Anne Boleyn: The real Tudor queen was more complex than seen in contemporary portrayals
Last spring, encouraged by the success of HBO's Rome and trying to exploit the Sunday-evening vacuum soon to be left by The Sopranos, Showtime offered us its own mix of sex, politics, and history: The Tudors. The sexy opening montage made it clear this was not going to be A Man For All Seasons.
Unlaced bodices, vigorous men on horses, and various absurdly good-looking actors (no one had consulted a historical portrait, it seemed) stared at the viewer with penetrating seriousness and/or incipient madness: Henry VIII's high-minded Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More (holding a book, of course); the king's Roman Catholic wife, Katherine of Aragon (holding a rosary, far too beautiful to soon be divorced); the young, athletic Henry (sinewy Jonathan Rhys Myers, challenging the image of the bloated tyrant we'd come to know through Holbein and Charles Laughton.) And playing race-around-the-castle tag with him, a stunningly gorgeous, annoyingly pouty actress I'd never seen before. Smoldering eyes, flaring nostrils, and bosom heaving with desire; she (Natalie Dormer) was obviously Anne Boleyn.
Although it strains the imagination to accept wiry Rhys Meyers as the young version of the towering, purse-lipped Henry of period depictions, the show, whose second season will open March 30, has been otherwise remarkably faithful, compared to most pop Tudoriana, to historical detail. In the first season, we even get to see the saintly More burn some heretics.
When it comes to Anne Boleyn, Henry's second wife, the mother of Elizabeth I, the woman at the center of his divorce and break with the pope, however, The Tudors sticks strictly to slut stereotype — and then some. Dormer entices, provokes, and manipulates her way through the first season. The second season suggests that, while in France as a teenager, she slept with half the courtiers (and possibly the French king), and learned to do things with her hands that were far from maidenly. Later, sitting beside Henry, she wears a gown designed more for a Pussycat Doll than a Tudor queen. When Henry presents her to the French court, she performs a Salome-style dance that makes one wonder just which historical series one is watching....
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Unlaced bodices, vigorous men on horses, and various absurdly good-looking actors (no one had consulted a historical portrait, it seemed) stared at the viewer with penetrating seriousness and/or incipient madness: Henry VIII's high-minded Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More (holding a book, of course); the king's Roman Catholic wife, Katherine of Aragon (holding a rosary, far too beautiful to soon be divorced); the young, athletic Henry (sinewy Jonathan Rhys Myers, challenging the image of the bloated tyrant we'd come to know through Holbein and Charles Laughton.) And playing race-around-the-castle tag with him, a stunningly gorgeous, annoyingly pouty actress I'd never seen before. Smoldering eyes, flaring nostrils, and bosom heaving with desire; she (Natalie Dormer) was obviously Anne Boleyn.
Although it strains the imagination to accept wiry Rhys Meyers as the young version of the towering, purse-lipped Henry of period depictions, the show, whose second season will open March 30, has been otherwise remarkably faithful, compared to most pop Tudoriana, to historical detail. In the first season, we even get to see the saintly More burn some heretics.
When it comes to Anne Boleyn, Henry's second wife, the mother of Elizabeth I, the woman at the center of his divorce and break with the pope, however, The Tudors sticks strictly to slut stereotype — and then some. Dormer entices, provokes, and manipulates her way through the first season. The second season suggests that, while in France as a teenager, she slept with half the courtiers (and possibly the French king), and learned to do things with her hands that were far from maidenly. Later, sitting beside Henry, she wears a gown designed more for a Pussycat Doll than a Tudor queen. When Henry presents her to the French court, she performs a Salome-style dance that makes one wonder just which historical series one is watching....