‘I read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the age of ten, and I think that it really set the direction of my future life and my interests; everything that I myself would try to be as a writer.’ Dame Hilary Mantel

‘There is a Shakespearean quality to Mantel’s writing: the mixture of low and high discourse, the political and historical setting, her theme of the rise and fall of great men. She revealed how all her writing, in her view, can be traced back to one single scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – act three, scene two – in which Mark Antony speaks over the dictator’s body, saying: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”

‘In 2012, Dame Hilary Mantel told the Edinburgh International Book Festival,  “I came to Shakespeare very early,” said Mantel. 

“When I was about eight, I found somewhere a black, grimy, ancient-looking book called Steps To Literature: Book Five. And in it there was a piece of Shakespeare, an extract from Julius Caesar … The crowd has been on the side of the conspirators and Brutus, but Antony, by a feat of rhetoric, turns them around so that they become not a crowd but a mob and they are hunting for the conspirators through Rome….Everything I have done is somehow wrapped into that scene. I have been concerned with revolution, with persuasion, with rhetoric, with the point where a crowd turns into a mob; in a larger sense, with the moment when one thing turns into another, whether a ghost into a solid person or a riot into a revolution. Everything, it seems to me, is in this scene.’ (From an article by Charlotte Higgins, writing in the Guardian, 2012.)

In a BBC 2012 podcast, My Shakespeare, Mantel elaborates further on the influence of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar on her writing. ‘Mark Antony’s speech begins, “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.” It’s a sort of political primer. It’s a handbook of political manipulation. It sums up, in one scene, everything you need to know about the political process, either in a democracy or an autocracy.’ 

In what other ways then did Shakespeare influence Mantel’s style and approach to historical fiction? In her 2017 Reith Lectures, Dame Hilary maintained that historical fiction ‘can bring the dead back to life’, in a way that factual history, with its focus on accuracy, does not. In her books, as in plays and paintings, ‘we sense the dead have a vital force still.’ Perhaps too, one of the reasons Shakespeare’s history plays have continued to be popular is because they also bring the dead back to life, imbuing them with that vital force that Mantel talks about. 

Never being one to shy away from controversy, in 2019 Mantel supported Professor Emma Smith, a Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University, on her viewpoint that Shakespeare’s work is mis-examined in the English high school curriculum. Smith claimed the genius of the playwright is the ‘gappiness’ of his works which asks big questions, but does not provide answers. Smith called for a new kind of exam to encourage students to put forward multiple explanations to the same question. She wrote that the current focus in exams led to pupils viewing Shakespeare as a single problem to be solved – often with the help of study guides that failed to convey the sophistication or ambiguous beauty of the text. This, she concluded, makes it impossible for students to seek to give a ‘correct’ answer in the exam hall. Instead they should be judged on how well they can explain the interpretation of various meanings. 

Mantel agreed. ‘My heart warmed when Smith said Shakespeare was deeply unsuitable as an exam subject in its present form. I think she is right – it is the gaps and absences that are creative; the indeterminacies, the questions.’ 

It is in the gaps in the private life of Mantel’s chief historical protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, that Mantel spent so much of her time using her informed imagination when writing her trilogy. 

Mantel wrote in the Guardian about why she began writing historical fiction.  ‘I wasn’t after quick results. I was prepared to look at all the material I could find, even though I knew it would take years, but what I wasn’t prepared for were the gaps, the erasures, the silences where there should have been evidence. These erasures and silences made me into a novelist, but at first I found them simply disconcerting. I didn’t like making things up, which put me at a disadvantage. In the end I scrambled through to an interim position that satisfied me. I would make up a man’s inner torments, but not, for instance, the colour of his drawing room wallpaper. [A reference to her other historical work: A Place of Greater Safety.]

‘The fact of history’s ephemerality opens a gap for the fictional, into which we pour our fears, fantasies, desires. Is there a firm divide between myth and history, fiction and fact: or do we move back and forth on a line between, our position indeterminate and always shifting?’

On the question of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, Mantel wrote in the Guardian in 2010, she strongly defends the authorship of the plays in the various Shakespearean Folios as being by the Bard himself. She writes, ‘What Shakespeare demonstrates is the authority of the human imagination. He commands the transpersonal; that is why he is a genius. If the scant facts of his life disappoint, that’s our problem. A genius is also a man who needs to eat.’ One can’t help thinking that the master taught the pupil well.

When Mantel died in September 2022, Claire Allfree wrote in the Independent what many devoted readers of Dame Mantel’s work thought, ‘Mantel had a grasp on character and circumstance, and their relationship to the ever unpredictable narrative of fate and power, to equal that of Shakespeare.’

Make sure you join us on the weekend of June 22nd and 23rd, 2024, as we discuss Hilary’s magnificent books and compare her version with the views of some of the most qualified historians on his life: