by PAUL LAY
http://youtu.be/zbZfh-5QsAw
The problem with historical fiction is that it needs heroes. History doesn’t.
More, luxuriant, confident, born to the purple, is every bit the Renaissance Man. Cromwell, jowly and clad in black, looks furtive, anxious and insecure, a man who by birth, though certainly not intellect and cunning, is out of position. Judging by reactions to the BBC’s six-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the contest over the legacies of More and Cromwell is as bitter as ever and damaging to serious widespread engagement with this crucial period of history.
Though this binary representation of More and Cromwell has a long pedigree – the Protestant propagandist John Foxe thought Cromwell a ‘valiant captain of Christ’, while More, a saint no less since 1935, has a special place in the hearts of English Catholics – it is Robert Bolt’s play of 1960, A Man for All Seasons – and, even more so, the film adaptation of 1966 – which revived this Manichean duel. More, beautifully played by Paul Schofield, was the elegant and erudite idealist, a saintly figure unconcerned with the trappings of a world with which his antagonist, Cromwell, in a wonderfully paranoid performance by Leo McKern, was all too smitten. It was a seductive but ludicrously hagiographical portrait of More, who, for all his brilliance, was a hairshirt-wearing, heretic hunter.
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