This post piqued my interest, and I thought I had to share. Anyone read this? Or Francis Bacon’s ‘The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn’ or John Banks’ ‘Virtue Betray’d’?
Anne Boleyn Play by Tom Taylor 1875
This post piqued my interest, and I thought I had to share. Anyone read this? Or Francis Bacon’s ‘The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn’ or John Banks’ ‘Virtue Betray’d’?
Tudor Blogger 
I’ve read the “Bacon” play and reviewed it here: https://anneboleynnovels.wordpress.com/2012/06/30/the-tragedy-of-anne-boleyn-by-sir-francis-bacon-decoded-by-elizabeth-wells-gallup-1901/. It’s pretty dire — basically a cut-and-paste job of Shakespeare, Bacon, and a lot of other Elizabethan writers, and very difficult to wade through. There’s an interesting back story to how Mrs. Gallup came to produce it, but since it’s a mixture made from a dozen different works and a whole lot more characters, there’s no consistency to it at all.
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Interesting view. I’ll bear that in mind when I get around to reading it fully. I’m analysing it alongside Shakespeare for my Masters thesis this year, and I’m kind of dreading having to wade through it now.
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Update on what I thought of the Bacon play – basically garbage. It took all my efforts to wade through to the end. I thought that his intentions were admirable but the way that he went about it was ridiculous. One of my favourite lines from my thesis was this … “Possibly Bacon saw witchcraft as a way to make the other charges sound just as silly, at a time where logic and reason were beginning to triumph over superstition. This appears to be the main theme of Bacon’s play – to make Anne Boleyn a real character rather than a faraway and unreachable figure.”
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