Shakespeare plundered them heavily for material and made it work, but he was famously good at writing. Plus he couldn’t really do the Tudors because, for the first half of his career, they were in charge and very sensitive unless described in a manner so ludicrously adulatory as to be unwatchable by anyone whose surname wasn’t Tudor. At the end of his life, he collaborated on a play about Henry VIII – the Stuarts were reigning by then so he could get away with it – but it’s not what you’d call a corker. I suppose it must have been tricky, for the creator of Falstaff, to write about a time when
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