‘My Lady Jane’ asks, ‘What if history was different?’

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 the latest in a recent series in which strong women attempt to take charge of their destinies in the oppressive, patriarchal societies of 16th and 17th century Europe, a period between the Middle Ages and the rise of modernity.

These shows take liberties with history, and that’s more true than “My Lady Jane.” Like the real historical figure, the title character, played by Emily Bader, is an educated, strong-willed young woman. Unlike the real Jane, the fantasy version is also able to outwit the political and religious forces conspiring against her with a reckless flair and a self-aware wink. There’s also some colorblind casting: King Edward VI (Jordan Peters) and one of his sisters, Bess (Abbie Hern), are black, a decision the show’s producers made when adapting the series from the novel by Brodi Ashton, Cynthia Hand and Jodi Meadows.

Oh yeah, and the show has human characters that turn into horses, dogs, snakes, and other animals. (They didn’t really exist.)

For showrunners Gemma Burgess and Meredith Glynn, the series offered a chance to save Jane from the cruelties of history — and have a little fun in the process.

“She was one of the most sophisticated women of her time,” Glynn said in a recent video interview with Burgess. “But she was still used as a pawn by her ambitious family and ultimately murdered. We had the opportunity to retell her story in a way that gives her the chance to be the hero of her story, rather than someone who is a victim, who is only remembered 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 the history of Lady Jane Grey, particularly that published closer to her time, came from a male perspective. As Bader put it in a separate video interview, “We’ve had this very loose kind of stereotype of these helpless women. If you went back to that time, it was difficult. But I’m sure these women were also incredibly colorful and involved and complicated.”

Other recent series don’t take quite the same historical liberties. “The Serpent Queen,” Season 2 premiering 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, follows Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore) as she maneuvers her son George (Nicholas Galitzine) into the bedchamber of the promiscuous King James I of England, later to become the Countess of Buckingham.

Each show plays a little loose with the details – the precise nature of the intimacy between James and George, for example, long debated by scholarsBut here no one turns into a horse.

Yet they both have a distinctly modern sensibility. “The Serpent Queen” breaks the fourth wall with pleasure. “Mary & George” features abundant and graphic sex, both straight and gay. And they share with “My Lady Jane” a mission to spotlight their heroines’ sense of agency, which chroniclers of the time often overlooked.

“The patriarchy was built into every aspect of everyone’s lives,” said Paul, the historian, whose recent book “The House of Dudley: A New History of Tudor England” includes the story of Lady Jane Grey.

“And then you add to that the dangers of childbirth, the high infant mortality rates and the clothes they were forced to wear 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 reading the novel intently on a New York City subway. Both she and Glynn had been obsessed with Lady Jane Grey as teenagers; Burgess had a poster of a Paul Delaroche painting depicting a blindfolded Lady Jane, moments 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 set out to present a different kind of story — something playful, even hopeful, but also casually substantial. The metamorphic characters, known as Ethians (who, like most of the series’ main elements, had their origins in the novel), and the commoners, known as Verities, represent the Protestant-Catholic schism at the heart of the real story. (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 other-ism that we might encounter,” Burgess said. “We wanted that to be a backdrop to the story, but we don’t want the show to be a polemic about any particular issue. We want this to be a really entertaining, swashbuckling spectacle.”

Glynn added: “Intelligent optimism. That’s what we keep telling ourselves.”

Much of that spirit is captured 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 ended up including covers of British classics 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 with the show because we’re retelling British history with a female voice,” Burgess added. “And we’re retelling British music history with 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’s something valuable in what’s 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 revitalize her.

“It’s somewhere in the Tudor multiverse. It’s just an alternate dimension somehow.”