You know how much we all loved the first series of Wolf Hall back in 2015, so we’ve been waiting on tenterhooks until the next installment, The Mirror and the Light, finally came to the U.S. via PBS Masterpiece. Was it worth the wait? FUCK YEAH!
I thought I might just give a few recappy highlights, but I was way too excited once I started watching the second series on PBS Passport — a nice perk, btw, of donating to my local station; I can watch online or through my smart TV. All 6 episodes were available at once on Passport, so I could catch up with our British brethren who’d seen it all already.
So here I go through the costumes in the whole series — the first three episodes are here, and now I’m wrapping up with the final three!
Do you want to read all of this review (with over 4,400 words and about 70 images) about Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light(2024)? The full post is here!
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I have to say, this series had some lovely ladies (The lady who plays Anna of Cleaves* has an especially fascinating face) and some lovely sartorial treasures – PURPLE & GOLD! – also, Cromwell gets to suffer the likely fate of all who make a tyrant an absolute tyrant.
Oh, special credit to Mr Thomas Brodie Sangster: in their costumes everyone else looks as though they work here, he looks as though he’s going to be running the place (If not right now, then very soon).
*Whose original Holbein portrait absolutely has a very subtle smile, as the article shows, so it’s not something the TV show added.
Also, Thomas Cromwell has a cheek to imagine a nice, cosy Abbey for his retirement: I hope the bees sting him!
Correction, I hope those bees live a long, flowery life and that Thomas Cromwell gets stung by hornets.
I do object to the hair-and-beard-style of Archbishop Cranmer (I presume that’s who is wearing the gold cope and mitre, marrying Henry and Anne). There’s a perfectly good portrait of him painted only 5-6 years later with respectably short hair and just a bit of 5 o’clock shadow. True, there are much later portraits of him with a patriarchal long white (but very well combed) beard, and John Foxe described him, seven years after his death as having “a long beard, white and thick”. So they could have gone for either look. But I can’t imagine any Tudor archbishop officiating at a royal wedding (or anything else) with his hair just looking unkempt.