The Tudors: Season One

Isabel and I just finished watching the finale to the first season of Showtime's The Tudors.

She is quite upset about the portrayal of Thomas More in the series as a whole, but particularly in the last episode.

I'd probably be more upset about the portrayal of Thomas More, but I'm still too busy trying to block the image of Henry VIII engaged in auto-eroticism over a servant boy while fantasizing about Anne Boleyn's breasts undulating over her neckline. Needless to say, I don't feel comfortable recommending the program to anyone. It's pretty much Renaissance pornography.

But back to More...
We got the sense that the writers were very confused about his character. He is a nervous, shy, fumbling figure whose religious devotion borders on fanatical. The series makes him directly responsible for the ferreting out, capture, trial, and burning of heretics...which he seems far too eager to perform. Most damning, however, he is portrayed as an impractical optimist whose idealism blinds him to the court intrigues surrounding him.

Nothing could be further from the jovial, prankster of Renaissance legend (sources claim that he was known to have jumped in the middle of dramatic performances by professional and improvised parts for himself on the spot) or the shrewd, worldliwise visionary that composed the politically jaded Raphael Hythloday in Utopia. While More depicts his fictional self as rather naive in Utopia, it is often thought that he does so as a satirical dodge from the biting critique of Hythloday (that is, if anything Hythloday says sounds treasonous in the text, he can point to passages where he explicitly disagrees with the character...even though it is obvious to the reader that Hythloday is usually--but not always--right).

I suspected we were going to be in trouble when Henry VIII's character praises Machiavelli's Prince and then chides More's Utopia for being (I kid you not) "too utopian." The whole point of Utopia is to satirically call out the very real social, political, and theological problems England was facing by proposing an imaginary place that had solved all of those problems. I had hoped that the point of the line in the show was to suggest that Henry didn't get More...but I think, in the end, it was really the writers who didn't get him.

I don't expect historical fictions to get all the history right...and I've appreciated the various Tudor Wikis online that keep a running tally of the gross inaccuracies of the show that I haven't caught on my own. Still, the point of altering a narrative, even a historical one, should be to either create a clearer sense of the character or experience of the time. Instead, the Tudors seems to obfuscate More's character and replace it with something that feels more like a modern evangelical misunderstanding of Renaissance Catholicism.

And did I mention there were far too many naked bosoms flopping around the screen? And the problem wasn't just that they were flopping, but why they were flopping...

Comments

[Sebastian]

My parents are big fans of this show. I decide to watch an episode with them at one point, but I didn't last more than 10 minutes before I decided this show wasn't for me, nor would it be worth the weekly spike in my blood pressure. But I simply regarded it as "not my cup of tea" at least until my father began taking about how Henry VIII really had some good ideas when he broke from the Church and all things aside he was pretty much still Catholic (which may be true, I’m not a Henry VIII expert, but not the point) so really it was all ok.

They also seem to have a fairly low opinion of the Thomas More character, which surprised me. I can't really comment on the show myself, as I do not watch it and don't know all the details. However, I do get the impression that the historical inaccuracies are doing more harm than good (perhaps that perception is obvious).

Either way I tend not to go for the Showtime/HBO shows. They seem to have a wealth of unnecessary pornographic scenes and I usually question their ability to survive on the standard networks (i.e. on plot alone).

[Peter Terp]

It is arguable that the English Reformation under both Henry and Elizabeth was largely spawned from political consolidation rather than personal spirituality. For instance, Elizabeth is believed to have retained a crucifix in a private chapel despite having ordered her goon squads of iconoclasts to smash to bits papist art. Henry was more or less predominantly interested in getting his heir, and Reformation was a means to an end (although the bits about Henry being strung along the path to Protestantism by Boleyn and Cromwell are pretty much historical).

I wonder how often writers really think they are improving the stories they adapt and how often they just mess with the story out of boredom...