British Universities Film & Video Council

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Cardinal Wolsey

Synopsis
Fiction short depicting the historic disagreement between Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey concerning the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. McKernan & Terris (op cit) note "the debt to Shakespeare is revealed in one intertitle bearing the lines ‘had I but served by God with half the zeal/I served my King, he would not in mine age/Have left me naked to mine enemies’ (III,ii). The quotation does not really follow on from the depicted action, and the connection with Henry VIII is only incidental".
Country
United States
Medium
Film
Technical information
Black-and-white / Silent
Year of release
1912
Duration
997 feet

Credits

Director
J. Stuart Blackton; Lawrence Trimble
Cast
Tefft JohnsonKing Henry VIII
Julia Swayne GordonQueen Katherine
Paul LoganThomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury
Hal ReidCardinal Wolsey
Clara Kimball YoungAnne Boleyn
George OberBishop of Essex
Harold WilsonKing’s friend
Robert GaillardGardiner, later Bishop of Winchester

Additional Details

Production type
Fiction Films
Plays
Henry VIII
Subjects
Drama
Keywords
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Notes

Reviews
Ball, Robert Hamilton. Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968 (pp136-9, 338). Ball indicates gaps in the action and identifies apparently missing scenes.

McKernan, Luke and Olwen Terris. Walking Shadows: Shakespeare in the National Film and Television Archive. London: BFI, 1994 (p.74).

Production Company

Name

Vitagraph Company of America

Archive

Name

BFI National Archive

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