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My political qualms aside, this is a beautiful and sensitive adaptation, and in the hands of Ben Power and Dominic Cooke the complex story makes an enormous amount of sense.
![watch the hollow crown henry iv part 1 watch the hollow crown henry iv part 1](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/32/d6/9a/32d69a48b88b6683d62a45aa88351536.jpg)
If those pesky commoners don’t challenge anything, we’ll all get along happily, and fortunately for the BBC, the Jack Cade rebellion is being cut from this Henry VI trilogy (in an unfathomable decision – why cut the best scenes of the whole sequence, unless the BBC’s legal team really can’t stand to hear ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers’?), so there’s no real challenge to monarchy in this adaptation, just a question over which monarch should wear the crown. I find it hard not to read this, in the context of English civil wars, as a message to ‘respect your betters’ or ‘Say what you like about structural inequality and inherited privilege, but it keeps people in line’. With a slight pause before them, the words “Take but degree away, and mark what discord follows”’ hang over this new trilogy as an epigraph. Given the relative monarchism and conservatism that often marks the BBC’s Shakespeare adaptations, it’s quite something to hear the new Hollow Crown beginning with Judi Dench in voiceover intoning choice excerpts of Ulysses’ famous ‘degree’ speech from Troilus and Cressida. May 9, 2016, by Peter Kirwan The Hollow Crown: Henry VI Part 1 The BBC