My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Sunday, June 27, 2010

Could Shakespeare really have written Henry VIII? Give me rewrite!

Let's go far out on a limb here and criticize...Shakespeare. Well, he didn't write all of "Henry VIII," that's obvious. Had a rare opportunity to see Henry VIII last night, outdoor performance recollecting the many S. in the Park performances I saw as a kid in nyc, my introduction to many of the plays. Never saw HVIII before, which led me to wonder how many in the canon I've seen performed - I know I've missed a few of the giants, oddly enough, over the course of a lifetime. Hm. Anyway, parts of HVIII are typically S-ean, and you can hear when the language, obviously his language, picks up - Wolsey's last speech of course, probably Buckingham's, too, and a few other passages, during which it's not just Jacobean verse, but you start to here working metaphors and images, bringing the characters' thoughts and interior life into shape and form. I also suspect S. wrote several of the more "comic" scenes, teh taverns and the ladies in waiting. If someone else collaborated, it had to be on the long, expository court scenes in which thoughts are not dramatized but just articulated at great length (unless S. was very young when he first wrote it, or very old and mailing it in). Also surprising how S. avoids some of the obvious moral conflicts that should be tearing Henry apart - he would not be so kind to other monarchs he portrayed in the histories and tragedies (and dark comedies, for that matter) - the whole architecture of the play seems to simple for S., at least for the mature S. And of course at the end the whole play becomes a suck-up to Queen Elizabeth - either S. totally caved in (let's just forget that HVIII had a bunch of other wives after Anne Boleyn, none of whom fared well), or a hack was called in to deal with the ending. Give me rewrite!

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