Photo rights: Nick Clarke
- March 21 2026 Directed by Elisabeth Dutton, The Trial of Thomas Cranmer by Anne Ridler, revived at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford: the site of Cranmer’s Trial.
Directed by Elisabeth Dutton and sponsored by The University of Fribourg’s Department of English:
Sponsored by WOMARD, Perry Mills directs …. The Enterlude of the Godly Queen Hester
Unperformed since the sixteenth century, and now played once more by a boys’ company, this play about the revered Old Testament Queen Esther is also a political satire on the fall of Thomas Wolsey, right-hand man of Henry VIII. Written in 1529 by Anonymous, King Assuerus can be seen as Henry, Esther as Katherine of Aragon, and Aman as the disgraced Cardinal. The ‘evil counsellor’ figure was important to Tudor drama of dissent; when it was unsafe to criticise the monarch directly, it was possible instead to attack his advisors, and blame unpopular policies on their bad advice. Alongside the English Enterlude, Edward’s Boys also present a short purimshpil. The purim plays (still a living tradition in Yiddish) tell the story of Esther in a rather different mode, celebrating the rescue of the Jewish people by their heroine in farcical style.
WOMARD 