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    Henry VIII
    Henry VIII
    Henry VIII
    Audiobook (abridged)55 minutes

    Henry VIII

    Written by William Shakespeare

    Narrated by Sybil Thorndike

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    This abridged performance of the last of Shakespeare's plays founded on English history was recorded in 1952. Henry VIII was first published in the 1623 folio edition of Shakespeare's plays. This performance stars Dame Sybil Thorndike, Sir Lewis Casson & Ralph Truman (as King Henry VIII).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSaland Publishing
    Release dateJan 7, 2008
    ISBN9781907818332
    Author

    William Shakespeare

    William Shakespeare is the world's greatest ever playwright. Born in 1564, he split his time between Stratford-upon-Avon and London, where he worked as a playwright, poet and actor. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway. Shakespeare died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two, leaving three children—Susanna, Hamnet and Judith. The rest is silence.

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    Reviews for Henry VIII

    3.5/5

    182 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The epitome of what an Arden edition should be. What a shame this came out so early, leaving so much for other editors to live up to!

      The dense (200 page) introduction covers everything you expect - production history, composition history, placing the play within a social, cultural, political context, and textual analysis - and includes the expected amount of academic frou-frou (but we forgive those in an Arden, surely). But what really makes it sing is the editor's wonderfully knowing sense of narrative voice. He has his own passionate beliefs, but is happy to situate those within the 400-year history of bardolatry and Shakespearean criticism, thus giving the amateur reader a great overall understanding of the issues editors and academics face in working with these texts. It's the kind of edition that breathes new life into a play that is often ignored.
    • 3/5
      Not bad. Not excellent. Happy birthday to it this year.
    • 3/5
      I feel like there's diminishing returns in these last few "Shakespeare and friends" works. This one was an awful lot of politics (the boring kind), a whole lotta telling, and almost everything important happening off-stage.

      That said, the scene where Cardinal Wosley's scheming is revealed and he realizes he's lost the favour of King Henry, and ultimately sends Cromwell away? Brilliantly done.

      Overall, however, not my favourite. Nope, not by a long shot.
    • 4/5
      This is one of the later and less well known of the Bard's plays (am reading it in the aftermath of The Mirror and the Light), and was co-written with another dramatist, John Fletcher. It telescopes the events of over 10 years between the execution of Buckingham for alleged treason to the birth of Elizabeth, taking in the fall of Wolsey and the King's divorce from Katherine of Aragon. A decent play for anyone knowledgeable enough about the Tudors to spot the historical errors! The play is perhaps most famous for being performed at the time the original Globe theatre burned down in 1613 due to a cannon being set off.
    • 3/5
      Henry VIII is the final play in the histories series. Although it’s frequently challenged as being written solely by Shakespeare, I'm accepting it as part of the canon. The histories begin, chronologically, with Richard II and take us all the way through the Wars of the Roses. The plot covers the execution of Buckingham, the rise and fall of Cardinal Wolsey, the divorce of Henry VIII and Queen Katherine, his marriage to Anne Boleyn, the birth of Elizabeth, and more. The play itself is rarely produces and not well known, but pieces of it will be familiar to anyone who has read Wolf Hall or The Other Boleyn Girl. There's a lot crammed into this one, but a few of the characters truly shine. Your heart breaks for the neglected Katherine. She’s tossed aside by her husband of 20 years when someone younger catches his eye. She has some fantastic moments when she challenges Cardinal Wolsey.“Y’ are meek and humble-mouth’d,You sign your place and calling, in full seeming, with meekness and humility;but your heart is cramm’d with arrogance, spleen, and pride.”Buckingham is also a sympathetic character with some great speeches. Overall the play doesn't flow as well as many of his others. It's too scattered, too many moving pieces, but it's still got some beautiful language. “Yet I am richer than my base accusers,That never knew what truth meant.”“Heat not a furnace for your foe so hotThat it do singe yourself.”“Love thyself last: cherish those hearts that hate thee;Corruption wins not more than honesty.Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace,To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not:Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's,Thy God's, and truth's.”
    • 4/5
      Henry has decided to divorce his first wife, Katherine, after twenty years of marriage, in order to marry Anne Bullen. At his side is the manipulative Cardinal Wolsey, common born yet with the King wrapped around his finger. Though Katherine pleads with her husband, Wolsey is instrumental in her downfall, and in the execution of the Duke of Buckingham, accused of treasonous gossip. The whole court holds its breath waiting for the day the King will realize he's been Wolsey's puppet.Clearly written to be performed for Elizabeth I, Shakespeare is currying favor. Henry VIII is a man who was manipulated into treating Katherine badly, and who rejoiced that Anne had given birth to a daughter (ha!). Anne is a sweet maiden who worries about Katherine, and the play ends with a gushing speech about Elizabeth herself. This probably won't make anyone's list of the best of Shakespeare, but it is interesting and there are some good scenes, such as Katherine ripping into Wolsey.
    • 3/5
      34 William Shakespeare, John Fletcher Henry VIIIFORMATOTHERSGENRERATINGE-BOOKLewis Theobald, editorLiterature***I read this late collaboration because I knew it had great speeches and because I wanted to see how the Bard and his fellows would have treated England's Stalin. I liked the great speeches, i.e., Katherine of Aragon's defense of herself and Wolsey's farewell to his greatness, and would like to think that Shakespeare wrote them. But I had to shake my head sadly at how the playwrights had to treat the Anne Boleyn story with kid gloves and eulogize the baby Elizabeth.
    • 2/5
      Shakespeare's "Henry VIII" is best remembered as the play that was on stage when the Globe Theater burned down. There's a reason that's what it's known for.... the play itself really doesn't hold up well to the bard's more famous works.Rife with historical inaccuracies, most of the action takes place off stage, so you just hear characters talking about it. (Yeah, I didn't like it when Hilary Mantel did this either.) It was the Elizabethan age, so of course Shakespeare makes the birth of Queen Elizabeth something like the second coming and is mostly laudatory about her mother Anne Boleyn. There really isn't much that's great about this one.
    • 2/5
      Well here we are in the ugly competition. "Worst plays by William Shakespeare". Wisely the first line is "I come no more to make you laugh:... And you won't. It seems to me, that a sort of historical pageant was required, perhaps to get some people to put their money down at the box-office, and this was cobbled up. It is a chore to read, and only the queen Catherine of Argon scenes have much fire. We have records that the theatre caught fire during one of the performances and the audience must have left the theatre early with some relief. The theatre burned down , this was WS's last history play, and he soon retired. the play was written or revised, in1613.
    • 2/5
      Read this as a companion piece after I finished Wolf Hall. I didn't even know he wrote a play about Henry VIII, and now I know why: it pretty much sucks. And a total whitewash, which makes sense in retrospect. Where's the fucking beheadings, Will?