A celebration of a great English heroine, Howard Brenton’s new play Anne Boleyn dramatises the life and legacy of Henry VIII’s notorious second wife.

Anne Boleyn is traditionally seen either as a pawn manipulated by an ambitious father and his friends into the King’s bed, or as a sexually licentious predator, even a witch. But Brenton puts a very different Anne – and her ghost – on the Globe stage. Witty and confident in her sexuality, she takes on the vicious world of Tudor Court politics. She is in love with Henry but also in love with the most dangerous ideas of her day. Conspiring with the exiled William Tyndale, the great translator of the Bible who was to be burnt as a heretic, Anne plots to make England Protestant, forever.

Brenton’s previous work at the Globe includes In Extremis.