Henry VIII

This is reckoned by cerebral types to be Shakespeare’s final work, but tradition accords that honour to The Tempest. Whatever its compositional place in the Shakespeare canon, Henry VIII is certainly one of the later works; it ends with the birth of Queen Elizabeth I, the monarch most closely associated with Shakespeare’s career. You’re forgiven if you assume that, since it’s toward the end of the canon, I’d simply lost all motivation and went for something obvious (that distinction goes to the two crowns for Richard II). In fact though, I came up with this rather unimaginative idea early on in the proceedings, due solely to my possession of a small wooden numeral 8, procured at a flea market in Brooklyn at the urging of my then three-year-old son. I will say that once I’d taken a few shots and seen how massive and towering it looked from a low angle, I was actually quite pleased with the effect. Whether it’s due to Charles Laughton’s corpulent, jaw dropping turn in in 1933’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, or Henry’s success at separating both maidens and wives from their heads, the notion of H8 as a towering, monolithic, immovable entity seemed to me to be quite effectively communicated by the lone 8, transformed by the camera angle from a friendly little forerunner of its fridge-magnet descendants, into a massive announcement of heft and mass.