant. Seeing that world through the eyes of a real person who we have come to know and even care about brought us closer to understanding what life in Henry VIII’s orbit was really like and the constant fear, uncertainty and danger faced by those around him.

So is this fictional artistic licence something that, as an interpretation writer, I should be scared of? Possibly not. If I’m writing about life for families in a coal mining village, for example, does it cheat the audience if we take a real person from the records and imagine what their story may have been? If we put into that one person the genuine experiences of many others to give the audience a real, personal connection to the history? If we imagine the conversations that might have taken place around the kitchen table or how someone might have felt dealing with hardship, danger and poverty? Does it cheapen the narrative if we attempt to guess the thoughts, feelings and motivations of people whose life experience was so different to ours?

On the contrary, I suggest this approach can only help modern audiences to engage with and better understand their past, which is surely the point. It is, after all, called ‘interpretation’ for a reason. But the key for me is to ensure that it is only ever done with absolute authenticity; using the truth of what we know to create a world that does justice to the people and the places that we want to remember and celebrate.

I would love to know your thoughts. How much should copywriters let our imaginations loose when it comes to telling stories from history?