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Having written most recently about the late actor Paul Scofield, and his rendering of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, I can’t help but do a little “compare and contrast” with the Showtime series, The Tudors, now in its second season.

Of course, it’s not a fair match-up: Michael Hirst, who created The Tudors and the two recent Elizabeth films starring Cate Blanchett, is no Bolt. But there is something about our enduring fascination with this historical drama (toss in The Other Boleyn Girl, book and film) worth noting. What sort of lens does The Tudors hold up to the past?

As it happens, I almost didn’t make it past the first couple episodes of Season One. The casting of a perfectly sculpted Adonis (aka Jonathan Rhys Meyers) as Henry VIII had me baffled, until he started ripping off sundry bodices. Ah, I thought: history as soft porn. It’s an established genre.

But I kept watching, in part because of the gorgeous sets and costumes and in part because I was hungry for even the briefest moment when historical and dramatic truth might coincide. Sam Neill grew into his role as Cardinal Wolsey (escaping from the large shadow of Orson Welles’ in Seasons). The female antagonists seems well cast and acted: Maria Doyle Kennedy as pious, dignified Katherine of Aragon and sly, seductive Nathalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn.

Poor Jeremy Northam: he’s a fine actor but the script forces him to portray Thomas More as at best something of a prig, and at worst a bloodthirsty hunter of heretics.

The Humanist as Grand Inquisitor. The notion would have been enough to make even the agnostic Robert Bolt choke on his gin and tonic.

But one can hardly lay all the blame on Michael Hirst. He’s just reflecting a series of recent revisionist attacks on More—such as that of critic James Wood (reprinted in his collection The Broken Estate).

It’s true that Thomas More had a few heretics burned. And that his rhetoric turned shrill and perhaps even a little hysterical as he saw the looming threat of schism in the Church approaching. It is easy to castigate this departure from Humanist poise, but it is worth remembering that the cataclysm he feared did, indeed, come to pass, unleashing terrible bloodshed and destruction.

Critics like Wood and filmmakers like Hirst have reduced the great currents of historical change to the constricted psychology of the self. The New York Times critic wrote of the Tudors that “it radically reduces it’s the era’s thematic conflicts to simplistic struggles over personal and erotic power…. [I]t takes on one of the most powerful and protested institutions in human history— the Catholic Church during the Renaissance—and provides little sense of what the English people have to gain or lose by breaking with it.”

Ironically, it was in the reign of Henry VIII that that reductionist view of the self was beginning to emerge. The rise of the autonomous individual is both the glory and the tragedy of the modern era. Whatever gains there may have been, they are shadowed by grievous losses—individual interpretation of scripture and the concept of the freely choosing, private self bring in their wake a loss of community and a sense of the common good.

The sacrament of marriage and the communion and unity of the Church were parallel—and paramount—institutions to Thomas More. They might be corrupt and broken, but they were part of a seamless, sacred continuum and their indissolubility remained a constant challenge for renewal and reform. Individuals might suffer within them, but they could not move outside them without losing their anchor in transcendence.

By shrinking everything to “personal and erotic power,” The Tudors seems to side with Henry VIII, even while revealing him to be an odious monster of the will. Focusing exclusively on the court and its intrigues, Hirst’s treatment fails to show the larger social realm and becomes claustrophobic.

Contrast HBO’s recent series, Rome. In the characters of Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, we are given a link to the experience of the common man, allowing for the registration of the huge political and social changes taking place at the end of the Roman republic.

The truth is that we are all Henry’s bastard children—solipsistic individuals, frenzied consumers, sick to death of choosing even as our choices multiply. We can take Thomas More’s actions on the eve of this historical catastrophe out of context and vilify him as an inquisitor. Or we can seek to regain the sacramental vision the undergirded his life and witness.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Written by: Gregory Wolfe

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