Plays of the Year Special: The Six Wives of Henry VIII

The play-cycle The Six Wives of Henry VIII , starring Keith Michell and produced by Mark Shivas, proved the outstanding BBC TV drama success of 1970, being immediately repeated and resulting in numerous awards for both stars and staff. The BBC took the unusual step of commissioning six seperate plays from leading TV dramatists and scriptwriters. The full texts of the six plays are here given, accommpanied by twelve pages of stills.As J. C. Trewin says in a perceptive introduction, "The plays in this volume are important, not simply because of thier exciting dramatic quality, their technique framed for the television screen, but also because they show us a man who, popularly, has been so overcast by tradition that few people have paused to consider him afresh . . . These six plays now flash up a Henry more complete, more reasonable than any we have yet seen on stage or screen".