SOURCE: Canby, Vincent. “Does Shakespeare Really Need B12 Shots?” New York Times 147 (14 June 1998): AR4.

In the following excerpted review, Canby evaluates the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Henry VIII at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, characterizing Gregory Doran's directorial effort as “a vigorous, clear-eyed, unhackneyed delight.”

There probably isn't a scholar or critic in the world who would rate Henry VIII as one of Shakespeare's great history plays. It possesses no grandly iconic heroes or villains of diabolic ambitions. It contains no patches of soaring verse and commemorates no single splendid event that forever changed the course of the British monarchy. It is essentially a patched-together propaganda piece.

The general belief today is that Shakespeare himself wrote less than half the text, and that John Fletcher and others were responsible for the rest. Part pageant, part history, the play seems to have been composed quickly and to order...