I only realised last night that the actress, Lydia Leonard, played Anne Boleyn in the RSC Bring Up the Bodies (and Cherie Blair in The Crown) — she’s very good.
@Sausagenbacon, I agree it’s uninvolving, and I revere Hilary Mantel, and adored the trilogy of novels. It’s been intelligently adapted, the cast are almost without exception excellent (I liked what Timothy Spall did with Norfolk), but it’s got the same problem as the RSC adaptations. Without the richness and subtlety of Mantel’s writing of Cromwell’s POV, all we have is a thoroughly familiar story and a lot of shots of men in hats walking into and out of rooms.
I don’t remember the last series being this uninvolving. Is it the editing that’s changed, or the lack of the ‘Anne Boleyn replaces Katharine and then falls in her turn’ governing narrative thread? I just thought last night that if I saw Cromwell take off his hat on entering a room one more time, I would scream! And I get that it’s historically accurate, the hat stuff. It’s just not very interesting to look at. Ditto all those long shots of Cromwell, seen from behind, walking across a large room.
It’s hard to do justice to Mantel’s characterisation, I think. It’s simply not clear whether her Cromwell, if he didn't actually ‘betray’ Wolsey, simply kept away when it was clear Henry had banished him, so as not to wreck his own prospects, just as it’s not entirely clear how much of his zeal in dissolving the monasteries was down to his pro-Reformation religious beliefs and how much his desire to line his own and Henry’s coffers.
Historically, I think George Cavendish writes about Cromwell crying after Wolsey’s downfall and ascribing it to fear that he would now lose everything. Mantel writes the scene, very interesting,y, as Cromwell grieving for his dead wife and daughters and lying about the real reason he’s in tears. This seems to have been transmuted in the adaptation to Cromwell crying after Dorothea told him Wolsey died believing Cromwell had betrayed him. It’s a lot less subtle.