The funny thing is that even though all of Henry's wives were extremely white (insofar as "whiteness" was a thing back then) people did get extremely fucking weird about the fact that Catherine of Aragon had red hair and blue eyes, while Anne Boleyn was a dark-eyed brunette
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein
It played a lot into her negative reputation, the details of her homewrecker status aside, it was a big part of the imagery of Catherine as a hapless victim of a demonic temptress Cardinal Wolsey called Anne "the night crow"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein
This was a whole thing, when Natalie Dormer auditioned to play Anne Boleyn on The Tudors and got the part, she dyed her hair without telling the producers, not knowing that they cast her largely on looks and they liked her as a blonde much better than as a brunette
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein
She describes a whole tearful confrontation once she got on set with the brown hair Where as both a history buff and an actor she felt it was incredibly insulting that they thought Anne's real hair color, a huge part of her real-life image, was "wrong" for the part
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Oh Natalie. Always a Queen, but it's never easy.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect
It does seem like this is mostly Henry and the rest being assholes, though, rather than something racialized?
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Replying to @mssilverstein
"Race" as we know it was still in the process of being invented back then but there absolutely was prejudice against darker complexioned people in favor of fairer complexion being a sign of virtue, which you can see in Shakespeare's plays etc.
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Race in Shakespeare is complicated, though. His portrayals of racialized figures are meant to be read *sympathetically* compared to other work from the time, which doesn’t mean it’s not problematic. Just that it’s not purely “racist” in an historical lens.
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Yeah even Othello is a bad person, he's tragically trapped in what Shakespeare thinks of as his inescapable biological condition, his Moorish hot blood
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Replying to @arthur_affect @OrionKidder and
And Aaron the Moor, by contrast, is not just a villain but this *ultimate* villain Like Don John in Much Ado, he gives a whole eloquent monologue about how even though he seemingly has every reason to be happy and content he's gonna blow it up because it's his nature to do so
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