The Stage and the Set

n school, Shakespeare was on the highest literary pedestal. His genius seemed to come from out of the blue, and flourish on a rarified plane all its own. In truth, as “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England”, the new exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, attests, the age Shakespeare was born into was a theatrical, dramatic and sometimes tragic age, one in which an upstart Welsh family—the Tudors—would marshal every art, myth and motif as they sought to assert their dynastic legitimacy after the end of the long War of the Roses, fought between the houses of York and Lancaster. Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I, would be the Tudor rulers of England. Of these, Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I, would become household names. Henry VIII—“Henry the Eighth”—remains famous for his wives, his appetite for power and his eye for objects of great beauty, from books to castles. Elizabeth I—“Queen Elizabeth”—remains famous for her authority, her virginity and the myth