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King Henry Viii The Arden Shakespeare
Paperback Edition: 3/2001
Edited by Gordon McMullan
Henry VIII has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet the play has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. McMullan's enthusiastic and engaging edition shows how current critical attitudes permit a new perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play: it is revealed as a complex meditation on the progress of Reformation, which reads English life since Henry VIII's day as a series of bewildering changes in national and personal allegiance and represents 'history' as the product of varied and contradictory testimony. McMullan argues that the play's self-conscious textuality underlies its unsettling quality and that in terms of its genre, too, the play is a puzzle, variously read as history, 'late' play and court masque, adding to that list 'a most unlikely comedy'.
McMullan makes a powerful claim for the rehabilitation of Henry VIII, providing the fullest performance history of any edition to date and suggesting new directions for future stagings; locating the play in the context of its first year of performance and the extraordinary politics of that year; analysing its relations with Shakespeare's 'late plays' and with the work of other contemporary playwrights; and providing a startling new account of the dramatic relationship between the play's rival queens. By way of a thorough account of the play's intertextual origins and a radical assessment of the arguments for and critical implications of the play's status as a collaboration, McMullan reads Henry VIII not as a marginal 'late' Shakespeare play but as a play which is paradigmatic of the achievement of Renaissance drama as a whole.
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Henry VIII has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet the play has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. McMullan's enthusiastic and engaging edition shows how current critical attitudes permit a new perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play: it is revealed as a complex meditation on the progress of Reformation, which reads English life since Henry VIII's day as a series of bewildering changes in national and personal allegiance and represents 'history' as the product of varied and contradictory testimony. McMullan argues that the play's self-conscious textuality underlies its unsettling quality and that in terms of its genre, too, the play is a puzzle, variously read as history, 'late' play and court masque, adding to that list 'a most unlikely comedy'.
McMullan makes a powerful claim for the rehabilitation of Henry VIII, providing the fullest performance history of any edition to date and suggesting new directions for future stagings; locating the play in the context of its first year of performance and the extraordinary politics of that year; analysing its relations with Shakespeare's 'late plays' and with the work of other contemporary playwrights; and providing a startling new account of the dramatic relationship between the play's rival queens. By way of a thorough account of the play's intertextual origins and a radical assessment of the arguments for and critical implications of the play's status as a collaboration, McMullan reads Henry VIII not as a marginal 'late' Shakespeare play but as a play which is paradigmatic of the achievement of Renaissance drama as a whole.
Publisher : Arden Shakespeare
Subjects: Non-fiction, Art/design/film