Blog # 49...September 2015


Theatre performances can be many things – entertaining or thought provoking, making us laugh or cry, maybe all of the above.  At their best, they introduce us to a world, either interior or exterior that we may have never known otherwise. 

I was one of the lucky ones to see The Last Wife, actor Kate Hennig’s debut as a playwright at Stratford (sold out ‘till the end of its run in early October). It piqued my interest in the Tudors and made me think about women in history.
Kateryn Parr was the sixth (and last) wife in Henry VIII’s reign that stretched from 1509 till 1547… a lot of spouses to squeeze into 38 years.  Kateryn was 31 and had been married and widowed twice by the time she married Henry at Hampton Court in 1543.  She’s often eclipsed by some of her predecessors, particularly Anne Boleyn, but held her own as an extremely intelligent, cultured and kind woman who had a significant influence on the court and on Henry’s three children.  She encouraged Henry to recognize his two daughters and add them to the list of succession.     Mary and then Elizabeth became the last of the Tudor queens after their brother Edward’s brief reign and death at 16.

History, as they say, is written by the winners. It’s also written mainly by men, so the actions and influences of women are largely unnoticed,   Alan Dilworth, director of the play, summed it up this way, “if we are fish, the water we swim in is patriarchy.”  Most women were occupied with the important but largely unrecognized domestic tasks that supported and made possible what happened on the battlefield and got into the history books.  Plus ca change…
There have been many biographies of significant women from Joan of Arc to Rosemary Sullivan’s recent Stalin’s Daughter. Historian Margaret Macmillan who will deliver this year’s Massey lectures has chosen as her topic History’s People and features in one lecture women like Fanny Parkes and Elizabeth Simcoe who defied or ignored the constraints of their own societies. Kateryn Parr is only one of many women since the world began who took initiative, acted bravely and was influential in the lives of her family and the playing out of historical events.  Wouldn’t it be great if, somewhere in the future, women’s stories are accepted as part of our common history rather than a sidebar?

This starts my fifth year as a blogger, see you all in October.