Following its sell-out success last year, Howard Brenton’s dramatisation of the life and legacy of Henry VIII’s notorious second wife, Anne Boleyn, returns to Shakespeare’s Globe for a second year.

Anne Boleyn is traditionally seen either as a pawn manipulated by an ambitious father and his friends into the King’s bed, or as a sexually licentious predator, even a witch. But Brenton puts a very different Anne – and her ghost – on the Globe stage. Witty and confident in her sexuality, she takes on the vicious world of Tudor Court politics. She is in love with Henry but also in love with the most dangerous ideas of her day. Conspiring with the exiled William Tyndale, the great translator of the Bible who was to be burnt as a heretic, Anne plots to make England Protestant, forever.

Anne Boleyn playwright Brenton’s previous work at the Globe includes In Extremis.