Shardlake: the Disneyfication of the Monasteries

What works, and doesn’t, translating from page to screen.

James Cary

James is a writer of sit coms for TV and radio.

Two men in Tudor clothing converse in a street

Shardlake, left, played by Arthur Hughes.

Have you ever had that sense of dread on discovering your favourite novel is going to be a movie or a TV series? Fans of CJ Sansom’s books have been divided on the adaptation of their favourite historical novels about a hunchbacked lawyer during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Some have been delighted by what they’ve seen, and felt the four episodes of Shardlake on Disney+ were true to the original books. Others were appalled.

The originals books are greatly loved. On The Rest is Entertainment podcast, Richard Osman read out comments from his own mother about how and why she loved CJ Sansom’s book so much. I was not so captivated. I read the first book, Dissolution, some years ago and liked it. But I didn’t like it enough to read more.

So when the TV adaptation landed on Disney+ I was curious. My own reaction was relief that CJ Sansom had passed away only days before his first novel arrived in our living rooms. Sansom was committed to historical accuracy and authenticity. The TV Series? Not so much.

But Shardlake is entertainment for the masses, not the bookish. Why shouldn’t sixteenth century monks have incredible teeth? Why shouldn’t they burn candles by the dozen in every room of the monastery, day and night, despite the fact that candles were eye-wateringly expensive back then? And yes, these monks should be going to church at least nine times a day, and spend hours in prayer and private study. But who really wants to watch that? This isn’t Wolf Hall on BBC2. This is mainstream global streaming TV: the Disneyfication of the Monasteries.

Given the differences in the media, why are both versions of Shardlake so successful? The secret sauce is the hunchback himself, Shardlake.

As a screenwriter myself, I know all too well that the dynamics of twenty-first century television – aka ‘content’ – and novels are very different. (My failed novels have reinforced this lesson for me). Shardlake has to appeal to an international audience who have not read, and will never read, CJ Sansom’s books. They won’t even listen to Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook talk about the Dissolution of the Monasteries on The Rest is History podcast.

Novels are fairly cheap to print. TV is expensive, burning money faster than the monks of St Donatus can burn candles. Shardlake is international TV, financed internationally and filmed internationally. Consequently, you are not looking at the Kent countryside. You are looking at Hungary, Austria and Romania for a mixture of reasons. Mostly these would be tax breaks, cheaper crews and financial incentives.

St Donatus’s monastery is a mash up of the medieval Kreuzenstein Castle near Vienna and the gothic Hunedoara Castle in Transylvania. It looks brilliant. It just does not in any way resemble a medieval monastery – which were surprisingly uniform through Europe. The chapel at the monastery is comically small, whereas there would, in real life, be a hilariously large abbey.

The New Stateman said, “This is not Merrye Englande. It is the Grand Anywhere we’ve come to know all too well in the age of streaming, and it bores me to death, my eyes unable to stick to it,” which seems a little over dramatic. Most of the reviewers were unconcerned by this lack of historical accuracy. The Guardian called it ‘magnificent’, others ambivalent. It scored about 80% on Rotten Tomatoes with both the critics and the audience. Overall, Shardlake has been a hit.

Given the differences in the media, why are both versions of Shardlake so successful? The secret sauce is the hunchback himself, Shardlake. He is the sleuth, trying to solve the murder of a fellow commissioner in the service of the King’s ruthless right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell. The recipe for the Shardlake sauce is made up of two key ingredients.

Shardlake bears his cross with fortitude, not bitterness.

The first is his goodness. It seems like a bland attribute, but it’s rather refreshing, especially in a world divided both then and now. Shardlake is not complex character with inner demons. (At least that’s not how he’s presented in the first book or this adaptation.) When I read the book, my abiding memory is that Shardlake was one of the good guys. This was surprising at the time as normally Protestants were seen Philistines and cultural vandals who cynically changed their theology to strip the church of its wealth, before passing the churches on to their descendants who smashed the statues, whitewashed the walls and, eventually, cancelled Christmas. Shardlake may be in the service of Thomas Cromwell, but he knows in his heart of hearts that Anne Bolyen was innocent of the crimes for which she was beheaded. And in some small way, he makes amends for this.

But Shardlake’s goodness is only half of the recipe. The other half is his hunched back. In the sixteenth century, this makes him an object of ridicule and shame. It is not flipped around to become a strength. It is an affliction with which he has to cope. Given Shardlake’s world steeped in religion, we are reminded of the ministry of Jesus, who attracted the sick, the crippled, the lepers and the blind. They were, of course, healed and Shardlake is not so fortunate.

Shardlake bears his cross with fortitude, not bitterness. Likewise, Jesus Christ himself bore his cross as a victim of injustice on trumped up charges, beaten and executed as one cursed alongside criminals, saying ‘Father forgive’. Shardlake, like Christ in the gospels, is a suffering servant. And now Disney may see the Gospel According to Shardlake spreading all over the world.

Column

Culture

1 December 2023

4 min read

Depreciating human life: a year-end market report

The cold currency of trading hostages repels George Pitcher, who explores the casual acceptance that some lives are biddable against lives of intrinsically higher value.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Three men huddle around a laptop and talk animatedly.

Israel's Prime Minister monitors the recent hostage exhchange.

Prime Minister's Office, Israeli Government.

There is something peculiarly horrific about the barter of Israeli hostages held in Gaza by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. And it isn’t only the unimaginable suffering these innocent civilians have to endure somewhere on an unknown scale between life and death.

It’s also that their lives are reduced to their commodity value. Hostages are assets to be traded in the market for peace, not human beings. It’s difficult to write this, but it’s almost as if three dead hostages, including a 10-month-old baby, said to have been killed in an Israeli airstrike, have lost their asset value. These ones are no good – they don’t work anymore.

Negotiating the release of hostages for peace terms is as old as the Hebron Hills. An Egyptian pharaoh once released his enslaved Israelites to Moses in return for the lifting of the plagues being inflicted on his people. But there is something of the neo-liberal free market in the way that post-modern conflict resolution uses human life as a currency of exchange.

Ryan Gilfeather wrote excellently here how this material valuation offends against the human dignity in which the divine invests. The imago dei that humanity bears, if you like, is not to be reduced to a bounty, a financial liability or an asset value.

As a consequence, human life is tradeable. Yes, it has value, but its share price can fall as well as rise.

I’d want to take that a step further, to ask how that depreciation has come about with such ready acceptance and to note a couple of instances where the mentality of the trade in human existence has become a natural process of marketing.

The attitude, I think, has its roots in the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Don’t get me wrong: This is no censure of progressivism. Universal literacy, healthcare, scientific endeavour and the birth and growth of democracy are all very good ideas indeed. But the Enlightenment also brought the capitalist mindset to almost every area of human existence. Our lives, in many contexts, became actuarial.

This is not my idea. The great, perhaps the greatest, Christian mind of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis, railed against how Fascism and genocide were the bastard offspring of our common-law marriage to progressive thinking, in that traditional values of human existence were now only there to be debunked.

I am indebted to Lewis’s biographer, A.N. Wilson, for this. In Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man, he writes of “The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere specimens… begins to affect our very language.’

Lewis was no white-knuckled reactionary, but he did recognise that the values and virtues of ancient religious thought were binned at humanity’s peril. We had begun to understand the price of human life, rather the the value of it.

This is not to suggest for a moment that the ancient world was a nirvana (or even a Narnia). The Garden of Eden was lost at the beginning of time, not at the Enlightenment. Brutality, slavery and cruelty are part of our post-lapsarian world.

It’s just that religious virtue used to be a bulwark against such things. As a consequence, human life is tradeable. Yes, it has value, but its share price can fall as well as rise. By the 21st century, we can look behind us to see how that has played out. Allow me to elucidate a couple of examples of how casual is our acceptance that some lives are biddable against lives of intrinsically higher value.

The first is the almost clownishly implemented government policy proposal to redeploy migrants to the UK to Rwanda. Almost clownishly, because it would be funny if it didn’t involve a trade in human misery, the idea that desperate people endangering their lives and those of their families in small boats can be made someone else’s problem to sort out, simply by looking away. These people are worthless, you see, because they are not us and only we belong here (whoever “we” may be). The idea is that we pay Rwanda per capita to take them, rather as we might send our plastic refuse to China for landfill.

A second example of merchandising human life I would cite are the repeated attempts to have assisted suicide, or voluntary euthanasia, legalised in the UK, rather than enhancing palliative end-of-life care. These proposals depend entirely on the state legislature endorsing that some human lives aren’t worth living and are disposable.

At base, it’s the same principle as the Rwanda policy, other than we’d be killing them, or assisting them to kill themselves, rather than disposing of them in a central African waste-bin.

These are the “anythings” that humans believe in when they stop recognising the sanctity of human life. The value equation used for Gazan hostages is on the same continuum as the human trafficker and the politician who tries to stop him, or the calculation of the cost to the state and their family of a terminally ill patient offered an alternative way out.

It’s just that these equations have become invisible to the naked eye. We don’t see them anymore. But, I’d suggest, for Christ’s sake we’d better start looking.