ABSTRACT
The historic double Booker win, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have gone on to make literary history through being adapted for the stage for Royal Shakespeare Company productions. Adapted and performed as two separate plays, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have had successful runs in Stratford, London and New York. Thomas Cromwell then engineers the split with Rome necessary for the king’s second marriage via complex legislation; he also encourages Henry to begin referring to the Pope as the ‘Bishop of Rome’. Unlike the first quotation, metaphor is not associated with truth transformed: it is the embodiment of fakery. This disjunction in terms of metaphor describes the departure of the Tudor books and a new solidity in the form of the link to ‘history’. Thinking in terms of the theory, metaphor is also significant theoretically. For Lacan, the process of meaning is reliant upon metonymy and metaphor; for Derrida, it is difference and deferral.
