‘You Think You Know a Story…’: Reframing the Tudors on Television in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

AbstractOver the past 10 years, there has been an explosion in the number of television dramas about Tudor England. These programmes have been engaged in a re-visioning of history that prioritizes a heterogeneous approach to the past, adapting historical themes, figures, and events in order to challenge existing conceptions about the nature of history. By using Showtime’s The Tudors (2007–2010) and the BBC’s Wolf Hall 2015 as examples, this paper explores how both series reimagine the Tudor era by destabilising traditional modes of historical engagement and emphasizing the shared narrative lineage of historiography and history as entertainment. Ultimately, the paper argues that these programmes are responding not only to new ways of accessing the past, but also by adapting a period which is central to an Anglocentric cultural identity, they are responding to the crises and political faultlines that have marked the twenty-first century.