Lady Jane Grey is generally seen as a tragic heroine, the teenage queen of England and Ireland for nine days in 1553 before her enemies manipulated her into an early death by execution. As the brash narrator of the Amazon series “My Lady Jane” puts it, “History remembers her as the ultimate damsel in distress.”
Then he adds, using a vulgar term for ‘forgetting’: ‘[Expletive] That. What if history was different?”
That’s the animating question (and tone) of “My Lady Jane,” which premiered Thursday on Prime Video. Playful, optimistic, a little bit raunchy, this take on the Jane Grey story plays like an R-rated “The Princess Bride,” with influences from everything from “A Knight’s Tale” to the cult Britcom favorite “Blackadder.”
It is also just the latest in a handful of recent series in which strong women attempt to wrest control of their destinies in the oppressive patriarchal societies of 16th and 17th century Europe, a period between the Middle Ages and the turmoil of modernity.
These shows take liberties with history, none more so than “My Lady Jane.” Like the real-life historical figure, the title character, played by Emily Bader, is an educated and strong-willed young woman. Unlike the real Jane, the fantasy version is also able to outsmart the political and religious forces conspiring against her, with a reckless flair and a self-aware wink. There’s also color-blind casting: King Edward VI (Jordan Peters) and one of his sisters, Bess (Abbie Hern), are black, a decision made by the show’s producers when adapting the series from Brodi Ashton’s novel, Cynthia Hand and Jodi Weiden.
And oh yes: the series has human characters that turn into horses, dogs, snakes and other animals. (They didn’t really exist.)
For the showrunners, Gemma Burgess and Meredith Glynn, the series offered a chance to save Jane from the atrocities of history – and have a little fun along the way.
“She was one of the most educated women of her time,” Glynn said in a recent video interview alongside Burgess. “But she was still used as a pawn by her ambitious family and eventually murdered. We had the opportunity to retell her story in a way that gives her the chance to be the hero of her story, instead of someone who is a victim, who we only remember because of her death.”
To a large extent, of course, Jane used to be a victim — in effect, put to death by her enemies through a complex series of machinations. In rewriting history, does the show also risk whitewashing it? Historian Dr. Joanne Paul, a historical consultant for “My Lady Jane,” said she didn’t have a problem with it.
“I’ve never been one to think that history is so important when it’s presented in a dramatic form,” Paul said. “I understand the importance of telling a story, and I understand how television and movies can bring people into history and make them curious about what really happened. And I think that’s fantastic.”
Much of Lady Jane Grey’s history, especially those published closer to her time, came from a male perspective. As Bader put it in a separate video interview: “We’ve been given a very loose sort of stereotypical image of these helpless women. If you were to go back to that time, it was difficult. But I’m sure these women were also incredibly colorful, involved and complicated.”
Other recent series don’t quite take the same historical liberties. “The Serpent Queen,” season 2 of which premieres July 12 on Starz, stars Samantha Morton as Catherine de’ Medici, the Italian-born queen of France in the 16th century who developed her iron will as an orphan in Florence . The limited series “Mary & George,” also on Starz, shows how Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore) maneuvered her son George (Nicholas Galitzine) into the bedroom of the promiscuous King James I of England, who later became Countess of Buckingham.
Each show plays a little fast and loose with the details; the precise nature of James and George’s intimacy, for example, long debated by scholars. But no one turns into a horse here.
Yet both have a distinctly modern sensibility. “The Serpent Queen” is happy to shatter the fourth wall. “Mary & George” features copious and explicit sex, both straight and gay. And they share with “My Lady Jane” a mission to highlight their heroines’ sense of agency, often overlooked by chroniclers of the time.
“Patriarchy was built into every aspect of everyone’s life,” said Paul, the historian, whose recent book “The House of Dudley: A New History of Tudor England” includes the story of Lady Jane Gray.
“And then you add the dangers of childbirth, the high infant mortality rate, the clothes they were forced into and everything else,” Paul continued, “and it was a terrible time to be a woman.”
Burgess first fell in love with “My Lady Jane” after seeing a woman attentively reading the novel on a New York subway. Both she and Glynn were obsessed with Lady Jane Gray as teenagers; Burgess had a poster of a Paul Delaroche painting depicting a blindfolded Lady Jane just before her beheading. (It hung right next to Burgess’ Donnie Wahlberg poster). She devoured the 1986 film “Lady Jane,” starring Helena Bonham Carter. Like most, she saw Lady Jane as a tragic heroine.
With “My Lady Jane,” Burgess and Glynn wanted to present a different kind of story – something playful, even hopeful, but also casually substantive. The metamorphic characters, known as Ethians (who, like most major elements of the series, have their origins in the novel), and the commoners, known as Verities, represent the Protestant-Catholic schism that is at the heart of the real story forms. (Lady Jane was Protestant; her enemies, including her successor, Mary I, were Catholic)
The Ethians are hunted and persecuted, and “My Lady Jane” allows it to sidestep the subject of religion without sacrificing the deadly conflicts of the time.
“The Ethians are a metaphor for any kind of otherism that we might encounter,” Burgess said. “We wanted that to be a backdrop for the story, but we don’t want the show to be a polemic about any topic. We want this to be a really fun, swashbuckling romp.”
Glynn added: “Intelligent optimism. That is what we keep repeating to ourselves.”
Much of that spirit is reflected in the way “My Lady Jane” uses music. In addition to their mutual Lady Jane fandom, Burgess and Glynn also share a passion for British Invasion bands – the Yardbirds, the Troggs and others. But they wanted the soundtrack to reflect Lady Jane’s empowerment. So they eventually recorded cover versions of British classics as performed by female artists, including a Lizzie Esau cover of the Yardbirds’ version of ‘I’m a Man’, commissioned for the series, and an existing version of David Bowie’s ‘ Rebel Rebel” by Tegan and Sara.
“We knew we wanted to use that music, even when we were in the writers’ room,” Glynn said. “It works for the show because we’re retelling British history in a female voice,” Burgess added. “And we’re retelling British music history in female voices.”
Paul sees shows like “My Lady Jane,” “The Serpent Queen” and “Mary & George” as part of a larger trend of tweaking specific historical periods while preserving the qualities that made those periods so appealing in the first place. She cited the TV series “Bridgerton” and “Our Flag Means Death,” and even Broadway hits like “Hamilton” and “Six,” as other examples of what she calls “alt-history.”
“I think it comes from a kind of revolutionary impulse to overturn something, to rewrite something, while still understanding that there is something of value in what is being overturned,” she said. With ‘My Lady Jane,’ she added, “they want to reclaim her as an agent and infuse her with something modern, and rescue her and bring her back to life.
“It’s somewhere in the Tudor period multiverse. Somehow it’s just an alternate dimension.”
