The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. Edited and introduced by John Margeson, King Henry VIII appears here for the first time in a New Cambridge Shakespeare edition. In his introduction Margeson explores the political and religious background to the play, its pageant-like structure and visual effects, and its varied ironies. He also discusses its stage history, from the famous occasion in 1613 when the Globe theatre burned down during a performance of King Henry VIII to important theatrical productions of the late twentieth century. A balanced account is provided of the authorship controversy that arose in the nineteenth century, when John Fletcher's name was first put forward as a likely collaborator.

Famous figures who shaped events in their time make history come alive for readers in our own. In clear, fast-moving narrative, these books tell the life history of their exceptional subjects.

This is the first fully annotated and comprehensive modern-spelling edition of King Henry VIII to appear for over a decade. It makes full use of current scholarship on the dating, authorship, printing, and sources of the play, as well as critical interpretations. The editor concludes that Shakespeare and his younger colleague John Fletcher worked on the script together but that Shakespeare was probably the guiding spirit.

Antonia Fraser's bestselling biography of Henry VIII's six wives; a subject of enduring fascination. The six wives of Henry VIII - Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr - have become defined in a popular sense not so much by their lives as by the way these lives ended. But, as Antonia Fraser conclusively proves, they were rich and feisty characters. They may have been victims of Henry's obsession with a male heir, but they were not willing victims. On the contrary, they displayed considerable strength and intelligence at a time when their sex supposedly possessed little of either.

Henry VIII used his wardrobe, and that of his family and household, as a way of expressing his wealth and magnificence. This book encompasses the first detailed study of male and female dress worn at the court of Henry VIII (1509-47) and covers the dress of the king and his immediate family, the royal household and the broader court circle. Henry VIII's wardrobe is set in context by a study of Henry VII's clothes, court and household. ~ ~ As none of Henry VIII's clothes survive, evidence is drawn primarily from the great wardrobe accounts, wardrobe warrants, and inventories, and is interpreted using evidence from narrative sources, paintings, drawings and a small selection of contemporary garments, mainly from European collections. ~ ~ Key areas for consideration include the king's personal wardrobe, how Henry VIII's queens used their clothes to define their status, the textiles provided for the pattern of royal coronations, marriages and funerals and the role of the great wardrobe, wardrobe of the robes and laundry. In addition there is information on the cut and construction of garments, materials and colours, dr given as gifts, the function of livery and the hierarchy of dress within the royal household, and the network of craftsmen working for the court. The text is accompanied by full transcripts of James Worsley's wardrobe books of 1516 and 1521 which provide a brief glimpse of the king's clothes.