SIX: The Musical by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss: A Pop Revision of the Lives of Henry VIII’s Six Wives as a Critique of the Representation of the Female Experience through Diachronic Parallels

From the early 1960s on, feminist historians set out to recover women's participation in and exclusion from processes of social transformations and political change. Moreover, these historians have focused on the marginalisation of women and their experiences in history, where most women’s achievements have been recorded as linked to those of men—if ever recorded. One consequence has been the loss of women’s perspective on several historical events, whether social, economic, political, or cultural. Historians are not the only ones trying to recover women’s contributions and experiences, as the growing number of films, books, and theatre performances on historical retellings of women’s stories demonstrate. The aim of this thesis is to argue how fictional work, specifically musical theatre, can enhance the revision of history in order to highlight the marginalisation and misrepresentation of women. Through an analysis of the musical SIX by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the dissertation will show how the authors have been able to criticise the mistreatment of the female experience by revising the lives of the six wives of Henry VIII. Presenting them as a female pop group, the authors draw diachronic parallels between the queens’ experiences as women at court in sixteenth-century England and the experience of women nowadays to show how the female experience in a male-centred and male-dominated society has not substantially changed.