Such poor neglected books!

[mirrorshard]

I've been collecting copies of a particular Shakespeare set, one of the early mass-market paperback editions -


EACH NUMBER SOLD SEPARATELY
AT THE RATE OF M0,30

THE PLAYS
OF
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
IN
37 PARTS.

---

No. 21.
KING HENRY VIII.

LEIPZIG
BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
1868.


The problem is, this one had uncut pages. The poor thing's been around so long, and nobody's wanted to read it... that really appals me. It may not be the most popular of plays, but still, it deserves a careful cherishing. And got it, taking full advantage of the lovely acoustics in my kitchen. Though the fact that its first experience had to involve a sharp knife is possibly not ideal.

Comments

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

It's...hrm. It's not really a favorite play of mine, but there is some brilliant stuff in it. Katherine has some really good material, and Wolsey's last scene is magnificent.

(Also, I do sort of love that it's indebted to George Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, in places; I wrote about that text a couple of years ago and am very fond of it [cf. icon].)

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

I went to see quite a few plays in the Wolsey Theatre, in Ipswich, when I lived near there. They had quite a few ushers, as it happened.

Thinking about it, I can sort of see why the story was so popular in that era, given the vicious anti-Catholic bias.

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

Yeah -- though that's complicated really, as you'll see in the portrayal of Katherine.

George Cavendish was gentleman-usher to Wolsey, and his biography of Wolsey was written to defend his old boss against the rather bad reputation he'd gotten (it was a Marian text, which is why he could do this; some very late editions apparently have a "now that Elizabeth is going to be queen we're totally boned" coda, but I've never seen it). It's fascinating, because there is this huge focus on all of the people and all of the stuff surrounding Wolsey -- very much a retainer's-eye view of history, and that has interesting historiographical implications. (Also we learn all about the contents of Wolsey's chamberpot during his final illness. The paper I wrote on this text, which also discussed More's Richard III, took as its jumping-off point the fact that both of these texts have privy scenes at key points in the narrative.)