‘Shardlake’ is a satisfying historical whodunnit
Shardlake, we get a meet-cute that’s well-written and tells us something meaningful about the two lead characters’ dynamic. Set in 1537 during the reign of Henry VIII, the miniseries sees the king’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell (Sean Bean) ordering the intrepid, hunchbacked attorney Matthew Shardlake (Arthur Hughes) to investigate a murder-via-decapitation at a Tudor monastery at Scarnsea. In the meet-cute, Shardlake strikes a conversation with Cromwell’s man Friday Jack Barak (Anthony Boyle) moments after the two of them witness a Peruvian parrot called Tabitha at a local market, uttering lines like, “Death to the Pope" and “Death to the bishop in Rome".
Shardlake is unimpressed, telling Barak that the bird was merely repeating what it had heard—it wasn’t really “talking" on its own. At which Barak, loyal to his master Cromwell, simply says, “If you would kindly repeat after me, master Shardlake, God bless Lord Cromwell". Under the right circumstances, actual talking and “parroting" become indistinguishable from each other.
Shardlake and Barak’s Sherlock Holmes-Watson riffs through the rest of the show land harder because of this impactful first meeting. Shardlake has four hour-long episodes and is based on the novel Dissolution (2003) by C.J. Sansom, the first book to feature the attorney Matthew Shardlake as protagonist.
Sansom (who died just a week before the show aired, at age 71) was a solicitor by training, and his fictional attorney would appear in six other novels, the last of them being Tombland (2018). As Tabitha the parrot’s murderous intentions towards the Pope show us, this was an era of great animus towards the Roman catholic church. Just two decades earlier, in 1517, Martin Luther began the Reformation
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