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The Last days of Anne Boleyn
spookyLX
Posts: 11,730 Forum Member
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Any one watching ?
I have been looking forward to this programme ,
I have been looking forward to this programme ,
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spookyLX
Posts: 11,730 spookyLX
Posts: 11,730
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I think she was to a point , But I feel she was also partly to blame for her downfall as well
2013 - 1536 = 477 years no?
Imo it's fantasy to suggest Cromwell engineered the whole plot when clearly Henry,desperate for an heir or not,had a penchant for removing any obstacle.The charges made against her may well have been exaggerated but Cromwell was under orders.
Alarmingly my summation aligns me with serial nutter Starkey.:eek::D By the way,who's the female historian that's a dead ringer for Ken Dodd?
I noticed that too, so annoying. How hard is it to use a calculator.
She's a writer called Hilary Mantel. And now I can't unsee Doddy.
Cromwell was Henry's hatchetman. He wanted her gone after losing their son and his eye had already wandered. And what Henry wanted he got.
The irony being that the child she did give him was one of the greatest and longest rulers this country has ever known.
One thing I don't like about these programmes is that is so repetitive to the point that it seems like its building up to something... oh yeah what they mentioned 5 minutes ago.
I agree with some of the historians but i don't think you can blame one person or one incident on her downfall - it was a number of factors all which they highlighted. it felt like the programme was trying to pinpoint it all too much on one event and person.
I do find that the idea of her being imprisoned in that tower for all that time and never seeing her child again must of been heartbreaking.
There was no mention of the Goiter she apparently had either.
Thanks for that Duryea I assumed she was (merely) an academic but Wiki tells me that two Booker prize awards for her books about Thomas Cromwell suggest she'll be a big feature in tomorrow's offering.
I'll be watching as I agree with Clarkie66's view that all too often these programmes reach for conclusions that are mired in opinion and not evidence.I love the idea that documents exist from the period that can be independently translated by scholars from the french for example,or accurately interpreted by English experts.
I look forward to the next instalment.
Her name is Suzannah Lipscomb
17th to 18th = 2 "
18th to 19th = 3 "
19th to 20th = 4 "
20th to 21st = 5 "
2013 - 1536 = 477 years
Count these.
I love Hilary Mantel's books about Cromwell - great stuff. Even though people complain about historical novelists being taken seriously as theorists, I found her interesting to listen to on the show - quite eloquent.
Who is a 'Dr'.
I find Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies ... I was going to say "almost unreadable", but no, I find them unreadable. I can't read more then a few sentences in one of them before I want to throw it across the room.
Here's an example found by opening Bring Up the Bodies to a page picked at random and starting near mid-page:
*throw*
The narrative voice "he ... he ... he ... he ... he ... he" is only a relatively minor annoyance, and that it's in present tense is fine, though that's been rather over-used in recent fiction. I've read and enjoyed even books written in 2nd person, so I'm not bothered by the unusual.
Anyway, before I watched this show, I wasn't aware there was so much disagreement and controversy about what had happened. Now that I do know, I think I can afford to skip Mantel's particular take on it.
Like I say, her Cromwell books are famous for dividing opinion going by the Amazon reviews alone. If you dislike them then that's obviously fine but I think they're fantastic and that they conjure up a vibrant world. Most of the critical reviews I've read are focused on her narrative technique of saying 'he' so that's why I particularly highlighted that. Anyway I don't think we should get into any further discussion of these books as that's really for the 'books' forum on here.
I don't get the logic of the second part of your post though. You dislike the way that Mantel's Cromwell books are written so you're going to ignore her take on Anne Boleyn in the documentary? Mantel still has valid observations to make (just as much as the other novelists featured at any rate) despite the fact that a reader may not have got on with her books.
Opinion is not very divided on Amazon UK. (I haven't looked at the other ones.)
5 star 470
4 star 91
3 star 45
2 star 22
1 star 27
Really divisive books have a lot of 4 or 5 star reviews and a similar number of 1 or 2.
Anyway, I'm surprised that the reviews are so positive. A book that gets a lot of media coverage will usually be read by many people who wouldn't normally try such a book, which often results in many negative reviews and in people resenting the way they (feel they were) misled. A lot of people must at least have been surprised by the 3rd-person present "he ... he ... he". So I do wonder why so many like it.
(A partial explanation occurs to me. The ratings for Wolf Hall were more mixed. Most people who didn't like it didn't bother with Bring Up the Bodies, which would 'filter out' some of the low ratings.)
Well, I was going to say that no, I listened to what she said in the show (so didn't ignore it); I just meant I thought I could afford to skip the books. But now that I've though about it a bit more, I'd go further. I think that the way she writes, in these novels, and her immersion in imagination in the mind of Cromwell, makes me distrust her views and indeed makes me want to avoid any deeper engagement with them.
I did like the program though. I'll be honest and say I'm not a history buff and wasn't that familiar with the story of Anne Boleyn (and what I did remember seemed to come mostly from The Tudors, which is possibly not the most reliable source) but I did like the idea of having different experts promoting their own (usually contradictory) narratives. It seems to me with history documentaries that they generally decide in advance the story they're telling, and then selectively pick quotes from the assembled experts to reinforce this story. So it seems quite brave to have a documentary where they're not afraid to simply let the experts' speak and just follow where it leads.