Cultural depictions of Anne Boleyn

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Anne Boleyn was beheaded on the 19th of May 1536, convicted of treason on charges of adultery that most historians now consider fabricated. She had been Queen of England for fewer than three years. And yet, nearly five centuries later, she has been played by Geneviève Bujold, Natalie Portman, Natalie Dormer, Claire Foy, and Jodie Turner-Smith, among many others. She has been the subject of operas, musicals, novels, songs, and television dramas on nearly every continent. She haunts a staircases at Hogwarts. She appears in an episode of The Simpsons. A Dutch progressive metal band dedicated three tracks to her life, death, and the pregnancy that may have doomed her.

  What makes Anne Boleyn so durable? The source material is both rich and contested. She was, in one common framing, the woman whose relationship with Henry VIII broke England from the Catholic Church. In another, she was a cunning political operator who overplayed her hand. In still another, she was a victim of royal harassment who had no real power to refuse the king. Each era seems to find in Anne exactly what it needs to argue about itself. The question is not just who Anne Boleyn was, but what different centuries have needed her to be.

• 2. The Romantic Victim

  ›

  Elizabeth Benger's biography of Anne, published in the 19th century, was particularly full of praise. So was Selina Bunbury's book, titled Star of the Court. The image these writers promoted was recognizable across two centuries: a strong-willed, beautiful woman destroyed by a husband who was presented as a brutal tyrant.

  Jane Austen subscribed to this view. So did Agnes Strickland and novelist Jean Plaidy. Playwright Maxwell Anderson built his 1948 play Anne of the Thousand Days around the same interpretation. The 1969 film adaptation of that play gave Geneviève Bujold her most acclaimed role, earning her both a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination.

  On Broadway in 1949, Joyce Redman played Anne opposite Rex Harrison, whose portrayal of Henry won the Tony Award. The play's grip on the imagination was strong enough that the Donizetti opera Anna Bolena, which premiered in 1830 with music by Gaetano Donizetti and a libretto by Felice Romani, drew from a similar well. Maria Callas, Beverly Sills, Joan Sutherland, and Anna Netrebko are among the sopranos who have sung the title role across decades of productions.

  The romantic-victim frame has staying power in part because it is emotionally satisfying. The powerful woman brought low by an even more powerful man is a legible tragedy. What the academic historians of the late 20th century would argue is that the frame, for all its emotional clarity, left out almost everything politically interesting about Anne.

• 3. The Reformist Agent

  ›

  Eric Ives, the British historian, produced what became the most famous academic biography of Anne, and then revised it for a second edition. That revision was shaped in part by fellow historian David Starkey's focus on a Reformist sermon that Anne had commissioned. The implication was significant: Anne may have had an authentic spiritual mission, not merely a political one.

  Both Ives and Starkey argue that it may have been Anne's specific Reformist agenda, rather than simply her failure to produce a male heir, that put her at odds with Thomas Cromwell and led to her execution. Starkey, who hosted a television series on all six of Henry's wives, has been a particularly forceful advocate for this view. Authors David Loades, John Guy, and Diarmaid MacCulloch have also published works sympathetic or admiring on the subject.

  Feminist scholars added a further layer. Karen Lindsey's book Divorced, Beheaded, Survived argues that Henry's relentless pursuit of Anne was not a flirtation she enjoyed but a form of royal harassment. Her delaying tactics, Lindsey contends, were the closest she could come to refusal. Lindsey draws a parallel with Henry's relationships with Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr, both of which have traditionally been read as not wholly consensual.

  Julia Marsen portrayed Anne in Starkey's 2001 documentary series. Sophie Hunter played the role in his 2009 documentary Henry VIII: Mind of a Tyrant. The television landscape around this more intellectually serious Anne was busy: Claire Foy took the role in the 2015 BBC Two series Wolf Hall, adapted from Hilary Mantel's novels, which placed Anne at the center of a web of court politics rather than a love story.

• 4. The Villain and the Contested Record

  ›

  Retha Warnicke's academic work takes a different path entirely. She focuses on the unmitigated gender prejudices of the early 16th century and argues that those pressures shaped Anne into first a pawn, then a willing agent for her own family's advancement. Warnicke's hypotheses are controversial: she suggests Anne's brother George was part of a clandestine homosexual clique at court, and that Anne would have gone so far as to use her brother's seed to produce a male heir for Henry. The majority of scholars do not support these claims.

  Philippa Gregory drew on Warnicke's work for her bestselling novel The Other Boleyn Girl, published in 2001, which casts Anne as the hard-hearted villain and gives the role of sympathetic heroine to Anne's sister Mary. In her author's note, Gregory stated that the novel's conclusion was based on Warnicke's findings. Warnicke has publicly distanced herself from the novel and its presentation of the Boleyns.

  Jodhi May portrayed Anne in the 2003 British television adaptation of Gregory's novel. Natalie Portman took the role in the 2008 film version. The film reached an audience far larger than any academic monograph, and with it the Gregory-Warnicke version of Anne entered mainstream popular culture alongside, and in direct competition with, the Ives-Starkey version.

  Alison Weir, whose work on Anne is described as notably unflattering, and novelist Joanna Denny, whose popular biography was highly favorable, represent the range even within popular non-fiction. The contested record is not purely an academic matter. It has produced genuinely incompatible Annes on bookshelves and screens simultaneously.

• 5. Anne on Stage and Screen

  ›

  Clara Kimball Young played Anne Boleyn in a 1912 short film about Cardinal Wolsey. Henny Porten portrayed her in the 1920 film directed by the young Ernst Lubitsch. Merle Oberon played Anne in the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII, which won Charles Laughton an Oscar for his portrayal of Henry. Vanessa Redgrave played Anne in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons. The line of screen Annes runs nearly the full length of cinema history.

  Dorothy Tutin was nominated for a BAFTA TV Award for the 1970 drama serial The Six Wives of Henry VIII. The same production was later compressed into the 1972 film Henry VIII and His Six Wives, with Charlotte Rampling as Anne. Natalie Dormer's portrayal in the Showtime series The Tudors, which ran across seasons 1 and 2 in 2007 and 2008, and a brief cameo in season 4 in 2010, won her two Gemini Awards.

  In 2021, Jodie Turner-Smith portrayed Anne in a miniseries set in Anne's final five months. Amy Manson played Anne in dream sequences in the 2021 film Spencer. Amy James-Kelly took the role in the 2022 Netflix show Blood, Sex and Royalty. The throughline across these productions is not a unified interpretation but an unbroken appetite.

  On stage, Howard Brenton's 2010 play Anne Boleyn, staged at Shakespeare's Globe, placed her life at the center of a drama about religious upheaval. Lydia Leonard played Anne in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Wolf Hall Parts One and Two, both on Broadway and in London's West End. The musical Six, by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, which debuted in 2017 and imagines all six of Henry's wives as a modern pop group, has since been performed across London, the United States, Australia, and a Norwegian Cruise Line production, with multiple actresses taking the role of Anne across those runs.

• 6. Anne in Music and Popular Culture

  ›

  Roger Waters referenced Anne Boleyn in his song "Watching TV" on the album Amused to Death, placing her in a list of historical figures alongside the Rosenbergs and the unknown Nicaraguan. Tori Amos referenced her in "Talula" from Boys for Pele, and in an interview stated that her earlier song "Crucify" from the album Little Earthquakes was inspired by Anne. Courtney Love's band Hole included a lyric about Anne in the song "Old Age", which appeared on the outtakes album My Body, the Hand Grenade; Anne also appeared in the artwork of that album, and her image, with a cutout showing her "B" necklace, appears on the back cover of Hole's album Nobody's Daughter, released on the 27th of April 2010.

  Rick Wakeman titled the fifth track of his 1973 album The Six Wives of Henry VIII simply "Anne Boleyn". The Dutch symphonic rock band Kayak released a single called "Anne" about her from their 1980 album Periscope Life. The English band alt-J wrote part of their song "Deadcrush" about Anne, referring to her as "Anna Bolina". The Dutch progressive metal band Ex Libris devoted the first chapter of their trilogy "ANN" to her life, covering her courtship, a miscarriage, and her beheading across three tracks.

  Anne's presence in television comedy and drama ranges from the macabre to the absurd. In The Addams Family, Morticia's headless doll is named Anne Boleyn. An episode of The Office (US) has Dwight Schrute identifying "Greensleeves" as a traditional English ballad about the beheaded Anne Boleyn. In Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Anne is named among famous historical fallen witches during an exorcism ritual. In Season 2 of Gossip Girl, Blair Waldorf cites Anne as a cautionary tale about thinking only with one's heart. In RuPaul's Drag Race: UK vs the World Series 2, Tia Kofi won the Snatch Game challenge portraying Anne.

  The claim that Anne was a witch connects her portrait, visible on the Hogwarts staircases in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, to centuries of suspicion about her. That suspicion was itself part of the case against her in 1536, and it has never fully left the cultural imagination.

• 7. Anne in Literature

  ›

  William Shakespeare is believed by some scholars to have encoded Anne's downfall in The Winter's Tale, written in 1610-11. He and John Fletcher depicted her directly in The Famous History of the Life of King Henry VIII, written around 1613, where she appears spelled as Anne Bullen, and the play follows her wooing by Henry and the events leading to the birth of Princess Elizabeth.

  Hilary Mantel made Anne a central character in Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies, where the court politics surrounding her rise and fall are filtered through the perspective of Thomas Cromwell. Susan Bordo examined how Anne has been constructed across time in The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England's Most Notorious Queen (2013). Jean Bruller, writing as Vercors, produced a French-language Anne Boleyn in 1985 that presents her as a far-sighted English patriot who sought to make England strong and independent by ending its dependence on the Catholic Church and building up its navy.

  Robin Maxwell wrote two novels centered on Anne: The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn (1997) and Mademoiselle Boleyn (2007). Nancy Kress placed Anne at the center of a science fiction story, "And Wild For To Hold", in which she is kidnapped by time travelers and brought to a future society where she engages in political intrigue. The range of literary Annes, from Shakespeare's Anne Bullen to Kress's time-traveling queen, traces a path that shows how a single historical figure can be pressed into almost any generic shape a writer requires.

  The 2019 novel The Most Happy, by Holly Eloise Walters, follows Anne from childhood to death. That same sustained interest from writers continues to generate new titles, suggesting that the archive is not closing but expanding, with each new version implicitly arguing against the ones that came before.