Lofgeornost
Feeling Martian!
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I saw that as well, quite good especially the actor who did Henry VIII if I remember right.
Mantel's books are very readable, the kind of thing you just pick up and find half an hour has passed.
Yeah, it was Damien Lewis playing Henry VIII. He's very good in general--he did a convincing Dick Winters in the Band of Brothers miniseries and was outstanding as Brodie in Homeland. As those performances show, he can do a pitch-perfect American accent, though of course he didn't need to when playing Henry. I also really liked Rylance as Cromwell, and I thought Claire Foy did a pretty good Anne Boleyn. Anton Lesser played a very different Sir Thomas More, compared to Paul Scofield in "A Man for All Seasons," which I still really like.
I think it's the mix of being a renaissance man and commoner. So when he is at court he is an underdog in one way (i.e. station of birth) but superior in another (experience of continental learning).
Going beyond him personally I notice Early Modern characters are more popular in general, not just for viewers/readers but even authors themselves. The period lies at the root of many contemporary talking points in politics, religion, sociology, etc and so has more appeal than the more alien Middle Ages let alone earlier times.
I think that's part of it. Henry VIII's reign seems to have a kind of massive gravitational attraction for fiction and movies. It was dramatic, of course, and we know a good deal about it. But there are other episodes or eras in Early Modern Britain that offer just as much potential drama, but get in comparison very little attention--say the twenty years between 1640 and 1660, for instance. Likewise, the Wars of the Roses, and especially Richard III, get a lot of attention in popular culture, but the reign of Edward II, which was even more filled with soap-opera material, gets little.
I read an interesting essay a couple of years back about the stage production of "Wolf Hall' that suggested that part of its appeal is that Henry VIII is the boss from hell. No matter how carefully Cromwell maneuvers through the court and tries to serve his master, there's always that threat that someday he will slip--and his head literally will roll. The author of the essay connected this with the plight of most people nowadays who work in the middle levels of big organizations--there is always the fear that the people at the top (who seem increasingly regal in their power and privilege) will someday eliminate your job, or decide it's time to replace you with someone else. It wasn't an entirely convincing analogy, but I thought it had a point.
Cromwell himself has been a lionized figure since G.R. Elton's Tudor Revolution in Government appeared in 1953. Elton made Cromwell the hero of what he presented as the largest change in English administration since the Norman Conquest, and until the 1800s. My vague impression is that scholarship has chipped away at this idea over the last half-century, showing that there was more continuity with Late Medieval modes of government in Henry VIII's reign than Elton allowed, and a bit more change under the Yorkists. But it's interesting to me that Cromwell has apparently survived that corrosion.