The Network King: Re-creating Henry VIII for a Global Television Audience

Abstract

A glossy publicity still for the second series of Showtime’s The Tudors pictures Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) earnestly in conversation with Pope Paul III (Peter O’Toole). The teasing fantasy of a-meeting-that- never-happened speaks to a niche audience capable of understanding - and taking pleasure from - The Tudors’ edgy and playful approach to the historical record. Staged solely for advertising purposes (Henry and the Pope never meet in the series itself), the photograph purposefully courts controversy, provoking assessments such as David Starkey’s that The Tudors is ‘terrible history with no point’.¹ Other historians have singled out the fact that, in addition to the fictive encounter, the pope in the picture is, of course, the wrong pope (it was Pope Clement VII, not Pope Paul III, who refused the divorce and excommunicated Henry). This ‘error’ - along with many of The Tudors’ signature telescopings, temporal switchings, accelerations and substitutions - has been seized on as either a bizarre anomaly (‘Quite why the Pope has to be the wrong one is a mystery,’ reflects John Guy) or a genuine mistake indicative of poor research.² The confusion among the critics is revealing of the gap that currently exists between traditional scholarship and a relatively new mode of television programming, one which often has historical and literary adaptation at its heart.³