Wolf Hall influenced Wolf Hall

Peter Straughan's six episodes adapt Mantel's novel and Bring Up the Bodies, with Mantel closely involved and credited as a consultant. The adaptation's problem was the book's method: Wolf Hall is written almost entirely inside Cromwell's head, in a present tense that never leaves him. The series solves it by keeping Mark Rylance in nearly every frame and letting reaction carry what the prose narrates, and by lighting scenes with candles and daylight only so the viewer is as confined to his sight as the reader is to his thoughts.