Man is Wolf to Man: Review of Wolf Hall Parts 1 and 2

Amy D. Stackhouse, Ph.D.
Iona College

The Winter Garden Theater, New York City
April 25, 2015

Full disclosure: I think Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both Man Booker Prize winners, are two of the most creative works of literary historical fiction written in our time. So when I saw in the New York Review of Books the full-page advertisement for the Broadway debut of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, which, for some reason, was called Wolf Hall Part 2 for the American audience, my heart leapt, especially since I am also a fan of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

For those of you who might have missed the books or the BBC series, Wolf Hall is a sympathetic portrayal of Thomas Cromwell’s rise in the court of Henry VIII from about 1500 to Thomas More’s death in 1535. Bring Up the Bodies is the second book in the trilogy, the third of which is provisionally titled “The Mirror and the Light,” and it follows Cromwell from shortly after the death of More through the…