Bettie's Books

 

Series of plays by Mike Walker, inspired by Holinshed's Chronicles, about the early years of the Plantagenet dynasty.

The first of the House of Anjou to be king of England, Henry II's long reign was finally beset by conflict with his sons.

King Henry II ...... David Warner
Queen Eleanor ...... Jane Lapotaire
Prince Richard ...... Joseph Cohen-Cole
Prince Hal ...... Piers Wehner
Prince Geoffrey ...... Rhys Jennings
William Marshall ...... Stephen Hogan
Bertran de Bourne ...... Bruce Alexander
King Louis ...... Philip Fox
Courtier ...... John Biggins

Broadcast on:
BBC Radio 4, 3:00pm Sunday 14th February 2010.

Drama, Classic & Period, Historical
Directed by Jeremy Mortimer.

From wiki - Raphael Holinshed (died c. 1580) was an English chronicler, whose work, commonly known as Holinshed's Chronicles, was one of the major sources used by William Shakespeare for a number of his plays.

He is thought to have come from Cheshire, but lived in London, where he worked as a translator for the printer Reginald Wolfe. Wolfe gave him the project of compiling a world history from the Flood to the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This ambitious project was never finished, but one portion was published as The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1577. Holinshed was only one contributor to this work; others involved in its production included William Harrison, Richard Stanyhurst, and John Hooker.

Shakespeare used the revised second edition of the Chronicles (published in 1587) as the source for most of his history plays, the plot of Macbeth, and for portions of King Lear and Cymbeline.



Henry, known as the Young King (28 February 1155 – 11 June 1183) was the second of five sons of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was junior King of England; Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou and Maine.

Because he predeceased his father, he is not counted in the numerical succession of kings of England. Nonetheless, he was an anointed king and his royal status was not disputed. There is a question about his knighting. According to one of Becket's correspondents, Henry was knighted by his father before the coronation, but the biographer of William Marshal asserts that the king was knighted by William in the course of the rebellion of 1173.

Henry the Young King died in the summer of 1183, during the course of a campaign in the Limousin against his father and his brother, Richard. He had just completed a pillage of local monasteries to raise money to pay his mercenaries. He contracted dysentery at the beginning of June