Mantel

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020), the novel about Shakespeare’s son and wife, is considered as the continuation of postmodernist interest in Shakespeare exemplified by A. Burgess’s and R. Nye’s novels about the Bard. However, O’Farrell’s approach to history through the lens of everyday family life, her present-tense narrative and especially her manner of reinterpreting the historical facts all point to another, more recent literary influence – Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels.

The last novel of Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy is approached through the lens of the contemporary theory of power. As a historical novelist, Mantel opens up the mentality behind political and social forms of power under Tudor monarchy, the dominance of traditional medieval system and, in Cromwell’s attempt to create bureaucratic government, the emergence of power devoid of the coating of sacredness.