I enjoyed this production, but the feminist writer Phillipa Gregory sure loves her inventions?
Anne did commit incest with her brother (one of the actual trumped-up charges against her) so she could be pregnant and not executed by Henry, as George's jealous wife Jane Parker alledgedly related?
It is a fictional story based on factual events.
Its no point getting worked up about what is true and what is not.
Its that man again!!
This is terrible. I thought I'd seen it before and didn't recall how bad it was, but now realise I saw the later remake, which was better than this.
Not only is the quality of the transfer awful, but the acting, casting, everything is bad.
"Anne did commit incest with her brother (one of the actual trumped-up charges against her) so she could be pregnant"
This is why I was (so I thought) rewatching it. In addition to just having seen The Last Days of Anne Boleyn. I was thinking about that point and while I'd never believed it, wondered if there could have been some truth to it.
If Anne's very life were on the line, and she knew she couldn't get pregnant by Henry, is it possible she became so desperate as to have sex with George, however repugnant it would have been to them both, because she knew she could absolutely trust her own brother to keep this secret to his grave and *had* to get pregnant somehow?? I don't know. Put in that light, I suppose it's possible.
On another note, while Jared Harris is a fine actor, wow is he ever miscast as charismatic Henry. At this point in his life he was charismatic, witty, accomplished, admired and loved by all accounts, regardless of what he became later on.
The woman who plays Mary is fine, but similarly those cast as Anne and George are poorly cast, and written even worse.
I'm only 20 minutes in and it's so bad I'm going to have to bail.
I'm just trying to imaging getting it up for my own sister, knowing that if I couldn't we'd both be marching to the chopping block, and if I did, we'd probably be marching to the chopping block anyway, and if we were caught, we'd definitely be marching to the chopping block!
Talk about as dick-wilter!
I thought of that -- the d!ck-wilting problem. Nothing about this scenario is exactly a turn-on, is it?
George wasn't in danger of losing his head, so if this is true, he'd have done it to save Anne, and to preserve their family's power. It was normal for him to come visit her, unattended, in her chambers, so there would have been opportunity with very little chance of discovery.
If it's true, it's just as horrific in an entirely different way as the choice in Sophie's Choice. I'd always written this off as pure fabrication on the part of Cromwell, trying to make Anne look as shockingly awful as possible. So it was only after watching the later version of The Other Boleyn Girl which played out this theory, that I seriously thought about it.
OTOH, The Last Days of Anne Boleyn theorises everything was just peachy between Anne and Henry until two weeks prior to her death, and at that point everything went pear-shaped because Anne was conspired against.
Who knows what the truth is? It's frustrating to not be able to suss out what really happened, but there is only so much source material out there, and a whole lot of theories.
I've always assumed that Anne B. was innocent of all the charges brought against her, and that Phillippa Gregory is even less reliable than Anne's accusers. Her real crime was to disappoint Henry, but in those days England had enough rule of law that he had to invent charges and put her through a show trial, he couldn't just yell "Off with her head!". That's how much the law meant to Henry and his courtiers.
Of course I'm not 100% sure, nobody can be 100% sure about events that took place centuries ago, no matter how well documented. But I am 100% sure that Gregory didnt rely on original documentation when writing her book, she made stuff up.
I wandered off on one fact-searching aspect of Anne or another, and went down the usual internet rabbit hole along the way.
Yes, I've always assumed the same about Anne. I don't know much about Phillippa Gregory, save once I tried reading one of her historical novels, and didn't get very far. I don't think much of her as a writer, or a "historian." It might have been The Other Boleyn Girl I tried to read.
It's clear she has a dim view of Anne, in ways that go against what is known about her, so it's not surprising to hear she made things up.
What I found was a letter from Anne to Henry, purported to be the last one she wrote him, not long after she'd been imprisoned. It's rather impressive. She pleads with him that if he's determined to mete out punishment for things she's innocent of, to punish only her, and not the accused men, who are also innocent.
She also swore on her immortal soul, shortly before her execution, she was innocent of all she was accused of. People forget she was a sincerely religious person, and I don't think she'd have risked her immortal soul right before death, if she wasn't innocent. Not even for Elizabeth and her family.