Wolf Hall and the Birth of Modern Subjectivity

The British costume drama, and the novels upon which it is based, force viewers to inhabit the dangerous time/space of modernity.

There is a moment in the television series Wolf Hall in which the Duke of Norfolk (played with biting panache by Bernard Hill) calls Thomas Cromwell by what he seems to think is the worst insult imaginable. He calls him a “person,” the implication being that there is something fundamentally tainted about being such a thing as a person. For a man like Norfolk, a representative of one of the grand old noble families of England, it must be dismaying indeed to see a person like Cromwell — raised the son of a blacksmith in Putnam — climbing his way resolutely up the ladder of power to become the righthand man to the King of England himself.

In many ways, this moment crystallizes the central message that Wolf Hall, like the novels that it is based upon, articulates: namely that Thomas Cromwell is, in many significant ways, the first modern subject. Unbound by the strictures that have governed the England that he was brought up in, highly critical of both the increasingly inflexible nobility and the corrupt church, Cromwell sees it as his mission to drag England into the modern age. And, because the series works so hard to suture us…