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

Director

Cast

Tefft Johnson	King Henry VIII
Julia Swayne Gordon	Queen Katherine
Paul Logan	Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury
Hal Reid	Cardinal Wolsey
Clara Kimball Young	Anne Boleyn
George Ober	Bishop of Essex
Harold Wilson	King’s friend
Robert Gaillard	Gardiner, later Bishop of Winchester

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).

SHAKESPEARE