King Henry VIII

"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 fresh 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 claim for the rehabilitation of "King Henry VIII", providing a full performance history 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.