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Painting efforts are going well. My portrayal of Orsino from Twelfth Night is proceeding nicely. I received my copy of the Marlowe Society newsletter from Mr. Roger Hards, and the reproduction of my painting of Christopher Marlowe looks very good. Roger also did a very nice job on the description of the painting. I was thinking about possible future, Marlowe-inspired, works and the one that persistently presents itself to my mind is a major passage in Tamburlaine where the Scythian bad-boy makes a great deal of his color scheme of white/red/black and its unpleasant connotations. Interesting that Tamburlaine's preferred color scheme was also that of Nazi Germany! Anyway, perhaps something exotically oriental could be done with an actor playing Tamburlaine at the Theatre in Marlowe's time dressed in a white/red/black Elizabethan version of Turkish or Arabian fashion...
Latest Reading: Following up Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars and Bernard's The King's Reformation, I turned to an older biography of Henry VIII by J.J. Scarisbrick. I am almost finished with the last chapter, which is a summation of the reign. The last word seems to be that of opportunities wasted. Whether one signs on with Bernard's insistence of Henry as prime mover in all acts of his reign and follower of a consistent religious line or not, in the final analysis Henry is a supremely unlikable man who seems to have done the right things for the wrong reasons. His penchant for abbreviating the opposition is also an off-putting characteristic. I was surprised, when reading Henrician history, to realize that Thomas More wasn't really the saintly Paul Schofield fellow of "A Man for All Seasons"; his burning of heretics, hair-shirt, and vitriolic writings against those who disagreed with him theologically render him a fully rounded, and really strange, individual. But Thomas More's nasty habits do not justify Henry's treatment of him. If I am not mistaken, More had guardianship/custody of a lunatic who he would regularly beat with switches in his garden at Chelsea-on the ass. Perhaps Henry should have followed this example when searching for an appropriate punishment for More's refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy.....