Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis to Return for 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light'
Masterpiece and the BBC have announced that filming will begin shortly on Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the second installment based on Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel's critically acclaimed trilogy of novels. Rumors have swirled for the past few years that a second season of Wolf Hall was in the works, but the project was generally assumed to be on hold until Mantel finished the final book in the series, called The Mirror and the Light. With its completion and subsequent publication in 2020, it would appear the time to return to Cromwell's England is finally upon us.
Wolf Hall follows the story of Thomas Cromwell, a man who rose from working-class beginnings as a blacksmith's son to become one of the most powerful figures in the court of King Henry VIII. He was – among many other things - one of the primary architects of the Protestant Reformation in England, and largely responsible for both the dissolution of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and the fall of Anne Boleyn several years later. He also negotiated Henry's infamously disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves and presided over the dissolution of the monasteries, an act which saw all religious houses across England, Wales, and Ireland disbanded, made Henry a great deal of money by allowing him to dispose of their assets for his own gain, and tore a gaping hole in the social fabric of society by destroying a key source of charity for the old and infirm.
Despite all this, Mantel's novels are remarkably sympathetic to Cromwell, often in contrast to a literary and historical tradition that generally likes to set his determined scheming and naked ambition at odds with the quiet moral certainty of Sir Thomas More, who was ultimately canonized by the Catholic Church following his execution for refusing to acknowledge Henry's divorce. (It's hard to compete with a literal saint, after all.)
