The Ghosts of Shakespeare

by Mark Anthony | Nidd Films

“We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.” The Tempest, IV.i.

In this reflective piece, writer-producer Mark Anthony explores how Sweetheart: Angel of the Moor — a true Yorkshire tragedy — carries echoes of Shakespeare’s great works. Drawing on his years teaching Theatre Studies, Mark examines how the Bard’s themes of love, control, and conscience still speak through modern storytelling, and how Mary-Jane Skaife’s voice connects to centuries of women silenced by society.

“Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1

When I first began shaping Sweetheart: Angel of the Moor, I didn’t think of Shakespeare directly. My focus was Mary-Jane Skaife, a young Yorkshire woman whose life ended violently in 1858, and the landscape that held her story. But as the script deepened, I started hearing echoes. Not deliberate quotations or borrowed words, but rhythms, emotions, and moral struggles that felt unmistakably Shakespearean.

After years of teaching Theatre Studies at advanced level, I suppose some of that language, structure, and instinct for human conflict has taken root in my writing, almost unknowingly. When you live for decades inside those worlds of ambition, jealousy, conscience, and love, it seeps into the way you see people, even when you think you’ve stepped away from the stage. And perhaps that’s what’s happening here: Sweetheart doesn’t imitate Shakespeare, but it breathes some of the same air.

In Sweetheart, the tension between love and control drives everything. Mary-Jane’s relationship with James Atkinson begins as devotion and becomes possession, a pattern Shakespeare understood centuries ago. From Othello’s jealousy to Romeo and Juliet’s fatal idealism, his work reminds us how passion can curdle into something darker when shaped by pride and fear. Mary-Jane, like Desdemona or Ophelia, carries the cost of that imbalance. Her silence says as much as her words: she navigates her fate with grace even as the world refuses to hear her.

One of the most revealing lines in the script — “But words are wind” — could easily belong to Shakespeare’s stage. It distils the fragility of promises, the empty noise of men who mistake desire for love. Shakespeare’s women often stood in the same storm: bound by language, judged by it, and often destroyed because of it. Mary-Jane’s defiance isn’t loud, but it is absolute, the quiet resistance of a woman who knows truth when she hears lies.

Even the moor feels Shakespearean. In King Lear, the heath becomes a mirror of madness and revelation; in Sweetheart, the Yorkshire wind performs the same role. Nature isn’t backdrop, it’s conscience. The land remembers what the law forgets. Candlelight, gusts, and the cry of the Barghest all serve as the film’s chorus, echoing the inner turmoil that polite society refuses to name. Like Shakespeare, I wanted the weather to feel moral, not meteorological.

What connects Sweetheart most to Shakespeare’s world is its moral reckoning. Both expose how society excuses male guilt while silencing female truth. James Atkinson’s “madness” defence at trial reflects the same moral blindness that allowed Macbeth’s ambition or Angelo’s hypocrisy to fester. Shakespeare’s tragedies often end with order restored, but justice remains uneasy, a truth that still rings in Mary-Jane’s story.

As in Measure for Measure, where virtue is tested by hypocrisy and justice bends to power, the world of Sweetheart reveals how easily law can disguise cruelty beneath righteousness.

Like Measure for Measure, Sweetheart exposes how female virtue is judged while male desire is excused. Both stories question the policing of love and morality, revealing how easily justice bends to power when women’s voices are silenced.

Perhaps that’s what Shakespeare was attempting to warn us about — that civilisation and cruelty often coexist. That love and violence spring from the same flawed human need to possess. And that unless we learn to listen — truly listen — history will keep finding new Mary-Janes to silence.

Through Sweetheart, I wanted to let one of Shakespeare’s unspoken women finally speak — through silence, through wind, through light.

Author’s Note

Writing Sweetheart: Angel of the Moor has reminded me how the stories we teach and carry never really leave us. Years of teaching Shakespeare and Theatre Studies have shaped the way I see people, how love and power intertwine, how silence holds meaning. In discovering Mary-Jane’s voice, I’ve realised I’m still in conversation with those same truths Shakespeare wrestled with: justice, conscience, and the human cost of control.

Sweetheart: Angel of the Moor

A Nidd Films production | Written & Produced by Mark Anthony

Currently in development as a short historical drama exploring women’s voices, justice, and Yorkshire folklore.