King Henry VIII has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. This edition offers a new perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play, revealing it as a complex meditation on the progress of Reformation which sees 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 makes a powerful claim for the rehabilitation of Henry VIII, providing the fullest performance history of any edition to date and reading the work not as a marginal 'late' Shakespeare play but as a play which is paradigmatic of the achievement of Renaissance drama as a whole.

 

This book is part of a book series called Arden Shakespeare .

This book is aimed at the following children: secondary school , university .

There are 508 pages in this book. This book was published 2000 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC .

Rene Weis is Professor of English at University College London and a distinguished editor and biographer of Shakespeare.