“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” — Shakespeare, “Henry IV, Part 2”
“Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” and “Marie Antoinette” — airing back to back on PBS’ WNET-Channel 13 on Sunday nights — give us two kings in crisis as seen through the eyes of two insiders who will soon be axed.
Based on the conclusion of Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed trilogy, “The Mirror and the Light” finds Henry VIII (Damian Lewis) and his Lord Privy Seal, Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance) — though whose eyes the story is told — at the height of their powers after the execution of Henry’s dynamic but troublesome second queen, Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy), and third marriage to Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips), who is not quite as demure as she seems. Despite the power couple’s (Henry and Cromwell’s) zenith, all is not well. A rebellion is brewing in the Roman Catholic north of England over the gutting of the monasteries and abbeys — an act of destruction that disturbs Jane, who served Henry’s Catholic first queen, Catherine of Aragon, and who champions Henry and Catherine’s estranged daughter, Mary (Lilit Lesser).
For her part, Mary — having been verbally and physically abused and deprived of her parents’ company and court life after supporting her mother in the annulment of her marriage — wonders what she’s really gained by signing away her birthright and acknowledging her “illegitimacy,” her father’s supremacy as head of the Church of England and his marriage to Jane and any subsequent children as his heirs. Cromwell, who promised her mother to look after her and, in this telling at least, is drawn to her. urges patience. But he, too, is unsettled, haunted by his abandonment of his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce), who once occupied the position of king’s fixer that Cromwell now holds.
Indeed, an atmosphere of dread permeates “Wolf Hall,” which takes its name from the Seymour family seat even as it captures the wolves-at-the-door tenor of the narrative. No one is happy, and the closer the characters are to the seat of power — the unhappy king himself, consumed with grievance and vengeance — the more joyless they are.
Joseph-Siffred Duplessis’ portrait of Louis XVI (circa 1774-76, oil on canvas, Palace of Versailles).
The Louis XVI of “Marie Antoinette” (Louis Cunningham), a well-intentioned but ineffectual ruler, is a far more sympathetic character than the monstrous Henry, but he, too, is riddled with anxiety at the height of his powers. His triumphant, but costly, backing of the now-emancipated American colonies has obscured a vicious cycle of borrowing and national debt even as it has exacerbated it. Meanwhile, wife Marie Antoinette (Emilia Schüle) — hardly the clueless solipsist of many accounts but historically not the feminist of this narrative either — is unwittingly drawn into court intrigues that foreshadow the couple’s grisly end.
So much power, wealth, beauty, status, what have you, and so little joy. Why is that"? Perhaps it has less to do with the men and women themselves than with the very nature of power. The more you have, the more you stand to lose, for absolute power is not so much about absolute corruption as it is absolute maintenance. The only way out is down. Sometimes this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In our society, we are constantly told about American exceptionalism, a concept that many around the world have bought into as well. But now we are seeing that nothing exceeds like success. With trillions in lost investments thanks to President Donald J. Trump’s tariffs, which have been put on a 90-day pause, measles on the rise and deepening divisions making bipartisan solutions impossible, we are a long way off from the nation that a few short months ago worried about the price of eggs and the mental well-being of then President Joe Biden.
But even without the daily barrage of bad news, the United States has been in an existential crisis for a long time, perhaps in part because we focused on making money to the exclusion of enjoying and sharing money.
No empire lasts forever, but is it still possible for the United States to become the equitable democratic republic it purports to be? That would require the will of the people to come together to find and spread the joy in their success. As history and historical dramas tell us, the odds are not in our favor.