A Brechtian Reinterpretation of Thomas Cromwell: Hilary Mantel’s Novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies

Summary

Two of the most acclaimed historical novels of recent years are British writer Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), both of which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. These books are the first two completed installments of a planned trilogy on one of the most ambivalent figures in British history: Thomas Cromwell, the savvy but impenetrable lawyer, adviser, and chief minister of Henry VIII, whose political maneuvers to facilitate the king's divorce from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, so that he could get married to Anne Boleyn, brought about the English Reformation and transformed the British monarchy, though at the cost of many lives. The first of these novels culminates in Anne's coronation in 1533 but ends with the public beheading of former Lord Chancellor Thomas More in 1535, the second one concludes with Anne's beheading in 1536, and the third one— forthcoming under the title The Mirror and the Light—will very likely close with Cromwell's own decapitation in 1540. Even though Mantel has not yet completed her trilogy, the first two books have already been adapted into a BBC miniseries (Wolf Hall) and a stage production by the Royal Shakespeare Company (Wolf Hall Parts One and Two).

In fall 2012 The New Yorker published a profile of Mantel by Larissa MacFarquhar which included the following passage:

But while with facts she was cautious, with form she was experimental. She tried everything. She read a lot of plays, and she loved Brecht, so she thought maybe she could write a Brechtian novel. She liked writing dialogue, it turned out, and much of the novel came out in that form.

Even though the novel in question here is A Place of Greater Safety from 1992, which is set during the French Revolution, this essay will examine the extent to which Mantel's love for Brecht may also have left traces in the first two books of her Cromwell trilogy, which she wrote almost twenty years later. There is no evidence that Mantel has deliberately adapted any of Brecht's plays in her Cromwell novels.