Newsletter #4: Anne Boleyn, etc

Why are there so many dramas about the Tudor Queen? Plus - a Hans Holbein giveaway, a pre-historic podcast and a rumble with William the Conqueror

Just after midsummer, on June 29th 1613, the famous Globe theatre at Southwark, on the south bank of the river Thames, caught fire and burned down. The blaze was started by an overambitious display of Jacobean pyrotechnics, which is to say that some stage cannon let off during a performance set light to the theatre’s thatched roof.

At first nothing much…