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 ...
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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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Seller's Description:
Near Fine in near fine jacket. First edition, 2013. Cloth hardcover in dust jacket, 334 pp., clean unmarked text, Near Fine copy in Near Fine dust jacket, light rubbing or bumping to the tips of the book's covers, some rubbing to the tips of the dust jacket. Dust jacket housed in archival dust jacket protector.