In Fiction
Fictional portrayals of Walsingham tend to follow Jesuit interpretations, depicting him as sinister and Machiavellian. He features in conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Christopher Marlowe, whom he predeceased. Charles Nicholl examined (and rejected) such theories in The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (1992), which was used as a source by Anthony Burgess for his novel A Dead Man in Deptford (1993).
The 1998 film Elizabeth gives considerable, although historically inaccurate, prominence to Walsingham (portrayed by Geoffrey Rush). It fictionalizes him as irreligious and sexually ambiguous, merges chronologically distant events, and inaccurately suggests that he murdered Mary of Guise. Rush reprised the role in the 2007 sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Both Stephen Murray in the 1970 BBC series Elizabeth R and Patrick Malahide in the 2005 Channel Four miniseries Elizabeth I play him as a dour official.
Read more about this topic: Francis Walsingham
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“A fiction about soft or easy deaths ... is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)