The Creation of Anne Boleyn

by Susan Bordo

  Something surprising happens in The Concubine. For only one of two times in her career as a heroine of romantic fiction, Anne actually does commit adultery—three separate acts, with three different men—in order to secretly get pregnant again after she’s lost the child she’d been carrying by the king. What’s bizarre—and not very credible, even in a work of romantic fiction—is that none of her partners “could say truthfully that he had sinned with the Queen,” for each coupling had happened during a masked ball, and Anne, in costume and with her voice disguised, “had made absolutely sure that no man could look at her next day and think . . .”16 The reader is left in the same position with respect to whom she had sex with, for we’re never told. This was the last time fictional Anne would actually be guilty of any of the charges laid against her until 2001, when the first truly despicable Anne since Chapuys’ letters became the reigning queen of historical fiction.

  Barnes’s and Lofts’s Henry and Anne are never soul mates or even lovers in anything but the most mechanical sense; they are bad romances from the start. In contrast, Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days, which premiered December 8, 1948, the year before Barnes’s novel was published, is the story of a true love affair gone sour. Drama critic Brooks Atkinson called the play “the story of two violent, willful people who act on each other without mercy.”17 That may be going a bit too far. The violence amounts to a slap across the face, but “willful” is on target—and so is the passion that Anne and Henry’s battle of wills brings about. It’s truly a match between equals, in every respect except the fatal inequality of Henry’s power over Anne’s life and death. And in a season that also brought South Pacific and Death of a Salesman to Broadway, it was a surprisingly popular success, despite the fact that it is written in a combination of prose and verse, and often wanders into long, somewhat pretentious poetic monologues. The key to its popularity: Although the play is peppered with fragmentary (and often confusing) references to “large” historical issues and events, the central drama is domestic—a battle of the sexes between Henry and Anne, within which they behave more like a man and a woman than a bluebeard and a vixen in a Grand Historical Drama.

  Most audiences of the play would have been familiar with the Henry played by Charles Laughton, who in Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) bequeathed to us the enduring image of Henry devouring a chicken, tearing off a chunk, taking one bite, then chucking each piece over his shoulder as he dives for the next while burpingly lamenting the death of civility. “There’s no delicacy nowadays. No consideration for others [belch]. Refinement’s a thing of the past! . . . Manners are dead! [Belch.]”18 Some might have remembered Emil Jannings’s gluttonous, volatile lecher from Ernst Lubitsch’s melodramatic silent movie, Anna Boleyn (1920). From prevailing representations they would have expected a buffoon; a leering bloated tyrant; or “Bluff King Hal.” In Anne of the Thousand Days they got manly, handsome Rex Harrison (who won a Tony for the role), charming and suave, but also calculating, arrogant, and utterly unused to being refused anything, even by God. (“I pray,” he says, “and God answers.”19)

  As for Anne, her previous appearances on stage and in film exhibited little in the way of “character.” Shakespeare’s play is not and never was among his most popular, and the real show-stealing speeches are given to Katherine. In Gaetano Donizetti’s 1830 opera, Anna Bolena, Anne is pure victim, tormented by the loss of her first love, Percy (a theme undoubtedly picked up from Vertue Betray’d), manipulated and treated coldly by Henry, and ultimately driven mad by everything that has happened to her (the high point of the opera finds Anne in the Tower careening between hallucinations from a happier past and hysterical confrontation with her present agony). In Lubitsch’s version, Anne is also a victim, a virtuous—and blonde—sacrificial lamb very much in the tradition of the wide-eyed, demure heroines that Mary Pickford made famous. Barely post-Victorian, she goes to her death unadorned, in a plain white smock.20 Merle Oberon (Korda’s Anne) was the first of many elegant, hypnotic beauties who helped create the more glamorous version of femininity that reigned in the thirties—and that seems to be her main function in the film. She has only a few scenes to play, and each one seems designed to highlight the actress’s regal (and, in those days, “exotic”21) beauty. As she prepares for her execution, she gazes into the mirror, fusses with her hair, ponders which headdress to wear. She preens, she suffers a bit, she looks beautiful, and then she’s gone. Relieved of Anne, the Korda film can then go on to play future episodes in Henry’s “private life” mostly as comedy—although with dark undertones. Before Anne is executed, for example, we are given a scene of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting fluttering about, preparing the king’s bed and gossiping with each other over Anne’s impending execution and Jane Seymour’s takeover.

  1ST LADY: So that’s the king’s bed.

  NURSE: Yes, my dear. And he has not long left it—feel!

  1ST LADY: I wonder what he looks like—in bed.

  2ND LADY (a rival beauty): You’ll never know!

  1ST LADY (annoyed): Well, there’s no need to be spiteful, is there, Mistress Nurse?

  NURSE (consolingly): No, my dear; and you’ve as good a chance as another when the king’s in one of his merry moods.

  The girls laugh.

  1ST LADY: Oh! I never meant . . . I never thought . . .

  2ND LADY: Didn’t you, darling?

  NURSE: Now, ladies! You’re not here to quarrel, but to get busy with your needles. Look—all these A’s must come out, and J’s go in. Hurry, ladies, hurry!

  Anderson’s Anne (played by petite but feisty Joyce Redman) was clearly not influenced by these earlier stage and film depictions. Perhaps Bette Davis’s Elizabeth I in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), which was based on a stage play that was also written by Anderson, helped shape his image of Anne. Perhaps—as Francis Hackett claimed—Anderson was influenced by Hackett’s 1939 novel. There, as with his portrait of Henry in his 1929 biography Henry VIII: The Personal History of a Dynast and His Wives, Hackett was determined to go beyond the clichés and stereotypes to show readers that “it is creatures of flesh and blood . . . who make great history.”22 With Henry, this required going beyond the caricatures of Bluff King Hal, the jovial serial collector of wives, a cartoon figure described by Hackett as “one of the most vulgar and fatuous and horrible of illusions.”23 With Anne, he wanted readers to understand how this woman—and only this woman, with the exceptions, perhaps, of his grandmother and Katherine Parr—could have, for so long, matched Henry eye to eye, power for power, in the relationship. His Anne has a personality that refuses to be vanquished; this is what draws Henry to her, while infuriating everyone else.

  If ever a slip of a girl owed it to the established order to satisfy her lover by a union outside the bonds of matrimony, this was a clear instance; and Cardinals and ambassadors and blood-relations and the pope were soon beside themselves with eagerness to learn that this chit would remain simply Henry’s mistress. Her father grew weary of her obstinacy. Her uncle Norfolk resented her ambition. Her sister could not understand Anne’s rigorousness. But she was not a coquette nor a wanton. She was a high-spirited, high-minded girl who made this marriage a term of her being and who, in spite of this, delivered herself to ruin.24

  It’s a pretty accurate description of Anderson’s Anne too.25 Fiercely independent and apparently without a drop of fear, “the slip of a girl” refuses Henry’s advances and calls him out: “You are spoiled and vengeful and malicious and bloody. The poetry they praise so much is sour, and the music you write’s worse. You dance like a hobbledehoy; you make love as you eat—with a good deal of noise and no subtlety.”26 Although in “real life” this attitude would probably have resulted in her head going missing much earlier in the story, in the play it inflames Henry’s desire for her, and he vows that “[i]f it breaks the world in two like an apple and flings the halves into the void, I shall make you queen.”27 Anderson’s Anne also has
a sexual past—she confides to Percy, her first love, that she slept with men while she was in France and even before that. Sander and others had claimed that too. But what is striking here is how irrelevant it is to the play’s assessment of Anne’s moral character. She’s not a virgin—big deal. The king knows it and doesn’t care. Neither does Percy. She tells him about it matter-of-factly, without a hint of coyness; she’s more the modern “liberated” woman than either the trembling virgin or the temptress who endows sexuality with subversive power.

  When Henry and Anne finally sleep together, it is a wildly transporting experience for both of them: “I’m deep in love,” Anne declares (so deep she no longer cares about the divorce), and Henry proclaims it “a new age. Gold or some choicer metal—or no metal at all, but exaltation, darling. Wildfire in the air, wildfire in the blood!”28

  The irony (and existential essence and dramatic spine of the play) is that falling in love with Henry after years of hating him is the beginning of Anne’s downfall, for it finally releases him from his erotic bondage to her. “After that night,” she muses later in her room in the Tower, “I was lost.”29 What follows is the speech that gave the play its title.

  From the day he first made me his, to the last day I made him mine, yes, let me set it down in numbers. I who can count and reckon, and have the time. Of all the days I was his and did not love him—this; and this; and this many. Of all the days I was his—and he had ceased to love me—this many; and this. In days—it comes to a thousand days—out of the years. Strangely, just a thousand. And of that thousand—one—when we were both in love. Only one, when our loves met and overlapped and were both mine and his. When I no longer hated him, he began to hate me. Except for that one day. One day, out of all the years.30

  I’ve always loved that speech for its psychological acuity about the kind of love that is fueled by challenge and pursuit, as Henry’s desire for Anne was. Whatever her motives, Anne was not easily conquered. This may have inflamed Henry’s passion, but it also meant there was a danger to Anne in finally giving in. For what he found in his arms was a real woman rather than a fantasized ideal—and as a real woman, Anne, having been elevated in Henry’s imagination by years of longing, was bound to disappoint.31 This is a new theme in Anne’s fictional afterlives, one which Norah Lofts develops in chilling detail after his and Anne’s first sex together. (It affects even Henry’s sense of smell.) “For years and years, whenever he had been near her he had been conscious of the scent of her hair, not oversweet, not musky, in no way obtrusive, a dry, clean fragrance, all her own; but now, nearer to her than he had ever been, he was only aware of his own freshly soaped odor and the scented oil which he had rubbed into his hair and beard . . . He could have cried when he thought of how he had soaked and scrubbed himself, put on his finest clothes and his jewels.”32 All that for “just another woman in a bed!”33

  Anne and Henry’s sexual attraction for each other does not degenerate so starkly or decisively in Anne of the Thousand Days. Even after Henry has begun to court Jane, he still can be aroused by Anne; when her fury is ignited, so is his desire for her. And furious she often is—over his betrayal, over the prospect of Elizabeth’s being made a bastard, and over Henry’s underestimating of her integrity. No fictional Anne before had ever been so proudly defiant, so insistent on her own autonomy, so utterly unintimidated by Henry. For drama critic Joseph Wood Krutch, this is what made Anderson’s Anne so “intriguing.” “In her own way she is as ruthless as Henry, no dove snatched up by an eagle, but an eagle herself. What she has is a prideful integrity incapable of a sin against herself, though quite capable of most of the other sins in the calendar.”34 This inability to “sin against herself” ultimately sends her to her death, but it’s also what gives her enormous power. She will risk anything, endure anything, in order to retain her self-respect. Even at the end, condemned to death, she continues to challenge Henry, tormenting him with a lie that is also a final show of her unwillingness to “do all this gently,” as Henry would like.

  Before you go, perhaps you should hear one thing—I lied to you. I loved you, but I lied to you! I was untrue! Untrue with many!35

  She thus leaves Henry with an uncertainty that he will “take to the grave” (as she puts it).36 Did she? Didn’t she? Unknowable and elusive once again, she goes to her death knowing that her own power in the relationship has been restored.

  As successful as it was, Anne of the Thousand Days was not made into a movie until twenty years later. It was deemed untouchable by movie studios in 1949, as it dealt with subjects—adultery, incest, illegitimacy, even the word “virgin”—that the Motion Picture Production Code would not permit. It wasn’t until the sixties that the code began to be killed off, bit by bit, by the “foreign invasion” of sexually franker European films and the need for American movies to offer something that television could not. In 1966, Mike Nichols’s screen adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—a less fatal but more foul-mouthed “bad romance” than Anne of the Thousand Days—did the code in. And Anderson’s Anne was ready to be revived—and, as I will argue, reimagined—for a new generation.

  This sixteenth-century portrait (artist unknown), often referred to as “the NPG portrait” because it hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, is thought to be one of the few surviving copies of an original painting. Although it’s not discernible in this black-and-white photograph of the portrait, Anne has chestnut—not black—hair.© Heritage Images/Corbis

  This anonymous portrait, hanging at Hever Castle, Anne’s childhood home, captures a childlike innocence not usually seen in depictions of Anne.Hever Castle & Gardens

  Anne in an Elizabethan collar. Depictions of Anne have often followed the fashions of the artist’s era, not Anne’s.Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

  In the nineteenth century, the early days of Henry’s relationship with Anne became a subject of romantic imagery, with Henry a tender suitor and Anne his adored (and blonde) darling.Copyright and courtesy of Rotherham Heritage Services

  A less idealizing nineteenth-century view of Henry that imagines a cold, unwavering Henry with a voluptuous, fainting Anne behaving according to Victorian stereotypes.© Bettman/Corbis

  Anne as tragic heroine. Early nineteenth-century French painters often drew on unjustly condemned historical figures, such as Anne and Lady Jane Grey, to comment on the politics of their own time.Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

  Lubitsch’s 1920 Anna Boleyn, with Emil Jannings as a predatory Henry and Henny Porten as a sweet, suffering Anne.© Paramount Pictures/Photofest

  Although it wasn’t the first historical novel to feature Anne, Francis Hackett’s 1939 novel, the first to be issued in paperback, made her a best-selling fictional heroine for the first time.Queen Anne Boleyn, Popular Library

  This scene—a publicity still—never appears in Alexander Korda’s 1933 The Private Life of Henry VIII, which dispenses with Anne (the gorgeous Merle Oberon) very early in the film to focus on the exploits of Charles Laughton’s gluttonous, lecherous Henry. The wives, from left to right: Elsa Lanchester (as Anne of Cleves), Binnie Barnes (as Katherine Howard), Everley Gregg (as Katherine Parr), and Oberon as Anne.© United Artists/Photofest

  To this day, Geneviève Bujold’s fiery, proud Anne remains the quintessential portrayal for many viewers.© Universal Pictures/Photofest

  Dorothy Tutin brought gravity and maturity to her portrayal of Anne in the Masterpiece Theatre television series The Six Wives of Henry VIII.Photofest

  Natalie Dormer, who fought to make Anne more than just a seductress in the second season of The Tudors, is shown here in one of Joan Bergin’s anachronistic (but award-winning) costumes, fixing her sights on Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Henry.© Showtime/Photofest

  Anne as Mean Girl: Natalie Portman in The Other Boleyn Girl.© Columbia Pictures/Photofest

  Howard Brenton’s 2010 play Anne Boleyn (with Anthony Howell as Henry and Miranda Raison as a bl
onde Anne) is the first popular depiction to emphasize Anne’s reformist activities as well as her flirtatious side.Manuel Harlan/Shakespeare’s Globe Press Office

  Sarah Mensinga is among the contemporary artists who have used irony and wit to present what is arguably a feminist perspective on Anne’s execution.Sarah Mensinga

  Anne continues to fascinate. Emily Pooley’s stunning waxwork creates a sense of intimacy with a young Anne, whom it is easy for girls and young women of today to identify with. If you look carefully, you can also see Anne’s controversial sixth finger, which Pooley included to point ominously ahead to the false rumors that were spread by her enemies after her death.Emily Pooley