Brianna here, also known as Jane the Quene.
In building this character, I have been playing a lot with Jane's seemingly oppositional traits. She was known as a gentle, compassionate and soft-spoken woman with a natural modesty. But she was also known for being incredibly firm with her ladies and enforcing huge changes in the court after Anne Boleyn. She insisted her ladies dressed demurely in gowns with high necklines.- but it seems she herself seemingly maintained a low-cut square neck in the cut of her gowns.
When it comes to making decisions as a physical performer, I have these oppositions to play with; and I also have her image. Here is a sketch made of her by Holbein.
She keeps her chin tucked, which to me looks like she mainly interacts with life through her eyes. Taking it in, being seen but not heard? Watching? Is that a passive stance or is she judging?
These are all really fun options for me to play with as an actress.
But how did this woman catch King Henry??
And then I discovered this painting...
Alright, Sexy Jane! This from a mural of Hans Holbein sketching Jane Seymour, located at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Presumably this coy, wanton pose somehow inspired the very Holbein portrait shown above? Holbein was known for only painting what he saw, and he was forgiven the resulting discrepancies as the effects of an artist's temperament and vision. After the boistrous Anne Boleyn, could Holbein have painted a modest and contained little Jane to please the eye of a king who was sick of her opposite?
I love the flirty, turned-up edges of her hat and the low, low neckline. Now this looks like a girl who could catch a King! (And that handkerchief- I was playing with a hankie for photos well before I'd seen this pic. This confirms, it's a good prop!) The discovery of this painting gives me one more layer to explore. How do I depict Jane? Whose interpretation might be truest? And does that matter when hundreds of years have passed, and after all- all these stories and paintings come from someone else. What words do we have that were her own to give us clues about who she really was?
There's seems to be some confusion; that mural was not painted BY Holbein, it is a mural OF Holbein with Jane Seymour supposedly sitting next to him. It was painted 2 centuries after these people died! There is NOTHING historically accurate about it. We have reams of documents from 16th century diplomats and court officials, so we knew exactly what kind of woman Jane Seymour was, and she most certainly wasn't this fliratious, come hither girl in the mural. Jane was dour, uptight, and VERY QUIET - which was the trait that so attracted Henry. Read that snippet of the letter that Henry wrote to Jane; then compare it to one of the ; letters he wrote to Anne Boleyn. Now that's passion. The letter to Jane could have been correspondence to one of his lawyers, for all the passion it contains. Henry was exhausted after fighting for years with both Katherine of Aragon and Anne, two women who were more than a match for him. The Seymour family poisoned his mind against Anne, made him believe that what he needed was a quiet, submissive, obdeient wife - and stuck Jane under his nose at the right moment. Whether she was truly that way is another story, but had she been the alluring coquette of that mural, given Henry's desire for a chaste, mousy wife, she probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere with him at that time. After KoA and Anne, all he wanted for a wife was a very pampered brood mare, a woman to produce sons, and otherwise leave him alone. As for her clothing, the square necklines of her dresses seem to be cut rather low, but if you notice, she's wearing a white filler that does all the way up her neck. Jane was VERY prudish, which is just what Henry wanted at the time, after 10 years with an incorrigible flirt like Anne. The Imperial ambassador, Chapuays, made it clear in his letter to the Emperor that Queen Jane didn't have much of a bosom, so even if she wanted to, there wasn't anything to show off!
ReplyDeleteIf you're going to portray Jane, just pretend you're a dour school marm with absolutely no sense of humour, and you'll have Jane down to a T!