Few British monarchs loom as large in the public imagination as King Henry VIII. Straddling the line between man and myth, he is best known for his infamous six marriages and his penchant for beheadings. But where does fiction meet fact? In cinema and on television, he has been portrayed by a host of actors, but have any of them captured the real Henry VIII?
In this discussion, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb and fellow historians look at how Henry VIII has been reimagined on screen, what those portrayals get right and wrong, and why this towering figure continues to fascinate us, more than 500 years after he came to the throne.
Joining Suzannah Lipscomb for this Not Just the Tudors Late are Jessie Childs, Tudor England specialist and the author of Henry VIII's Last Victim; Doctor Joanne Paul of the University of Sussex, an expert of early modern English history, who wrote Thomas Moore: A Life and Death in Tudor England; and with first-hand experience of depicting historical figures on film, historian and screenwriter Alex Von Tunzelmann.
Join us for the first in our new series of 'Not Just the Tudors...Lates' for another entertaining and thought-provoking conversation.
Up Next in More From Suzannah Lipscomb
-
What if the Gunpowder Plot Succeeded?...
November 5th, 1605... beneath the shadowed vaults of the Houses of Parliament, a man waits with 36 barrels of gunpowder by his side, and a plan that could change the fate of a nation forever.
Then, in a moment, it's over... Guy Fawkes is caught and the plan thwarted. But what if he wasn't?
Led ...
-
Why the English Revolution Failed - N...
January 1649, Whitehall. A king steps onto the scaffold. Moments later, Charles I is dead... tried and executed by his own subjects. For the first time in its history, England is without a monarch.
What follows is one of the most radical experiments in British history. The House of Lords is abol...
-
The Ashmolean Up Close: Witches in Pi...
The third film in our series exploring the remarkable collections of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
In this episode, Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb investigates the shifting image of witches in the early modern imagination. In conversation with curator An Van Camp, we trace how witches were portrayed...
9 Comments