'Wolf Hall' Costume Notes: The "Wreckage" of a Visual Wedding Feast

Our long international literary adaptation nightmare is over. Mark Rylance, Damian Lewis, and Kate Phillips are back on our screens for the next six weeks, and while a great many things are not remotely all right with either the worlds of Tudor England or the present day, at least we have the beauty of Wolf Hall: The Mirror & the Light to sustain us. And it is beautiful. The Wolf Hall that greeted us in 2015 was peak Masterpiece, just about the prestige-iest prestige series imaginable, thanks to its award-winning source material*, A-list cast, nuanced performances, lovely score, and sumptuous visuals.

Wolf Hall: The Mirror & the Light, based on Mantel’s trilogy-closing novel, builds on the audience’s affection for the original miniseries, sending us down increasingly thorny paths as Thomas Cromwell — a blacksmith’s son from Putney whose knack for business and canny insights into the hearts and minds of royalty have made him indispensable to Henry VIII — enjoys the political and economic fruits of his many years of morally flexible hard work, only to see it all slip through his fingers on the way to the literal chopping block.

The most significant difference between the first series and the new one is visual. The original Wolf Hall used daylight and candlelight exclusively (£20,000 worth of candles, according to director Peter Kosminsky!) to illuminate its scenes. This season adds studio lighting to the mix, with the happy result that we can see so much more of the action and, most notably for this piece, far more details of the costumes.