Word: viii
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...Samuel Johnson once wrote, "He was the person of the greatest virtue these islands ever produced." Saintliness can carry a man only so far, but in the case of Sir Thomas it seems to have carried him far enough: to the post of Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. More's virtue found an uncongenial home in the Renaissance court, where moral rectitude was hardly a lasting recipe for success. Henry admired him, but these were difficult times; the King's friendships had to take second place to the King's lusts--or more precisely, his obsession with perpetuating...
There are gaps in Johnson's book, some obviously by design. He disdains to rerun the story of Henry VIII's war with the papacy over his divorce, assuming that most English-speaking readers know it already. At other times, though, particularly in his discussion of more recent times, Johnson's book has some peculiar lacunae. There is not a word about Russian Orthodoxy under the Czars, or under Communism. Nor about pentecostalism, a significant force in American Christianity since the turn of the century and now a phenomenon world wide. He barely touches on the Protestant...
...have played five Macbeths, three Mark Antonys, one El Cid, a cardinal and three Presidents," intoned Actor Charlton Heston. "But never have I played such a role where my own equipment served me so little." Heston's latest brush with the big boys is as King Henry VIII in Director Richard Fleischer's film The Prince and the Pauper. The actor needed plastic in his makeup plus padding on his body to effect the appropriate regal bearing. "My eyes are deep set; his were close to the surface," observed Heston. "My face is angular; his was square...
...sports, music, religion, commentary and light entertainment. But the BBC shows that have found their way to the U.S. and turned a tidy profit for the corporation have been mainly polished dramas and documentaries, such as The Forsythe Saga, Elizabeth R. with Glenda Jackson, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man and Alistair Cooke's America. The Shakespeare series, says BBC Programming Director Alasdair Milne, with no understatement at all, "is a vast project, the biggest we have ever undertaken, and a tremendously exciting one. We think it ought to be done...
...this musical is like watching a marauding shark becalmed in a suburban swimming pool. As an actor, Nicol Williamson radiates a sense of imminent danger, mercurial passion and magnetic authority in such a way that he could be every inch the awesome monarch that Henry VIII was. But in Rex he is submerged in a book that swamps that masterful Tudor reign with research-soaked tedium...