Review of the series Shardlake

So far, the historical detective mystery Shardlake has been limited to one short season of four episodes, but we should probably expect a sequel and even a relatively long-running show, where a fictional British investigator-lawyer named Matthew Shardlake from the distant dark sixteenth century will investigate a new case in each subsequent season and try (in vain but determined) to fight for ephemeral justice in a world of liars-politicians and liars-churchmenbeing to a certain extent an outcast in the medieval society of ignorant people and hypocrites because of his congenital disability: a hump on his back and an underdeveloped arm (however, little has changed in politics and the church in five centuries).

The series, based on a series of novels by C.J. Sensom, is set in 1536. England is ruled by Henry VIII, who has just sent his wife Anne Boleyn to the guillotine for alleged adultery. And Matthew Shardlake was one of the witnesses in that controversial case, because he is not just some “private detective” but a confidant of the chief court lawyer and first advisor to King Thomas Cromwell (the latter, in fact the main intriguer and organizer of Boleyn’s execution, was episodically portrayed by Sean Bean, but unlike in Game of Thrones, he was not the one who was beheaded here, he beheaded many people himself).

Actually, it’s about beheadings. The story begins with the fact that in one of the English Catholic monasteries someone brazenly beheads a lawyer who was personally exiled to the abbey by Cromwell (the driving force behind the Reformation, the very process when the Anglican Church separated from the Roman Church). The great intriguer, who intends to dissolve all Catholic parishes in England and distribute the church’s wealth to the starving people, sees the severed head as a great excuse. In fact, when he sends to Shardlake Abbey to investigate the murder, he says so: “It will be very good if the murderer turns out to be one of the monks. If not, then we need to prove that they are all papists, grabbers, and sodomites, so that the pretext for dissolution is ironclad.” But Shardlake, although he works for Cromwell, has principles and honor, serves law and morality, so he will deal with monks, nobles, and even himself honestly.

The eccentric detective is a cliché in many classic and modern detective stories. So the Shardlake series opposes this already somewhat worn-out template with a new type of detective hero: a noble knight and noble fighter against human rot, who has physical disabilities, and this further alienates him from a society that is completely distorted not only outside but inside. Matthew Shardlake (who is not a cynic, because he is a moralist, but he is willing to use black humor) borrowed some features from William of Baskerville from Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (actually, there are quite obvious allusions to the famous mystery novel about the exposure of mysterious deaths in an Italian monastery in the fourteenth century, only there was a confrontation between the Papists and Franciscans), and from Sherlock Holmes (accordingly, there is also a version of Watson’s sidekick here), and from the hunchback Quasimodo from Notre Dame de Paris, and from Ichabod Crane from Sleepy Hollow (Shardlake similarly shocks pious ignoramuses with the “miracles” of the very first elementary forensics).

The main role in the series was played by a young English theater and radio actor Arthur Hughes. And this is, so to speak, a special role for a special actor. The thing is that Hughes, unlike his character, does not have a hump, but his arm is really damaged by diastrophic dysplasia. Therefore, Shardlake’s feelings, which he expresses through an internal monologue, harshly criticizing himself for his clumsy chivalry and naive hopes for sympathy from a woman, are to some extent Arthur Hughes’s personal experiences. And the flashback fragment, where the detective recalls how, as a child, he confessed to a priest that he also felt his “God’s calling,” to which the minister ruthlessly replied that a churchman must conform to “God’s likeness, and look at you.” is again painfully personal, because there must have been someone in Hughes’s life who was so narrow-minded that he responded to the young man’s desire to become an actor with something like “what kind of actor are you, look at you.”

It must be said that this type of detective, Matthew Shardlake (a hunchback on the outside, a knight on the inside), is a perfect fit for the Middle Ages, an era where canonical valor and romance were combined with the darkest and most vile barbarism. In a fairy tale, of course, he would have turned into a handsome prince in the end, but in this historical mystification, he undergoes an internal rather than an external transformation and ceases to be a parrot on the shoulder of the villainous Cromwell. Realizing that there is no truth in the kingdom or in the church (or in women who will not fall in love with him), Shardlake chooses the fourth path: he becomes a crooked shadow of an uncompromising conscience in an almost hopeless place.