Overview

The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth is Shakespeare’s most thoughtful history play—it was about this play that Schlegel made his famous comment that “Shakespeare was as profound a historian as a poet.” Yet, this last play, Shakespeare’s lone Tudor history, was popular at its first playing and has proven a crowd pleaser whenever it has been performed. Ever seductive in its trappings of power and emphatic pomp and pageantry, it delineates in a political way the characters of England’s most surpassing statesman and her finest queen, as well as of the king thought most infamous of all by celebrated later English writers like Hazlitt and Dickens. The dramatist here takes only the highest view of all these personages and presents each of them in such an order that they may be seen by all for who and what they truly are. The study proceeds as an interpretive commentary, act-by-act and scene-by-scene, and should be considered with the text of the play at one’s elbow.

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9780881464337

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Guy Story Brown is director of The Straight Gate, a 501c3 residential prison aftercare and substance abuse recovery project in Texas. His PhD is in political philosophy and Western literature from the University of Dallas Institute of Philosophic Studies. Brown is a fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, a life member of the Inspiration Point Fine Arts Colony in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and has served as president of the Fine Arts Society of Texas from 1981 through 1990. He is the author of Shakespeare’s History: Introduction to The Interpretation of “The First Part of King Henry the Sixth” and the English Histories and Shakespeare’s Philosopher King: Reading “The Tragedy of King Lear.”

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