By The Sword Divided: The English Civil War as Sunday-Night Television Drama

Abstract

The English Civil War’s absence from screen-drama has been long bemoaned. Although scholars have started interrogating the topic, particularly with reference to cinematic depictions, thus far there has been total critical neglect of a unique attempt to bring the wars onto the small screen, as popular primetime ‘Sunday-night’ period drama. This article examines this attempt, the BBC1 show, By The Sword Divided (1983-1985), considering its representation of warfare and use of historical research and contextualizing it against popular understandings of civil war history specifically and perceptions of warfare more generally, as well as formats of 1980s popular television drama.