Wives and wooings

The programme gets it right in rating Henry VIII ‘at the edge of William Shakespeare’s drama and theatre’. It’s from the very end of his working life, co-written with John Fletcher, and is but seldom given. This, as became abundantly apparent in AandBC’s production for the RSC’s Complete Works, is because it’s a dry biscuit, and especially so when ‘staged’ along the length of the narrow centre of the nave of a church like Stratford’s Holy Trinity. Seated in raked tiers on either side, we were supposedly judge and jury in the machinations of Henry’s divorce of Katherine of Aragon and the battle royal between Catholicism in Wolsey and emergent Protestantism in Cranmer. But as, typically, long speeches were exchanged between Wolsey at one end of the aisle and Henry at the other, only those near the centre could have picked up the whole story.

With the first part running on for nearly two hours this was a strain.