The Tudors and the Tudor Court: Know Your Symptom

Abstract

The Tudors is a historical drama that stages, compulsively, the production of the male body as that which stays the same, which escapes the demands of history. The Tudor court as constructed in The Tudors is a machine for the endless staging of the encounter, or perhaps more accurately the nonencounter, between history and masculinity. There is, therefore, a strange disturbing sense in which the Tudor court functions as a romance space—it is a place in which the viewer is constantly taught how to recognize real, as opposed to historical, manhood. Of course, this repetition is itself a sign of the instability of the romance of masculinity as staged through the court in The Tudors. Jonathan Rhys Mears’ body has to be lauded and staged over and over again in order to publicly defeat historicism and in the process sustain a notion of the male body as desirable across or even beyond history. This public production of the male body depends upon the court as a symbolic space capable of bearing the burden of history. The problem is, as with all good romances, the court/narrative takes on a life of its own and in the process creates a genuinely historical image of Henry’s court.