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Except… With grand locations and epic sweeps of the camera come actors striking poses and declaiming as seriously as their cinematography demands. You’d think the 2012-2016 series is more modern than the 1960. The Hollow Crown is epic movies for television.

That, and some fantastic actors.Īn Age of Kings is made in small studios, in black and white, with an amazing cast of soon-to-be-very-famous actors who often pop up weeks later in different parts and wigs, like a theatre rep company. The main things I remember from each of these series are what you might call grand historical sweeps, from how TV is produced to how monarchs are compared in Shakespeare. Richard II in 1960 is much less fabulous than Ben Whishaw but even more all at sea than in other versions I’ve seen and Bolingbroke is just creepy, so even from the first you think ‘Neither as King, please’ (and also think ‘How can I work “insatiate cormorant!” into conversation?’). (Sadly, no episodes of The Hollow Crown are subtitled “An Age of Kings”).Īn Age of Kings – Sean Connery vs Robert Hardy

The opening episode of An Age of Kings is the first half of Richard II and takes its title from a famous line in that play: An Age of Kings 1 – The Hollow Crown. For me, it better evokes the Henriads, as they have a lot of Kings but most of them aren’t up to it (nor enjoying it). “The Hollow Crown” sounds bleaker and darker less appealing, more modern. “An Age of Kings” is a title fit for grandeur, ambition and six-months’-worth of TV. The Hollow Crown is seven movies, shown in two series in 20. But you might think of the two Henriads – sets of plays about the Henrys – as the original Roses Wars plus the Prequel Trilogy (OK, tetralogy, but Henry IV’s in two Parts, which is cheating).Īn Age of Kings is one continuous story shown fortnightly across April-November 1960, the plays broken into hour-and-a-bit episodes. These series are the only times I’ve watched all the plays as a set, though I’ve seen half of them presented solo in other versions (not counting Game of Thrones). Two of the Kings here, and not the best ones, get multiple plays to their names Edward IV doesn’t get his own. They do the complete run of the two Henriads in historical order (which even Shakespeare didn’t): Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III. What’s A Henriad and Why Do I Need To Watch Two of Them?Īn Age of Kings and The Hollow Crown are both fantastic but very different takes on the same plays. Sometimes I’m in the mood and swept away by a series like this sometimes I run up against modern avant-garde interpretation of the sort insightfully described by Shakespearean scholar Philomena Cunk as “completely f-ing unwatchable” and founder.

I’m at most a very casual Shakespeare fan. An Age of Kings – Robert Hardy chats up Judi Dench