History, thanks to streaming, is also experiencing a great comeback in cinematography and television fiction that we can only greet with enthusiasm. The decline of history in recent decades has been one of the most frustrating facts of the global cultural landscape. History, even Greco-Roman history, is an exceptional key to understanding the contemporary world. For the great leaders of humanity as well as for the little Napoleons who trample the soil of the planet, history is something foreign to their thinking, their action and rarely falls within their field of vision, when it should guide them.
Mediating history through fiction may be the operation that resurrects it in public conversation. Many Italians know what little of English history through Shakespeare's tragedies. Who else would know about Richard III or Macbeth? Just as foreigners can learn something of Italian history through Verdi's melodrama. At least they might be curious.
To resurrect the historical novel in the 69st century was undoubtedly the British Hilary Mantel, XNUMX years old from the eastern Midlands, the only writer to have been awarded twice the Booker Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in the Anglo-Saxon world . The beauty of the matter is that the Mantel writes gigantic novels, rarely under 500 pages. He started with a trilogy on the French Revolution, The secret history of the revolution, immediately fascinated by the three young revolutionaries who fell, in their early thirties, under the guillotine in the same year, 1794: Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins. She then continued with the Thomas Cromwell trilogy of which two volumes have been released and the third conclusive is expected for 2019. Thomas Cronwell is not the Cromwell of the only republican experience attempted in the British Isles; that's Oliver and he is also studied in middle school. Thomas is the prime minister of Henry VIII, a politician of humble origins, but very skilled, who however failed to escape the tragic fate of all those who had approached the mercurial English monarch.
Donatella Valente, who has read the first two books of the Trilogy, is about this writer who is also a courageous and irreverent polemicist. She takes a moment to mock the more recent icons of the British imagination.
Judging by the photos, Hilary Mantel is a middle-aged lady with a light complexion, whose dominant trait is roundness: she is round, her hairdo slightly bouffant, her round blue eyes wide open towards the camera. In short, a somewhat funny woman, with an air between astonished and incredulous.
Funny or not, the fact is that Hilary Mantel is the author of two novels (soon three) which, within a few years of each other, have brought together the most authoritative critics and the general public, generally very distant, ensuring her the prizes most prestigious literature and, at the same time, bestseller sales. The writer was included by the magazine "Time" among the one hundred most influential people on earth.
The two novels in question Wolf Hall e Anne Boleyn, a family matter, published in Italy by Fazi Editore — are set in Henry VIII's England and have ushered in a new happy season for the historical novel, thus reshuffling editorial marketing policies.
Last February, the fame of the writer had a further peak, not for literary reasons but for the judgment she gave of Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, Queen consort of England and mother of the heir to the Windsor throne.
In fact, in a lecture held at the British Museum on the subject of Royal bodies ("Royal bodies"), Mantel said that Kate is a "appallingly thin and fake smile jointed doll", a woman devoid of personality and expression, enabled to say only "thank you" and "please", selected exclusively to procreate: in other words only a mare, however "royal".
Open the sky: newspapers and tabloids from all over the world have harshly criticized her, not sparing easy comments on the envious acrimony that would have moved Mantel, not exactly beautiful and twice as old as Kate. Even David Cameron, at the time prime minister, took the trouble to defend the filiform duchess before falling like Robespierre under the weight of his somewhat adventurous initiatives. In Mantel's eyes, the comparison would still be indecorous for the Jacobin.
The writer rejected the criticisms of the sender, saying that some press play the usual game of Eve against Eve, that her words were taken from their context and that hers was not a judgment but an observation of the treatment that history , the monarchy system itself and the media reserve for “royal bodies”. And she didn't think she needed to apologize to Kate, who didn't bat an eyelid either.
On closer inspection, in fact, rather than lese majesty it was a historical reflection elaborated with full knowledge of the facts, since Mantel is an author who knows history well and knows how to tell it. With huge success.
Rain di awards on Tudor
Hilary Mary Mantel was actually born Thompson: Mantel is her stepfather's name. Born in 1951, English from Derbyshire, with the first two episodes of her trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, prime minister of Henry VIII Tudor, she sold millions of copies and won almost all the most important British literary awards.
in 2009 Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize; in 2012 Anne Boleyn, a family matter (original title Bring up the bodies) not only won the same prestigious award again — no one before her had succeeded — but she has also collected other illustrious awards, also earning the Costa Book Award in two different categories (best novel and book of the year) and the David Cohen Award, a sort of English Nobel Lifetime Achievement, while the BBC made it one scripted with --Mark Rylance as Henry VIII's prime minister e Claire Foy in those of Anne Boleyn.
Hilary Mantel has to her credit 14 novels, short stories and an autobiography (The ghosts of a lifetime, Einaudi 2006), even if, although it has always been well reviewed, it achieved true success only thanks to the Tudors. Evidently, it was her reflection, changing the subject of each novel is not a good move... And so the writer is back at work and writing The Mirror and the Light, the final episode of the triumphant trilogy expected for 2019.
Un unusual protagonist
But who is Thomas Cromwell? Born in 1485, of humble origins, he left England at a very young age for the European continent and returned there after more than twenty years, polyglot and with a singular curriculum as a mercenary, merchant and banker. Step by step, with ruthlessness and discretion, Cromwell won the full trust of King Henry VIII until he became his prime minister.
Always keeping very aloof, very faithful to the crown, he was the architect of the Anglican schism from the Church of Rome and the careful helmsman of three of the six marriages of the sovereign, fully sharing his concern for the absence of a male heir and therefore for the continuity dynastic. In short, he was a man of immense yet inconspicuous power, whose star went out in 1540, at the age of 55, when he was executed by order of his ungrateful king.
In the history books Thomas Cromwell is not a prominent character and is dismissed as a man of undeniable political ability but of low moral caliber. So why did Hilary Mantel choose him as the protagonist of her ponderous trilogy?
I wanted to tell her story because it has never been told, - she explained in an interview - to clean it of junk and prejudices and start over from the character as if it had just been discovered. And also because she has always liked this bad, manipulative and murderous man, more than the king of hers: “Henry VIII is the great icon of the time, but the real power, the one behind the throne, passes through Cromwell.
When the erudition si based with la writing
To give voice and thoughts to the hitherto little-known courtier and move into the world of the Tudors through his eyes, the writer has obviously studied the more than ample documentation on his public life but has also gone on the hunt for news on his private life, almost all unknown. In short, Mantel has studied a lot but, as a fascinated Alessandro Baricco wrote, she doesn't feel it, which sounds like a compliment because it means that erudition has merged with history and narrative ability, coming to life and transforming a potential historical meatloaf in a literary work of great quality, which on the one hand reinvents the foundation myth of the British island and on the other revives the glories of the historical novel as a successful literary genre.
With a writing that is never trivial or obvious, surprising for the very modern stylistic code applied to such a subject, the over 1300 total pages of the two novels flow into a narrative that restores sixteenth-century London and the Tudor court in minute detail. The protagonist meets and clashes with kings, queens and would-be queens, ministers and ambassadors, popes and cardinals and with a multitude of supporting actors and minor figures, in a plot in which he is always the one holding the camera on his shoulder, so to speak . But the most compelling thing is that everyone, including Cromwell, oblivious to the flow of a story that only we know.
Le Figures female, la key of the kingdom di Enrico VIII
In this beautiful story, the female figures stand out: Catherine of Aragon, the first queen, surrounded by a crowd of lawyers in direct line with the papal court to defend her role; Anne Boleyn, who with tenacity and seductiveness keeps Henry on the rope until the latter, breaking away from Rome, unleashes an institutional earthquake of no return and crowns her queen number two; Jane Seymour, the third queen, a shy and plain girl with a lunar face…
In turn the protagonists of a more or less intense infatuation with the intemperate sovereign, all of them are however called to answer a single question: who can give Henry a male heir who will ensure the continuity of the Tudors?
"For this reason the female body is the fulcrum of history and the engine of the political process that will lead to the Reform" said Mantel: the powerful king depends entirely on his queen to have what he urgently needs and which only she can give him, sheltering him from harmful dynastic uncertainties.
Royal ladies
Here then is that the release on Kate effectively takes on a different dimension from the one that tabloids and the media in general have wanted to attribute to it with the usual simplifications of disposable information and with a robust dose of hypocrisy, and is placed in a historical reflection more broad-based.
In fact, in the long conference held at the British Museum, Mrs. Mantel spoke, yes, of Kate, and she did so in the terms reported by the press around the world, but it was not a judgment of merit and it was a brief passage within a long and documented excursus on the equally royal bodies of Marie Antoinette of France and Lady D., the current Elizabeth and Prince Charles, Henry VIII and his queens. In analyzing her, Mantel has placed side by side different characters, each with her story in History, all however united by being just "bodies", albeit "gifts".
Royals are both gods and beasts,” he said. “They're people, but their being goes beyond the individual, they're vectors of a bloodline: basically they're reproductive machines, a set of organs.
This applies to male royal bodies, but even more to royal ladies, nothing but carefully selected "real vaginas" to give the right answer, the only one that matters in that context: an heir to the throne, preferably male.
Nothing personal therefore towards the Duchess of Cambridge, who is only the latest in chronological order of a long, long line of royal bodies…
Nothing di new under il Sun
To go back to the Tudor saga, Wolf Hall spans more or less thirty years of Thomas Cromwell's life, from adolescence to full maturity, while Anne Boleyn, a family matter, in a darkening atmosphere, takes place in less than a year and ends with the execution of the queen, supported by a Cromwell at the height of power and seriously worried about the dynastic weakness of the kingdom, still without the coveted male heir .
The third and final episode of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is still in progress but once again we already know how it ends: Jane Seymour, crowned queen shortly after Anne's head is rolled into the executioner's basket, dies after giving birth (finally) to Edward; however, a single heir does not sufficiently guarantee the dynastic line. And here is the marriage with Anne of Clèves, queen number four, a disaster. Henry gets tired of his prime minister and Cromwell's brilliant parable ends on the gallows, in the hands of an incompetent executioner who, according to the chronicles of the time, had to land more than one blow to complete the job...
So far the official story: we'll see how our writer will tell us and if once again critics and the public will fall in love with her singular hero.
After all, all good things come in threes…
Extract da Wolf Hall
[Cromwell met Anne Boleyn to plead the case of Cardinal Wolsey, the king's adviser, who had fallen into disgrace]
As he retraces his steps - eight antechambers before resuming his day - he knows that Anna has advanced somewhere where he can see her, the morning light resting under the curve of the gorge. He sees the thin arch of her eyebrows, her smile, the curve of the nape of her long thin neck. He sees the speed, the intelligence, the rigor of the woman. He didn't think she would help the cardinal, but to ask what is there to lose? It's the first time I've offered it to you, he thinks, but it might not be the last.
There was a moment when Anna gave him all her attention: her raven gaze pierced him. Even the king knows how to look at you: blue eyes, deceptively mild. Will it be the same between them? Or will they look at it another way? For an instant it is clear to him, then not anymore. He is standing by the window. Some starlings perch among the black buds of a bare tree. Then, like black gems opening, the birds open their wings: they flap, chirp, set everything in motion, the air, the wings, the black notes of a keyboard. He realizes that he is observing them with pleasure: that something almost vanished, a timid nod towards the future, is ready to welcome spring. In a contained and desperate way he can't wait for Easter to arrive, the end of the Lenten fast, of penance. Beyond this black world there is another: a world of possible things, and in that world, if Anne can be queen, Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it, then not anymore. It's a brief moment. But an intuition cannot be erased. He can't go back to the moment until he's had it.
Listen to the passage read by Donatella Valente.
