SELF-FASHIONING AND THE THEATRICALITY OF POWER IN HILARY MANTEL’S WOLF HALL AND BRING UP THE BODIES Word count: 18,386 Mathilda Schacht Student number: 01608244 Supervisor(s): Prof. Dr. Guido Latré, Dr. Sarah Bonciarelli A dissertation submitted to Ghent University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels Academic year: 2019 – 2020 kik Schacht 1 Acknowledgements I would love to thank my supervisor, Professor Guido Latré, who was always very kind and encouraging about my work. I enjoyed following his course about the Renaissance and I am forever grateful for all the help he gave me during my writing process. I would also like to thank my mother and father. Their support has been and still is, priceless. I am blessed to have people surrounding me with endless love. I am eternally grateful for my father’s help during my writing progress. I will truly miss our conversations about Master Cromwell. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my friends who revised certain parts of this master dissertation. A special thanks to Nils and Ada, whose efforts I will always remember. Schacht 2 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations ..................................................................................................................5 Introduction.................................................................................................................................6 1 Thomas Cromwell: The Historical Figure .............................................................................10 2 Obtaining and Maintaining Power in the Renaissance ..........................................................15 2.1 Institutions.......................................................................................................................16 2.1.1 God’s Representative on Earth.................................................................................16 2.1.2 The King’s Council ..................................................................................................16 2.1.3 Parliament.................................................................................................................17 2.2 Strategies .........................................................................................................................17 2.2.1 Propaganda: Displaying Wealth, Status and Political Power...................................18 2.2.2 Patronage: the Exchange of Land, Honours or Titles for Loyalty............................20 2.2.3 Consultation: Visiting the King on a Regular Basis.................................................20 2.2.4 Coercion: Manipulation, Threatening and Implementing Sanctions........................21 3 The Concept of Self-Fashioning ............................................................................................22 3.1 Self-fashioning in Writing...............................................................................................26 3.2 Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors .............................................................27 3.3 Thomas More and the Theatrical Metaphor....................................................................29 3.4 Theatricality as the Result of Self-fashioning.................................................................33 4 The Many Masks of Thomas Cromwell ................................................................................34 Schacht 3 4.1 Mask 1: Cromwell the Enigma........................................................................................37 4.1.1 The Art of Displaying and Concealing.....................................................................39 4.1.2 Cromwell the Murderer ............................................................................................41 4.2 Mask 2: Cromwell the Enemy.........................................................................................43 4.2.1 The Case of Stephen Gardiner..................................................................................43 4.2.2 The Case of Katherine of Aragon.............................................................................44 4.3 Mask 3: Cromwell the Manipulator ................................................................................45 4.4 Mask 4: Cromwell the Ally.............................................................................................46 4.4.1 Anne Boleyn: Friend or Foe .....................................................................................46 4.5 A Glimpse of the Real Cromwell....................................................................................48 4.5.1 The Self-made Man ..................................................................................................49 4.5.2 The Cardinal’s Loyal Friend.....................................................................................51 4.5.3 Cromwell the Caring Family-man............................................................................52 4.5.4 Cromwell a Friend of the Arts..................................................................................54 4.5.5 Cromwell’s Vice: Vanity..........................................................................................55 4.5.6 Through the Cracks of the Mask ..............................................................................56 4.5.7 Cromwell the Religious Man....................................................................................58 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................67 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................69 Schacht 4 List of Abbreviations - WH = Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel - BB = Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel - TC = Thomas Cromwell: A Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch Schacht 5 Self-fashioning and the Theatricality of Power in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies Introduction A little boy from Putney rises in society and becomes one of the greatest and most powerful statesmen that England has ever known. This is, in short, the story of Thomas Cromwell. A man who has been portrayed as a side character in many movies, television series, and novels. By some, he has been depicted as a villain, by others as a hero. Never before has he been the sole focus of a trilogy. This changed when Dame Hilary Mantel put him at the centre of the stage in her famous Cromwell novels. Mantel is a contemporary English novelist whose works include personal memoirs, short stories, and neo-historical fiction. Wolf Hall (2009) is the first part of her Cromwell- trilogy. The story focuses on the rise of the English statesman Thomas Cromwell and on Henry VIII’s annulment of his first marriage to Katherine of Aragon, all leading up to the ascent of Anne Boleyn, the second wife. Bring Up the Bodies (2012) focuses on Cromwell’s struggle to obey the king’s wish to get rid of Anne, who was not able to produce a healthy male heir, and to marry Jane Seymour. Mantel won the Man Booker Prize for each of these works of neo-historical fiction. The third, and final part of the trilogy The Mirror and the Light (2020) was published in March and has left critics in awe of yet another masterpiece. Schacht 6 Many literary critics anticipate that this novel will enable her to win another Man Booker Prize. An aspect that is often discussed within the literary field is what exactly makes Mantel’s writing so brilliant and intriguing. Why can we not get enough of this man who lived so many years ago? People said to her, as she explains in her fourth Reith lecture for the BBC, “[b]ut you know the end, people say. So how do you maintain suspense? It’s not a real problem. You succeed not despite the fact that your reader knows what will happen, but because of it” (Mantel, Reith 4). Despite the fact that people know how Cromwell’s life has ended, they keep on reading her novels. One answer to this question might lie in the fact that her writing is so erudite and that it covers many aspects of the English Renaissance. To dissect the elements that form Mantel’s way of writing seems an impossible task, as one can only get a glimpse by analysing the novels. It appears to be nearly impossible to distinguish all the elements that make Cromwell such an intriguing character because he keeps shape- shifting in a figurative way of speaking. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to focus on the aspect of power and theatricality. Cromwell did not have a noble background. He was a prototypical Renaissance man who was conscious of the fact that upward mobility was possible and made that his aspiration in life. The English Renaissance was a time when individuals were able to escape their class and rise in society, even up to the highest regions of power. This strife for a higher position can be seen as a game. How this power game was played is very specific to its context: the actions take place in the sixteenth century at the English court of Henry VIII. This struggle for power and all its aspects, which took place in a time where power was not solely bound to heritage, but also to personal merit and individual profiling, will be Schacht 7 discussed in this dissertation. To make the subject more specific, the main objective will be to analyse how Mantel applied the power game, and the strategies to achieve it, to the characters in her historical fiction. About the genre