King Henry VIII (Shakespeare in Performance).

One of the services performed by this series is to provide volumes on both the widely studied and the lesser known plays. Tastes change and the theatrical repertoire follows suit. Both Love's Labour's Lost and Titus Andronicus are held in higher esteem today than a hundred years ago and frequently revived while the once popular King Henry VIII has become a collector's item for the assiduous theatregoer. Hugh Richmond is a strong advocate of the play's importance, claiming that 'its diverse qualities of verbal realism and physical spectacle . . . have had a sustained and decisive influence on the history of the English stage and even on the evolution of historical realism in the medium of cinematic film'. He writes out of his experience as an editor of the text and as a producer of the play for stage and television, making good use of the latter in exploring its potential in performance.

Richmond uses the term 'realism' …