Word: boleyn
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Anne of the Thousand Days (by Maxwell Anderson; produced by the Playwrights' Company & Leland Hay ward) is yet another shot at history for Maxwell Anderson, and very likely another hit. From the turbulent story of Henry VIII's Anne Boleyn, Playwright Anderson has made a plump and gaudy stage piece, a thing of fierce desires, clashing wills, momentous acts. For love or lust of Anne, Henry divorced Catherine of Aragon, broke with Rome, opened an age of bloodshed; while the insolent and ambitious Anne would be Henry's queen or nothing at the start, still his queen...
Died. Anthony William Hall, 53, village police inspector, pretender to the throne of Britain as King Anthony I (he claimed direct descent from Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn); of a heart ailment; in Little Dewchurch, England. Hall, who leaves no heir (his older brother Don, once renounced all claims to kingship in the event of Anthony's success), campaigned for the throne with dignity but persistence, addressed some 2,000 outdoor meetings. At various times he sent a notice to King George V to quit, plumped for the return of the American colonies to Britain, and tried to build...
Scene the First: a bloodthirsty lady waiting in the stands for the decapitation of Anne Boleyn (that's Merle Oberon) says to the female in front of her, "Would you mind removing your hat, please?" From there on, it's deuces (and Queens) wild, with an intended or unintended laugh ever 7 1-2 seconds, and a chance to receive the most erroneous impression of a historical period that ever engraved upon celluloid. Scene the Second: in struts Charles Laughton as the marrying king, with some of the placid content of an enraged bull in a cow pasture...
...cause of all the action, he never seems the center of the play; and its interest wobbles between the just deserts visited on that "proud, bad man," the ambitious Cardinal Wolsey, and the unjust deserts visited on that proud, good woman whom Henry cast aside for Anne Boleyn-Katherine of Aragon...
Henry VIII believed that his new bride, Anne Boleyn, was comparable to the finest products of the royal orchards-"a wife with a strawberry breath, cherry lips, apricot cheeks, and a soft velvet head like a melicotton [peach]." But old Farmer Brocke insisted that the new Queen was actually the daughter of Old Nick, as was proved by the fact that she had a mole shaped like a strawberry on her white neck, and sometimes touched it with her left hand-on which grew a rudimentary sixth finger. Farmer Brocke believed that King Henry had married a witch...