The Creation of Anne Boleyn (37 page)

The show premiered in the United States in April 2007. The first reviews were neither outraged nor particularly enthusiastic. Alessandra Stanley, in the
New York Times,
called it “enjoyable but not exhilarating, engaging but not hypnotic.”
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Ted Cox, in the
Daily Herald,
asked: “What do bare breasts and rampant sex scenes add to the life of Henry VIII?” and concluded that while “history certainly goes down easier when it’s being mixed with bodice-ripping romps in bed,” the show “never really ignites dramatically.”
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Ginia Bellafante, in a later review, referred to the first season as “somnolent.”
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A lot of viewers, apparently, didn’t agree; the preview episode gave Showtime its highest viewing figures for a series debut in three years.

It was when the show premiered on BBC six months later that the steam hit the fan, as the British reacted to the marathon sexuality and what in virtually every review was described as the gross, pandering “Americanization” of English history. “Perfectly preposterous. There are so many pouting babes and dashing blades in Henry’s court,
The Tudors
looks like a
CSI: Miami
pool party with ruffles”
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; “a Wikipedia entry with boobs”
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; “sexed up” and “dumbed down” for American audiences
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; “a porno-style historical semi-drama quite obviously not aimed at the serious television watcher”
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; “
Entourage
goes historical”
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; “if Jackie Collins wrote a dramatic version of Simon Schama’s
History of Britain,
it might come across like this.”
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When the historians got in on the action, criticisms of the historical inaccuracies were added to the complaints about the sex. Retha Warnicke, a historian who has advanced her own somewhat eccentric view of Anne’s fall, later incorporated in both
The Tudors
and
The Other Boleyn Girl
(a deformed fetus taken as a sign of witchcraft), “shuddered” at the conflation of Henry’s sisters, Mary and Margaret, into one person. “Truly dreadful,” she said of the merging of the two, which was done, according to Hirst, so that staff on location would not be confused when “Mary” was called to the set.
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Leanda de Lisle, who has written several well-regarded Tudor biographies, stated: “With inaccuracies in almost every sentence, the BBC is dumbing down the Tudor period.”
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Alison Weir compared the series to a Hollywood “fairytale.” “For a program to be made with integrity, it has to take account of the facts.”
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David Starkey (a self-confessed “all-purpose media tart,” who has created controversy in virtually every interview he has done) called the series “gratuitously awful” and “a Midwest view of the Tudors . . . made with the original intention of dumbing it down so that even an audience in Omaha could understand it.”
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There were some exceptions. There were historians who pointed out that simply by igniting interest in the period the series had done a service to Tudor history. Tracy Borman, who writes about Anne in
Elizabeth’s Women,
while acknowledging that the show was often historically inaccurate, admitted to having become “strangely addicted” and praised it for “re-creating the drama and atmosphere of Henry VIII’s court, with its intrigues, scandals, and betrayals.”
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John Guy, who has written more than a dozen scholarly books about Tudor England, agreed. “
The Tudors
conveys brilliantly the claustrophobic atmosphere of Henry’s court; it’s a place where back-watching is second-nature, plotting endemic . . . If you value true and accurate history, this isn’t for you. But then, it isn’t meant to be. It’s a rumbustious romp through the life and times of ‘Horrible Henry and the Terrible Tudors,’ a fiction loosely based on fact, and when the facts get in the way, they’re ditched. If you can accept that, then watch and enjoy, for that’s what the real-life characters would have done. Thomas More, who always loved a comic turn, will be spinning in his grave if he’s watching this new series. But at least he’ll be smiling.”
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Hirst had never claimed the series was 100 percent historically accurate, and to be fair to
The Tudors,
there’s not a film or television series—or play or novel, for that matter (and few biographies)—that can lay claim to that. “What?” a reader wrote in response to a critical
Guardian
story, “It’s NOT historically accurate?? Thanks goodness I know that Robin Hood
is
an American with a number 1 soundtrack, King Arthur is an old Scotsman, and the Americans single-handedly won the Second World War!”
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He makes a strong point.
Anne of the Thousand Days,
in addition to numerous other alterations of history, has that invented—yet somehow perfect—scene in the Tower between Anne and Henry.
The Private Life of Henry VIII
turns Anne of Cleves into a wisecracking cardsharp who is physically disgusted by Henry rather than (as history tells it) the other way around.
A Man for All Seasons
neglects to mention that Thomas More, besides being a witty intellectual, also burned quite a few heretics and was apparently not quite the devoted husband he appeared to be. The BBC production of
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
barely notes that there was a conflict of authority between Henry and the Church, beyond the issue of the divorce; it’s actually much more the wife-centered, “feminized” history that Starkey berates than
The Tudors,
which spends a lot of time on the more “masculine” (and for Starkey, historically central) end of things: diplomatic skirmishes, wars, and court politics. Hirst, in his interview with me, pointed out with some justice that while
The Tudors
got slammed for its gaps and inventions, Hilary Mantel’s
Wolf Hall
gets nothing but praise for its liberties with history.
Wolf Hall,
he says, is “complete fiction. But nobody says that. They all say: ‘What a wonderful book, what insights it brings to the Tudors.’ Isn’t that bizarre?”
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Mantel’s quirky, magisterial portrait of Thomas Cromwell
is
a wonderful book, an imaginative tour de force that makes the precarious yet oddly cozy world of the Tudor court seem both completely familiar and utterly strange. Yet Hirst is right, it doesn’t shy away from tweaking the facts. Ignoring the fact that Cromwell and Anne had many of the same religious commitments for most of Anne’s reign, Mantel paints Anne through Cromwell’s eyes as a predatory calculator, brittle, anxious, and cold—a view that Cromwell is unlikely to have held during the period that
Wolf Hall
takes place. Mantel’s 2013 sequel,
Bring Up the Bodies,
which deals with the chilling, sudden turnabout of Anne’s fortunes “as it might have looked from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view,”
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goes even further, presenting a “theory” about Anne’s fall that is quite different from what most historians now believe—namely, that Cromwell played the leading hand in cooking up the ruthless plot that cost Anne her life. Mantel’s Cromwell, less the master strategist of a political coup than the nimble, pragmatic servant of Henry’s fickle love life, has some fortunately timed gossip fall in his lap and simply follows the wind, never quite sure of the truth himself—and leaving the historically uninformed reader unsure as well. “What is the nature of the border between truth and lies?” Mantel has Cromwell musing as the bits and pieces of rumor pile up. “It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstanding and twisted tales.”
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In
Bring Up the Bodies,
Mantel brilliantly re-creates that permeable and blurred experience (even Anne’s guilt or innocence remains undecided at the end of the novel), which is what makes her fiction remarkable. Yet it is as blurred with regard to the truth as the false rumors that swirled around Anne’s sexual behavior.

It’s worth reflecting on our shifting standards with regard to the historical accuracy of fictional representations. Although historians complain about the distortions of history in
The Tudors,
the show actually sticks much more closely and in greater detail to the historical record than any other production. Ironically, that has made it more vulnerable to criticism. With the leisure of four seasons, the series is able to deal with much more of what actually happened; therefore, it has much more “data” to not get quite right or alter deliberately for dramatic purposes. And despite the condescending remarks of the British press, the show is actually intellectually far more demanding than
The Six Wives of Henry VIII.
Perhaps its chief offense is being “pop” rather than “literary.” I adored
Wolf Hall
(despite its nasty portrait of Anne), but I know a great deal about the period and have to wonder how many of those who praised it actually were able to follow it. It’s an extremely dense, demanding work of art, particularly for those who aren’t familiar with all the cultural references; even keeping all the Thomases straight is a challenge. Perhaps critics were afraid to question its fidelity to history because, like students in a high-theory college course, they were afraid of displaying their own ignorance.

Among historians, what is seen as “dreadful” and what slides by is often a matter of whom and what you care about. As an Anne scholar and a feminist, I bristle most when she is dragged through the sexist muck, but devotees of David Starkey are oblivious to his stereotyping (and his work claims the status of “history”). Some depictions get away with nonsense because they were created long enough ago that they are viewed as dusty, cultural artifacts, and as such are not held to standards of factual accuracy. Television and movies, because they carry with them the illusion of verisimilitude—real bodies, real action, and often in highly realistic settings and costumes—are more likely to be criticized for historical inaccuracy no matter how often their creators, as Hirst does, insist that they are not meant to be entirely factual. If they comport themselves with enough dignity, however—like the BBC productions or
A Man for All Seasons
—they are off the hook. And then there is the post–Oliver Stone, “postmodern” problem: We no longer have much assurance that viewers or readers will be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, so special anxiety about the transgressions of
The Tudors
or
The Other Boleyn Girl
is “justified” by virtue of a cultural milieu in which the created image (whether computer-generated visuals or concocted narratives) is consumed, without scrutiny, as “reality.”

The Tudors’
chief offense, I believe, is not that it is “dumb” or especially riddled with inaccuracies, but that it exploits audience’s tastes for eye candy, cinematic sex, and soap-opera drama. If the series had aimed at more refined tastes, I believe, fewer historians would have found the Mary/Margaret conflation so outrageous. They would have been respectfully curious as to the reason for it, but they would not have so readily cried “shame!”—as though the Virgin Mary had been slandered. My most serious problem with the show’s pandering to soap-opera tastes is that it inevitably led to recycling the image of Anne Boleyn as the seductive, scheming Other Woman. That’s the classic soapy element of the story, after all: Sexpot steals husband from mousy, menopausal first wife. Hirst says he never intended this and attributes it less to the script than to “deep cultural projections.” He had initially seen Anne, he told me, as a victim of her father’s ambitions, and believed he was writing the script to emphasize that. He was surprised when “critics started to trot this line out: ‘Here she is, just a manipulative bitch.’ Well, actually I hadn’t written it like that. But they couldn’t get out of the stereotypes that had been handed down to them and that’s what they thought they were seeing on the screen. It didn’t matter what they were actually seeing. They had already decided that Anne Boleyn was this Other Woman, this manipulative bitch.”
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I agree with Hirst about the power of the history of cultural images; but it’s odd that he would be so naïve about the way that the show’s own imagery reinforced them. Dormer believes it was indeed unconscious on Hirst’s part, that in capitalizing on the sexual chemistry between Henry and Anne, and while portraying Katherine as virtuous and long-suffering, he slipped into a very common male mind-set. “Men still have trouble recognizing,” she told me, “that a woman can be complex, can have ambition, good looks, sexuality, erudition, and common sense. A woman can have all those facets, and yet men, in literature and in drama, seem to need to simplify women, to polarize us as either the whore or the angel. That sensibility is prevalent, even to this day. I have a lot of respect for Michael, as a writer and a human being, but I think that he has that tendency. I don’t think he does it consciously. I think it’s something innate that just happens and he doesn’t realize it.”
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