Teresa is watching The Mirror & The Light. I have to confess that I find such ‘historical dramas’ more irritating than entertaining.
I recall art historian Kenneth Clark noting how late Renaissance art was surely and obviously on a downward path, once all the actors became paragons of beauty.
What Clarke was getting at, I believe, is that there ought to be a truthful relationship between art and life. Turning ugly and ordinary people – if, granted, in extraordinary circumstances – into super-models does art, truth and life disservice.
So why does it always happen? That entertainment lies so frequently and flagrantly? There are doubtless many reasons. But wishful thinking, or fantasy, and worldly success, seem obvious reasons.
In some ways Carry On Henry is at least as historically accurate as Wolfe Hall, albeit in a very comical and irreverent way. But at least Henry is less conventionally handsome, more obviously and grotesquely selfish, and – from a safe distance – an utterly risible fool.
What I dislike most of all in everything from this, to the recent Louis Sun God thing, or Downton Abbey, is the romantic rehabilitation of royalty and privilege.
As (?) said, monarchy is the Popery of government. So fat serial-killer Harry splits with Rome? It doesn’t make him Martin Luther, or any other kind of religious reformer.