How Six: The Musical remixes the stories of the Tudor Queens
You know the words. You’ve seen the show. But how well do you know the six Tudor queens? How well does anyone know the Tudor queens, really? At first glance, Six: The Musical might seem like a simple show about singing and dancing queens, but it actually has a lot of things to say about how the queens are remembered.
Henry VIII and his six wives lived five hundred years ago. Since then, they have been interpreted in so many ways as historians, writers and enthusiasts work to piece together the fragments of evidence that remain about their lives. Six: The Musical is another entry in the list of historical fiction about the queens, but this time it has a twist - the musical imagines what the queens would say if they were able to respond to the ways history writers have presented them and their stories. Throughout the show, our knowledge of the queens is disrupted as they take back the microphone. But how exactly does the musical remix our understanding of the Tudor queens? How does it respond to the assumptions that have been made about them over time? And how does it match up to the academic research about them?
When I first decided to make a video about Six: The Musical, I thought it would relatively straightforward. Six short songs about six fascinating lives. How complicated could it be? And yet now a few months later, the video is finally here and I realise I couldn’t have been more wrong. It turns out that researching a queen’s biography plus all the ways they have been interpreted and then comparing it to their representation in the musical – and then doing it six times over for six queens – takes a little time to put together!
This video is as a historical review of Six: The Musical, but it’s also an introduction to historiography in disguise. Historiography is in essence the ‘history of history’. It’s the collation of all the ways the past has been constructed, understood and presented by history writers, and also the study of how this has changed over time. There is a common idea that the field of history is a concrete thing, where historical facts go in and truthful books come out. However, this isn’t the case at all (it would be too easy if it were!). Every time a fiction writer gets out their laptop, a filmmaker sets up their cameras, or a historian writes up their archive research, they are making decisions about how to mould the information into digestible chunks and this inevitably affects our understanding of that past.
Usually, writers aim to keep their personal biases out their work but that doesn’t mean they always succeed and it definitely mean that all of them even try! Henry VIII’s six wives have been reimagined and reinterpreted countless times - so much so that’s it difficult to find the queens themselves under the weight of all those opinions!
I wanted to make this video to introduce the idea that history isn’t static and that the way we think about the past changes all the time. I hope it helps viewers to think critically about the stories told about the past and also about who is doing the telling.
Here are all the books and articles I read for this video:
Catherine of Aragon
Amy Appleford, ‘Shakespeare’s Katherine of Aragon: Last Medieval Queen, First Recusant Martyr’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40:1 (2010), 149-172
Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, ‘Catherine of Aragon’s Letters, English Popular Memory, and Male Authorial Fantasies’, Studies in Philology, 118:2 (2021), 207-241
Betty S. Travitsky, ‘Reprinting Tudor History: The Case of Catherine of Aragon’, Renaissance Quarterly, 50:1 (1997)
Anne Boleyn
Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014)
Stephanie Russo, ‘Contemporary Girlhood and Anne Boleyn in Young Adult Fiction’, Girlhood Studies 13:1 (2020), 17-32
Roland Hui, ‘Anne of the Wicked Ways: Perceptions of Anne Boleyn as a Witch in History and in Popular Culture’, Parergon 35:1 (2018), 97-118
Ruth Lexton, ‘Reading the Adulterous/Treasonous Queen in Early Modern England: Malory’s Guinevere and Anne Boleyn’, Exemplaria, 27:3 (2015), 222-241
Mickey Mayhew, ‘Skewed intimacies and subcultural identities: Anne Boleyn and the expression of fealty in a social media forum’, London South Bank University, PhD thesis (2018)
Laura Saxton, ‘“She was dead meat”: Imagining the Execution of Anne Boleyn in History and Fiction’, Parergon, 37:2 (2020), 103-124
Jane Seymour
Alastair Vannan, ‘The Death of Queen Jane: Ballad, History and Propaganda’, Folk Music Journal, 10:3 (2013), 347-369
Anne of Cleves
David Loades, The Tudor Queens of England (London, Bloomsbury, 2009)
Hillary Nunn, ‘“It lak'th but life": Redford's "Wit and Science", ‘Anne of Cleves and the Politics of Interpretation’, Comparative Drama, 33:2 (1999), 270-291
Valerie Schutte, ‘Anne of Cleves in Book and Manuscript’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 21 (2018), 123-322
Retha M. Warnicke, ‘Henry VIII’s Greeting of Anne of Cleves and Early Modern Court Protocol’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 28:4 (1996), 565-585
Retha M. Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Katheryne Howard
Nicola Clark, ‘Queen Katherine Howard: Space, Place, and Promiscuity Pre- and Post-Marriage, 1536-1541, Royal Studies Journal, 6:2 (2019), 89-103
Bradley J. Irish, ‘“The Secret Chamber and Other Suspect Places”: Materiality, Space, and the fall of Catherine Howard’, Early Modern Women, 4 (2009), 169-173
Valerie Schutte, ‘The Fictional Queen Katherine Howard’, Early Modern Women, 12:1 (2018), 146-159
Katherine Parr
Andrew Hiscock, ‘“A supernal liuly faith”: Katherine Parr and the authoring of devotion’, Women’s Writing, 9:2, 177-198
Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook, ‘Katherine Parr and Reformed Religion’, Anglican and Episcopal History, 72:1 (2003), 55-78
Micheline White, ‘Katherine Parr, Translation, and the Dissemination of Erasmus’s View on War and Peace’, Renaissance and Reformation, 43:2 (2020), 67-91
Julie Van Parys-Rotondi, ‘Queen Katherine Parr as a translation bellwether: The instances of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor’, Parallèles, 34:1 (2022)
Micheline White, ‘“Pray for the Monarch”: The surprising contributions of Katherine Parr and Queen Elizabeth I to the Book of Common Prayer’, Times Literary Supplement, 5844 (2015)
General
David Summers, The Judgement of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
C.J. Summers and T.L. Pebworth, Representing Women in Renaissance England (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997)
David Wallace: ‘Periodizing Women: Mary Ward (1585-1645) and the Premodern Canon’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 36 (2006), 398-453