The Mirror and the Light: TV Adaptation Has Begun
by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | February 25, 2020
According to this February 25, 2020 article in the Radio Times,
“Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky has apparently already been sent the manuscript for Hilary Mantel’s long-awaited sequel The Mirror and the Light – and the work of adapting it for TV has begun. But Piers Wenger, the BBC’s Drama Controller, said he still had no idea when the drama will make it to our screens. At a press event in London, he commented: “I can’t say that now. Genuinely I think we are engaged in those conversations around getting [co-writer] Peter Straughan, Peter Kosminsky, getting the cast back together.â€
The Times February 22, 2020 article had this to say when interviewing Hilary Mantel about her third and final installment of the book series,
“The king is aging and ill, and his moods are erratic. His daughter Mary is refusing to turn her back on Catholic Spain and acknowledge Henry as the head of Church. His illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, dies suddenly and the King is tortured by the absence of a male heir. Cromwell must negotiate the delicacies of the new Queen’s bedchamber while keeping an eye on the aristocratic Catholic families, hoping to bring about a reconciliation with Rome. Jane Seymour does eventually give the king a son, but dies in the process. On top of this, Mantel has given Cromwell an illegitimate child, who travels from Amsterdam to find him. It is a rare deviation from the truth. Cromwell was thought to have had an illegitimate daughter, but her name was Jane and she was born shortly after his wife’s death. The thing Henry wants above all else is a child, but women’s bodies simply won’t account for themselves. They have all the power, not the formal power but the physical power, and despite all the cleverness of his ministers, only a woman can give him what he wants. While Cromwell is trying to extract us from Rome, he was also, through Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves, trying to enter an allegiance with the German and Scandinavian states. It was unfortunate that the King was unable to muster enthusiasm for Anne, who was unflatteringly known as the Flanders Mare – in the book he claimed she has a displeasing air an instructs his courtiers to make sure she is properly washed.”
The BBC reports this in a February 24, 2020 article,
“Reviewers have hailed Hilary Mantel’s finale to her Thomas Cromwell trilogy as “magnificent” and “a masterpiece” ahead of its publication next week. Beginning with Anne Boleyn’s 1536 execution, The Mirror and the Light continues Cromwell’s story up to his own execution four years later. The Mirror and the Light will be published in the UK by Fourth Estate on 5 March.”
All of this begs the question,
https://twitter.com/FanFunDamian/status/1232344491924901889