I had reason to look into the back catalogue of the Irish writer Ronan Bennett recently. Irrespective of his somewhat colourful life, he’s also an estimable writer of fiction in a range of forms. Previously, I recall being exceptionally impressed by his novel The Catastrophist, which I reviewed on publication for the Sunday Independent in Ireland.
Bennett, like Alex Garland and many others before them, has made the sensible and lucrative move into writing for the screen, and I noticed that one of his earliest forays into screenwriting was a television play called Love Lies Bleeding. It’s an unusually heavyweight production in retrospect. It was directed by Mike Winterbottom, and starred, inter alia, Mark Rylance, Brendan Gleeson and James Nesbitt. Unsurprisingly, given the author, it’s about the Northern Ireland peace process. Surprisingly, it actually predated the IRA ceasefire.
Some little bell began ringing distantly at the back of my skull at this point. Bennett has long since moved on to other themes and topics, as is wise, but it seemed to me that there was something curiously familiar nonetheless about this particular play. It was, of course, the title.
It turns out that Love Lies Bleeding is one of those titles that writers simply cannot resist. It doesn’t matter how many times it has been used for a wide range of different texts. It seems like there’s always someone, like Bennett, who simply has to have it for their latest work.
Bennett actually seems to have beaten the rush in audiovisual terms. Following his 1993 screenplay, there have been three American movies and another British television thriller all with the same title. But he didn’t originate it at all.
In fact, we can go as far back as a Jacobean tragicomedy by Beaumont and Fletcher, written while Shakespeare was still alive. Also titled Philaster, it was clearly quite popular, being performed between 1610 and 1613, including a run at court, and was published in 1620, three years before Shakespeare’s first folio.
It was also the title of a poem by William Wordsworth, of all people, dating back to the 1840s. Swinburne, about a decade later, also fancied the title for one of his own poems. Since then, it has been a song by Elton John, a stage play by Don DeLillo, the American postmodernist novelist, and a myriad of other things too. The most curious thing of all is that almost none of these works of – let’s say writing because they range across many forms – resemble one another.
In short, Love Lies Bleeding is the all-purpose title. It’s vague yet evocative, alliterative and memorable, poetic and punchy. You could call almost anything Love Lies Bleeding. The only detriment, and it’s one which some of the greats have chosen to ignore, is that it has been used so many times previously. Somehow, it seems never to become threadbare or cliched.
Personally, I’m crap at titles. It’s the kind of responsibility I’d happily hand over to others if I could. And a good title is a very important thing. It’s like a calling card for a work of art. It names it, and it provides the initial hook to the reader, the first point at which someone will decide whether to abandon interest or push on a little further. I’ve ignored some undoubtedly great literature because the title left me cold. No doubt you have too. We all have. So getting a title right, or at least getting it to work, is very important.
Which leaves me wondering, is it preferable to have a mediocre if original title, or something like Love Lies Bleeding, which has proven its worth across a range of genres and over four centuries? The marketing people presumably would say go with what you know works. And these days, there’s not a writer, or a content creator (to use modern parlance) who doesn’t have a little marketing person skulking around in the back of their heads.
