Scrooby church: exterior.

Scrooby church: interior.

How Scrooby Is This?

How is the story presented? The film is visually attractive. Actors from The Royal Shakespere Company wear historically accurate costumes that contribute greatly to the film’s appeal. Interior locations convincingly suggest the early seventeenth century (although any antiques dealer might wonder how King James I managed to sit enthroned on a chair from the period of William and Mary). Excellent photography shows winter scenes of the Pilgrims’ landing and early explorations on Cape Cod. Excerpts from Bradford’s memoirs keep the story moving along. The documentary genre’s expectable experts talk, ranging from professors whose knowledge of the general period begins to illuminate the historical context of the story of the Pilgrims (Diarmaid MacCulloch, Francis Bremer, Karen Kupperman, Len Travers), through several museum specialists on Pilgrim topics (James Baker, Paula Marcoux, Peter Arenstam, Carolyn Travers), and non-academic historians (Nathaniel Philbrick, Libby O’Connell), to several speakers whose expertise is purely an assumption based on heredity reinforced by ethnic costuming (Linda Coombs, Ramona Peters, Jonathan Perry). All have equal weight in a world where truth is a mere matter of earnestly felt opinion.

Much is excellent. Are there, nonetheless, errors? What kind? How many? The film begins with momentary glimpses of later scenes to establish the direction of the story – a church, a ship in a stormy sea, a colonist pierced by an Indian’s arrow, close-up views of yelling faces, the “Mayflower” and the date 1620, a frantic woman calling out “already there’s a mutiny!” We know where we’re going and we’re in a rush to get there. A caption shifts the story thirteen years backwards to start at Scrooby, and here we notice the first problem - Scrooby parish church is represented by the church of Fairford, Gloucestershire, for no apparent reason. The interior of Scrooby church next turns out really to be Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon-Avon, with Shakespere’s epitaph on the left. But then Fairford’s famous stained-glass window of the Last Judgement appears as if it were in Scrooby. Is this sleight-of-hand significant? The question recedes as Hampton Court Palace is suggested well enough by Charlcote Park Manor House, where King James rules with silk-clad peevishness. Then we see William Bradford and Dorothy May courting in an Amsterdam garden defined by an American split-rail fence unlike anything in The Netherlands. Captions indicate that the story shifts to Leiden. That town is illustrated by an assortment of views of Bruges (cloth hall belfry, St. John’s Hospital, St. Salvator tower, etc.), without any of Leiden. How important is this? The Dutch will laugh, but so what? By analogy, would there be any objection to showing Eastern Coastal Woodland Indians living in teepees or cliff-dwellings?