Divorced, Beheaded, Live in Concert: Race-ing Henry’s VIII’s Queens in Six

The hit pop musical Six, written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, reimagines the six wives of Henry VIII as a contemporary girl group. Six premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017, and has since toured through the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. A version was even staged on a Norwegian cruise line in 2019. Six has been extremely popular, has been performed to sellout crowds internationally, and was nominated for five Laurence Olivier Awards in 2019. The musical gives each of the queens of Henry VIII the chance to tell her story in song and dance, and explicitly transforms the story of women whom history has pitted against each other into a vision of inclusive feminist sisterhood for the twenty-first-century. Six has no men in the cast at all, featuring only people who identify as women or non-binary in both the cast and the band. Significantly, the show’s color-blind casting has meant that each of the queens has been represented as a woman of color.¹ The musical format opens up a unique space for a creative re-interpretation of history, in which the whiteness of the British monarchy is replaced with a vision of diverse representation which appeals to the expectations of a young twenty-first-century audience. The combination of contemporary pop music and a historical storyline, unique to historical musicals such as Six and Hamilton, allows for a conscious blending of the sexual and racial politics of the present with stories of the past. 

Six is a celebratory feminist reinterpretation of the “divorced-beheaded-died-divorced-beheaded-survived” narrative; the show’s tagline is “Divorced. Beheaded. LIVE in concert!” The plot of the musical is simple: the wives compete to win the title of the wife who had to endure the most hardships as a result of her marriage to Henry VIII. Each wife has a solo number to convince the audience that she should be given this title. At the end of Six, the wives decide that competing against each other is not the way forward. Instead, they decide to reclaim the narratives of their own lives. It is the six, they realise, who make Henry interesting, and not the other way around.

Six uses contemporary pop songs to tell the stories of its six queens. Each queen is associated with a specific type of singer, and her solo is inspired by the type of music associated with that singer (her “Queenspiration”). Catherine of Aragon, for instance, is styled after Beyoncé and Shakira, and her song “No Way” is an up-tempo girl power anthem.² Many of these Queenspirations are artists of color: Anne of Cleves is modelled after Nicki Minaj and Rihanna, for instance. Interestingly, it is the wife who is associated primarily with submissiveness – Jane Seymour, the woman who gave Henry the son he craved – who is associated most closely with a white artist (Adele is the touchstone for Jane’s solo, “Heart of Stone”).³ Six also uses intentional anachronism in order to present a vision of the past that is in line with the sensibilities of the present: Anne Boleyn, for instance, refers to texting Henry, and Anne of Cleves notes that her problem was that she did not look like her “profile picture.”⁴ Katharine Harris has argued that the use of intentional anachronism is characteristic of neo-historical fiction, which, “enables the texts to be their most honest, authentic selves.”⁵

Six makes no claims to historical fact — the show is sung by women who refer to their own beheadings. The musical is openly revisionist, asking the audience to reconsider the well-worn narrative of Henry VIII’s queens firmly through the lens of the present, making visible the presentism of all historical fictions.

Even as the show does not ask the audience to take it seriously as “accurate” history, Six demonstrates a comprehensive knowledge of the mythos associated with each queen in the popular imagination. Anne Boleyn’s solo, “Don’t Lose Ur Head,” is inspired by the music of Avril Lavigne and Lily Allen, and presents her as a cheeky, rebellious woman who did not really intend to cause the chaos that she leaves in her wake, but could not really do any different in the circumstances. The musical challenges the perception that Anne was a self-aware schemer: instead, the Anne of Six does not anticipate the effects of her actions. Six is aware of the way that each queen has been associated with a specific “type” – the patient one (Catherine of Aragon), the ambitious one (Anne Boleyn), the compliant one (Jane Seymour), the plain one (Anne of Cleves), the flighty one (Katherine Howard), and the intelligent one (Catherine Parr) – and actively works to nuance our understandings of each woman. Perhaps the most easily visible manifestation of Six‘s revision of Tudor history, however, is its casting of actors of color to represent the most infamous queens of English history. The choice to race Henry’s queens against the backdrop of Brexit and racist public commentary about Meghan Markle, the first mixed-race woman to enter the British Royal Family, allows Six to reject the whiteness of British history and instead postulate an inclusive, diverse vision of modern British identity. 

Color-blind casting, Hamilton and Six

Color-blind casting is a term that refers to the practice of disregarding skin color when casting for roles. Color-blind casting is usually conceptualised as offering opportunities to actors of color to play roles from which they would otherwise be excluded. However, the fact that color-blind casting allows for greater diversity on the stage does not mean it is an entirely unproblematic practice. The term implicitly defines whiteness as neutral and universal, while people of color are marked out as different. The emphasis on “blindness” presumes that the casting process is apolitical, and that we should not notice or comment on the politics of a non-white actor taking on a role usually associated with white actors. To be “color-blind” is often taken up as a liberal defense against racism that denies the realities of structural racism: “I don’t see race” does not mean systemic racism does not exist.⁶ Color-blind casting has become increasingly common on Broadway since the mid-1970s hit A Chorus Line, although, as Todd Decker argues, the presence of a diverse cast onstage did not translate into a real consideration of race within the shows themselves.⁷ As Peter Erickson writes, this notion of color-blind casting has given way to a more conscious perception of the “full, varied range of color-blind effects.”⁸ It is questionable whether color-blind casting, for instance, does actually result in increased opportunities for actors of color, who are still in the minority on theatre stages across the Western world. As Angela Pao has shown, too, color-blind casting sometimes has the effect of emphasizing “assimilation” into whiteness, as the practice can have the effect of flattening out difference and assuming equality amongst different races.⁹ Color-blind casting has also been used by those acting in bad faith to cast white actors in roles written for Black people. The theatre industry has accordingly moved towards a model of “color-conscious” casting, in which an affirmative action model is adopted to ensure diversity.¹⁰ Ayanna Thompson provides another conceptual means through which to view color-blind casting, arguing that “cross-cultural casting assumes that an actor’s race carries a wealth of semiotic meanings that can and should inform a production’s cultural, historical, and perhaps even political landscape.”¹¹ According to Thompson, cross-cultural casting is not a process of “blinding” people to race, but a process of making race, with all its attendant meanings, a key part of the fabric of the performance. While Six does not precisely center race in the performance itself, in that race is not explicitly raised in the script or the lyrics of the song, the aesthetics of the show, the style of the costumes, and the show’s fandom all emphasize the color-conscious nature of the production.

Six‘s closest analogue is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, which tells the story of Revolution era American political Alexander Hamilton through the mediums of hip-hop, jazz and other contemporary musical styles. Hamilton does not precisely adhere to a color-blind casting policy. Instead, the show mandates that the principal roles are to be played by non-white actors; this approach is more accurately defined as “color-conscious.” The show’s original Broadway cast included Miranda as Alexander Hamilton, Daveed Diggs as Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Jackson as George Washington, and Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr; the Founding Fathers of the United States are embodied exclusively by men of color. Likewise, the Schuyler sisters (Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy) were all played by women of color. The only role to be consistently played by a white actor is that of King George III, who was played by Jonathan Groff in the original 2015 Broadway production.

Hamilton’s practice of featuring people of color in the roles of the Founding Fathers has not been without controversy. The legality of calling for non-white actors in a casting call was briefly challenged in New York, for instance.¹² More significantly, Donatella Galella has argued that the show occupies a “centrist position that mobilizes performers of color and the myth of meritocracy in order to extol and envision the United States as a multiracial utopia.”¹³ In this reading, the show’s celebration of immigrant success elides the reality of structural racism. As Alex Nichols has written, too, casting Black men in the role of historical figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson is an “audacious choice given that both men are strongly associated with owning, and in the case of the latter, raping and impregnating slaves.” ((Alex Nichols, “You Should Be Terrified That People Who Like ‘Hamilton’ Run Our Country,” Current Affairs, July 2016, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/07/you-should-be-terrified-that-people-who-like-hamilton-run-our-country.))The casting of women of color to play the Schuyler sisters was also a point of critique, given that the Schuyler family owned people who were enslaved. The show also does not feature any actual people of color from history, as Lyra Monteiro points out.¹⁴ Elissa Harbert, however, has suggested that negative reviews of history musicals are common, and reflect a “prevailing skepticism about the value of history as entertainment and the suitability of Broadway musicals for enacting serious issues.”¹⁵ While her analysis does not extend to Six, which has received almost universally positive reviews, Harbert’s work suggests an ambivalence amongst theatre critics and historians alike about the capacity of the genre to handle the complexity of historical subject matter.

However, others have seen Hamilton‘s casting policy as an empowering political strategy for breaking down perceptions of the stage as a space associated with whiteness. Brian Eugenio Herrera writes that the “non-white casting call strategically flips the script of those casting conventions that purport neutrality while actually privileging variations of whiteness as most neutral, versatile, or universal.”¹⁶ Heather S. Nathans has also argued that Hamilton “invites artists and audiences to invoke the power of performance in re-imagining the nation’s most familiar narratives, as well as the stories of those who lives have not been preserved in the archives.”¹⁷ This reading stresses the radicalism of Miranda, who has Puerto Rican heritage, reimagining and recasting the Founding Fathers so that they resemble precisely those people who have largely been invisible in accounts of the founding of the United States. Patricia Herrera has also written that Hamilton “makes visible the Afro-diasporic significance in American history in the face of a larger society that rarely recognizes it,” focusing on the way that the show’s music opens up discussions about the influence of Latinx musicians on the development of American hip-hop.¹⁸ More significantly, perhaps, Hamilton makes visible the revolutionary ethos that underpinned American society, and by foregrounding Black actors, it implicitly asks audiences to connect the drive to reform society with the structural racism that people of color still face within the United States. While Hamilton provides a diverse audience with a way into the otherwise whitewashed landscape of American history, it also models a way of thinking through the politics of the present through the lens of the politics of the past. The world of Hamilton is an America in which people of color populate “the room where it happens.” Likewise, Six is a vision of British history in which women of color exist; the wives of Henry VIII are not a collection of white women, but instead, a diverse, inclusive range of women of all races.

Six has an official “color-blind” casting policy — and all productions to date across the world have featured multiple women of color in their casts — but I would argue that their actual approach to casting would be better defined as “color-conscious,” because casting calls for productions of the show explicitly ask for “the most exceptionally talented group of people of all shapes, sizes and ethnicities.”¹⁹ To date, no production of Six has ever been exclusively comprised of white artists, suggesting a consciousness about the need for a diverse cast. No individual role is designated as belonging to an actress of color, and all six queens have variously been played by women of different races in different productions across the globe. In the 2020 Australian production, for instance, at least three of the queens were played by women of color. Given that the British monarchy have represented an ongoing legacy of white nationhood and colonial exploitation, the radicalism of presenting the queens of Henry VIII, perhaps England’s most famous king, as women of color cannot be understated. While Henry VIII’s reign predates England’s involvement in the slave trade, which commenced during the reign of his daughter Elizabeth I, the English royal family directly supported and facilitated the slave trade until the beginning of the nineteenth-century, and benefited from it financially long beyond that. As Afua Hirsch writes, “it’s no exaggeration to say that the wealth of the royal family, much like the wealth of the nation itself, was built on the back of slavery and related trade, investment, and industry.”²⁰

The politics of Moss and Marlow’s decision to cast women of color as Henry’s queens has gone largely unremarked upon, however, even while Hamilton‘s use of Black actors to portray men who owned enslaved people continues to be a source of controversy. On the face of it, Six‘s use of color-blind casting is rather less politically charged: none of these women owned slaves or was directly responsible for any of the sins of colonialism. It is rather easier to depoliticize Henry VIII’s queens than it is America’s Founding Fathers. Another potential point of critique is the fact that Six never directly addresses race at all: there is no diegetic commentary on race or colonialism at any point throughout the production. However, there is something deeply subversive about representing Catherine of Aragon, in particular, as a woman of color. Catherine’s parents, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, presided over the Reconquista, in which their Muslim and Jewish subjects were either forcibly converted to Christianity or exiled from Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella also conquered Granada and overthrew the Muslim dynasty that had ruled the area for centuries, and their patronage of Christopher Columbus led to the establishment of Spain as a major colonial power throughout the Americas. James H. Sweet has argued that modern understandings of race can be traced directly back to Spain, asserting that, “Iberian racism was a necessary precondition for the system of human bondage that would develop in the Americas during the sixteenth-century and beyond.”²¹ Casting Catherine of Aragon as a woman of color, whose song is modelled on the music style of Beyoncé, can be read by the historically literate viewer as a direct rejection of the racism that underpinned the Reconquista.

There is also considerable evidence that the supposed whiteness of the Tudor era specifically is central to understandings of English nationhood. The prominent English historian David Starkey recently stated in an interview that Miranda Kauffman’s award-winning Black Tudors, which examines the lives of Black people living in Tudor England, was “the invention of a false past”, despite the fact that Kauffman was working with documentary sources that made clear that it is presumptions of the whiteness of the past that constitute an invented idea about history.²² There has been much written about the use of an imagined racially homogenous medieval past by extremists and white supremacists, and given the slipperiness of the boundary delineating “medieval” and “early modern,” it is reasonable to suggest that the Tudor era is also bound up in these assumptions of whiteness.²³ David Starkey’s racist reading of English history affirms the belief often espoused by white supremacists that the medieval and early modern period were culturally homogeneous and, therefore, white utopias that have been subsequently destroyed by the introduction of racial diversity. Six is, on the surface, immersed in a context of which British nationalists would approve: the Tudor past.

In 2010, Michael Gove, who was then Education Secretary but would later be one of the co-conveners of the Brexit-era Vote Leave Committee, advocated for the history curriculum in schools to be overhauled to emphasize a pro-empire account of British history.²⁴ The Tudor period is significant to such “pro-empire” accounts because it was the epoch in which the empire was inaugurated and because it is often referred to as a Golden Age for England; a time of colonial expansion and intellectual achievement, culminating in the works of William Shakespeare. Peter Mandler has described this veneration of the Tudor period as the “cult of the Olden Time,” which stretches from the end of the Wars of the Roses through to the Civil War, but which is most commonly associated with the “Merrie England of Good Queen Bess.”²⁵ The sheer ubiquity of representations of the Tudor period suggests that the era has always had a unique appeal; my research uncovered several hundred historical fictions have been written about Anne Boleyn alone over the past five hundred years.²⁶

Representing the most famous queens of England as a collective of multiracial women takes on additional depth and significance when read against the Brexit vote in 2016, in which the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. The Leave vote deployed anti-immigrant discourse, and “an appeal to an imperial past and an immigration-free future.”²⁷ Research has also indicated that concerns about non-white immigration drove votes for the Leave campaign from both the white working-class and the white middle-class; in other words, the vote to leave the European Union cannot be understood as being tied solely to economic disadvantage, as is often alleged.²⁸ There is also significant evidence that “Brexit did not instigate racism and xenophobia, but brought it to the surface in a state-sanctioned way through the referendum.”²⁹ At a time when increasingly insular definitions of nationhood were gaining currency, Six asks that the audience reconsider existing definitions of Englishness which equate it with whiteness by providing a visual display of the racial diversity of England (and the other countries in which the show has been staged). While such color-consciousness in casting is always political, the significance of Six‘s decision to represent English history in this manner and at this time cannot be overstated. While the show lacks a diegetic commentary on race, the visual manifestation of an inclusive England disrupts heteropatriarchal, colonial and white supremacist ideologies.  

The reign of Henry VIII is particularly significant to this reconsideration of English national identity, as it was Henry who broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. England as a Protestant nation, as distinct from Catholic continental Europe, has since the sixteenth-century been a key element of its national identity. As David Reynolds argues, it was in this period and into the reign of Elizabeth I that a new national identity emerged: “rooted in providentalist interpretations of recent history, it depicted the English as a staunchly Protestant nation, blessed by God’s protection.”³⁰ Six makes many references to the Reformation, including the line “Okay ladies let’s get in Reformation”: a witty rewriting of a line from Beyoncé’s single Formation.³¹ However, Six does not take the English Reformation at all seriously as some kind of nation-defining move towards reason and away from superstition: instead, Anne Boleyn sings about how the Reformation simply had to happen because the Catholic Church unreasonably prevented her and Henry from getting “X-rated.”³² Six does not reproduce a nostalgic vision of the Tudor period as the glorious birth of rational Protestantism, but instead represents the court of Henry as a violent, exploitative, and misogynist world. While the show does draw parallels between the way women have been treated in the past and in the present – which is especially evident in Katherine Howard’s solo “All You Wanna Do,” in which she gradually realizes the extent of her own victimization at the hands of men – the audience is not invited to see the Tudor court as glamorous or appealing in any way. Instead, we are invited to see the Tudor world as a heteropatriarchal world that damaged and victimized women

The casting of Six also prompts a consideration of the relationship of history to race discourse today. The rise of Six has also almost exactly coincided with the period in which the American biracial actress Meghan Markle met, began a relationship with, and married Prince Harry. The couple’s relationship began in July 2016, and their relationship was announced on 27 November 2017. In a statement on 8 November 2016, Prince Harry condemned what he described as the “outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments,” as well as the media more broadly.³³ In January 2020, the pair announced that they were stepping down from their roles as senior royal members, largely due to racist and sexist commentary about Markle. In other words, just as Six was providing British audiences with the visual spectacle of a range of multiracial “queens,” the only biracial member of the royal family for centuries – albeit one who would almost certainly never become queen – was being subjected to such vitriolic racism that the younger son of the heir to the throne felt it necessary to leave his royal duties and flee to the United States.³⁴ When their son Archie was born in May 2019, a BBC presenter was fired for tweeting an image of a chimpanzee which he labelled ‘Royal Baby leaves hospital.”³⁵ As Nathalie Weidhase has written, much of the tone of the media coverage about Markle suggests that her marriage to Prince Harry has put the “purity of the royal family…under threat.”³⁶ As Mira Assaf Kafantaris argues of the politics of interracial marriages like Meghan and Harry’s, “an interracial union embodies a fear of irreversible change; white hope promises racial purity, and interracial marriage disrupts this fantasy.”³⁷ If Markle’s presence was a problem for the British monarchy, so too has been her absence. Discourse around their move to the United States has been described as “selfish” and “deluded,” and Markle has been framed as the prime mover behind the decision to “force” Prince Harry away from his family.³⁸ While Markle’s identity as a biracial American divorcée had previously and optimistically been framed as the modernization that the monarchy required, the British royal family seemingly could not accommodate or imagine a woman of color as a royal body. As Weidhase writes, “a conservative institution cannot cover up the ideological underpinnings of a deeply regressive politics, and instead works only to make visible the imperial nostalgia at the heart of Brexit.”³⁹ Six completely overturns this conservative image of the British monarchy by instead reimagining it as the most progressive, inclusive space imaginable. While at the beginning of the show, the wives bicker among themselves, by the end of the show they revel in their closeness and develop a sympathetic bond based on the fact that they have all suffered at the hands of the same man; in other words, they become a sisterhood. The gap between how Britain actually treated a biracial royal woman and the way that the show normalises the spectacle of a queen of color suggests that Six is quite self-conscious in its revisionist presentation of the British monarchy. 

The radicalism of Six‘s revisionist portrait of Tudor England has perhaps not been noted because the show itself does not call attention to race at all. Unlike Hamilton, which features diegetic commentary about its color-conscious portrayal of the Founding Fathers – “immigrants get the job done” is a famous line from the musical that calls attention to the diversity of its cast – in Six it is simply taken as a given that the actors portraying the queens reflect the racial diversity of the present. These queens look and sound like modern women, not remote Tudor figures. They wear modern, colorful costumes featuring short skirts, fishnet stockings and diamante boots, with only the barest nod to Tudor costume, such as the ruffs that the cast wear when performing “Haus of Holbein.” Hamilton, by way of contrast, dresses the actors in more obviously period-style clothing. The fact that Catherine of Aragon has been played by actors of color is not what draws attention in coverage of Six, because the show has never asked that people notice or comment on that casting choice. Reviews usually only make reference to the “diverse” cast in passing, and recent articles about the growing popularity of the musical do not make reference to the racial element of the show at all.⁴⁰ Instead, audiences are positioned to accept that England is multiracial and, further, that it has always been multiracial. The show therefore disrupts white supremacist ideologies through the visual spectacle of its “queening” of non-white actors. Like Hamilton, Six presents a fantasy rewriting of England and its past, present and future. Instead of being a landscape where women are persecuted, preyed upon, and killed by men, the musical celebrates an empowered, diverse range of female experiences and imagines a space in which women transcend their roles as wives. History may not have looked quite like this, Six suggests, but the future can be precisely this kind of celebratory inclusive feminist space.

Redefining queens

Six champions inclusive female power and works to dismantle the traditional definition of a queen as a woman married to a king by removing Henry VIII from the show entirely. While the wives initially fought amongst themselves, the musical plots their realisation that they have all suffered because of the same man. In Six, a woman’s power lies not in her relationship to a man, but within her support of other women: as Catherine Parr declares, “All I need is Six.”⁴¹ No longer wives – or ex-wives – the reimagined Tudor queens become a multiracial sisterhood. At the end of the musical, the wives band together to imagine alternative futures for themselves. Catherine of Aragon refuses to marry Henry and instead joins a gospel choir; Anne Boleyn writes lyrics for William Shakespeare; Jane Seymour lives and starts a family band; Anne of Cleves parties; Katherine Howard sings; and Catherine Parr brings the six together to record an album.⁴² The song “Six” presents a fantasy future for each queen but, more importantly, repeatedly stresses unity and self-definition beyond their role as “wives.” The song is essentially a revised version of the musical’s opening number, “Ex-Wives,” but this time the word “wife” is rejected: “we used to be six wives.” They decouple their lives from Henry and celebrate that, “we’re free to take our crowning glory.” They have spent “too many years lost in his story,” and refuse to do so any longer.⁴² They should not be celebrated for who they married, but for who they were. These women are not important because they were married to Henry and therefore took up the role of queen consort. They were queens because they were remarkable women in their own rights. What Six does, then, is essentially rewrite the definition of queen. The historical position of queen, whether queen consort or queen regnant, is a solitary one. It involves one woman holding political, social, and economic power over other women, whether that power is accrued through marriage or through birth.

Against the individual role of “queen,” Six posits a broader view of queens that extends from the queens that it depicts on the stage outward into the audience. This dynamic in the play is extended through to the audience through the activities of the show’s fandom, which I will turn to in a moment, and diegetically through the inclusion of the audience into the text of the musical itself. The audience is invited to sing along and film the “Megasix” encore, for instance, and a line about the familiarity of the story of Henry VIII and his six wives through the “A Levels” was converted to a reference to the “HSC” (Higher School Certificate) for the 2020 Australian production. The show functions less as a narrative-driven musical (like Hamilton), and more as a pop concert; there is no “action” as such beyond the audience’s engagement with the queens and their songs. Six has a slim running-time of approximately seventy-five minutes, and there are no cast members besides the six queens and the (all-female or non-binary) band, enhancing the concert-like atmosphere.  Audience members also often also cosplay as their favourite queen, and so a direct alignment with the show and its audiences is fostered.

Six actively thinks about and promotes this sense of feminist solidarity across all intersecting vectors of disadvantage in its fandom suggests its commitment to intersectionality and inclusion. Six has accrued a robust, global online fandom since its premiere in 2017, and this fandom is known as the “Queendom.” In the world of Six, everybody who identifies as a woman or a non-binary person is a queen in a global and diverse sisterhood of queens. By referring to the show’s fans as “queens,” Six invites audience identification with this celebration of female power and ambition, and proactively uses social media to encourage emotional investment in the show. A frequent slogan that is used both within the fandom and by the Six social media team is “queens fix each other’s crowns.” In a tweet directly addressing a specific piece of audience criticism levelled at a member of the cast, the official Twitter account put out the following statement: “Listen up Queens! It’s been brought to our attention that some of our followers have been making hurtful comments to our incredible cast. The Queendom is a place of sisterhood, empowerment and togetherness. We celebrate each other every day and fix each other’s crowns.”⁴³ In a follow-up, they tweeted: “The message of SIX is to NOT compare. We are ALL royalty and we are ALL fabulous.”⁴³ These messages affirm the message of diversity that Six is keen to promulgate: the lesson of the show is that all women and non-binary people are queens and that is the role of all queens to support each other. It is important to note that the tweets referred to here were criticizing the size of a West End cast-member’s body, and were not examples of racist abuse.

The show’s demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion is also reflected in the demographics of its fandom. Aya Esther Hayashi has recently suggested that a “young, networked audience could be the key to diversifying theatrical audiences,” which is borne out by the success of Six‘s deliberate efforts to cultivate a young, diverse fandom.⁴⁴ A video of fans and cast members singing one of the songs from the musical while in COVID-19 lockdown makes visible the diversity of the fandom: the video highlights fans of all ages, races, genders, sexual orientations, sizes and abilities.⁴⁵ This video was compiled by a member of the Six team and is, admittedly, self-selecting. However, the video does reinforce the message that the creators of Six are not presuming default or universal whiteness in their audience and are actively seeking to reinforce the message that representation matters to Six; the conscious inclusion of non-white faces is an example of the kind of anti-racist praxis that is at the heart of the production. The diversity of the cast is mirrored by the diversity of Six‘s audience, and vice versa. Rukmini Pande has argued that fan studies has predominantly focused attention on white, cis-gendered, middle-class, female fans of popular media texts, and that transcultural and transnational fandoms have therefore been neglected.⁴⁶ Six retells the story of six extremely privileged white women who died five hundred years ago, and yet, it has become a unique example of a popular cultural product that has accrued a truly transnational and transcultural fandom precisely because of the inclusiveness of its representational practices.

The commitment to a fantasy past, present, and future is perhaps what unites Hamilton and Six most strongly. Both Hamilton and Six create corrective accounts of the past through their exploitation of the radical capacity of the pop history musical. For Hamilton, US history is reimagined as a triumphant immigrant narrative, while Six reimagines British monarchical history as an inclusive feminist network of sister queens. The creators of both know very well that this is not what history actually looked like, but they use intentional anachronism, contemporary pop music, and color-conscious casting in order to posit a new way of imagining the past in line with contemporary values. Six has a lot to say about ways of understanding history, but it has more to say about the intersection of race and power in the present. The show disrupts the heteropatriarchal world of Tudor history and promotes a new vision of British identity that is not tethered to whiteness. The queens of Six are gloriously, proudly diverse. Long may they reign.      

Works Cited

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Elliott, Andrew B.R. “Internet Medievalism and the White Middle Ages.” History Compass 16, no. 3 (2018): 1–10.

Erickson, Peter. “Afterword: The Blind Side in Colorblind Casting.” In Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. Edited by Ayanna Thompson, 241–49. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Galella, Donatella. “Being in ‘The Room Where It Happens’: Hamilton, Obama, and Nationalist Neoliberal Multicultural Inclusion.” Theatre Survey 59, no. 3 (2018): 363–85.

Harbert, Elissa. “Unlikely Subjects: The Critical Reception of History Musicals,” in The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical. Edited by Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman, 312–21. London: Routledge: 2020.

Harris, Katharine. “‘Part of the Project of That Book Was Not to Be Authentic’: Neo-Historical Authenticity and Its Anachronisms in Contemporary Historical Fiction.” Rethinking History 21, no. 2 (2017): 193–212.

Hayashi, Aya Esther. “‘YouTube! Musicals! YouTubescials!’: Cultivating Theatre Fandom through New Media.” In The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical. Edited by Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman, 374–83. London: Routledge, 2020.

Herrera, Brian Eugenio. “Miranda’s Manifesto.” Theater 47, no. 2 (2017): 23–33.

Herrera, Patricia. “Hamilton, Democracy, and Theatre in America.” Howlround: Theatre Commons, 2016. https://howlround.com/hamilton-democracy-and-theatre-america.

Hirsch, Afua. Brit(Ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. London: Vintage, 2018.

Hopkins, Kristin Bria. “There’s No Business Like Show Business: Abandoning Color-Blind Casting and Embracing Color-Conscious Casting in American Theatre.” Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law 9, no. 2 (2018): 131–55.

Kafantaris, Mira Assaf. “Why the Brits Can’t Keep Calm and Carry On About the Royal Baby (Hint: It’s About Race).” The Rambling, August 2019. https://the-rambling.com/2019/08/19/issue5-kafantaris/.

Kaufman Amy S., and Paul B. Sturtevant. The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2020.

Kornhaber, Spencer. “Hamilton: Casting After Colorblindness.” The Atlantic, March 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/hamilton-casting/476247/.

Mandler, Peter. “Revisiting the Olden Time: Popular Tudorism in the Time of Victoria.” In Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century. Edited by Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull, 13–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Marlow, Toby and Lucy Moss. Six: The Musical Songbook (Piano/Voice). London: Faber Music, 2020.

Marlow, Toby and Lucy Moss. Six: Divorced, Beheaded Broadway (Broadway Production Program). 2020.

McHenry, Jackson. “The Pop Queens of Six Will Start Belting on Broadway Again This September.” Vulture, May 2021. https://www.vulture.com/2021/05/musical-six-to-start-performances-on-broadway-september.html.

Milne, Seumas. “This Attempt to Rehabilitate Empire Is a Recipe for Conflict.” The Guardian, June 10, 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jun/10/british-empire-michael-gove-history-teaching.

Miyashiro, Adam. “‘Our Deeper Past’: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics.” Literature Compass 16 (2019): 1–11.

Monteiro, Lyra D. “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton,” The Public Historian 38, no. 1 (2016): 89–98.

Nathans, Heather S. “Crooked Histories: Re-Presenting Race, Slavery, and Alexander Hamilton Onstage.” Journal of the Early Republic 37, no. 2 (2017): 271–8.

Nichols, Alex. “You Should Be Terrified That People Who Like ‘Hamilton’ Run Our Country.” Current Affairs, July 2016. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/07/you-should-be-terrified-that-people-who-like-hamilton-run-our-country.

Pande, Rukmini. Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018.

Pao Angela C. No Safe Spaces: Re-Casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.

Paskett, Zoe. “How Six the Musical Became West End Royalty: From the Stage to the Queens of Streaming.” Evening Standard, December 4, 2020. https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/theatre/six-the-musical-history-west-end-b141329.html

Puente, Maria. “‘Megexit’ Divides U.K.: Is Meghan Markle to Blame for Royal Shocker?” USA Today, January 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2020/01/10/meghan-blamed-prince-harry-move-megxit/4419133002/.

Reynolds, David. Island Stories: Britain and Its History in the Age of Brexit. London: William Collins, 2019.

Russo, Stephanie. The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Sweet, James H. “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought.” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 143–66.

Thompson, Ayanna. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Valdes y Cocom, Mario de. “Queen Charlotte.” PBS.org. Accessed July 17, 2020. pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/royalfamily.html. However, this suggestion has been disputed by other historians.

Weidhase, Nathalie. “‘Prince Harry Has Gone Over to the Dark Side’: Race, Royalty and US-UK Romance in Brexit Britain.” In Love Across the Atlantic: US-UK Romance in Popular Culture. Edited by Barara Jane Brickman, Deborah Jermyn, and Theodore Louis Trost, 275–90. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

1. There has been some recent criticism by scholars about the ableism of the term “color-blind.” See, for instance: Subini Ancy Annamma, Darrell D. Jackson, and Deb Morrison, “Conceptualising Color-Evasiveness: Using Dis/Ability Critial Race Theory to Expand a Color-Blind Racial Ideology in Education and Society,” Race Ethnicity and Education 20, no. 2 (2017): 147–62. However, the term has been used here as it is still widely used and commonly understood, and used in commentary about the casting practices of Hamilton in particular. [↩]
2. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, Six: The Musical Songbook (Piano/Voice) (London: Faber Music, 2020), 115. [↩]
3. Six: Divorced, Beheaded Broadway (Broadway Production Program), 2020. [↩]
4. Marlow and Moss, 117. [↩]
5. Katharine Harris, “‘Part of the Project of That Book Was Not to Be Authentic’: Neo-Historical Authenticity and Its Anachronisms in Contemporary Historical Fiction,” Rethinking History 21, no. 2 (2017): 197. [↩]
6. Evan P. Apfelbaum, Samuel R. Sommers, and Michael I. Norton have written about “strategic” color-blindness in social interactions as a means by which white people avoid having to confront race. Evan P. Apfelbaum, Samuel R. Sommers, and Michael I. Norton, “Seeing Race and Seeming Racist? Evaluating Strategic Colorblindness in Social Interaction,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 4 (2008): 918–32. [↩]
7. Todd Decker, “The Multiracial Musical Metropolis: Casting and Race after A Chorus Line,” in The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical, ed. Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman (London: Routledge, 2020), 185–95. [↩]
8. Peter Erickson, “Afterword: The Blind Side in Colorblind Casting,” in Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, ed. Ayanna Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 241. [↩]
9. Angela C. Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-Casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 48. [↩]
10. Kristin Bria Hopkins, “There’s No Business Like Show Business: Abandoning Color-Blind Casting and Embracing Color-Conscious Casting in American Theatre,” Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law 9, no. 2 (2018): 131–55. [↩]
11. Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79. [↩]
12. Spencer Kornhaber, “Hamilton: Casting After Colorblindness,” The Atlantic, March 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/hamilton-casting/476247/. [↩]
13. Donatella Galella, “Being in ‘The Room Where It Happens’: Hamilton, Obama, and Nationalist Neoliberal Multicultural Inclusion,” Theatre Survey 59, no. 3 (2018): 364. [↩]
14. Lyra D. Monteiro, “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton,” The Public Historian 38, no. 1 (2016): 93. [↩]
15. Elissa Harbert, “Unlikely Subjects: The Critical Reception of History Musicals,” in The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical, ed. Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman (London, 2020), 313. [↩]
16. Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Miranda’s Manifesto,” Theater 47, no. 2 (2017): 30. [↩]
17. Heather S. Nathans, “Crooked Histories: Re-Presenting Race, Slavery, and Alexander Hamilton Onstage,” Journal of the Early Republic 37, no. 2 (2017): 275, original emphasis. [↩]
18. Patricia Herrera, “Hamilton, Democracy, and Theatre in America,” Howlround: Theatre Commons, 2016, https://howlround.com/hamilton-democracy-and-theatre-america. [↩]
19. “Six The Musical – Cast Audition Information and Casting Brief,” Six The Musical, 2019, https://www.sixthemusical.com/media/files/australia/SIX THE MUSICAL CAST AUDITION INFORMATION AND CASTING BRIEF 20190806.pdf. [↩]
20. Afua Hirsch, Brit(Ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (London: Vintage, 2018), 51. [↩]
21. James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 166. [↩]
22. @MirandaKauffman, July 3, 2020. [↩]
23. See, most recently: Andrew B.R. Elliott, “Internet Medievalism and the White Middle Ages,” History Compass 16, no. 3 (2018): 1–10; Adam Miyashiro, “‘Our Deeper Past’: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics,” Literature Compass 16 (2019): 1–11, Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2020). The Public Medievalist also commenced a long-running series of blog posts about the intersection of racism and medievalism in 2017: “Race, Racism and the Middle Ages,” The Public Medievalist, 2017, https://www.publicmedievalist.com/category/past-present/race-class-religion/race-racism-and-the-middle-ages/. [↩]
24. Seumas Milne, “This Attempt to Rehabilitate Empire Is a Recipe for Conflict,” The Guardian, June 10, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jun/10/british-empire-michael-gove-history-teaching. [↩]
25. Peter Mandler, “Revisiting the Olden Time: Popular Tudorism in the Time of Victoria,” in Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14. [↩]
26. Stephanie Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). [↩]
27. Hirsch, Brit(Ish), 271. [↩]
28. Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Brexit, Trump, and ‘Methodological Whiteness’: On the Misrecognition of Race and Class,” The British Journal of Sociology 68, no. 51 (2017): S214–32. [↩]
29. Michaela Benson and Chantelle Lewis, “Brexit, British People of Colour in the EU-27 and Everyday Racism in Britain and Europe,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 43, no. 13 (2019): 2,219. [↩]
30. David Reynolds, Island Stories: Britain and Its History in the Age of Brexit (London: William Collins, 2019), 64. [↩]
31. Marlow and Moss, Six, 117. [↩]
32. Marlow and Moss, Six, 115. [↩]
33. “A Statement by the Communications Secretary to Prince Harry,” The Royal Family UK Website, 2016, https://www.royal.uk/statement-communications-secretary-prince-harry. [↩]
34. There was considerable media coverage at the time of Prince Harry’s engagement to Markle about the suggestion made by the historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom that Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, had African ancestry through a familial connection to a branch of the Portuguese royal family. See: Mario de Valdes y Cocom, “Queen Charlotte,” PBS.org, accessed July 17, 2020, pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/royalfamily.html. However, this suggestion has been disputed by other historians. [↩]
35. “Danny Baker Fired by BBC over Royal Baby Chimp Tweet,” BBC.Com, May 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48212693. [↩]
36. Nathalie Weidhase, “‘Prince Harry Has Gone Over to the Dark Side’: Race, Royalty and US-UK Romance in Brexit Britain,” in Love Across the Atlantic: US-UK Romance in Popular Culture, ed. Barara Jane Brickman, Deborah Jermyn, and Theodore Louis Trost (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 277. [↩]
37. Mira Assaf Kafantaris, “Why the Brits Can’t Keep Calm and Carry On About the Royal Baby (Hint: It’s About Race),” The Rambling, August 2019, https://the-rambling.com/2019/08/19/issue5-kafantaris/. [↩]
38. Maria Puente, “‘Megexit’ Divides U.K.: Is Meghan Markle to Blame for Royal Shocker?,” USA Today, January 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2020/01/10/meghan-blamed-prince-harry-move-megxit/4419133002/. [↩]
39. Weidhase, “‘Prince Harry Has Gone Over to the Dark Side,'” 285. [↩]
40. Zoe Paskett, “How Six the Musical Became West End Royalty: From the Stage to the Queens of Streaming,” Evening Standard, December 4, 2020, https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/theatre/six-the-musical-history-west-end-b141329.html; Jackson McHenry, “The Pop Queens of Six Will Start Belting on Broadway Again This September,” Vulture, May 2021, https://www.vulture.com/2021/05/musical-six-to-start-performances-on-broadway-september.html. [↩]
41. Marlow and Moss, Six: All The Songs from the Hit Musical, 120. [↩]
42. Marlow and Moss, 120. [↩] [↩]
43. @SixTheMusical, October 19, 2019. [↩] [↩]
44. Aya Esther Hayashi, “‘YouTube! Musicals! YouTubescials!’: Cultivating Theatre Fandom through New Media,” in The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical, ed. Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman (London: Routledge, 2020), 382. [↩]
45. “Six – the Worldwide Cast of Queens and 3000 Fans Perform a Lockdown Collaboration,” YouTube, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh3zj_qjD1E. [↩]
46. Rukmini Pande, Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 5–6. [↩]