Heroes, Victims and Villains: How film and television affect our view of history. Focusing on the Tudor period.

Overall, the main aim of this dissertation will be to see what the public can take away and learn from film and television and whether it can add to their previous knowledge of the period. It will also analyse why A Man for All Seasons, Wolf Hall and The Tudors portray More, Cromwell and Henry in certain ways and why this might be. It will argue that one of the reasons people can learn about the past from film and television is because more often than not film and television can reflect the present. Therefore, the past can resonate with the present which helps the general public understand the past and the people of the past better. It will conclude by arguing that the general public can learn from film and television to an extent because it creates an awareness of the past and can, in some instances, open discussion and feed in to discourse. However, it will also highlight how film and television can often misrepresent people of the past and why this is an issue