Hilary Mantel shows a new side of Henry VIII in her books — and now on stage

Over the years, our idea of Henry the VIII was shaped by plays, movies and TV shows. But now, novelist Hilary Mantel has definitively revised that idea.

In her novels, "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies," Mantel focuses on a less well-known historical figure who's always been depicted as kind of a weasel: Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who maneuvered his way up to become Henry's right-hand man.

“It’s the arc of Thomas Cromwell’s story — a blacksmith’s son to Earl of Essex," Mantel says. "Poor boys, if they were clever and lucky, they could get on through the church. But Cromwell didn’t do that. He didn’t really climb the steps of the existing power structure. He just brought his own ladder and smashed it through the ceiling."

The novels have been huge bestsellers, and both won the Man Booker Prize, Britain's biggest award for fiction. Mantel is the first woman to win it twice. Now the books have been adapted into a Masterpiece Theater miniseries on PBS and a two-part, five-and-a-half hour show on Broadway, both called "Wolf Hall."

Mantel had been contemplating a book about Thomas Cromwell for 30 years. "You wait for somebody else to do it, because it’s so obvious,” she says. 

Cromwell’s low birth and his self-made rise to power gave Mantel a way to look at Henry VIII from a more down-to-earth perspective. Her version of Henry is more sympathetic than the wife-killing tyrant we’re familiar with.

“I try not to judge my characters,” Mantel says. “I ask my readers to walk a mile in their shoes, which is quite difficult when you’re looking at a monarch like Henry, who seems such a distant figure. I try to see him through Cromwell’s eyes.” Still, she says, Henry’s is “a uniquely English story. Nobody else has this monster king, of whom we are perversely proud."

Mantel has been deeply involved in the stage adaptations of her books. “I turned up as a kind of walking encyclopedia,” she says, “and I got drawn into the project. I’ve reshaped the scripts for Broadway.” The plays themselves are funnier than the books, and Mantel explains that’s on purpose.

“The books are witty. You smile, but in the theater that’s not good enough. A line that lies on the page and makes the reader smile becomes laugh-out-loud funny when actors are animating it,” she explains.

Mantel is currently working on the final book in the Cromwell trilogy. Working with the actors in the play has given her insights into the characters that have helped shape the third book, she says.

But though she’s been living with Thomas Cromwell non-stop for so long, Mantel isn’t tired of him yet: “I’m more fascinated by him than ever I was. I still can’t add him up. I suspect he’ll elude me at the last, and as soon as his head’s off he’ll get up and put it back on again.”

This story first aired as an interview on Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.