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<div class="wsite-multicol-table-wrap" style="margin:0 -15px;"> <table class="wsite-multicol-table"> <tbody class="wsite-multicol-tbody"> <tr class="wsite-multicol-tr"> <td class="wsite-multicol-col" style="width:68.965517241379%; padding:0 15px;"> <h2 class="wsite-content-title" style="text-align:left;">Anne Boleyn: An Afterlife</h2> <div><div style="height:20px;overflow:hidden"></div> <div id='727805313983338277-slideshow'></div> <script type='text/javascript'> (function(jQuery) { function init() { wSlideshow.render({elementID:"727805313983338277",nav:"thumbnails",navLocation:"bottom",captionLocation:"bottom",transition:"fade",autoplay:"0",speed:"5",aspectRatio:"auto",showControls:"true",randomStart:"false",images:[{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/5368702.jpg","width":"315","height":"275","caption":"May 19, 1536: Anne Boleyn, convicted of treason, adultery, and incest, becomes the first Queen in English history to be executed."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/640609.png","width":"400","height":"410","caption":"1563 and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of the Church: The “Goggle-Eyed Whore” Becomes A Martyr."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/7853266.png","width":"400","height":"380","caption":"1585, Nicholas Sander’s The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism: The Slut is Back, Now With Six Fingers"},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/4746258.jpg","width":"400","height":"533","caption":"1623, Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (or All is True): Anne as the Incubator of Elizabeth."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/934357.png","width":"400","height":"299","caption":"17th-18th centuries: The Soap Opera begins!"},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/3615807.png","width":"400","height":"313","caption":"19th c: Male historians saw her as a schemer, but romantic painters had the last word."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/7652673.png","width":"400","height":"539","caption":"1912-1939: The Historical Novel Makes Anne A Hot Commercial Item."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/1441131.png","width":"400","height":"348","caption":"1933's "Private Life of Henry VIII": Merle Oberon barely appeared..."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/633546.png","width":"400","height":"225","caption":"...But Charles Laughton taught the world how to eat chicken."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/9297424.png","width":"400","height":"570","caption":"1949: Barnes’ Brief Gaudy Hour (novel) and Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days (play): Anne and Henry Become a Post-War Couple."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/9965622.jpg","width":"400","height":"224","caption":"1969: Anne of the Thousand Days (film): Anne as Sixties’ Rebel Girl."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/7337131.png","width":"377","height":"375","caption":"1970: BBC “Henry VIII And His Six Wives”: Mini-Series Gravitas."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/7362076.png","width":"361","height":"488","caption":"Dorothy Tutin Brought Intelligence and Maturity to her Anne."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/3796356.png","width":"400","height":"607","caption":"2002: Philippa Gregory’s “The Other Boleyn Girl”: Mean Girl."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/5561722.png","width":"400","height":"488","caption":"2007: Showtime’s “The Tudors”: Natalie Dormer Makes (Postmodern) History."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/7765560.png","width":"400","height":"273","caption":"Anne, Endlessly Re-invented."},{"url":"2/1/8/1/21819458/8275647.png","width":"400","height":"266","caption":"You know you are timeless when you make it to "The Simpsons"!"}]}) } jQuery ? jQuery(init) : document.observe('dom:loaded', init) })(window._W && _W.jQuery) </script> <div style="height:20px;overflow:hidden"></div></div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"><span></span> <span></span><strong style=""><strong>May 19, 1536: Anne Boleyn, convicted of treason, adultery, and incest, becomes the first Queen in English history to be executed. </strong> </strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong>Anne dies with many enemies, mostly Catholic, who describe her as a scheming harpy, “goggle-eyed whore” and Lutheran heretic, who ensnared Henry with her French ways. <br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> Yet even just a few hours after the execution, with Henry already cavorting publicly with his newly betrothed Jane Seymour, many begin to question the justice of the verdict…and Henry’s second wife rises from the grave, to begin her cultural afterlife. <br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> “We always write from our time,” Hilary Mantel said in an interview with me. And Anne has been written and re-written….</strong><br /><span style=""></span><strong><br /><span style=""></span> At first, which “side” you are on depends on whether you are Protestant or Catholic:</strong><br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong><strong style="">1563 and John Foxe’s <em style="">Acts and Monuments of the Church: </em>The “Goggle-Eyed Whore” Becomes A Martyr. </strong></strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"><strong>Anne’s daughter Elizabeth ascends to the throne in 1558, and Protestant defenders begin to emerge from the closet. In their eyes, Anne Boleyn is a “most virtuous and noble lady” who helped bring true religion to England. </strong><br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span></div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong><strong style="">1585, Nicholas Sander’s <em style="">The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism</em>:</strong> <strong style="" "mso-bidi-font-weight:="" normal"="">The Slut is Back, Now With Six Fingers</strong></strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"><strong> Pro-Catholic Sander, exiled by Elizabeth, slings some fresh mud--and some of it <em style="">sticks</em>. Sanders: Not only did Anne sleep with half the French court and her father’s chaplain, but she is actually Henry’s daughter, by her own mother. She is also grossly deformed, with a projecting tooth, large growth on her neck, and six fingers on one hand. It’s a myth—Anne had an extra nail, not an extra finger—but many people still believe it to be a fact. </strong></div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong><strong style="">1623, Shakespeare’s <em style="">Henry VIII (or All is True):</em> Anne as the Incubator of Elizabeth.</strong></strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong>All was not true in the play, and Anne hardly had a role to speak, but no one cared. The distinction between “fiction” and “history” was not yet an issue, and the main point was to glorify the Virgin Queen.</strong><br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong><strong style="">1682, John Banks’s <em style="">Vertue Betray’d:</em> Anne as Hapless Victim of Henry’s Tyranny.</strong></strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong>Banks (following the “Secret History” of Madame D’Aulnoy, famous French writer of fairy-tales) and others cast a new narrative of love and betrayal and create a new dramatic persona: the “she-heroine.” Ingredients: clever, virtuous girl, wicked king, scheming “other woman,” and tragic ending. The soap opera begins…</strong><br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong><strong style="">1700-1900: Gender Wars! </strong></strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong>Fallen Woman or Scheming Adventuress? It still matters whether you are Protestant or Catholic, but it now begins to matter, too, whether you are a professional male historian or a “woman writer.” The Strickland sisters see Anne as a cautionary tale, while Anthony Froude and others view her as a “foolish and bad woman” who corrupted Henry. The male historians have nothing but scorn for the “sentimental” “tiddle-tattle” of the women writers—conveniently overlooking the fact that their own research relies largely on the gossipy letters of Eustace Chapuys, imperial ambassador to…Spain! (And Katherine’s dear friend). While the writers battle it out, romantic painters have the last word in the popular imagination. Anne is shown swooning, weeping, and stoically meeting an unjust end.</strong><br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong><strong style="">1912-1939:</strong> <strong style="" "mso-bidi-font-weight:="" normal"="">The Historical Novel Makes Anne A Hot Commercial Item.</strong></strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong>“ I dare not!” murmurs Anne in Mary Hasting’s Bradley’s fascinating <em style="">The Favor of Kings</em> (1912)…and then goes on to have—gasp--premarital sex with the King. (The Victorians mangled the date of Elizabeth’s birth to avoid confronting this fact.) And the fictional juice begins to flow…and flow…and flow. <br /><span></span></strong><br /> <strong>Love. Longing. Loathing. Lust. By the time she is published in paperback (Francis Hacket’s <em style="">Queen Anne Boleyn, </em>a much better novel than the paper-back sales pitch would suggest) the story has become the stuff of commercialism: “<em style="" "mso-bidi-font-style:="" normal"="">She conquered the heart of a king—and lost her life for her love</em>.” Um..What happened to the Reformation? </strong><br /><span style=""></span> <br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong><strong style="">1933: Korda’s <em style="">The Private Life of Henry VIII.</em> Anne Who? </strong></strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong>Gorgeous Merle Oberon, as Anne, gets killed off in the first fifteen minutes, and Charles Laughton ‘s Henry teaches the world how to eat chicken. Serial wife replacement as comedy? Somehow, they pulled it off. </strong><br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong><strong style="">1949: Barnes’<em style=""> Brief Gaudy Hour (novel) and </em>Maxwell Anderson’s<em style=""> Anne of the Thousand Days (play):</em></strong> <strong style="">Anne and Henry Become a Post-War Couple.</strong> </strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong>Anne is a feisty teenager, Henry has masculinity issues, and this marriage is in trouble. It was so much easier when the men were at war and the women knew their place! But the literary depictions begin to develop a complexity and reality missing before…</strong><br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"><strong><strong>1</strong><strong style="">969: <em style="" "mso-bidi-font-style:="" normal"="">Anne of the Thousand Days (film):</em></strong> <strong style="">Anne as Sixties’ Rebel Girl. </strong></strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong>Genevieve Bujold told me “Anne is <em style="">mine</em>.” Indeed. As the first truly iconic Anne, Bujold proudly plunges off the cliff decades before “Thelma and Louise.” Her elfin beauty charmed us, we cheered when she told Henry off in the tower (never happened, but who cares?), and yes, “Elizabeth Shall Be Queen!” You go girl!!</strong><br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong style=""><strong>1970: <em style="" "mso-bidi-font-style:="" normal"="">BBC “Henry VIII And His Six Wives”:</em> Mini-Series Gravitas. </strong> </strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong>The spectacle of Henry aging before our eyes as he went through one fascinating woman after another, including Dorothy Tutin’s complex Anne Boleyn, held us riveted to the small screen—and gave HBO something to sex-update 35 years later.</strong><br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"><strong> <strong style="">2002: <em style="" "mso-bidi-font-style:="" normal"="">Philippa Gregory’s “The Other Boleyn Girl”:</em></strong> <strong style="">Mean Girl. </strong></strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong>Clearly in touch with the times, Gregory mangles history to produce the nastiest Anne ever, and convinces a new generation, befuddled by the postmodern blurring of fiction and fact, that she really did sleep with her brother. Sander is chortling, historians are grimacing, and Gregory is smiling all the way to the best-seller list.</strong><br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong><strong style="">2007: <em style="" "mso-bidi-font-style:="" normal"="">Showtime’s “The Tudors”:</em></strong> <strong style="">Natalie Dormer Makes (Postmodern) History.</strong></strong> <br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong>Jonathan Rhys-Meyers refused to wear a fat suit, the Showtime execs demanded that the series not be boring in a “you know…BBC way,” and Michael Hirst (creator and writer of the series) did all he could to inject the Reformation Crisis in between the sex scenes. Only Natalie Dormer, barely known at the time, stood up for Anne, refusing to play her as a blonde and insisting that Hirst make her less slutty, smarter, and stronger in the second season. For historians, the changes may have seemed slight. But teenage and twenty-something viewers were enraptured. “She was a modern day girl in the wrong time period,” they declared, constructing a new, “third-wave” feminist icon out of Dormer’s portrayal: ambitious, intelligent, flirtatious and perhaps most important to her fans, “hugely complicated and not easy to dismiss.”</strong><br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong><strong style="">2007-2013:</strong> <strong style="" "mso-bidi-font-weight:="" normal"="">Viral Anne. </strong></strong><br /><span style=""></span> </div> <div class="paragraph" style="text-align:left;"> <strong>We can never get enough of Anne, it seems. She is a woman for all seasons, a Rorschach figure who tells us more about ourselves than about her own life and death. In part, this is due to the unsolvable mystery of who she “really” was. After her death, Henry did all he could to re-write her existence into absence: destroyed her portraits, her letters, removed her emblems. Ironically, this has allowed Anne to live on, a queen recreated anew by each generation—and in the Internet age, to spread her reign across a multitude of links. With “The Tudors” came the websites…and the tee shirts, mugs, and jewelry…and the Facebook pages. Quarrels erupt daily among amateur historians passionately attacking and defending themselves on Amazon.com. Elusive, contradictory, seductive. Henry may have tried to erase her, but succeeded instead in allowing her to live a hundred lives, forever. </strong><br /><span style=""></span><br /><span style=""></span> </div> </td> <td class="wsite-multicol-col" style="width:31.034482758621%; padding:0 15px;"> <div><div id="812817361565154930" align="left" style="width: 100%; overflow-y: hidden;" class="wcustomhtml"><iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/143938295&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=true</div> </div> <div class="wsite-youtube" style="margin-bottom:5px;margin-top:5px;"><div class="wsite-youtube-wrapper wsite-youtube-size-small wsite-youtube-align-right"> <div class="wsite-youtube-container"> <iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eVMHD57FZgY?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>
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