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.

Review

Culture

Death & life

20 November 2023

5 min read

How the Victorians could help us to die well

Victorians welcomed the angel of death, rather than fearing it. Ian Bradley explores their changing attitudes towards death. Part of the How to Die Well series.

Ian Bradley

Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews.

A bronze statue of a resting angel sits atop a low stone grave.

A grave in a Dresden cemetery.

Veit Hammer on Unsplash.

When it comes to dying well, there is much that we can learn from our Victorian forebears. Experiencing death more frequently and directly than most of us do, they were not frightened by it but regarded it rather as part of the natural order and, thanks to the pervasive influence of the Christian faith, as the gateway to eternal life.

In his widely read epic poem, ‘In Memoriam’, inspired by the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam at the age of 22 and published in 1851, Alfred Tennyson posed the rhetorical question: ‘How fares it with the happy dead?’. It struck a deep chord with his readers, as did his answer that they are ‘the breathers of an ampler day for ever nobler ends’.

The Victorians thought, wrote, preached, and sang about death and what follows it far more than we do today. Novels were judged by the power and pathos of their death bed scenes. Ninety hymns in the 1889 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern deal primarily with the experience of death and dying. By contrast, there is not a single hymn on this subject in its current successor, the 2013 Ancient & Modern: Hymns and Songs for Refreshing Worship. Death and heaven featured prominently in popular poems, none more so than those by Adelaide Procter, a devout Catholic and the second most read Victorian poet after Tennyson. For her, ‘the beautiful angel, Death, waiting at the portals of the skies’ is to be welcomed rather than dreaded. Her verses about a ‘lost chord’ that an organist realises he may only hear again in heaven, set to music by Arthur Sullivan, who also had no fear of death, became the best-selling song in Britain throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

To our modern taste, such sentiments may seem maudlin and morbid. We have done our best to sweep death under the carpet and we think little about what may follow it.

For most Victorian Christians death was something to be looked forward to rather than dreaded. Frederick William Faber, who converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, was typical in his enthusiastic evocation of its joyful and liberating character:

O grave and pleasant cheer of death! How it softens our hearts and without pain kills the spirit of the world within our hearts! It draws us towards God, filling us with strength and banishing our fears, and sanctifying us by the pathos of its sweetness. When we are weary and hemmed in by life, close and hot and crowded, when we are in strife and self-dissatisfied, we have only to look out in our imagination over wood and hill, and sunny earth and starlit mountains, and the broad seas whose blue waters are jewelled with bright islands, and rest ourselves on the sweet thought of the diligent, ubiquitous benignity of death.

To our modern taste, such sentiments may seem maudlin and morbid. We have done our best to sweep death under the carpet and we think little about what may follow it. For the Victorians, by contrast, it was an ever-present reality, mostly happening at home rather than out of sight in a curtained-off hospital bed or care home, and directly affecting the young as well as the old. The average life expectancy of someone born in Britain in 1837, the year of Victoria’s accession, was just 39 years, less than half the current figure of 81. Infant mortality stood at 150 per 1,000 births and actually rose through the century, reaching 160 per 1,000 births in 1899 – the current level is just over three per 1,000.

It was in this context that Victorian clergy sought to dispel anxious fears about death and help people to die well by expounding the Christian doctrine of eternal life. There was a pastoral imperative to do so when seeking to minister to so many who were dying or grieving.

Their focus was on the promise of heaven rather than the fear of hell. There was still a continuing adherence within the churches to the doctrine of eternal punishment for the wicked in the aftermath of a final and terrible Day of Judgment. However, the latter half of the nineteenth century saw a marked decline of belief in hell, prompted partly by the impact of the new German school of biblical criticism which challenged Biblical literalism and by moral revulsion at the idea that a basically benevolent and good God could consign people who had not led particularly bad lives to eternal torment.

Increasing missionary endeavour and contact with those of other faiths, or of no faith, also made many Christians uneasy with the idea that a large proportion of the human race were condemned to everlasting punishment simply because they had never encountered the Christian Gospel.

As fear of hell subsided, so hope of heaven came to occupy a much more prominent place in Victorian thought and imagination. This can be clearly seen in the language of hymns. Heaven receives over 100 explicit mentions in the seminal 1889 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern, and there are a further 43 references to Paradise. Hell is mentioned in just 15 of the 638 hymns and only in four of those is it conceived of primarily as a place of pain and punishment.

Hymns are, indeed, a good place to gain an insight into Victorian views of death and heaven. Two popular ones written at the very beginning of Victoria’s reign set the tone for those that followed. ‘I’m but a stranger here, heaven is my home’ by Thomas Taylor, a Bradford Congregational minister, and ‘There is a happy land, far, far away’ by Edinburgh schoolmaster Andrew Young, emphasize the idea of death as a home-coming and reinforce the conviction, increasingly common among Victorian clergy, that friends and family will be reunited in heaven.

As mortality rates rise in the wake of Covid and as a consequence of an ever-older population and death comes out of the closet, we are at last beginning to talk and think about it more. Through their poems and hymns, the Victorians can help us to be less fearful and to die well.

Ian's new book Breathers of an Ampler Day: Victorian Views of Heaven is published by Sacristy Press.