Review of Hannah Khalil’s Adaptation of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII (Directed by Amy Hodge) at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 16 September 2022

Abstract

Upon arrival at the Globe there was no mistaking the spectacle of the English monarchy and its hold on the British public. The queue of people who had gathered on that crisp autumn day waiting to view the Queen’s coffin was but metres from the playhouse’s gate, making it impossible for any of the approaching audience members to ignore. Those involved in the theatre’s 2022 production ofHenry VIII could not have anticipated that it would, for a time, coincide with the pomp and circumstance surrounding the death of the United Kingdom’s longest-reigning monarch. The performance – a reworking by Hannah Khalil of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s collaboration – was based on a text that originally explicitly celebrated the English monarchy, functioning as a piece of royal propaganda. As Mark Rankin has suggested, the entertainment was likely ‘designed specifically with a Stuart royal audience in mind’. However, in taking the position of third author, Khalil revised Henry VIII – rewriting, realigning, and even crafting new scenes – as a play for the common person, critical of the crown and other organisations of power. In her version of the script, Khalil added two women (Debbie Korley and Anna Savva) to act as semi-choral characters and audience surrogates. By clearly coding both of these women as much lower in status than the other – generally named – characters of the play, the new script positioned itself as a play for the British public interested in its relationship to modern structures of power, especially the English crown. Even without the Queen’s death being so present in the minds of the modern audience, Khalil’s script already offered an explicitly timely critique of excessive spending and its effects on the general public. The first dialogue of the play took place between the two women, who complained about England’s investment in the expensive and yet politically futile Field of the Cloth of Gold. In lines repurposed from Henry VIII’s Duke of Norfolk, one of the two women remarked, ‘I think / The peace between the French and us not values / The cost that did conclude it’ (1.1.87–89). This exchange was directly relevant to the current fears of