Alta capella were town wind bands found throughout continental Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, which typically consisted of shawms and slide trumpets or sackbuts. Waits were the British equivalent. These were not found anywhere outside of Europe.

External links[link]

• http://www.waits.org.uk

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1611 woodcut of Josquin des Prez, copied from a now-lost oil painting done during his lifetime^[1]

Josquin des Prez [Josquin Lebloitte dit Desprez] (French pronunciation: [ʒɔskɛ̃ depʁe]; c. 1450/1455 – 27 August 1521), often referred to simply as Josquin, was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance. He is also known as Josquin Desprez and Latinized as Josquinus Pratensis, alternatively Jodocus Pratensis, although he himself expressed his preferred spelling of his name, Josquin des Prez, in an acrostic in his motet Illibata Dei virgo nutrix.^[2][3] He was the most famous European composer between Guillaume Dufay and Palestrina, and is usually considered to be the central figure of the Franco-Flemish School. Josquin is widely considered by music scholars to be the first master of the high Renaissance style of polyphonic vocal music that was emerging during his lifetime.

During the 16th century, Josquin gradually acquired the reputation as the greatest composer of the age, his mastery of technique and expression universally imitated and admired. Writers as diverse as Baldassare Castiglione and Martin Luther wrote about his reputation and fame; theorists such as Heinrich Glarean and Gioseffo Zarlino held his style as that best representing perfection.^[4] He was so admired that many anonymous compositions were attributed to him by copyists, probably to increase their sales.^[5] At least 374 works are attributed to him;^[6] it was only after the advent of modern analytical scholarship that some of these mistaken attributions have been challenged, on the basis of stylistic features and manuscript evidence. Yet in spite of Josquin's colossal reputation, which endured until the beginning of the Baroque era and was revived in the 20th century, his biography is shadowy, and we know next to nothing about his personality. The only surviving work which may be in his own hand is a graffito on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, and only one contemporary mention of his character is known, in a letter to Duke Ercole I of Ferrara. The lives of dozens of minor composers of the Renaissance are better documented than the life of Josquin.^[7]

Josquin wrote both sacred and secular music, and in all of the significant vocal forms of the age, including masses, motets, chansons and frottole. During the 16th century, he was praised for both his supreme melodic gift and his use of ingenious technical devices. In modern times, scholars have attempted to ascertain the basic details of his biography, and have tried to define the key characteristics of his style to correct misattributions, a task that has proved difficult. Josquin liked to solve compositional problems in different ways in successive compositions, as did Stravinsky more than 400 years later. Sometimes he wrote in an austere style devoid of ornamentation, and at other times he wrote music requiring considerable virtuosity.^[8] Heinrich Glarean wrote in 1547 that Josquin was not only a "magnificent virtuoso" (the Latin can be translated also as "show-off") but capable of being a "mocker", using satire effectively.^[9] While the focus of scholarship in recent years has been to remove music from the "Josquin canon" (including some of his most famous pieces) and to reattribute it to his contemporaries, the remaining music represents some of the most famous and enduring of the Renaissance.^[10]

Life[link]

Birth and early career[link]

Little is known for certain of Josquin's early life. Much is inferential and speculative, though numerous clues have emerged from his works and the writings of contemporary composers, theorists, and writers of the next several generations. Josquin was born in the area controlled by the Dukes of Burgundy, and was possibly born either in Hainaut (modern-day Belgium), or immediately across the border in modern-day France, since several times in his life he was classified legally as a Frenchman (for instance, when he made his will). Josquin was long mistaken for a man with a similar name, Josquin de Kessalia, born around the year 1440, who sang in Milan from 1459 to 1474, dying in 1498. More recent scholarship has shown that Josquin des Prez was born around 1450 or a few years later, and did not go to Italy until the early 1480s.

Around 1466, perhaps on the death of his father, Josquin was named by his uncle and aunt, Gilles Lebloitte dit Desprez and Jacque Banestonne, as their heir. Their will gives Josquin's actual surname as Lebloitte. According to Matthews and Merkley, "des Prez" was a nickname.^[11]

According to an account by Claude Hémeré, a friend and librarian of Cardinal Richelieu whose evidence dates as late as 1633, and who used the records of the collegiate church of Saint-Quentin,^[12] Josquin became a choirboy at Saint-Quentin, probably around 1460, and was in charge of its music. Doubt has been cast on the accuracy of Hémeré's account, however.^[13] He may have studied counterpoint under Ockeghem, whom he greatly admired throughout his life: this is suggested both by the testimony of Gioseffo Zarlino and Lodovico Zacconi, writing later in the 16th century, and by Josquin's eloquent lament on the death of Ockeghem in 1497, Nymphes des bois/Requiem aeternam, based on the poem by Jean Molinet.^[13] All records from Saint-Quentin were destroyed in 1669; however the cathedral there was a center of music-making for the entire area, and in addition was an important center of royal patronage. Both Jean Mouton and Loyset Compère were buried there, and it is certainly possible that Josquin acquired his later connections with the French royal chapel through early experiences at Saint-Quentin.

The first definite record of his employment is dated 19 April 1477, and it shows that he was a singer at the chapel of René, Duke of Anjou, in Aix-en-Provence. He remained there at least until 1478. No certain records of his movements exist for the period from March 1478 until 1483, but if he remained in the employ of René he would have transferred to Paris in 1481 along with the rest of the chapel. One of Josquin's early motets, Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo, suggests a direct connection with Louis XI, who was king during this time. In 1483 Josquin returned to Condé to claim his inheritance from his aunt and uncle, who may have been killed by the army of Louis XI in May 1478, when they besieged the town, locked the population into the church, and burned them alive.^[14]

Milan[link]

The period of 1480 to 1482 has puzzled biographers: some contradictory evidence exists, suggesting either that Josquin was still in France, or was already in the service of the Sforza family, specifically with Ascanio Sforza, who had been banished from Milan and resided temporarily in Ferrara or Naples. Residence in Ferrara in the early 1480s could explain the Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae, composed for Ercole d'Este, but which stylistically does not fit with the usual date of 1503–4 when Josquin was known to be in Ferrara. Alternatively it has been suggested that Josquin spent some of that time in Hungary, based on a mid-16th century Roman document describing the Hungarian court in those years, and including Josquin as one of the musicians present.^[14]

In either 1483 or 1484 Josquin is known to have been in the service of the Sforza family in Milan. While in their employ, he made one or more trips to Rome, and possibly also to Paris; while in Milan he made the acquaintance of Franchinus Gaffurius, who was maestro di cappella of the cathedral there. He was in Milan again in 1489, after a possible period of travel; but he left that year.

Rome[link]

From 1489 to 1495 Josquin was a member of the papal choir, first under Pope Innocent VIII, and later under the Borgia pope Alexander VI. He may have gone there as part of a singer exchange with Gaspar van Weerbeke, who went back to Milan at the same time. While there, he may have been the one who carved his name into the wall of the Sistine Chapel; a "JOSQUINJ" was recently revealed by workers restoring the chapel. Since it was traditional for singers to carve their names into the walls, and hundreds of names were inscribed there during the period from the 15th to the 18th centuries, it is considered highly likely that the graffiti is by Josquin – and if so, it would be his only surviving autograph.^[15][16]

Josquin's mature style evolved during this period; as in Milan he had absorbed the influence of light Italian secular music, in Rome he refined his techniques of sacred music. Several of his motets have been dated to the years he spent at the papal chapel.

Departure from Rome; Milan and France[link]

Around 1498 Josquin most likely re-entered the service of the Sforza family, on the evidence of a pair of letters between the Gonzaga and Sforza families.^[14] He probably did not stay in Milan long, for in 1499 Louis XII captured Milan in his invasion of northern Italy and imprisoned Josquin's former employers. Around this time Josquin most likely returned to France, although documented details of his career around the turn of the 16th century are lacking. Prior to departing Italy he most likely wrote one of his most famous secular compositions, the frottola El grillo, as well as In te Domine speravi ("I have placed my hope in you, Lord"), based on Psalm 30. The latter composition may have been a veiled reference to the religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola, who had been burned at the stake in Florence in 1498, and for whom Josquin seems to have had a special reverence; the text was the monk's favorite psalm, a meditation on which he left incomplete in prison prior to his execution.^[17]

Some of Josquin's compositions, such as the instrumental Vive le roy, have been tentatively dated to the period around 1500 when he was in France. A motet, Memor esto verbi tui servo tuo ("Remember thy promise unto thy servant"), was, according to Heinrich Glarean writing in the Dodecachordon of 1547, composed as a gentle reminder to the king to keep his promise of a benefice to Josquin, which he had forgotten to keep. According to Glarean's story, it worked: the court applauded, and the king gave Josquin his benefice. Upon receiving it, Josquin reportedly wrote a motet on the text Benefecisti servo tuo, Domine ("Lord, thou hast dealt graciously with thy servant") to show his gratitude to the king.^[18]

Ferrara[link]

Ercole I d'Este was an important patron of the arts during the Italian Renaissance; he was Josquin's employer in 1503 and 1504.

Josquin probably remained in the service of Louis XII until 1503, when Duke Ercole I of Ferrara hired him for the chapel there.^[19] One of the rare mentions of Josquin's personality survives from this time. Prior to hiring Josquin, one of Duke Ercole's assistants recommended that he hire Heinrich Isaac instead, since Isaac was easier to get along with, more companionable, was more willing to compose on demand, and would cost significantly less (120 ducats vs. 200). Ercole, however, chose Josquin.^[14]

While in Ferrara, Josquin wrote some of his most famous compositions, including the austere, Savonarola-influenced Miserere,^[20] which became one of the most widely-distributed motets of the 16th century; the utterly contrasting, virtuoso motet Virgo salutiferi;^[21] and possibly the Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae, which is written on a cantus firmus derived from the musical letters in the Duke's name, a technique known as soggetto cavato.

Josquin did not stay in Ferrara long. An outbreak of the plague in the summer of 1503 prompted the evacuation of the Duke and his family, as well as two thirds of the citizens, and Josquin left by April of the next year, possibly also to escape the plague. His replacement, Jacob Obrecht, died of the plague in the summer of 1505,^[14] to be replaced by Antoine Brumel in 1506, who stayed until the disbanding of the chapel in 1510.

Retirement to Condé-sur-l'Escaut[link]

Josquin went directly from Ferrara to his home region of Condé-sur-l'Escaut, southeast of Lille on the present-day border between Belgium and France, becoming provost of the collegiate church of Notre-Dame on 3 May 1504, a large musical establishment that he headed for the rest of his life.^[22] While the chapter at Bourges Cathedral asked him to become master of the choirboys there in 1508, it is not known how he responded, and there is no record of his having been employed there; most scholars presume he remained in Condé.^[23]

During the last two decades of his life, Josquin's fame spread abroad along with his music. The newly-developed technology of printing made wide dissemination of his music possible, and Josquin was the favorite of the first printers: one of Petrucci's first publications, and the earliest surviving print of music by a single composer, was a book of Josquin's masses which he printed in Venice in 1502. This publication was successful enough that Petrucci published two further volumes of Josquin's masses, in 1504 and 1514, and reissued them several times.^[24]

On his death-bed Josquin asked that he be listed on the rolls as a foreigner, so that his property would not pass to the Lords and Ladies of Condé.^[22] This bit of evidence has been used to show that he was French by birth. Additionally, he left an endowment for the performance of his late motet, Pater noster/Ave Maria, at all general processions in the town when they passed in front of his house, stopping to place a wafer on the marketplace altar to the Holy Virgin. Pater noster may have been his last work.^[25]

Music[link]

Overview[link]

Josquin lived during a transitional stage in music history. Musical styles were changing rapidly, in part owing to the movement of musicians between different regions of Europe.^[26] Many northern musicians moved to Italy, the heart of the Renaissance, attracted by the Italian nobility's patronage of the arts; while in Italy, these composers were influenced by the native Italian styles, and often brought those ideas with them back to their homelands. The sinuous musical lines of the Ockeghem generation, the contrapuntal complexity of the Netherlanders, and the homophonic textures of the Italian lauda and secular music began to merge into a unified style; indeed Josquin was to be the leading figure in this musical process, which eventually resulted in the formation of an international musical language, of which the most famous composers included Palestrina and Lassus.^[27]

Josquin likely learned his craft in his home region in the North, in France, and then in Italy when he went to Milan and Rome. His early sacred works emulate the contrapuntal complexity and ornamented, melismatic lines of Ockeghem and his contemporaries, but at the same time he was learning his contrapuntal technique he was acquiring an Italianate idiom for his secular music: after all, he was surrounded by Italian popular music in Milan. By the end of his long creative career, which spanned approximately 50 productive years, he had developed a simplified style in which each voice of a polyphonic composition exhibited free and smooth motion, and close attention was paid to clear setting of text as well as clear alignment of text with musical motifs. While other composers were influential on the development of Josquin's style, especially in the late 15th century, he himself became the most influential composer in Europe, especially after the development of music printing, which was concurrent with the years of his maturity and peak output. This event made his influence even more decisive than it might otherwise have been.

Many "modern" musical compositional practices were being born in the era around 1500. Josquin made extensive use of "motivic cells" in his compositions, short, easily-recognizable melodic fragments which passed from voice to voice in a contrapuntal texture, giving it an inner unity. This is a basic organizational principle in music which has been practiced continuously from approximately 1500 until the present day.^[28]

Josquin wrote in all of the important forms current at the time, including masses, motets, chansons, and frottole. He even contributed to the development of a new form, the motet-chanson, of which he left at least three examples. In addition, some of his pieces were probably intended for instrumental performance.

Each area of his output can be further subdivided by form or by hypothetical period of composition. Since dating Josquin's compositions is particularly problematic, with scholarly consensus only achieved on a minority of works, discussion here is by type.

Masses[link]

Manuscript showing the opening Kyrie of the Missa de Beata Virgine, a late work. (Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Capp. Sist. 45, ff. 1v-2r)

Josquin wrote towards the end of the period in which the mass was the predominant form of sacred composition in Europe. The mass, as it had developed through the 15th century, was a long, multi-section form, with opportunities for large-scale structure and organization not possible in the other forms such as the motet. Josquin wrote some of the most famous examples of the genre, most using some kind of cyclic organization.

He wrote masses using the following general techniques, although there is considerable overlap between techniques in individual compositions:

• cantus firmus mass, in which a pre-existing tune appeared, mostly unchanged, in one voice of the texture, with the other voices being more or less freely composed;
• paraphrase mass, in which a pre-existing tune was used freely in all voices, and in many variations;
• parody mass, in which a pre-existing multi-voice song appeared in whole or in part, with material from all voices in use, not just the tune;
• soggetto cavato, or solmization mass, in which the tune is drawn from the syllables of a name or phrase (for example "la sol fa re mi" — A, G, F, D, E — based on the syllables of Lascia fare mi ("leave me alone", a phrase used by an unknown patron, in a context around which much legend has arisen).
• canon, in which an entire mass is based on canonic techniques, and no pre-existing material has been identified.^[29]

Most of these techniques, particularly paraphrase and parody, become standardized during the first half of the 16th century; Josquin was very much a pioneer, and what was perceived as mixing of these techniques by later observers was actually the process by which they were created.^[27]

Josquin was fond of canonic techniques, as were many other composers of his generation, and canon appears in all of his masses, sometimes to the exclusion of other structural devices.

Cantus-firmus masses[link]

Prior to Josquin's mature period, the most common technique for writing masses was the cantus firmus, a technique which had been in use already for most of the 15th century. It was the technique that Josquin used earliest in his career, with the Missa L'ami Baudichon, possibly his first mass.^[27] This mass is based on a secular – indeed ribald – tune similar to "Three Blind Mice". That basing a mass on such a source was an accepted procedure is evident from the existence of the mass in Sistine Chapel part-books copied during the papacy of Julius II (1503 to 1513).^[30]

Josquin's most famous cantus-firmus masses are the two based on the L'homme armé tune, which was the favorite tune for mass composition of the entire Renaissance. The earlier of the two, Missa L'homme armé super voces musicales, is a technical tour-de-force on the tune, containing numerous mensuration canons and contrapuntal display. It was by far the most famous of all his masses.^[31] The second, Missa L'homme armé sexti toni, is a "fantasia on the theme of the armed man."^[32] While based on a cantus firmus, it is also a paraphrase mass, for fragments of the tune appear in all voices. Technically it is almost restrained, compared to the other L'homme armé mass, until the closing Agnus Dei, which contains a complex canonic structure including a rare retrograde canon, around which other voices are woven.^[33]

Paraphrase masses[link]

The paraphrase technique differs from the cantus-firmus technique in that the source material, though it still consists of a monophonic original, is embellished, often with ornaments. As in the cantus-firmus technique, the source tune may appear in many voices of the mass.

Several of Josquin's masses feature the paraphrase technique, and they include some of his most famous work. The relatively early Missa Ave maris stella, which probably dates from his years in the Sistine Chapel choir, paraphrases the Marian antiphon of the same name; it is also one of his shortest masses.^[34] The late Missa de Beata Virgine paraphrases plainchants in praise of the Virgin Mary; it is a Lady Mass, a votive mass for Saturday performance, and was his most popular mass in the 16th century.^[27][35]

By far the most famous of Josquin's masses using the technique, and one of the most famous mass settings of the entire era, was the Missa pange lingua, based on the hymn by Thomas Aquinas for the Vespers of Corpus Christi. It was probably the last mass that Josquin composed.^[36] This mass is an extended fantasia on the tune, using the melody in all voices and in all parts of the mass, in elaborate and ever-changing polyphony. One of the high points of the mass is the et incarnatus est section of the Credo, where the texture becomes homophonic, and the tune appears in the topmost voice; here the portion which would normally set "Sing, O my tongue, of the mystery of the divine body" is instead given the words "And he became incarnate by the Holy Ghost from the Virgin Mary, and was made man."^[37]

Parody masses, masses on popular songs[link]

In parody masses, the source material was not a single line, but an entire texture, often of a popular song. Several works by Josquin fall loosely into this category, including the Missa Fortuna desperata, based on the three-voice song Fortuna desperata (possibly by Antoine Busnois); the Missa Malheur me bat (based on a chanson variously ascribed to Obrecht, Ockeghem, or, most likely, Abertijne Malcourt);^[27] and the Missa Mater Patris, based on a three-voice motet by Antoine Brumel. The Missa Mater Patris is probably the first true parody mass to be composed, for it no longer contains any hint of a cantus firmus.^[38] Parody technique was to become the most usual means of mass composition for the remainder of the 16th century, although the mass gradually fell out of favor as the motet grew in esteem.

Masses on solmization syllables[link]

The earliest known mass by any composer using this method of composition – the soggetto cavato – is the Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae, which Josquin probably wrote in the early 1480s for the powerful Ercole I, Duke of Ferrara. The notes of the cantus firmus are drawn from the musical syllables of the Duke's own name: Re – Ut – Re – Ut – Re – Fa – Mi – Re. Another mass using this technique is the Missa La sol fa re mi, based on the musical syllables contained in "Lascia fare mi" ("leave me alone!"). The story, as told by Glareanus in 1547, was that an unknown aristocrat used to order suitors away with this phrase, and Josquin immediately wrote an "exceedingly elegant" mass on it as a jab at him.^[39]

Canonic masses[link]

Opening of the Agnus Dei II from the Missa L'homme armé super voces musicales. The movement consists of a three-out-of-one mensuration canon. The middle voice is the slowest; the lowest voice sings at twice the speed of the middle voice, and the top voice at three times the speed. The first four notes of the canon are shown connected by lines of the same color. (The first eight notes of the canon are a quotation of the contratenor of Ockeghem's "Ma bouche rit")

Canonic masses came into increasing prominence in the latter part of the 15th century. Early examples include Ockeghem's famous Missa prolationum, consisting entirely of mensuration canons, the Missa L'homme armé of Guillaume Faugues, whose cantus firmus is presented in canon at the descending fifth, and the Missa [Ad fugam] of Marbrianus de Orto, based on freely composed canons at the fifth between superius and tenor. Josquin makes use of canon in the Osanna and Agnus Dei III of the Missa L'homme armé sexti toni, throughout the Missa Sine nomine, and in the final three movements of the Missa De beata virgine. The Missa L'homme armé super voces musicales incorporates mensuration canons in the Kyrie, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei II.^[40]

Motets[link]

Josquin's motet style varied from almost strictly homophonic settings with block chords and syllabic text declamation to highly ornate contrapuntal fantasias, to the psalm settings which combined these extremes with the addition of rhetorical figures and text-painting that foreshadowed the later development of the madrigal. He wrote many of his motets for four voices, an ensemble size which had become the compositional norm around 1500, and he also was a considerable innovator in writing motets for five and six voices.^[41] No motets of more than six voices have been reliably attributed to Josquin.

A passage from the psalm motet Domine ne in furore (Ps. 37). Three variants of a motive built on a major triad are introduced, each in paired imitation between two voices.

Almost all of Josquin's motets use some kind of compositional constraint on the process; they are not freely composed.^[42] Some of them use a cantus firmus as a unifying device; some are canonic; some use a motto which repeats throughout; some use several of these methods. The motets that use canon can be roughly divided into two groups: those in which the canon is plainly designed to be heard and appreciated as such, and another group in which a canon is present, but almost impossible to hear, and seemingly written to be appreciated by the eye, and by connoisseurs.^[43]

Josquin frequently used imitation, especially paired imitation, in writing his motets, with sections akin to fugal expositions occurring on successive lines of the text he was setting. An example is his setting of Dominus regnavit (Psalm 93), for four voices; each of the lines of the psalm begins with a voice singing a new tune alone, quickly followed by entries of other three voices in imitation.^[44]

In writing polyphonic settings of psalms, Josquin was a pioneer, and psalm settings form a large proportion of the motets of his later years. Few composers prior to Josquin had written polyphonic psalm settings.^[45] Some of Josquin's settings include the famous Miserere, written in Ferrara in 1503 or 1504 and most likely inspired by the recent execution of the reformist monk Girolamo Savonarola,^[46] Memor esto verbi tui, based on Psalm 119, and two settings of De profundis (Psalm 130), both of which are often considered to be among his most significant accomplishments.^[44][47]

Chansons and instrumental compositions[link]

In the domain of secular music, Josquin left numerous French chansons, for from three to six voices, as well as a handful of Italian secular songs known as frottole, as well as some pieces which were probably intended for instrumental performance. Problems of attribution are even more acute with the chansons than they are with other portions of his output: while about 70 three and four-voice chansons were published under his name during his lifetime, only six of the more than thirty five- and six-voice chansons attributed to him were circulated under his name during the same time. Many of the attributions added after his death are considered to be unreliable, and much work has been done in the last decades of the 20th century to correct attributions on stylistic grounds.^[48]

Josquin's earliest chansons were probably composed in northern Europe, under the influence of composers such as Ockeghem and Busnois. Unlike them, however, he never adhered strictly to the conventions of the formes fixes – the rigid and complex repetition patterns of the rondeau, virelai, and ballade – instead he often wrote his early chansons in strict imitation, a feature they shared with many of his sacred works.^[27] He was one of the first composers of chansons to make all voices equal parts of the texture; and many of his chansons contain points of imitation, in the manner of motets. However he did use melodic repetition, especially where the lines of text rhymed, and many of his chansons had a lighter texture, as well a faster tempo, than his motets.

Inside of his chansons, he often used a cantus firmus, sometimes a popular song whose origin can no longer be traced, as in Si j'avoye Marion.^[49] Other times he used a tune originally associated with a separate text; and still other times he freely composed an entire song, using no apparent external source material. Another technique he sometimes used was to take a popular song and write it as a canon with itself, in two inner voices, and write new melodic material above and around it, to a new text: he used this technique in one of his most famous chansons, Faulte d'argent ("The problem with money"), a song sung by a man who wakes in bed with a prostitute, broke and unable to pay her.

Some of his chansons were doubtless designed to be performed instrumentally. That Petrucci published many of them without text is strong evidence of this; additionally, some of the pieces (for example, the fanfare-like Vive le roy) contain writing more idiomatic for instruments than voices.^[27]

Josquin's most famous chansons circulated widely in Europe. Some of the better known include his lament on the death of Ockeghem, Nymphes des bois/Requiem aeternam; Mille regretz (the attribution of which has recently been questioned);^[50] Plus nulz regretz; and Je me complains.

In addition to his French chansons, he wrote at least three pieces in the manner of the Italian frottola, a popular Italian song form which he would have encountered during his years in Milan. These songs include Scaramella, El grillo, and In te domine speravi. They are even simpler in texture than his French chansons, being almost uniformly syllabic and homophonic, and they remain among the most frequently sung portions of his output.

Motet-chansons[link]

While in Milan, Josquin wrote several examples of a new type of piece developed by the composers there, the motet-chanson. These compositions were texturally very similar to 15th century chansons in the formes fixes mold, except that unlike those completely secular works, they contained a chant-derived Latin cantus-firmus in the lowest of the three voices. The other voices, in French, sang a secular text which had either a symbolic relationship to the sacred Latin text, or commented on it.^[51] Josquin's three known motet-chansons, Que vous madame/In pace, A la mort/Monstra te esse matrem, and Fortune destrange plummaige/Pauper sum ego, are similar stylistically to those by the other composers of the Milan chapel, such as Loyset Compère and Alexander Agricola.

Influence[link]

Josquin's fame lasted throughout the 16th century, and indeed increased for several decades after his death. Zarlino, writing in the 1580s, was still using examples from Josquin in his treatises on composition; and Josquin's fame was only eclipsed after the beginning of the Baroque era, with the decline of the pre-tonal polyphonic style. During the 18th and 19th centuries Josquin's fame was overshadowed by later Roman School composer Palestrina, whose music was seen as the summit of polyphonic refinement, and codified into a system of composition by theorists such as Johann Fux; however, during the 20th century, Josquin's reputation has grown steadily, to the point where scholars again consider him "the greatest and most successful composer of the age."^[52][53] According to Richard Sherr, writing in the introduction to the Josquin Companion, addressing specifically the shrinking of Josquin's canon due to correction of misattributions, "Josquin will survive because his best music really is as magnificent as everybody has always said it was."^[10]

Since the 1950s Josquin's reputation has been boosted by the increasing availability of recordings, of which there are many, and the rise of ensembles specializing in the performance of 16th century vocal music, many of which consider Josquin's output to be at the heart of their repertory.^[54]

Media[link]

	Josquin – El Grillo – performed by the dwsChorale Recorded in studio (1.6 Mb) Tu Pauperum Refugium Four bassoon ensemble performing from Josquin Des Prez's Magnus es tu, Domine.
Problems listening to these files? See media help.

Works list[link]

The difficulties in compiling a works list for Josquin cannot be overstated. Because of his immense prestige in the early sixteenth century, many scribes and publishers did not resist the temptation of attributing anonymous or otherwise spurious works to Josquin. The German editor Georg Forster summed up the situation admirably in 1540 when he wrote, "Now that Josquin is dead, he is putting out more works than when he was alive."^[55] Thus, the authenticity of many of the works listed below is disputed.

Masses[link]

1. Missa Ave maris stella (Rome, 1486–1495) (4 voices)
2. Missa D'ung aultre amer (4 voices; authorship questioned by Jeremy Noble)
3. Missa de Beata Virgine (around 1510) (4 voices in parts I–II, 5 voices in parts III–V)
4. Missa Di dadi (=N'aray je jamais) (4 voices; authorship doubted by some scholars)
5. Missa Faisant regretz (4 voices)
6. Missa Fortuna desperata (4 voices)
7. Missa Gaudeamus (4 voices)
8. Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae (Ferrara, 1503/04) (4 voices, 6 in Agnus III)
9. Missa La sol fa re mi (4 voices)
10. Missa L'ami Baudichon (4 voices)
11. Missa L'homme armé sexti toni (4 voices, 6 in Agnus III)
12. Missa L'homme armé super voces musicales (4 voices)
13. Missa Malheur me bat (4 voices, 6 in Agnus III)
14. Missa Mater patris (4 voices; authorship doubted by some scholars)
15. Missa Pange lingua (Condé, around 1514) (4 voices)
16. Missa Sine nomine (4 voices; canonic mass, originally titled "Missa Ad fugam")

Doubtful works:

1. Missa Ad fugam (4 voices)
2. Missa Da pacem (4 voices)
3. Missa Une musque de Biscaye (4 voices)

Mass fragments[link]

Of questionable authenticity, with the exception of the Credo De tous biens playne:

1. Credo Chascun me crie (= Des rouges nez)
2. Credo De tous biens playne
3. Credo Vilayge (II)
4. Credo [Quarti toni] (canonic)
5. Gloria De beata virgine
6. Sanctus De passione
7. Sanctus D'ung aultre amer
8. Credo Vilayge (I)
9. Credo La belle se siet (probably Robert de Févin)

Motets[link]

1. Absalon, fili mi (4vv) (attribution has been challenged; possibly Pierre de La Rue)
2. Absolve, quaesumus, Domine/Requiem aeternam (6vv) (attribution has been challenged)
3. Alma redemptoris mater;
4. Alma redemptoris mater / Ave regina caelorum;
5. Ave Maria, gratia plena ... benedicta tu (4vv);
6. Ave Maria, gratia plena ... Virgo serena (Milan 1484/85);^[56]
7. Ave munda spes, Maria (not in first complete works edition)
8. Ave nobilissima creatura
9. Ave verum corpus natum
10. Benedicta es, caelorum regina
11. Christum ducem, qui per crucem (4vv)
12. De profundis clamavi (4vv) (possibly middle-period composition: attribution has been questioned)
13. De profundis clamavi (5vv) (late composition)
14. Domine exaudi orationem meam
15. Domine, ne in fuore tuo (4vv)
16. Domine, non secundum peccata nostra (2-4vv; for Rome)
17. Ecce, tu pulchra es, amica mea
18. Factum est autem
19. Gaude virgo, mater Christi
20. Homo quidam fecit cenam magnam
21. Honor, decus, imperium
22. Huc me sydereo descendere jussit Olympo (5vv)
23. Illibata Dei virgo nutrix
24. In exitu Israel de Aegypto
25. In illo tempore assumpsit Jesus doudecim disciplus
26. Iniquos odio habui (4vv, only tenor part survives)
27. In principio erat Verbum (authenticity has been questioned)^[57]
28. Inviolata, integra et casta es, Maria
29. Jubilate Deo omnis terra
30. Liber generationis Jesu Christi
31. Magnificat quarti toni (attributed to Josquin on stylistic grounds)
32. Magnificat terii toni (attributed to Josquin on stylistic grounds)
33. Memor esto verbi tui
34. Miserere mei Deus (Ferrara, 1503)
35. Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo (France, 1480/83)
36. Missus est Gabriel angelus ad Mariam Virginem
37. Mittit ad virginem
38. Monstra te esse matrem
39. O admirabile commercium (part of a 5-motet cycle)
40. O bone et dulcissime Jesu
41. O Domine Jesu Christe (part of a Passion setting in 5 sections)
42. O virgo prudentissima
43. O virgo virginum
44. Pater noster, qui es in caelis (Condé, 1505–1521)
45. Planxit autem David
46. Praeter rerum seriem
47. Qui edunt me adhuc
48. Qui habitat in adiutorio altissimi
49. Qui velatus facie fuisti (part of a Passion setting in 6 sections)
50. Salve regina (4vv)
51. Salve regina (5vv, 1502)
52. Stabat Mater
53. Tu lumen, tu splendor
54. Tu solus qui facis mirabilia
55. Usquequo Domine oblivisceris me (attrib on stylistic grounds; only part survives)
56. Ut Phoebi radiis
57. Veni, sancte spiritus (also attrib to Forestier)
58. Victimae paschali laudes
59. Virgo prudentissima
60. Virgo salutiferi (Ferrara, 1504/05)
61. Vultum tuum deprecabuntur (7-part Passion cycle) (1480s)

Motet-chansons[link]

1. A la mort / Monstra te esse matrem
2. Fortune destrange plummaige/Pauper sum ego
3. Que vous madame / In pace in idipsum

Chansons[link]

1. A l'heure que je vous
2. A l'ombre d'ung buissonet, au matinet (3vv)
3. Adieu mes amours
4. Adieu mes amours (6vv or 7vv)
5. Baisé moy, ma doulce amye (4vv)
6. Belle, pour l'amour de vous
7. Bergerette savoyenne
8. Cela sans plus
9. Comment peult haver joye
10. Cueur langoreulx
11. De tous biens plaine (3vv)
12. De tous biens plaine (4vv)
13. Douleur me bat
14. Du mien amant
15. Dulces exuviae
16. En l'ombre d'ung buissonet tout, au long (3vv)
17. En l'ombre d'ung buissonet tout, au long (4vv)
18. Entré je suis en grant pensée (3vv)
19. Entré je suis en grant pensée (4vv)
20. Fama malum
21. Faulte d'argent
22. Fors seulement (only one of six voice parts survives)
23. Fortuna d'un gran tempo
24. Helas madame
25. Ile fantazies de Joskin
26. Incessament livré suis à martire
27. Je me complains
28. Je n'ose plus
29. Je ris et si ay larme
30. Je sey bien dire
31. La belle se siet
32. La Bernardina
33. La plus de plus
34. Le villain [jaloux]
35. Ma bouche rit et mon cueur pleure
36. Mille Regretz (4 voices)
37. Mon mary m'a diffamée
38. N'esse pas ung grant desplaisir
39. Nymphes des bois (written for the death of Johannes Ockeghem)
40. Nymphes, nappés / Circumdederunt me
41. Parfons regretz
42. Petite camusette;
43. Plaine de dueil
44. Plus n'estes ma maistresse
45. Plus nulz regretz (written between 1508 and 1511, commemorating the 1507 Treaty of Calais);
46. Plusieurs regretz
47. Pour souhaitter
48. Quant je vous voye
49. Qui belles amours a
50. Recordans de my signora
51. Regretz sans fin;
52. Se congié prens
53. Si j'ay perdu mon amy (3vv)
54. Si j'ay perdu mon amy (4vv)
55. Tant vous aimme Bergeronette
56. Tenz moy en voz bras
57. Une mousque de Biscaye;
58. Vive le roy (instrumental piece, written for Louis XII)
59. Vous l'arez, s'il vous plaist
60. Vous ne l'arez pas
61. textless (4vv)

Frottole[link]

1. El Grillo
2. In te Domine speravi per trovar pietà
3. Scaramella va alla guerra

References and further reading[link]

• Atlas, Allan W., ed. Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe, 1400–1600. New York: Norton, 1998. ISBN 0-393-97169-4.
• Blackburn, Bonnie J. "Masses Based on Popular Songs and Solmization Syllables". The Josquin Companion, edited by Richard Sherr, 51–88. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-19-816335-5
• Brown, Howard M. "Chanson" The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. London, Macmillan, 1980. (20 vol.) ISBN 1-56159-174-2.
• Charles, Sydney R. Josquin des Prez: A Guide to Research. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1983.
• Clutterham, Leslie. "Dating Josquin's Enigmatic Motet Illibata Dei virgo nutrix". Choral Journal 38, no. 3 (October 1997): 9–14. Online version as "Auobiographical [sic] Constructions in Josquin's Motet Illibata Dei virgo nutrix: Evidence for a Later Dating" (Accessed 8 May 2012).
• Duffin, Ross W., ed. A Josquin Anthology. Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-19-353218-2.
• Elders, Willem, ed. New Josquin Edition, 30 vols. Utrecht: Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1987- . ISBN 978-90-6375-051-0.
• Elders, Willem, and and Frits de Haen, eds. Proceedings of the International Josquin Symposium, Utrecht 1986 . Utrecht: Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1986. ISBN 90-6375-148-6.
• Fallows, David. Josquin. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2009, ISBN 978-2-503-53065-9.
• Gleason, Harold, and Warren Becker. Music in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Bloomington, Indiana: Frangipani Press, 1981. ISBN 0-89917-034-X.
• Godt, Irving. "Motivic Integration in Josquin's Motets." Journal of Music Theory, 21, 2 (Autumn, 1977): 264–92.
• Higgins, Paula. "The Apotheosis of Josquin des Prez and Other Mythologies of Musical Genius". Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57, 3 (Autumn, 2004): 443–510.
• Lowinsky, Edward E., ed. Josquin des Prez. London: Oxford University Press, 1976.
• Macey, Patrick. Bonfire Songs: Savonarola's Musical Legacy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1998. ISBN 0-19-816669-9.
• Macey, Patrick, Jeremy Noble, Jeffrey Dean, and Gustave Reese. Dean Roote. ed. Josquin des Prez. Grove Music Online. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/book/omo_gmo. Retrieved 29 October 2010.  (Subscription required)
• Matthews, Lora, and Paul Merkley. "Josquin des Prez". The Journal of Musicology (Summer 1998).^{[Full citation needed]}
• Merkley, Paul. "Josquin Desprez in Ferrara". The Journal of Musicology 18, 4 (2001): 544–83.
• Milsom, John. "Motets for Five or More Voices". In The Josquin Companion, edited by Richard Sherr, 281–320. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-19-816335-5
• Noble, Jeremy. "Josquin Desprez (works)" The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. London, Macmillan, 1980. (20 vol.) ISBN 1-56159-174-2.
• Pietschmann, Klaus. "Ein Graffito von Josquin Desprez auf der Cantoria der Sixtinischen Kapelle" Die Musikforschung vol. 52 no. 2 (1999), pp. 204–207.
• Reese, Gustave. Music in the Renaissance. New York: W. W. Norton, 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4.
• Reese, Gustave. "Josquin Desprez (biography)" The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. London, Macmillan, 1980. (20 vol.) ISBN 1-56159-174-2.
• Reese, Gustave, Jeremy Noble, Lewis Lockwood, Jessie Ann Owens, James Haar, Joseph Kerman, and Robert Stevenson. The new Grove High Renaissance Masters: Josquin, Plaestrina, Lassus, Byrd, Victoria. The Composer Biography Series; The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: Macmillan Publishers, 1980–84. ISBN 0-393-30093-5.
• Sherr, Richard, ed. The Josquin Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-19-816335-5.
• Wegman, Rob C. "Who Was Josquin?" In The Josquin Companion, edited by Richard Sherr, 21–50. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-19-816335-5

Notes[link]

Recordings[link]

• 1993 – Renaissance-polyfonie in Brugge. The Songbook of Zeghere van Male.. Capilla Flamenca. Eufoda 1155. Contains a recording of O intemerata and Mille regretz.
• 1996 – Pierre de la Rue . Missa Alleluia. Music at the Burgundy Court. Capilla Flamenca. Eufoda 1232. Contains a recording of Gaude Virgo and Huc me sidereo by Josquin des Prez
• 1996 – Oh Flanders Free. Music of the Flemish Renaissance: Ockeghem, Josquin, Susato, De la Rue. Capilla Flamenca. Alamire LUB 03, Naxos 8.554516. Contains a recording of El grillo, Guillaume se va chaufer and Kyrie from Missa la sol fa re mi by Josquin des Prez
• 1998 – Margarete – Maximilian I. Musik um 1500. Capilla Flamenca with La Caccia, Schola Cantorum Cantate Domino Aalst, Schola Gregoriana Lovaniensis. ORF Shop CD 265 (2 CDs). Contains a recording of Adieu mes amours by Josquin des Prez.
• 2000 – Magic. Flanders Recorder Quartet and friends. Contains a recording of Mille Regretz and Scaramella by Josquin des Prez.
• 2002 – Pierre de la Rue: Missa de septem doloribus. Capilla Flamenca and Psallentes. MEW 0207. Contains a recording of Stabat mater by Josquin des Prez.
• 2005 – Dulcis Melancholia. Biographie musicale de Marguerite d’Autriche. Capilla Flamenca. MEW 0525. Contains a recording of Belle pour l'amour de vous, Plus nulz regretz and Que vous madame / In pace by Josquin Desprez.
• 2007 – Désir D'aymer. Love Lyrics Around 1500: From Flanders To Italy. Capilla Flamenca. Eufoda 1369. Contains a recording of Baisés moy (4 voices and 6 voices) and O venus bant by Josquin des Prez.
• 2007 – Salve Mater Salve Jesu. Chant and Polyphony From Bohemia Around 1500. Capilla Flamenca and Schola Gregoriana Pragensis, with Barbara Maria Willi. KTC 1346. Contains a recording of Qui velatus facie fuisti by Josquin des Prez.

External links[link]

•  "Josquin Deprés". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. 
• Free scores by Josquin des Prez in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Free access to high-resolution images of manuscripts containing works by Josquin from Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music
• Free scores by Josquin des Prez at the International Music Score Library Project
• The Mutopia Project has compositions by Josquin des Prez
• Free scores by Josquin Des Prez in the Werner Icking Music Archive (WIMA)
• Josquin biography and discography
• Listen to free recordings of compositions from Umeå Akademiska Kör.
• Motet Ave Maria as interactive hypermedia (Shockwave required) at the BinAural Collaborative Hypertext

The Three Stooges
The Three Stooges in 1938's Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb. L to R: Moe Howard, Curly Howard, Larry Fine
Also known as	"Ted Healy and His Southern Gentlemen" "Ted Healy and His Stooges" "Ted Healy and His Three Lost Souls"
Genre	Slapstick comedy
Format	Short subject Feature film
Created by	Ted Healy
Starring	Moe Howard Curly Howard Larry Fine Shemp Howard Joe Besser Joe DeRita
Country of origin	United States
Language(s)	English
External links
threestooges.net

The Three Stooges were an American vaudeville and comedy act of the early to mid–20th century best known for their numerous short subject films. Their hallmark was physical farce and extreme slapstick. In films, the Stooges were commonly known by their first names: "Moe, Larry, and Curly" or "Moe, Larry, and Shemp," among other lineups. They started as "Ted Healy and his Southern Gentlemen" which comprised Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Shemp Howard. This original trio did one feature film entitled Soup to Nuts after which Shemp left the group to pursue a solo career, and was replaced by his brother Curly Howard. This incarnation of the team was the first to be known on film as The Three Stooges.

Shemp rejoined the group after Curly suffered a debilitating stroke in May 1946, reinstating the original line-up until November 1955, when Shemp died of a heart attack. In order to complete four Shemp-era shorts, film actor Joe Palma was used as a temporary body double to Shemp, before Joe Besser became the long-term replacement as the third Stooge. Ultimately, Joe DeRita (nicknamed "Curly Joe") replaced Joe Besser by 1958. The act regained momentum throughout the 1960s as popular kiddie fare until Larry Fine's paralyzing stroke in January 1970 effectively marked the end of the act proper. Moe tried, unsuccessfully, one final time to revive the Stooges with longtime supporting actor Emil Sitka filling in for Larry. Larry ultimately succumbed to a series of additional strokes in January 1975, followed by Moe, who died of lung cancer in May 1975.

History[link]

Ted Healy and his stooges[link]

The Three Stooges started in 1925 as part of a raucous vaudeville act called 'Ted Healy and His Stooges' (a.k.a. 'Ted Healy and His Southern Gentlemen', 'Ted Healy and His Three Lost Souls' and 'Ted Healy and His Racketeers'—the moniker 'Three Stooges' was never used during their tenure with Healy). In the act, lead comedian Healy would attempt to sing or tell jokes while his noisy assistants would keep "interrupting" him. Healy would respond by verbally and physically abusing his stooges. Brothers Moe and Shemp were joined later that year by violinist-comedian Larry Fine, and Fred Sanborn joined the group as well.^[1]

In 1930, Ted Healy and His Stooges (including Sanborn) appeared in their first Hollywood feature film, Soup to Nuts, released by Fox Film Corporation. The film was not a critical success, but the Stooges' performances were singled out as memorable, leading Fox to offer the trio a contract minus Healy. This enraged the prickly Healy, who told studio executives that the Stooges were his employees. The offer was withdrawn, and after Howard, Fine and Howard learned of the reason, they left Healy to form their own act, which quickly took off with a tour of the theatre circuit. Healy attempted to stop the new act with legal action, claiming they were using his copyrighted material. There are accounts of Healy threatening to bomb theaters if Howard, Fine and Howard ever performed there, which worried Shemp so much that he almost left the act; reportedly, only a pay raise kept him on board.^[2] Healy tried to save his act by hiring replacement stooges, but they were inexperienced and not as well-received as their predecessors.^[2] In 1932, with Moe now acting as business manager, Healy reached a new agreement with his former Stooges, and they were booked in a production of Jacob J. Shubert's The Passing Show of 1932. During rehearsals, Healy received a more lucrative offer and found a loophole in his contract allowing him to leave the production.^[2] Shemp, fed up with Healy's abrasiveness,^[2] decided to quit the act and found work almost immediately, in Vitaphone movie comedies produced in Brooklyn, New York.^[1]

With Shemp gone, Healy and the two remaining stooges (Moe and Larry) needed a replacement, so Moe suggested his younger brother Jerry Howard. Healy reportedly took one look at Jerry, who had long chestnut red locks and a handlebar mustache, and remarked that he did not look like he was funny.^[2] Jerry left the room and returned a few moments later with his head shaved (though his mustache remained for a time), and then quipped "Boy, do I look girly." Healy heard "Curly," and the name stuck.^[1] (There are varying accounts as to how the Curly character actually came about.)

In 1933, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) signed Healy and his Stooges to a movie contract. They appeared in feature films and short subjects, either together, individually, or with various combinations of actors. The trio was featured in a series of musical comedy shorts, beginning with Nertsery Rhymes. The short was one of a few shorts to be made with an early two-strip Technicolor process, including one featuring Curly without Healy or the other Stooges, Roast Beef and Movies (1934). The shorts themselves were built around recycled film footage of production numbers cut from MGM musicals, such as Children of Pleasure, Lord Byron of Broadway, and the unfinished March of Time (all 1930), which had been filmed in early Technicolor. Soon, additional shorts followed (sans the experimental Technicolor), including Beer and Pretzels (1933), Plane Nuts (1933), and The Big Idea (1934).^[1]

Healy and company also appeared in several MGM feature films as comic relief, such as Turn Back the Clock (1933), Meet the Baron (1933), Dancing Lady (1933), Fugitive Lovers (1934), and Hollywood Party (1934). Healy and the Stooges also appeared together in Myrt and Marge for Universal Pictures.^[1]

In 1934, the team's contract with MGM expired, and the Stooges parted professional company with Healy. According to Moe Howard's autobiography,^[3] the Stooges split with Ted Healy in 1934 once and for all because of Healy's alcoholism and abrasiveness. Their final film with Healy was MGM's 1934 film, Hollywood Party. Both Healy and the Stooges went on to separate successes, with Healy dying under mysterious circumstances in 1937.^[1]

The Columbia years[link]

Moe, Larry and Curly[link]

In 1934, the trio – now officially christened "The Three Stooges" – signed on to appear in two-reel comedy short subjects for Columbia Pictures. In Moe's autobiography, he said they each got $600 per week on a one-year contract with a renewable option;^[3] in the Ted Okuda–Edward Watz book The Columbia Comedy Shorts, the Stooges are said to have received $1,000 among them for their first Columbia effort, Woman Haters, and then signed a term contract for $7,500 per film (equal to $130,299 today), to be divided among the trio.^[4]

Within their first year at Columbia, the Stooges became wildly popular. Realizing this, Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn used the Stooges as leverage, as the demand for their films was so great that Columbia eventually refused to supply exhibitors with the trio's shorts unless they also agreed to book some of the studio's mediocre B movies. Cohn also saw to it that the Stooges remained ignorant of their popularity. During their 23 years spent at Columbia, the Stooges were never completely aware of their amazing drawing power at the box office. As their contracts with the studio included an open option that had to be renewed every year, Cohn would tell the boys that the short subjects were in decline, which was not a complete fabrication (Cohn's yearly mantra was "the market for comedy shorts is dying out, fellas.") Thinking their days were numbered, the Stooges would sweat it out each and every year, with Cohn renewing their contract for another year at the eleventh hour. This cruel deception kept the insecure Stooges unaware of their true value, resulting in them having second thoughts about asking for a better contract without a yearly option. Cohn's scare tactics worked for all 23 years the Stooges were at Columbia; the team never once asked for — nor were they ever given — a salary increase. It was not until after they stopped making the shorts in December 1957 did Moe learn of Cohn's underhanded tactics, what a valuable commodity the Stooges had been for the ailing studio, and how many millions more the act could have earned.^[4]

The Stooges were required to churn out up to eight short films per year within a 40-week period; for the remaining 12 or so weeks, they were free to pursue other employment. Usually, the Stooges would either spend this time with their families or tour the country promoting their live act.^[5] The Stooges appeared in 190 film shorts and five features while at Columbia. Del Lord directed more than three dozen Stooge films; Jules White directed dozens more, and his brother Jack White directed several under the pseudonym "Preston Black". Silent film star Charley Chase also shared directorial responsibilities with Lord and White, with more than pleasing results.^[4]

The Stooge films made between 1935–1941 captured the team at the peak, according to film historians Ted Okuda and Edward Watz, authors of The Columbia Comedy Shorts. Nearly every film produced became a classic in its own right. 1935's Hoi Polloi utilized the classic premise of a stuffy professor waging a bet that he can transform the uncultured trio into refined gentlemen; the plotline worked so well that it was reused twice, as Half-Wits Holiday and Pies and Guys. Three Little Beers featured the team employed at a brewery who then run amuck on a local golf course to win prize money. 1936's Disorder in the Court is considered a quintessential entry in the series, featuring the team as star witnesses to a murder trial. 1938's Violent is the Word for Curly was a quality Chase-directed short that featured the musical interlude, "Swingin' the Alphabet". In the 1940 film A Plumbing We Will Go, the trio were cast as inadvertent plumbers who nearly destroy a socialite's mansion, causing water to exit every appliance in the home.^[4] Other entries of the era, like Uncivil Warriors, A Pain in the Pullman, False Alarms, Grips, Grunts and Groans, The Sitter Downers, Dizzy Doctors, Tassels in the Air, We Want Our Mummy, Nutty but Nice, An Ache in Every Stake and In the Sweet Pie and Pie are considered among the team's finest work.^[4]

With the onset of World War II, the Stooges released several entries that poked fun at the rising Axis powers. You Nazty Spy! and its sequel I'll Never Heil Again burlesqued Hitler and the Nazis at a time when America was still neutral and resolutely isolationist. Moe is cast as "Moe Hailstone", an Adolf Hitler-like character, with Curly playing a Hermann Göring character (replete with medals), and Larry a Ribbentrop-type ambassador. Though revered by Stooge fans, as well as the Stooges themselves (Moe, Larry and director Jules White considered You Nazty Spy! their best film),^[6] the efforts indulged in a deliberately formless, non-sequitur style of verbal humor that was not the Stooges' forte, according to Okuda and Watz. Other wartime entries, like They Stooge to Conga, Higher Than a Kite, Back From the Front, Gents Without Cents and the controversial The Yoke's on Me have their moments, but taken in bulk, the wartime films are decidedly substandard.^[4] No Dough Boys ranks as the best of these farces. The team, made up as Japanese soldiers for a photo shoot, is mistaken for genuine saboteurs by a Nazi ringleader (Vernon Dent). The highlight of the film features the Stooges engaging in nonsensical gymnastics (the real spies are renowned acrobats) for a skeptical group of enemy agents.^[4]

The Stooges made occasional guest appearances in feature films, though generally they stuck to short subjects. Columbia offered theater owners an entire program of two-reel comedies (15 to 25 titles annually) featuring such stars as Buster Keaton, Andy Clyde, Charley Chase, and Hugh Herbert, but the Three Stooges shorts were the most popular of all.^[2]

The World War II era also brought on rising production costs that resulted in a reduced number of elaborate gags and outdoor sequences, Del Lord's stock and trade; as such, the quality of the teams' films (particularly those directed by Lord) began to slip after 1942. According to Okuda and Watz, entries like Loco Boy Makes Good, What's the Matador?, Sock-A-Bye Baby, I Can Hardly Wait and A Gem of a Jam are considered to be less quality work than previous efforts, and in a different class than their earlier films.^[4] The 1943 film Spook Louder, a remake of Mack Sennett's The Great Pie Mystery, is often cited as their worst film. The story of a phantom pie-thrower (later revealed to be the detective on the case) is repetitious and relying on the same jokes, which many Stooge fans consider to be far less humorous than their past work.^[4] Three Smart Saps, a film considered to be an improvement, features a reworking of a routine from Harold Lloyd's The Freshman, in which Curly's loosely basted suit begins to come apart at the seams while he is on the dance floor.^[4]

Film critics and stooge fans alike have cited Curly as the most popular member of the team.^[2] His childlike mannerisms and natural comedic charm (he had no previous acting experience) made him a hit with audiences, particularly children and women (the latter usually finding the trio's humor juvenile and uncouth). The fact that Curly had to shave his head for the act led him to feel unappealing to women. To mask his insecurities, Curly ate and drank excessively and caroused whenever the Stooges made personal appearances, which was approximately seven months out of the year. His weight ballooned in the 1940s, and his blood pressure was dangerously high.^[1] His wild lifestyle and constant drinking eventually caught up with him in 1945, and his performances suffered. In his last dozen shorts (ranging from 1945's If a Body Meets a Body through 1947's Half-Wits Holiday), he was seriously ill, struggling to get through even the most basic scenes.^[2]

It was during the final day of filming Half-Wits Holiday on May 6, 1946, that Curly suffered a debilitating stroke on the set, ending his 14-year career. Curly's health necessitated a temporary retirement from the act, and while the Stooges hoped for a full recovery, Curly never starred in a film again, except for one brief cameo appearance in the third film after Shemp returned to the trio, Hold That Lion! It was the only film that contained all four of the original Stooges (the three Howard brothers and Larry) on screen simultaneously; Jules White recalled Curly visiting the set one day, and White had him do this bit for fun. (Curly's cameo appearance was recycled in the 1953 remake Booty and the Beast.)^[3] In 1949, Curly was supposed to play a cameo role in the Stooge comedy Malice in the Palace, but he was physically unable to perform. His chef role was played by Larry.^[1]

Shemp returns[link]

Moe Howard turned to his older brother Shemp Howard to take Curly's place. Shemp, however, was hesitant to rejoin the Stooges, as he had a successful solo career at the time of Curly's untimely illness. However, he realized that Moe and Larry's careers would be finished without the Stooge act. Shemp wanted some kind of assurance that his rejoining was indeed temporary, and that he could leave the Stooges once Curly recovered. Curly remained gravely ill after 1950, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage caused by additional strokes on January 18, 1952.^[1]

Shemp appeared with the Stooges in 76 more shorts and a quickie Western comedy feature titled Gold Raiders.

During this period, Moe, Larry, and Shemp made a pilot for a Three Stooges television show called Jerks of All Trades in 1949. The series was never picked up, although the pilot is currently in the public domain and is available on home video, as is an early television appearance from around the same time on a vaudeville-style comedy series, Camel Comedy Caravan, originally broadcast live on CBS-TV on March 11, 1950, and starring Ed Wynn. Also available commercially is a kinescope of Moe, Larry, and Shemp's appearance on The Frank Sinatra Show, broadcast live over CBS-TV on January 1, 1952. Frank Sinatra was reportedly a big fan of the Stooges and slapstick comedy in general. On this broadcast, the Stooges are joined by one of their longtime stock-company members, Vernon Dent, who plays "Mr. Mortimer", a party-goer who requests a drink. The Stooges oblige with disastrous results.^[1]

The Three Stooges during the Shemp years (1947–1956), as represented in Malice in the Palace

Columbia's short-subject division downsized in 1952. Producer Hugh McCollum was discharged and director Edward Bernds resigned out of loyalty to McCollum, leaving only Jules White to both produce and direct the Stooges' remaining Columbia comedies. Almost overnight, the quality of the Stooge shorts declined. Production was significantly faster, with the former four-day filming schedules now tightened to two or three days. In another cost-cutting measure, White would create a "new" Stooge short by borrowing footage from old ones, setting it in a slightly different storyline, and filming a few new scenes often with the same actors in the same costumes. White was initially very subtle when recycling older footage: he would reuse only a single sequence of old film, re-edited so cleverly that it was not easy to detect. The later shorts were cheaper and the recycling more obvious, with as much as 75% of the running time consisting of old footage. White came to rely so much on older material that he could film the "new" shorts in a single day. Plus, any new footage filmed in order to link older material suffered from White's wooden directing and his penchant for telling his actors how to act. Shemp in particular disliked working with White.^[4]

Three years after Curly's death, Shemp died of a sudden heart attack at age 60 on November 22, 1955. Recycled footage of Shemp, combined with new footage utilizing Columbia supporting player Joe Palma as Shemp's double (only filmed from the back), were used to complete the last four films originally planned with Shemp: Rumpus in the Harem, Hot Stuff, Scheming Schemers, and Commotion on the Ocean.^[1]

Joe Besser replaces Shemp[link]

Joe Besser replaced Shemp in 1956, appearing in 16 shorts. Besser, noting how one side of Larry Fine's face seemed "calloused",^[7] had a clause in his contract specifically prohibiting him from being hit too hard (though this restriction was later lifted). Besser was the only "third" Stooge that dared to hit Moe back in retaliation and get away with it; Larry Fine was also known to hit Moe on occasion, but always with serious repercussions. "I usually played the kind of character who would hit others back," Besser recalled.^[8]

At that time, the Stooge films began to resemble sitcoms. Sitcoms, though, were now available for free. Television was the new popular medium, and by the time Besser joined the act, the Stooges were generally considered throwbacks to an obsolete era. The Besser films have long been considered the worst of the Stooge films. Though Besser was a very funny comedian (he was very popular on The Abbott and Costello Show), his whining mannerisms ("Not so harrrrd!") did not quite jell with the roughneck Stooge humor. However, Besser was not solely to blame for the lackluster quality of these final entries: the scripts were tired rehashes of earlier efforts (7 of the 16 films were remakes) and Moe and Larry's performances lacked energy. Both comedians were growing older, and could no longer perform pratfalls and physical comedy as they once had.^[4]

The final Stooge films had few bright moments, according to Okuda and Watz: Hoofs and Goofs, A Merry Mix Up, Rusty Romeos and Oil's Well That Ends Well are amusing, while the musical Sweet and Hot (long detested by fans) deserves some credit for straying from the norm. Muscle Up a Little Closer most resembled the sitcoms of the era, while Pies and Guys was a scene-for-scene remake of both Hoi Polloi and Half-Wits Holiday. The space craze also took hold of the American public at the time, resulting in three entries focusing on space travel: Space Ship Sappy, Outer Space Jitters and Flying Saucer Daffy.^[4]

The inevitable occurred soon enough. Columbia was the last studio still producing shorts, and the market for such films had all but dried up. As a result, the studio opted not to renew the Stooges' contract when it expired in late December 1957. The final comedy produced was Flying Saucer Daffy, filmed on December 19–20, 1957.^[5] Several days later, the Stooges were unceremoniously fired from Columbia Pictures after 24 years of making low-budget shorts. Joan Howard Maurer, daughter of Moe, wrote the following in 1982:

The boys' careers had suddenly come to an end. They were at Columbia one day and gone the next—no 'Thank yous,' no farewell party for their 24 years of dedication and service and the dollars their comedies had reaped for the studio. Moe Howard recalled that a few weeks after their exit from Columbia, he drove to the studio to say goodbye to several studio executives when he was stopped by a guard at the gate (obviously, not a Stooges fan) and, since he did not have the current year's studio pass, was refused entry. For the moment, it was a crushing blow.^[1]

Although the Stooges were no longer working for Columbia, the studio had enough completed films on the shelf to keep releasing new comedies for another 18 months, and not in the order they were produced. The final Stooge release, Sappy Bull Fighters, did not reach theaters until June 4, 1959. With no active contract in place, Moe and Larry discussed plans for a personal appearance tour; meanwhile, Besser's wife had a minor heart attack, and he preferred to stay local, leading him to withdraw from the act. For the first time in nearly 30 years, the Stooges hit a dead end.^[1]

The comeback: Larry, Moe and Curly Joe[link]

Seeing the success of how television, in its early years, allowed movie studios to unload a backlog of short films thought unmarketable, the Stooge films seemed perfect for the burgeoning genre. ABC television had even expressed interest as far back as 1949, purchasing exclusive rights to 30 of the trio's shorts.^[9] However, the success of television revivals for such names as Laurel and Hardy, Woody Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry and the Our Gang series in the late 1950s led Columbia to cash in again on the Stooges. In January 1958, Columbia's television subsidiary Screen Gems offered a package consisting of 78 Stooge shorts (mainly from the Curly era), which were well received.^[10] Almost immediately, an additional 40 shorts hit the market, and by 1959, all 190 Stooge shorts were airing regularly. Due to the massive quantity of Stooge product available for broadcast, the films were broadcast Monday through Friday, leading to heavy exposure aimed squarely at children. This led parents to watch alongside of their offspring, and before long, Howard and Fine found themselves in high demand.^[4] Moe quickly signed movie and burlesque comic Joe DeRita for the "third Stooge" role; DeRita adopted first a crew cut and then a completely shaven hairstyle and became "Curly Joe" because of his resemblance to the original Curly Howard (also to make it easier to distinguish him from Joe Besser, the earlier Stooge called Joe).

This Three Stooges lineup went on to make a series of popular full-length films from 1959 to 1965, most notably Have Rocket, Will Travel, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules and The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze. The films were aimed at the kiddie-matinee market, and most were farce outings in the Stooge tradition, with the exception of Snow White and the Three Stooges, a children's fantasy in Technicolor. They also appeared as firemen (the role that helped make them famous in Soup to Nuts) in the film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Throughout the 1960s, The Three Stooges were one of the most popular and highest-paid live acts in America.^[8]

The Stooges also tried their hand at another weekly television series in 1960 titled The Three Stooges Scrapbook. Filmed in color and with a laugh track, the first episode, "Home Cooking," featured the boys rehearsing for a new television show. Like Jerks of All Trades, the pilot did not sell. However, Norman Maurer was able to reuse the footage (reprocessed in black and white) for the first 20 minutes of the feature film The Three Stooges in Orbit.^[1]

The trio also filmed 41 short comedy skits for The New Three Stooges, which features a series of 156 animated cartoons produced for television. The Stooges appeared in live-action color footage, which preceded and followed each animated adventure in which they voiced their respective characters.^[1]

Final years[link]

In 1969, the Three Stooges filmed a pilot episode for a new TV series entitled Kook's Tour, a combination travelogue-sitcom that had the "retired" Stooges traveling around the world, with the episodes filmed on location.^[1]

On January 9, 1970, during production of the pilot, Larry suffered a paralyzing stroke, ending his acting career, as well as plans for the television series.^[1]

Plans were in the works for longtime foil Emil Sitka to replace Larry as the "Middle Stooge" in 1971, but nothing ever came of that idea other than the proposed publicity still reproduced here.^[1] Three years later, just before Christmas of 1974, Larry Fine suffered yet another stroke at the age of 72 and four weeks later, suffered a more massive one. Slipping into a coma, he died a week later of a stroke-induced cerebral hemorrhage on January 24, 1975.^[1]

Devastated by his friend's death, Moe nevertheless decided that the Three Stooges should continue. Several movie ideas were considered, one of which according to critic and movie historian Leonard Maltin, (who also uncovered a pre-production photo) was entitled Blazing Stewardesses. Before pre-production could begin, Moe fell ill from lung cancer, and died three months later on May 4, 1975.^[3]

However, Blazing Stewardesses, the last film idea that the Three Stooges had ever seriously considered, was eventually made, starring the last of the surviving Ritz Brothers comedy troupe and released to moderate acclaim later that year.^[1]

Joe DeRita continued to perform live into the mid-1970s with Mousie Garner and Frank Mitchell as "The New Three Stooges" enjoying recognition well into old age, before retiring by 1979.

Of the remaining "original-replacement" Stooges, Joe Besser died of heart failure on March 1, 1988, followed by Joe DeRita of pneumonia on July 3, 1993.

Legacy and perspective[link]

Over half a century since their last short film was released, the Three Stooges remain wildly popular with audiences. Their films have never left the television airwaves since first appearing in 1958, and they continue to delight old fans while attracting a new legion of fervent admirers. A hard-working group of working-class comedians who were never the critic's darlings, the durable act endured several personnel changes in their careers that would have permanently sidelined a less persistent act.^[4] The Stooges would not have lasted as long as they did as a unit without Moe Howard's guiding hand.^[1]

The Ted Okuda/Edward Watz-penned book The Columbia Comedy Shorts puts the Stooges legacy in critical perspective:

Many scholarly studies of motion picture comedy have overlooked the Three Stooges entirely—and not without valid reasoning. Aesthetically, the Stooges violated every rule that constitutes "good" comedic style. Their characters lacked the emotional depth of Charlie Chaplin and Harry Langdon; they were never as witty or subtle as Buster Keaton. They were not disciplined enough to sustain lengthy comic sequences; far too often, they were willing to suspend what little narrative structure their pictures possessed in order to insert a number of gratuitous jokes. Nearly every premise they have employed (spoofs of westerns, horror films, costume melodramas) has been done to better effect by other comedians. And yet, in spite of the overwhelming artistic odds against them, they were responsible for some of the finest comedies ever made. Their humor was the most undistilled form of low comedy; they were not great innovators, but as quick laugh practitioners, they place second to none. If public taste is any criterion, the Stooges have been the reigning kings of comedy for over fifty years.^[4]

Beginning in the 1980s, the Stooges finally began to receive long-overdue critical recognition. The release of nearly all their films on DVD by 2010 has allowed critics of Joe Besser and Joe DeRita—often the recipients of significant fan backlash—to appreciate the unique style of comedy both comedians brought to the Stooges. In addition, the DVD market in particular has allowed fans to view the entire Stooge film corpus as distinct periods in their long, distinguished career instead of comparing one Stooge to the other (the Curly vs. Shemp debate continues to this day^[11][12][13]).

The team appeared in 220 films. In the end, it is the durability of the 190 timeless short films the Stooges made at Columbia Pictures that acts as an enduring tribute to the comedy team. Their continued popularity worldwide has proven to even the most skeptical critics that their films—quite simply—are funny.^[4] American television personality Steve Allen went on record in the mid-1980s saying "though they never achieved widespread critical acclaim, they achieved exactly what they had always intended to do: they made people laugh."^[14]

Line-ups[link]

Years	Moe	Shemp	Larry	Curly	Joe	Curly Joe
1925–1932 (7)	Y	Y	Y
1932–1946 (14)	Y		Y	Y
1946–1955 (9)	Y	Y	Y
1956–1958 (2)	Y		Y		Y
1958–1971 (13)	Y		Y			Y

Moe Howard
Real Name: Moses Harry Horwitz
Born: (1897-06-19)June 19, 1897
Died: May 4, 1975(1975-05-04) (aged 77)
Stooge years: 1922–1975

Larry Fine
Real Name: Louis Feinberg
Born: (1902-10-05)October 5, 1902
Died: January 24, 1975(1975-01-24) (aged 72)
Stooge years: 1925–1971

Curly Howard
Real Name: Jerome Lester Horwitz
Born: (1903-10-22)October 22, 1903
Died: January 18, 1952(1952-01-18) (aged 48)
Stooge years: 1932–1946

Shemp Howard
Real Name: Samuel Horwitz
Born: (1895-03-11)March 11, 1895
Died: November 22, 1955(1955-11-22) (aged 60)
Stooge years: 1922–1932, 1946–1955

Joe Besser
Born: (1907-08-12)August 12, 1907
Died: March 1, 1988(1988-03-01) (aged 80)
Stooge years: 1956–1958

Joe DeRita ("Curly Joe")
Real Name: Joseph Wardell
Born: (1909-07-12)July 12, 1909
Died: July 3, 1993(1993-07-03) (aged 83)
Stooge years: 1958–1975

Shorts[link]

The Three Stooges appeared in 220 films throughout their career. Of those 220, 190 short films were made for Columbia Pictures between 1934 and 1959, for which the trio are best known. Their contract was extended each year from 1934 until the final one expired on December 31, 1957. The last 8 of the 16 shorts with Joe Besser were released soon afterward.

C3 Entertainment, Inc.[link]

Throughout their career, Moe acted as both their main creative force and business manager. Comedy III (C3) was formed by Moe, Larry and Joe DeRita in 1959 to manage all business and merchandise transactions for the team. C3 was basically in the background, with Moe's son-in-law Norman Maurer managing the comedy teams' film interests under Normandy Productions, and merchandising affairs under Norman Maurer Productions (NMP). Norman Maurer died of cancer in 1986.

In 1994, the heirs of Larry Fine and Joe DeRita filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against Moe's family, particularly Joan Howard Maurer and her son Jeffrey, who had inherited the NMP/Normandy business. The lawsuit alleged that the Howards had cheated the DeRita and Fine families out of their share of royalties. Howard was ordered to pay $2.6 million in damages; $1.6 million was for compensatory damages to Jean DeRita, while the remaining $1 million was divided between four of Fine's grandchildren. The Fine and DeRita families were represented by California attorney Bela G. Lugosi. Jr.^[15]

The resulting 1994 lawsuit led to the reestablishment of C3 as a three-way interest of Fine/[Moe]Howard/DeRita. The DeRita heirs received the proxy to the Howard share, giving them majority control on the company's management. Joe DeRita's stepsons, Robert and Earl Benjamin, became the senior management of C3, with Lugosi, Jr. serving as an executive board member for several years. The Benjamins later incorporated the company, and C3 is currently the owner of all Three Stooges trademarks and merchandising. Larry's grandson Eric Lamond is the representative of the Fines' one-third interest in the company.^[16]

Since 1995, C3 has authorized and provided the services of veteran actors Jim Skousen, Alan Semok, and Dave Knight (as Moe, Larry, and Curly respectively) for numerous "personal appearances" by the Stooge characters for a variety of merchandising and promotional events. This latter day trio has also provided voices for the characters in a variety of radio spots, merchandising tie-ins, and most recently for the first new Three Stooges short in fifty years. A CGI animation by Famous Frames Mobile Interactive, a first-wave "new media" company, entitled The Grate Debate, has Moe, Larry and Curly running for President.

Television broadcasts and rights issues[link]

A handful of Three Stooges shorts first aired on television in 1949, on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network. It was not until 1958 that Screen Gems packaged 78 shorts for national syndication; the package was gradually enlarged to encompass the entire library of 190 shorts. In 1959, KTTV in Los Angeles purchased the Three Stooges films for air, but by the early 1970s, rival station KTLA began airing the Stooges films, keeping them in the schedule until early 1994. The Family Channel (now ABC Family) ran the shorts as part of their Stooge TV block from February 19, 1996, to January 2, 1998. In the late 1990s, AMC had held the rights to the Three Stooges shorts, originally airing them under the Stooges Playhouse block, but replacing it in 1999 with N.Y.U.K. (New Yuk University of Knuckleheads). Featuring host Leslie Nielsen in the form of a college instructor, the block aired several shorts often grouped by a theme, such as similar schtick used in different films. Although the block was discontinued after AMC revamped their format in 2002, the network still ran Stooges shorts occasionally. The AMC run ended when Spike TV picked them up in 2004, airing them in their Stooges Slap-Happy Hour. By 2007, the network had discontinued the block. Although Spike did air Stooges shorts for a brief period of time after the block was canceled, as of late April 2008, Three Stooges has disappeared from the network's schedule entirely. The Three Stooges returned on December 31, 2009, on AMC, starting with the "Countdown with the Stooges" New Year's Eve marathon. AMC planned to put several episodes on their website in 2010.

Since the 1990s Columbia and its television division's successor, Sony Pictures Television, has preferred to license the Stooges shorts to cable networks, precluding the films from being shown on local broadcast TV. Two stations in Chicago and Boston, however, signed long-term syndication contracts with Columbia years ago and have declined to terminate them. Thus, WMEU-CA in Chicago currently airs all 190 Three Stooges shorts on Stooge-a-Palooza, hosted by Rich Koz, and WSBK-TV in Boston airs Stooge shorts and feature films. KTLA in Los Angeles dropped the shorts in 1994, but brought them back in 2007 as part of a special retro-marathon commemorating the station's 60th anniversary. Since that time, the station's original 16mm Stooges film prints have aired occasionally as part of mini-marathons on holidays. Antenna TV, a network broadcasting on the digital subchannels of local broadcast stations (owned by Tribune Broadcasting, who also owns KTLA), began airing the Stooges shorts upon the network's January 1, 2011 launch, which run in multi-hour blocks on weekends; most of the Three Stooges feature films are also broadcast on the network, through Antenna TV's distribution agreement with Sony Pictures Entertainment (whose Columbia Pictures subsidiary released most of the films).

Some of the Stooge films have been colorized by two separate companies. The first colorized DVD releases, distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, were prepared by West Wing Studios in 2004. The following year, Legend Films colorized the public domain shorts Malice in the Palace, Sing a Song of Six Pants, Disorder in the Court and Brideless Groom. Disorder in the Court and Brideless Groom also appears on two of West Wing's colorized releases. In any event, the Columbia-produced shorts (aside from the public domain films) are handled by Sony Pictures Entertainment, while the MGM Stooges shorts are owned by Warner Bros. via their Turner Entertainment division. Sony offers 21 of the shorts on their web platform Crackle, along with eleven Minisodes. Meanwhile, the rights to the Stooges' feature films rests with the studios that originally produced them (Columbia/Sony for the Columbia films, and 20th Century Fox for the Fox films).

International airings[link]

• Japan - NTV
• Germany - ARD

Home video release and public reception[link]

Between 1984 and 1985, RCA Columbia Pictures Home Video released a total of thirteen Three Stooges volumes on VHS, Beta and Laserdisc, each containing three shorts. These titles were later reissued on VHS by its successor, Sony Pictures Entertainment, between 1995 and 1997, with a DVD reissue between 2000 and 2004.

[edit] The Three Stooges Collection

On October 30, 2007, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released a two-disc DVD set entitled The Three Stooges Collection, Volume One: 1934–1936. The set contains shorts from the first three years the Stooges worked at Columbia Pictures, marking the first time ever that all 19 shorts were released in their original theatrical order to DVD. Additionally, every short was remastered in high definition, a first for the Stooge films. Previous DVD releases were based on themes (wartime, history, work, etc.), and sold poorly. Fans and critics alike praised Sony for finally giving the Stooges the proper DVD treatment. One critic states "the Three Stooges on DVD has been a real mix'n match hodgepodge of un-restored titles and illogical entries. This new...boxset...seems to be the first concerted effort to categorize their huge body of work chronologically with many shorts seeing the digital light for the first time."^[17] Videolibrarian.com critic added "finally, the studio knuckleheads got it right! The way that the Three Stooges have been presented on home video has been a real slap in the face and poke in the eye to fans. They've been anthologized, colorized, and public domain-ed, as their shorts have been released and re-released in varying degrees of quality. Highly recommended."^[18] Critic James Plath of DVDtown.com added, "Thank you, Sony, for finally giving these Columbia Pictures icons the kind of DVD retrospective that they deserve. Remastered in High Definition and presented in chronological order, these short films now give fans the chance to appreciate the development of one of the most successful comedy teams in history."^[19]

The chronological series proved very successful and wildly popular, and Sony wasted little time preparing the next set for release. Volume Two: 1937–1939 was released on May 27, 2008, followed by Volume Three: 1940–1942' three months later on August 26, 2008. Demand exceeded supply, proving to Sony that they had a hit on their hands. In response, Volume Four: 1943–1945 was released on October 7, 2008, a mere two months after its predecessor.^[20] The global economic crisis slowed down the release schedule after Volume Four, and Volume Five: 1946–1948 was belatedly released on March 17, 2009. Volume Five is the first in the series to feature Shemp Howard with the Stooges.^[21] Volume Six: 1949–1951 was released June 16, 2009,^[22] and Volume Seven: 1952–1954 was released on November 10, 2009.^[23] The eighth and final volume was released on June 1, 2010, bringing the series to a close. For the first time in history, all 190 Three Stooges short subjects became available to the public, uncut and unedited.

A new 20-disc DVD boxed set entitled The Three Stooges: The Ultimate Collection, reported to include all 190 shorts from volumes 1-8 and additional bonus material, is scheduled to be released in June 2012.

Music[link]

• Several instrumental tunes were played over the opening credits at different times in the production of the short features. The most commonly used themes were:
  • The verse portion of the Civil War era song "Listen to the Mockingbird", played in a comical way, complete with sounds of birds and such. This was first used in Pardon My Scotch, their ninth short film, in 1935. (Prior to that comedic short, the opening theme varied and was typically connected to the storyline in some fashion.)
  • "Three Blind Mice", beginning in 1939 as a slow but straightforward presentation (dubbed the "sliding strings" version), often breaking into a "jazzy" style before ending. In mid-1942, another more driving version, complete with accordion was played fast all the way through.
• The Columbia short subject Woman Haters was done completely in rhyme, mostly recited (not sung), in rhythm with a Jazz-Age underscore running throughout the film, but with some key lines sung. It was sixth in a Musical Novelties short subject series, and appropriated its musical score from the first five films. The memorable "My Life, My Love, My All," was originally "At Last!" from the film Um-Pa.
• "Swinging the Alphabet" (a.k.a. B-A-bay, B-E-be, B-I-bicky-bi…) from Violent Is the Word for Curly is perhaps the best-known song performed by the Stooges on film.
• The Stooges broke into a three-part harmonized version of "Tears" ("You'll Never Know Just What Tears Are") in Horses' Collars, A Ducking They Did Go (in which the melody was sung by Bud Jamison) and Half Shot Shooters. The song, which was written by Moe, Larry, Shemp, and one-time Ted Healy Stooge Fred Sanborn, first appeared in the 1930 feature film Soup to Nuts.
• The "Lucia Sextet" (Chi mi frena in tal memento?), from the opera Lucia di Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti (announced by Larry as "the Sextet from Lucy"), is played on a record player and lip-synched by the Stooges in Micro-Phonies. The same melody re-appears in Squareheads of the Round Table as the tune of "Oh, Elaine, can you come out tonight?". Micro-Phonies also includes the Johann Strauss II waltz "Voices of Spring" ("Frühlingsstimmen") Op. 410. Another Strauss waltz, "The Blue Danube", is featured in Ants in the Pantry and Punch Drunks.
• The song "Fredric March" (named after the actor) was a favorite of director Jules White; it appeared in at least seven different Columbia shorts:
  • Termites of 1938 – The Stooges "play" this song on a violin, flute, and string bass at a dinner party in an attempt to attract mice.
  • Dutiful But Dumb – Curly is hidden inside a floor-standing radio, and plays the song on a modified harmonica.
  • Three Little Twirps – Heard as background music at the circus while Moe and Curly sell tickets.
  • Idle Roomers – Curly plays the song on a trombone to calm a wolf man.
  • Gents Without Cents – Three girls perform acrobatics on stage while this song is playing.
  • Gents in a Jam – Shemp and Moe have a problem with a radio that will not stop playing this song.
  • Pardon My Backfire – The song plays on a car radio.
• The Moe–Larry–Curly Joe lineup of the Stooges recorded several musical record albums in the early 1960s. Most of their songs were adaptations of nursery rhymes. Among their more popular recordings were "Making a Record" (a surreal trip to a recording studio built around the song "Go Tell Aunt Mary"), "Three Little Fishes", "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth", "Wreck the Halls with Boughs of Holly", "Mairzy Doats" and "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas".
• In 1983, a group called the Jump 'N the Saddle Band recorded a track called "The Curly Shuffle", which featured the narrator singing about his love of the Stooges mixed with a chorus of many of Curly's catchphrases and sound effects. In the mid-1980s, the song became a popular mid-game hit for New York Mets fans in the Shea Stadium bleachers, who would dance in small groups to the tune whenever the song was played between innings. The music video, which featured clips of the classic Stooges shorts, was also included as a bonus feature on one of the 1984 VHS releases.

Feature motion pictures[link]

The Three Stooges also made appearances in many feature length movies in the course of their careers:

Film	Year	Moe	Larry	Curly	Shemp	Joe	Curly Joe
Soup to Nuts	1930	Y	Y		Y
Turn Back the Clock	1933	Y	Y	Y
Meet the Baron	1933	Y	Y	Y
Dancing Lady	1933	Y	Y	Y
Broadway to Hollywood	1933	Y		Y
Myrt and Marge	1933	Y	Y	Y
Fugitive Lovers	1934	Y	Y	Y
Hollywood Party (cameos)	1934	Y	Y	Y
The Captain Hates the Sea (cameos)	1934	Y	Y	Y
Start Cheering	1938	Y	Y	Y
Time Out for Rhythm	1941	Y	Y	Y
My Sister Eileen (cameos)	1942	Y	Y	Y
Rockin' in the Rockies	1945	Y	Y	Y
Swing Parade of 1946	1946	Y	Y	Y
Gold Raiders	1951	Y	Y		Y
Have Rocket, Will Travel	1959	Y	Y				Y
Stop! Look! and Laugh! (compilation)	1960	Y	Y	Y
Snow White and the Three Stooges	1961	Y	Y				Y
The Three Stooges Meet Hercules	1962	Y	Y				Y
The Three Stooges in Orbit	1962	Y	Y				Y
The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze	1963	Y	Y				Y
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (cameos)	1963	Y	Y				Y
4 for Texas (cameo)	1963	Y	Y				Y
The Outlaws Is Coming	1965	Y	Y				Y
Kook's Tour (TV pilot)	1970	Y	Y				Y

Joe Besser never appeared with the Stooges in a feature film.

Three feature-length Columbia releases were actually packages of older Columbia shorts. Columbia Laff Hour (introduced in 1956) was a random assortment that included the Stooges among other Columbia comedians like Andy Clyde, Hugh Herbert, and Vera Vague; the content and length varied from one theater to the next. Three Stooges Fun-o-Rama (introduced in 1959) was an all-Stooges show capitalizing on their TV fame, again with shorts chosen at random for individual theaters. The Three Stooges Follies (1974) was similar to Laff Hour, with a trio of Stooge comedies augmented by Buster Keaton and Vera Vague shorts, a Batman serial chapter, and a Kate Smith musical.

Museum[link]

Gary Lassin, grandson-in-law of Larry Fine, opened the Stoogeum in 2004, in a renovated architect's office in Spring House, Pennsylvania, 25 miles (40 km) north of Philadelphia. The museum-quality exhibits fill three stories 10,000 square feet (930 m²), including an 85-seat theater.^[24] Peter Seely, editor of the book Stoogeology: Essays on the Three Stooges said that the Stoogeum has "more stuff than I even imagined existed." 2,500 people visit it yearly, many during the annual Three Stooges Fan Club gathering in April.^[25]

In other media[link]

Comic books[link]

Over the years, several Three Stooges comics were produced.

• St. John Publications published the first Three Stooges comics in 1949 with 2 issues, then again in 1953–54 with 7 issues.
• Dell Comics published a Three Stooges series first as one-shots in their Four Color Comics line for five issues, then gave them a numbered series for four more issues (#6–9). With #10, the title would be published by Gold Key Comics. Under Gold Key, the series lasted through issue #55 in 1972.
• Gold Key Comics then published the Little Stooges series (7 issues, 1972–74) with story and art by Norman Maurer, Moe's son-in-law. This series featured the adventures of three fictional sons of the Three Stooges, as sort of modern-day teen-age versions of the characters.
• Eclipse Comics published the Three-D Three Stooges series (3 issues, 1986–1987) which reprinted stories from the St. John Publications series.^[26]
• Malibu Comics did a couple of one-shot comics, reprinting stories from the Gold Key Comics in 1989 and 1991.
• Bluewater Comics issued a biographical comic in 2011 which followed the lives and careers of the group.

Music[link]

Beginning in 1959, the Three Stooges began to appear in a series of novelty records. Their first recording was a 45 rpm single of the title song from Have Rocket, Will Travel. The trio released additional singles and LPs on the Golden and Coral labels, mixing comedy adventure albums and off-beat renditions of children's songs. Their final recording was the 1966 Yogi Bear and the Three Stooges Meet the Mad, Mad, Mad Dr. No-No, which incorporated the Three Stooges into the cast of the Yogi Bear cartoons.^[1]

The Stooges are referenced in the video for Weird Al Yankovic's "Like a Surgeon" with a hospital PA system asked for "Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard."

Radio[link]

Sirius XM Radio aired a special about the Stooges hosted by Tom Bergeron on Friday, July 31, 2009, at 2:00PM on the Sirius Howard 101 channel. Bergeron had conducted the interviews at the age of 17 back when he was still in high school in 1971. The television host had the tapes in storage for many years and was convinced on-air during an interview with Howard Stern to bring them in and turn it into a special.

After finding "the lost tapes," Bergeron brought them into Stern's production studio. He stated that the tapes were so old that the tapes with the Larry Fine interviews began to shred as Stern's radio engineers ran them through their cart players. They only really had the one shot, and fortunately for Three Stooges fans, the tapes were saved.

"The Lost Stooges Tapes" was hosted by Tom Bergeron, with modern commentary on the almost 40-year-old interviews that he had conducted with Larry Fine and Moe Howard. At the times of these interviews, Moe was still living at home and Larry had suffered a stroke and was living in a Senior Citizen's home.

Television[link]

In addition to the unsuccessful television series pilots Jerks of All Trades, The Three Stooges Scrapbook, and the incomplete Kook's Tour, the Stooges appeared in a show called The New Three Stooges which ran from 1965 to 1966. This series featured a mix of thirty-nine live-action segments which were used as wraparounds to 156 animated Stooges shorts. The New Three Stooges became the only regularly scheduled television show in history for the Stooges.^[1] Unlike other films shorts that aired on television, like the Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, and Popeye, the film shorts of the Stooges never had a regularly scheduled national television program to air in, neither on network nor syndicated. When Columbia/Screen Gems licensed the film library to television, the shorts aired in any fashion the local stations chose (examples: late-night "filler" material between the end of the late movie and the channel's sign-off time; in "marathon" sessions running shorts back-to-back for one, one-and-a-half, or two hours; etc.)

In the October 13, 1967 "Who's Afraid of Mother Goose?" episode of ABC's "World-of-Disney"-like anthology series Off to See the Wizard, the Three Stooges made a short appearance as "the three men in a tub".

Two episodes of Hanna-Barbera's The New Scooby-Doo Movies aired on CBS featuring animated Stooges as guest stars: the premiere, "Ghastly Ghost Town" (September 9, 1972) and "The Ghost of the Red Baron" (November 18, 1972). There also was a short-lived animated series, also produced by Hanna-Barbera, titled The Robonic Stooges, originally seen as a featured segment on The Skatebirds (CBS, 1977–1978), featuring Moe, Larry, and Curly (voiced by Paul Winchell, Joe Baker and Frank Welker, respectively) as bionic cartoon superheroes with extendable limbs, similar to the later Inspector Gadget. The Robonic Stooges later aired as a separate half-hour series, retitled The Three Robonic Stooges (each half-hour featured two segments of The Three Robonic Stooges and one segment of Woofer And Whimper, Dog Detectives, the latter re-edited from episodes of Clue Club, an earlier Hanna-Barbera cartoon series). There are also many Stooges references in the sitcom ALF.

In the episode "Beware The Creeper" of The New Batman Adventures. the Joker retreats to his hide-out after a quick fight with Batman. He yells out for his three henchmen "Moe? Larr? Cur?" only to find that they are not there. Shortly after that, Batman comes across these three goons in a pool hall; they have distinctive accents and hair styles similar to those of Moe, Larry, and Curly. These henchmen are briefly seen throughout the rest of the season.

2000 television film[link]

In spring of 2000, longtime Stooge fan Mel Gibson executive-produced a TV film (The Three Stooges^[27]) about the lives and careers of the comedians. Playing Moe was Paul Ben-Victor, Evan Handler was Larry, John Kassir was Shemp and Michael Chiklis was Curly. It was filmed in Australia and was produced for and broadcast on ABC. It was based on Michael Fleming's authorized biography of the Stooges, "The Three Stooges: From Amalgamated Morons to American Icons". Its unflattering portrayal of Ted Healy led Healy's son to give media interviews calling the film inaccurate. Additional error of fact included the hint that Moe Howard was down on his luck later in life and worked as a gofer (go fer...); someone who goes and gets stuff, at the studio, where he, his brothers and Larry had formerly worked as actors. Moe was the most careful with his money, which he invested well. He and his wife Helen owned a comfortable house in Toluca Lake in which they raised their children.

The film regularly runs on the American Movie Classics (AMC) channel.

Feature film revival[link]

A film about the Three Stooges, simply titled The Three Stooges, started production on March 14, 2011 with 20th Century Fox^[28] and will be directed by the Farrelly brothers. The film had been in what one critic has dubbed "development hell".^[29] The Farrellys, who have wanted to make this film since 1996, said that they were not going to do a biopic or remake, but instead new Three Stooges episodes set in the present day. The plot of the episodes is an adventure that revolves around the Stooges characters.^[30]

Casting players for the title characters proved difficult for the studio. Originally slated were Sean Penn to play Larry, Benicio del Toro to play Moe and Jim Carrey to play Curly. Both Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro left the project but returned while no official confirmation had been made about Jim Carrey. When del Toro was interviewed on MTV News for The Wolfman, he spoke about playing Moe. He was later asked who was going to play Larry and Curly in the film and commented that he still thought that Sean Penn and Jim Carrey were going to play them, though he added "Nothing is for sure yet."^[31][32] A story in The Hollywood Reporter stated that Will Sasso would play Curly in the upcoming comedy and that Hank Azaria was the front runner to play Moe.^[33] Sasso was ultimately cast as Curly; Sean Hayes of Will & Grace was cast as Larry Fine,^[34] while Chris Diamantopoulos was cast as Moe.^[35] Jane Lynch later joined the cast, playing a nun.^[36] The film was released on April 13, 2012.

Video games[link]

In 1984 Gottlieb released an arcade game featuring the Stooges trying to find three kidnapped brides. Later in 1987, game developers Cinemaware released a successful Three Stooges computer game, available for Apple IIGS, Amiga, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Based on the Stooges earning money by doing odd jobs to prevent the foreclosure of an orphanage, it incorporated audio from the original films and was popular enough to be reissued for the Game Boy Advance in 2002, as well as for PlayStation in 2004.^[37]

In foreign languages[link]

In most other languages, the Three Stooges are known by their English name. However, in Chinese, the trio is known as Sānge Chòu Píjiàng (三個臭皮匠)^[38] or Huóbǎo Sānrénzǔ (活寶三人組). Sānge Chòu Píjiàng, literally "Three Smelly Shoemakers", derives from a saying in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Sāngè chòu píjiàng shèngguò yīgè Zhūgě Liàng (三個臭皮匠，勝過一個諸葛亮) or "Three smelly shoemakers (are enough to) overcome one Zhuge Liang [a hero of the story]", i.e. three inferior people can overpower a superior person when they combine their strength. Huóbǎo Sānrénzǔ translates as "Trio of Buffoons".^[39]

In Japanese they are known as San Baka Taishō (三ばか大将)^[40] meaning "Three Idiot Generals" or "Three Baka Generals". The Japanese term baka (馬鹿, "fool" or "idiot", lit. "horse deer") is associated with the Chinese idiom zhǐlù wéimǎ (指鹿為馬; lit. "point at a deer and call it a horse", in Japanese shika o sashite uma to nasu [鹿を指して馬と為す]) meaning "deliberate misrepresentation for ulterior purposes". In Spanish they are known as Los tres chiflados^[41] or, roughly, "The Three Crackpots". In French and German usage, the name of the trio is partially translated as Les Trois Stooges and Die drei Stooges respectively. In Thai, the trio is known as 3 สมุนจอมป่วน (3 Samunčhǭmpūan; IPA: [sà mun tɕɔːm pùːan]) or 3 พี่น้องจอมยุ่ง (Phīnǭngčhǭmyung; IPA: [pʰîː nɔ́ːŋ tɕɔːm jûŋ]). In Portuguese, they are known as Os Três Patetas in Brazil, and Os Três Estarolas in Portugal, being "estarola" a direct translation to "stooge", while "pateta" being more related to "goofy".

See also[link]

• The Three Stooges in popular culture

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Besser, Joe (with Lenburg, Jeff, and Lenburg, Greg), Not Just a Stooge (1984) Excelsior Books, Inc. (reissued 1987 as Once a Stooge, Always a Stooge) Roundtable Publications (Autobiography of Joe Besser, including anecdotes about Abbott and Costello and Olsen and Johnson)
• Bruskin, David N., Behind the Three Stooges: The White Brothers: Conversations with David N. Bruskin (1993) Directors Guild of America (In-depth interviews with producer-directors Jules White, Jack White, and Sam White)
• Comedy III Productions, Inc., Pop, You're "Poifect!": A Three Stooges Salute to Dad (2002) Andrews McMeel
• Cox, Steve and Terry, Jim, One Fine Stooge: Larry Fine's Frizzy Life in Pictures (2005) Cumberland House Publishing
• Davis, Lon and Davis, Debra (eds.), Stooges Among Us (2008) BearManor Media ISBN 1-59393-300-2
• Feinberg, Morris, Larry: The Stooge in the Middle (1984) Last Gasp of San Francisco (Biography of Larry Fine, attributed to his brother but actually ghostwritten by Bob Davis)
• Fericano, Paul, Stoogism Anthology (1977) Poor Souls Printing
• Fine, Larry (with Carone, James), Stroke of Luck (1973) Siena Publishing Co. (Larry Fine's autobiography, transcribed from interviews toward the end of his life)
• Flanagan, Bill, Last of the Moe Haircuts (1986) McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Books, Inc.
• Fleming, Michael, The Three Stooges: An Illustrated History, from Amalgamated Morons to American Icons (2002) Broadway Publishing
• Forrester, Jeffrey, The Stoogephile Trivia Book (1982) Contemporary Books, Inc.
• Forrester, Jeffrey, The Stooge Chronicles (1981) Contemporary Books, Inc. (Comprehensive overview of the team's career; also discusses the various Ted Healy stooges)
• Forrester, Tom, with Forrester, Jeff, The Stooges' Lost Episodes (1988) Contemporary Books, Inc. (Discussion of obscure Stooges appearances, including solo films by individual Stooges)
• Forrester, Jeff, with Forrester, Tom, and Wallison, Joe, The Three Stooges: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Most Popular Comedy Team of All Time (2001) Donaldson Books
• Garner, Paul, Mousie Garner: Autobiography of a Vaudeville Stooge (1999) McFarland & Co.
• Hansen, Tom and Forrester, Jeffrey, Stoogemania: An Extravaganza of Stooge Photos, Puzzles, Trivia, Collectibles and More (1984) Contemporary Books, Inc. (Overview of Three Stooges memorabilia)
• Howard, Moe, Moe Howard and the Three Stooges (1977) Citadel Press (Moe Howard's autobiography, completed and released posthumously by his daughter)
• Koceimba, Bill, with Kaufman, Eric A., and Sack, Steve, The Three Stooges Golf Spoof and Trivia Book (1999) Gazelle, Inc.
• Kurson, Robert, The Official Three Stooges Encyclopedia: The Ultimate Knucklehead's Guide to Stoogedom, from Amalgamated Association of Morons to Ziller, Zeller, and Zoller (1999) McGraw-Hill
• Kurson, Robert, The Official Three Stooges Cookbook (1998) Contemporary Books, Inc.
• Lenburg, Jeff, with Maurer, Joan Howard, and Lenburg, Greg, The Three Stooges Scrapbook (1982, revised 1994, 2000) Citadel Press
• Longley, Maximillian, The Conservative In Spite of Himself: A Reluctant Right-Winger's Thoughts on Life, Law and the Three Stooges (2007) Monograph Publishers
• Maltin, Leonard, The Great Movie Comedians (1978) Crown Books
• Maltin, Leonard, Movie Comedy Teams (1970, revised 1985) New American Library
• Maltin, Leonard, Selected Short Subjects (first published as The Great Movie Shorts, 1972) Crown Books, (revised 1983) Da Capo Press
• McGarry, Annie, The Wacky World of the Three Stooges (1992) Crescent Books
• Maurer, Joan Howard, Curly: An Illustrated Biography of the Superstooge (1985, revised 1988) Citadel Press
• Maurer, Joan Howard (ed.), The Three Stooges Book of Scripts (1984) Citadel Press
• Maurer, Joan Howard and Maurer, Norman (eds.), The Three Stooges Book of Scripts, Volume II (1987) Citadel Press
• Okuda, Ted and Watz, Edward, The Columbia Comedy Shorts (1998) McFarland & Co. (Comprehensive history of the Columbia short subject department; Stooge colleagues Edward Bernds and Emil Sitka are quoted extensively)
• Seely, Peter and Pieper, Gail W., Stoogeology: Essays on the Three Stooges (2007) McFarland & Co.
• Smith, Ronald L., The Stooge Fans' I.Q. Test (1988) Contemporary Books, Inc.
• Solomon, Jon, The Complete Three Stooges: The Official Filmography and Three Stooges Companion (2000) Comedy III Productions

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: The Three Stooges

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: The Three Stooges

• Three Stooges Online Filmography at threestooges.net
• The Three Stooges Official Website (sanctioned by C3 Entertainment, Inc. - threestooges.com)
• The Stoogeum (Three Stooges Museum) – stoogeum.com
• A Three Stooges compilation is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• Portrait (2009) of The Three Stooges (with Shemp) by noted illustrator Drew Friedman
• Interview with Moe Howard on new success with the younger generation from the Ocala Star-Banner – February 22, 1959 accessed via Google News
• The Three Stooges (2012) at the Internet Movie Database
• Dan Barry (April 13, 2012). "Even the Three Stooges Needed Second Fiddles". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/movies/the-three-stooges-used-a-lot-of-second-fiddles.html. 

Henry VIII
King Henry VIII after Hans Holbein the Younger, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
King of England and Ireland (more...)
Reign	21 April 1509 – 28 January 1547
Coronation	24 June 1509
Predecessor	Henry VII
Successor	Edward VI
Spouse	Catherine of Aragon Anne Boleyn Jane Seymour Anne of Cleves Catherine Howard Catherine Parr
Among others Issue
Henry, Duke of Cornwall Mary I of England Henry FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Richmond and Somerset Elizabeth I of England Edward VI of England
House	House of Tudor
Father	Henry VII of England
Mother	Elizabeth of York
Born	(1491-06-28)28 June 1491 Greenwich Palace, Greenwich
Died	28 January 1547(1547-01-28) (aged 55) Palace of Whitehall, London
Burial	4 February 1547 St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle
Signature
Religion	Christianity (Anglican, previously Roman Catholic)

English Royalty
House of Tudor
Royal Coat of Arms
Henry VIII
Henry, Duke of Cornwall
Mary I
Elizabeth I
Edward VI

Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547) was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. He was Lord, and later King, of Ireland, as well as continuing the nominal claim by the English monarchs to the Kingdom of France. Henry was the second monarch of the House of Tudor, succeeding his father, Henry VII.

Besides his six marriages, Henry VIII is known for his role in the separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. Henry's struggles with Rome led to the separation of the Church of England from papal authority, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and establishing himself as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Yet he remained a believer in core Catholic theological teachings, even after his excommunication from the Catholic Church.^[1] Henry oversaw the legal union of England and Wales with the Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542.

Henry was considered an attractive, educated and accomplished king in his prime and has a reputation as "one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne".^[2][3] Besides ruling with absolute power, he also engaged himself as an author and composer. His desire to provide England with a male heir—which stemmed partly from personal vanity and partly because he believed a daughter would be unable to consolidate the Tudor Dynasty and the fragile peace that existed following the Wars of the Roses^[4]—led to the two things for which Henry is remembered: his six marriages, and the English Reformation, making England a mostly Protestant nation. In later life he became morbidly obese and his health suffered; his public image is frequently depicted as one of a lustful, egotistical, harsh, and insecure king.^[5]

Early years: 1491–1509[link]

Catherine of Aragon as a young widow, by Henry VII's court painter, Michael Sittow, in c. 1502.

Born at Greenwich Palace, Henry VIII was the third child of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.^[6] Of the young Henry's six siblings, only three — Arthur, Prince of Wales; Margaret; and Mary — survived infancy. In 1493, at the age of two, Henry was appointed Constable of Dover Castle and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. In 1494, he was made Duke of York. He was subsequently appointed Earl Marshal of England and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Henry was given a first-rate education from leading tutors, becoming fluent in Latin, French, and Spanish.^[7] As it was expected that the throne would pass to Prince Arthur, Henry's older brother, Henry was prepared for a clerical career. Elizabeth of York, his mother, died when Henry was aged 11.^[8]

Death of Prince Arthur[link]

In 1502, Arthur died at the age of 15, after only 20 weeks of marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Arthur's death thrust all his duties upon his younger brother, the 10-year-old Henry, who then became Prince of Wales. Henry VII renewed his efforts to seal a marital alliance between England and Spain, by offering his second son in marriage to Prince Arthur's widow, Catherine of Aragon, youngest surviving child of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile.^[9] For the new Prince of Wales to marry his brother's widow, a dispensation from the Pope was normally required to overrule the impediment of affinity because, as told in the Book of Leviticus, "If a brother is to marry the wife of a brother they will remain childless." Catherine swore that her marriage to Prince Arthur had not been consummated. Still, both the English and Spanish parties agreed that an additional papal dispensation of affinity would be prudent to remove all doubt regarding the legitimacy of the marriage.

The impatience of Catherine's mother, Queen Isabella I, induced Pope Julius II to grant dispensation in the form of a Papal bull. So, 14 months after her young husband's death, Catherine was betrothed to his even younger brother, Henry. Yet by 1505, Henry VII lost interest in a Spanish alliance and the younger Henry declared that his betrothal had been arranged without his consent.

Continued diplomatic manoeuvring over the fate of the proposed marriage lingered until the death of Henry VII in 1509. Only 17 years old, Henry married Catherine on 11 June 1509 and, on 24 June 1509, the two were crowned at Westminster Abbey.

Early reign: 1509–1525[link]

Two days after his coronation, he arrested his father's two most unpopular ministers, Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley (grandfather of Henry's daughter Elizabeth's favourite courtier, Robert Dudley). They were charged with high treason and were executed in 1510. This was to become Henry's primary tactic for dealing with those who stood in his way,^[10] as believed by historians such as Crofton. Henry also returned to the public some of the money supposedly extorted by the two ministers.

... his executors made restitution of great sums of money, to many persons taken against good conscience to the said king's use, by the forenamed Empson and Dudley.^[11]

Eighteen year-old Henry after his coronation in 1509.

Henry cultivated the image of a Renaissance Man and his court was a centre of scholarly and artistic innovation and glamorous excess, epitomised by the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He was an accomplished musician, author, and poet. His best known musical composition is "Pastime with Good Company" or "The Kynges Ballade". He was an avid gambler and dice player, and excelled at sports, especially jousting, hunting, and real tennis. He was known for his strong defence of conventional Christian piety.^[12] Meeting Francis I on 7 June 1520 near Calais, he entertained the French king with a fortnight of lavish entertainment to establish a closer diplomatic relationship after the military conflicts of the previous decade.

France and the Habsburgs[link]

In 1511 Pope Julius II proclaimed a Holy League against France. The new alliance rapidly grew to include not only Spain and the Holy Roman Empire but England as well. Henry decided to use the occasion to expand his holdings in northern France. He concluded the Treaty of Westminster, a pledge of mutual aid with Spain against France, in November 1511 and prepared for involvement in the War of the League of Cambrai.

In 1513 Henry invaded France and his troops defeated a French army at the Battle of the Spurs. His brother-in-law, James IV of Scotland, invaded England at the behest of Louis XII of France,^[13] but failed to draw Henry's attention away from France. The English army, led by Queen Catherine, who acted as regent of England while Henry was in France, defeated the Scots at the Battle of Flodden on 9 September 1513. Among the dead was the Scottish King James IV, ending Scotland's brief involvement in the war.

On 18 February 1516 Queen Catherine bore Henry his first child to survive infancy, Princess Mary. (A son, Henry, Duke of Cornwall, had been born in 1511 but lived only a few weeks.)

Power and authority[link]

Government and finances under Henry[link]

Financially, the reign of Henry was a near-disaster. Although he inherited a prosperous economy (and further augmented his royal treasury by seizures of church lands), Henry's heavy spending and high taxes damaged the economy.^[14][15] For example, Henry expanded the Royal Navy from 5 to 53 ships. He loved palaces; he began with a dozen and died with fifty-five, in which he hung 2,000 tapestries.^[16] By comparison, his neighbour and nephew James V of Scotland had five palaces and 200 tapestries.^[17] He took pride in showing off his collection of weapons, which included exotic archery equipment, 2,250 pieces of land ordnance and 6,500 handguns.^[18]

Henry VIII with Charles Quint (right) and Pope Leo X (center), circa 1520.

Henry began his reign with heavy reliance on advisers and ended with complete control. From 1514 to 1529, Thomas Wolsey (1473–1530), a Catholic cardinal, served as lord chancellor and practically controlled domestic and foreign policy for the young king. He negotiated the truce with France that was signalled by the dramatic display of amity on the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520). He switched England back and forth as an ally of France and the Holy Roman Empire. Wolsey centralised the national government and extended the jurisdiction of the conciliar courts, particularly the Star Chamber. His use of forced loans to pay for foreign wars angered the rich, who were annoyed as well by his enormous wealth and ostentatious living. Wolsey disappointed the king when he failed to secure a divorce from Queen Catherine. The treasury was empty after years of extravagance; the peers and people were dissatisfied and Henry needed an entirely new approach; Wolsey had to be replaced. After 16 years at the top he lost power in 1529 and in 1530 was arrested on false charges of treason and died in custody. Wolsey's fall was a warning to the Pope and to the clergy of England of what might be expected for failure to comply with the king's wishes. Henry then took full control of his government, although at court numerous complex factions continued to try to ruin and destroy each other.

Henry VIII's suit of armour, c.1544, Italian made. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Geoffrey Elton (1962) argues there was a major Tudor revolution in government. While crediting Henry with intelligence and shrewdness, Elton finds that much of the positive action, especially the break with Rome, was the work of Thomas Cromwell and not the king. Elton sees Henry as competent, but too lazy to take direct control of affairs for any extended period; that is, the king was an opportunist who relied on others for most of his ideas and to do most of the work. Henry's marital adventures are part of Elton's chain of evidence; a man who marries six wives, Elton notes, is not someone who fully controls his own fate. Elton shows that Thomas Cromwell had conceived of a commonwealth of England that included popular participation through Parliament and that this was generally expressed in the preambles to legislation. Parliamentary consent did not mean that the king had yielded any of his authority; Henry VIII was a paternalistic ruler who did not hesitate to use his power. Popular "consent" was a means to augment rather than limit royal power.^[19]

Reformation[link]

Henry never formally repudiated the doctrines of the Catholic Church, but he declared himself supreme head of the church in England in 1534. This, combined with subsequent actions, eventually resulted in a separated church, the Church of England. Henry and his advisors felt the pope was acting in the role of an Italian prince involved in secular affairs, which obscured his religious role. They said Rome treated England as a minor stepchild, allowing it one cardinal out of fifty, and no possibility of that cardinal becoming pope. For reasons of state it was increasingly intolerable to Henry that major decisions in England were settled by Italians. The divorce issue exemplified the problem but was not itself the cause of the problem.^[20]

Henry's reformation of the English church involved more complex motives and methods than his desire for a new wife and an heir. Henry asserted that his first marriage had never been valid, but the divorce issue was only one factor in Henry's desire to reform the church. In 1532–1537, he instituted a number of statutes — the act of appeal (Statute in Restraint of Appeals, 1533), the various Acts of Succession (1533, 1534, and 1536), the first Act of Supremacy (1534), and others — that dealt with the relationship between the king and the pope and the structure of the Church of England. During these years, Henry suppressed monasteries and pilgrimage shrines in his attempt to reform the church. The king was always the dominant force in the making of religious policy; his policy, which he pursued skilfully and consistently, is best characterised as a search for the middle way.^[21]

Questions over what was the true faith were resolved with the adoption of the orthodox "Act of Six Articles" (1539) and a careful holding of the balance between extreme factions after 1540. Even so, the era saw movement away from religious orthodoxy, the more so as the pillars of the old beliefs, especially Thomas More and John Fisher, had been unable to accept the change and had been executed in 1535 for refusing to renounce papal authority. Critical for the Henrician reformation was the new political theology of obedience to the prince that was enthusiastically adopted by the Church of England in the 1530s. It reflected Martin Luther's new interpretation of the fourth commandment ("Honor thy father and mother") and was mediated to an English audience by William Tyndale.

Half-Groat of Henry VIII

The founding of royal authority on the Ten Commandments, and thus on the word of God, was a particularly attractive feature of this doctrine, which became a defining feature of Henrician religion. Rival tendencies within the Church of England sought to exploit it in the pursuit of their particular agendas. Reformers strove to preserve its connections with the broader framework of Lutheran theology, with the emphasis on faith alone and the word of God, while conservatives emphasised good works, ceremonies, and charity. The Reformers linked royal supremacy and the word of God to persuade Henry to publish the Great Bible in 1539, an English translation that was a formidable prop for his new-found dignity.^[22]

Response to the reforms was mixed. The reforms, which closed down monasteries that were the only support of the impoverished,^[23] alienated most of the population outside of London and helped provoke the great northern rising of 1536–1537, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace.^[24] It was the only real threat to Henry's security on the throne in all his reign. Some 30,000 rebels in nine groups were led by the charismatic Robert Aske, together with most of the northern nobility. Aske went to London to negotiate terms; once there he was arrested, charged with treason and executed. About 200 rebels were executed and the disturbances ended.^[25] Elsewhere the changes were accepted and welcomed, and those who clung to Catholic rites kept quiet or moved in secrecy. They would reemerge in the reign of Henry's daughter Mary (1553–1558).

Dissolving the monasteries[link]

England possessed numerous religious houses that owned large tracts of land worked by tenants. Henry dissolved them (1536–1541) and transferred a fifth of England's landed wealth to new hands. The program was designed primarily to create a landed gentry beholden to the crown, which would use the lands much more efficiently.

Henry made radical changes in traditional religious practices. He ordered the clergy to preach against superstitious images, relics, miracles, and pilgrimages, and to remove most candles. The catechism of 1545, called the King's Primer, left out the saints. Latin rituals gave way to English. Shrines to saints were destroyed — including the popular one of St. Thomas of Canterbury — and relics were ridiculed as worthless old bones.

Mistresses[link]

Contrary to popular belief, Henry may not have had very many affairs outside marriage. Apart from women he later married, the identities of only two mistresses are completely undisputed: Elizabeth Blount and Mary Boleyn.^[26] However, it is unlikely that they were the only two; Alison Weir has argued that, aside from the affairs listed below, there were numerous other short-term and secret liaisons, most of them conducted in the king's river-side mansion of Jordan House.^[27]

Elizabeth "Bessie" Blount gave birth in June 1519 to Henry's illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy. The young boy was made Duke of Richmond in June 1525 in what some thought was one step on the path to legitimising him. In 1533, FitzRoy married Mary Howard, Anne Boleyn's first cousin, but died three years later without any children. At the time of FitzRoy's death (July 1536), Parliament was enacting the Second Succession Act, which could have allowed Henry's illegitimate son to become king.

Mary Boleyn was Henry's mistress before her sister, Anne, became his second wife. She is thought to have been Catherine's lady-in-waiting at some point between 1519 and 1526. There has been speculation that Mary's two children, Catherine and Henry, were fathered by Henry, but this has never been proved and the King never acknowledged them as he did Henry FitzRoy.

In 1510 it was reported that Henry was conducting an affair with one of the sisters of Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, either Elizabeth or Anne Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon.^[28] Her brother, the Duke of Buckingham, became enraged and Lord George Hastings, her husband, sent her to a convent. Eustace Chapuys wrote, "the husband of that lady went away, carried her off and placed her in a convent sixty miles from here, that no one may see her."^[29]

Biographer Antonia Fraser has claimed that Henry had an affair with Mary Shelton in 1535, in opposition to the traditional belief that Margaret ("Madge") Shelton was Henry's lover.^[30]

King's Great Matter: 1525–1533[link]

The Six Wives of Henry VIII
Catherine of Aragon
Anne Boleyn
Jane Seymour
Anne of Cleves
Catherine Howard
Catherine Parr

Henry became impatient with Catherine's inability to produce the heir he desired. All of Catherine's children died in infancy except their daughter Mary.^[31] Henry wanted a male heir to consolidate the power of the Tudor dynasty.

In 1525, as Henry grew more impatient, he became enamoured of a charismatic young woman in the Queen's entourage, Anne Boleyn.^[32] Anne at first resisted his attempts to seduce her, and refused to become his mistress as her sister Mary Boleyn had. She said "I beseech your highness most earnestly to desist, and to this my answer in good part. I would rather lose my life than my honesty."^[27]:160 This refusal made Henry even more attracted, and he pursued her relentlessly.

Eventually, Anne saw her opportunity in Henry's infatuation and determined she would only yield to his embraces as his acknowledged queen.^[33] It soon became the King's absorbing desire to annul his marriage to Catherine.^[34]

Henry appealed directly to the Holy See, independently from Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, from whom he kept his plans for Anne secret. Instead, Henry's secretary, William Knight, was sent to Pope Clement VII to sue for the annulment. The grounds were that the bull of Pope Julius II was obtained by false pretences, because Catherine's brief marriage to the sickly Arthur had been consummated. Henry petitioned, in the event of annulment, a dispensation to marry again to any woman even in the first degree of affinity, whether the affinity was contracted by lawful or unlawful connection. This clearly had reference to Anne.^[33]

Catherine of Aragon, first queen of Henry VIII

However, as the pope was at that time imprisoned by Catherine's nephew, Emperor Charles V, Knight had difficulty in getting access to him, and so only managed to obtain the conditional dispensation for a new marriage. Henry now had no choice but to put the matter into the hands of Wolsey. Wolsey did all he could to secure a decision in the King's favour, going so far as to arrange an ecclesiastical court to meet in England, with a representative from the Pope.^[33] Shakespeare's play, Henry VIII, accurately records Catherine of Aragon's astounding coup in that remarkable courtroom in Act II, scene iv. She bows low to Henry, put herself at his mercy, states her case with irrefutable eloquence and then sweeps out of the courtroom, a woman both formidable and clearly wronged. However much this moment swayed those present and the rest of the world to her side, the Pope had never had any intention of empowering his legate. Charles V resisted the annulment of his aunt's marriage, but it is not clear how far this influenced the pope. But it is clear that Henry saw that the Pope was unlikely to give him an annulment from the Emperor's aunt.^[35] The pope forbade Henry to proceed to a new marriage before a decision was given in Rome, not in England. Wolsey bore the blame. Convinced that he was treacherous, Anne Boleyn maintained pressure until Wolsey was dismissed from public office in 1529. After being dismissed, the cardinal begged her to help him return to power, but she refused. He then began a plot to have Anne forced into exile and began communication with Queen Catherine and the Pope to that end. When this was discovered, Henry ordered Wolsey's arrest and had it not been for his death from illness in 1530, he might have been executed for treason.^[36] His replacement, Sir Thomas More, initially cooperated with the king's new policy, denouncing Wolsey in Parliament and proclaiming the opinion of the theologians at Oxford and Cambridge that the marriage of Henry to Catherine had been unlawful. As Henry began to deny the authority of the Pope, More's qualms grew.

A year later, Queen Catherine was banished from court and her rooms were given to Anne. With Wolsey gone, Anne had considerable power over political matters. She was an unusually educated and intellectual woman for her time, and was keenly absorbed and engaged with the ideas of the Protestant Reformers. When Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham died, Anne had the Boleyn family's chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, appointed to the vacant position. Through the intervention of the King of France, this was conceded by Rome, the pallium being granted to him by Clement.^[37]

Breaking the power of Rome in England proceeded slowly. In 1532, a lawyer who was a supporter of Anne, Thomas Cromwell, brought before Parliament a number of acts including the Supplication against the Ordinaries and the Submission of the Clergy, which recognised Royal Supremacy over the church. Following these acts, Thomas More resigned as Chancellor, leaving Cromwell as Henry's chief minister.^[38]

Second marriage[link]

Portrait of Anne Boleyn, Henry's second queen; a later copy of an original painted in about 1534

In the winter of 1532, Henry attended a meeting with Francis I of France at Calais in which he enlisted the support of the French king for his new marriage.^[39] Immediately upon returning to Dover in England, Henry and Anne went through a secret wedding service.^[40] She soon became pregnant and there was a second wedding service in London on 25 January 1533. On 23 May 1533, Cranmer, sitting in judgment at a special court convened at Dunstable Priory to rule on the validity of the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, declared the marriage of Henry and Catherine null and void. Five days later, on 28 May 1533, Cranmer declared the marriage of Henry and Anne to be valid.^[41]

Catherine was formally stripped of her title as queen, and Anne was crowned queen consort on 1 June 1533. The queen gave birth to a daughter slightly prematurely on 7 September 1533. The child was christened Elizabeth, in honour of Henry's mother, Elizabeth of York.^[42] Rejecting the decisions of the Pope, Parliament validated the marriage of Henry and Anne with the First Succession Act (Act of Succession 1533). Catherine's daughter, Mary, was declared illegitimate, and Anne's issue were declared next in the line of succession. Most notable in this declaration was a clause repudiating "any foreign authority, prince or potentate". All adults in the Kingdom were required to acknowledge the Act's provisions by oath; those who refused were subject to imprisonment for life. Any publisher or printer of any literature alleging that the marriage was invalid was automatically guilty of high treason and could be punished by death.

Separation from Rome: 1533–1540[link]

Meanwhile, Parliament had forbidden all appeals to Rome and exacted the penalties of praemunire against all who introduced papal bulls into England. Parliament prohibited the Church from making any regulations (canons) without the king's consent. It was only then that Pope Clement at last took the step of launching sentences of excommunication against Henry and Thomas Cranmer,^[43][44] declaring at the same time the archbishop's decree of annulment to be invalid and the marriage with Anne null and papal nuncio was withdrawn from England and diplomatic relations with Rome were broken off.^[37] Several more laws were passed in England. The Ecclesiastical Appointments Act 1534 required the clergy to elect bishops nominated by the Sovereign. The Act of Supremacy in 1534 declared that the King was "the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England" and the Treasons Act 1534 made it high treason, punishable by death, to refuse to acknowledge the King as such. In response to the excommunications, the Peter's Pence Act was passed in and it reiterated that England had "no superior under God, but only your Grace" and that Henry's "imperial crown" had been diminished by "the unreasonable and uncharitable usurpations and exactions" of the Pope.^[45]

In defiance of the Pope the Church of England was now under Henry’s control, not Rome's. Protestant Reformers still faced persecution, particularly over objections to Henry's annulment. Many fled abroad where they met further difficulties, including the influential William Tyndale, who was eventually executed and his body burned at King Henry's behest. Theological and practical reforms would follow only under Henry's successors (see end of section).

Personal troubles[link]

The king and queen were not pleased with married life. The royal couple enjoyed periods of calm and affection, but Anne refused to play the submissive role expected of her. The vivacity and opinionated intellect that had made her so attractive as an illicit lover made her too independent for the largely ceremonial role of a royal wife, given that Henry expected absolute obedience from those who interacted with him in an official capacity at court. It made her many enemies. For his part, Henry disliked Anne’s constant irritability and violent temper. After a false pregnancy or miscarriage in 1534, he saw her failure to give him a son as a betrayal. As early as Christmas 1534, Henry was discussing with Cranmer and Cromwell the chances of leaving Anne without having to return to Catherine.^[46]

Opposition to Henry's religious policies was quickly suppressed in England. A number of dissenting monks were tortured and executed. The most prominent resisters included John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More, Henry's former Lord Chancellor, both of who refused to take the oath to the King and were subsequently convicted of high treason and beheaded at Tower Hill, just outside the Tower of London.

These suppressions, including the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries Act of 1536, in turn contributed to further resistance among the English people, most notably in the Pilgrimage of Grace, a large uprising in northern England in October, 1536. Henry VIII promised the rebels he would pardon them and thanked them for raising the issues to his attention, then invited the rebel leader, Robert Aske to a royal banquet. At the banquet, Henry asked Aske to write down what had happened so he could have a better idea of the problems he would "change." Aske did what the King asked, although what he had written was later used against him as a confession. The King's word could not be questioned (as he was held as God's chosen, and second only to God himself) so Aske told the rebels they had been successful and they could disperse and go home. However, because Henry saw the rebels as traitors, he did not feel obliged to keep his promises. The rebels realised that the King was not keeping his promises and rebelled again later that year, but their strength was less in the second attempt and the King ordered the rebellion crushed. The leaders, including Aske, were arrested and executed for treason.

Execution of Anne Boleyn[link]

Jane Seymour became Henry's third wife.

On 8 January 1536 news reached the king and the queen that Catherine of Aragon had died. Upon hearing the news of her death, Henry and Anne reportedly decked themselves in bright yellow clothing, yellow being the colour of mourning in Spain at the time. Henry called for public displays of joy regarding Catherine's death. The queen was pregnant again, and she was aware of the consequences if she failed to give birth to a son. Her life could be in danger, as with both wives dead, Henry would be free to remarry and no one could claim that the union was illegal. Later that month, the King was unhorsed in a tournament and was badly injured. It seemed for a time that the King's life was in danger. When news of this accident reached the queen, she was sent into shock and miscarried a male child that was about 15 weeks old, on the day of Catherine’s funeral, 29 January 1536. For most observers, this personal loss was the beginning of the end of the royal marriage.^[47]

Henry VIII with Jane Seymour and the young Prince Edward, c.1545, by unknown artist, Royal Collection, Hampton Court (detail). At the time that this was painted, Henry was married to his sixth wife, Catherine Parr.

Given the King's desperate desire for a son, the sequence of Anne's pregnancies has attracted much interest. Author Mike Ashley speculated that Anne had two stillborn children after Elizabeth's birth and before the birth of the male child she miscarried in 1536.^[48] Most sources attest only to the birth of Elizabeth in September 1533, a possible miscarriage in the summer of 1534, and the miscarriage of a male child, of almost four months gestation, in January 1536.^[49] As Anne recovered from her final miscarriage, Henry declared that his marriage had been the product of witchcraft. The King's new mistress, Jane Seymour, was quickly moved into new quarters. This was followed by Anne's brother, George Boleyn, being refused a prestigious court honour, the Order of the Garter, which was instead given to Jane Seymour's brother.^[50]

Five men, including Anne's own brother, were arrested on charges of incest and treason, accused of having sexual relationships with the queen.^[51] On 2 May 1536 Anne was arrested and taken to the Tower of London. She was accused of adultery, incest and high treason.^[52] Although the evidence against them was unconvincing, the accused were found guilty and condemned to death by the peers. George Boleyn and the other accused men were executed on 17 May 1536. At 8 am on 19 May 1536, the queen was executed on Tower Green. She knelt upright, in the French style of executions. The execution was swift and consisted of a single stroke.^[53]

Birth of a prince[link]

The day after Anne's execution in 1536 Henry became engaged to Jane Seymour, one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting to whom the king had been showing favour for some time. They were married 10 days later. At about the same time as this, his third marriage, Henry granted his assent to the Laws in Wales Act 1535, which legally annexed Wales, uniting England and Wales into one unified nation. This was followed by the Second Succession Act (Act of Succession 1536), which declared Henry's children by Queen Jane to be next in the line of succession and declared both the Lady Mary and the Lady Elizabeth illegitimate, thus excluding them from the throne. The king was granted the power to further determine the line of succession in his will. In 1537, Jane gave birth to a son, Prince Edward, the future Edward VI. The birth was difficult and the queen died at Hampton Court Palace on 24 October 1537 from an infection. After Jane's death, the entire court mourned with Henry for an extended period. Henry considered Jane to be his "true" wife, being the only one who had given him the male heir that he so desperately sought. He was later to be buried next to her at his death.

Final years: 1540–1547[link]

Henry around 1539 or 1540

In 1540, Henry sanctioned the destruction of shrines to saints. At this time, Henry wished to marry once again to ensure the succession. Thomas Cromwell, created Earl of Essex, suggested Anne, the sister of the Protestant Duke of Cleves, who was seen as an important ally in case of a Roman Catholic attack on England. Hans Holbein the Younger was dispatched to Cleves to paint a portrait of Anne for the king. Despite speculation that Holbein painted her in an overly flattering light, it is more likely that the portrait was accurate; Holbein remained in favour at court. After regarding Holbein's portrayal, and urged by the complimentary description of Anne given by his courtiers (and the fact that many others whom Holbein painted had no desire to risk marriage with Henry), the king agreed to wed Anne. On Anne's arrival in England, Henry is said to have found her unattractive, privately calling her a "Flanders Mare". There is no record of Anne's opinion of the relative attractions of her morbidly obese new husband.^[54]

Portrait of Anne of Cleves by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1539.

Henry wished to annul the marriage so he could marry another. The Duke of Cleves had become engaged in a dispute with the Holy Roman Emperor, with whom Henry had no desire to quarrel. Queen Anne was intelligent enough not to impede Henry's quest for an annulment. Upon the question of marital sex, she testified that her marriage had never been consummated. Henry was said to have come into the room each night and merely kissed his new bride on the forehead before retiring. All impediments to an annulment were thus removed.

The marriage was subsequently dissolved and Anne received the title of "The King's Sister", and was granted Hever Castle, the former residence of the Boleyn family. Cromwell, meanwhile, fell out of favour for his role in arranging the marriage and was subsequently attainted and beheaded. The office of Vicegerent in Spirituals, which had been specifically created for him, was not filled.

Miniature Portrait of Catherine Howard by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1540.

On 28 July 1540 (the same day Cromwell was executed), Henry married the young Catherine Howard, Anne Boleyn's first cousin and a lady-in-waiting of Anne's.^[55] He was absolutely delighted with his new queen. Soon after her marriage, however, Queen Catherine had an affair with the courtier Thomas Culpeper. She employed Francis Dereham, who was previously informally engaged to her and had an affair with her prior to her marriage, as her secretary. Thomas Cranmer, who was opposed to the powerful Roman Catholic Howard family, brought evidence of Queen Catherine's activities to the king's notice. Though Henry originally refused to believe the allegations, he allowed Cranmer to conduct an investigation, which resulted in Queen Catherine's implication. When questioned, the queen could have admitted a prior contract to marry Dereham, which would have made her subsequent marriage to Henry invalid, but she instead claimed that Dereham had forced her to enter into an adulterous relationship. Dereham, meanwhile, exposed Queen Catherine's relationship with Thomas Culpeper. Catherine was executed on 13 February 1542. She was aged between 17 and 22 when she died (opinions differ as to her year of birth). That same year, England's remaining monasteries were all dissolved, and their property transferred to the Crown. Abbots and priors lost their seats in the House of Lords; only archbishops and bishops came to comprise the ecclesiastical element of the body. The Lords Spiritual, as members of the clergy with seats in the House of Lords were known, were for the first time outnumbered by the Lords Temporal.

Catherine Parr, Henry's sixth and last wife.

Henry married his last wife, the wealthy widow Catherine Parr, in 1543. She argued with Henry over religion; she was a reformer, but Henry remained a conservative. This behaviour nearly proved her undoing, but she saved herself by a show of submissiveness. She helped reconcile Henry with his first two daughters, the Lady Mary and the Lady Elizabeth. In 1544, an Act of Parliament put the daughters back in the line of succession after Edward, Prince of Wales, though they were still deemed illegitimate. The same act allowed Henry to determine further succession to the throne in his will.

A wave of political executions that commenced with Edmund de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk in 1513 ended with Henry Earl of Surrey in January, 1547. Although some sources claim that, according to Holinshed, the number of executions in this reign amounted to 72,000, the figure referred to "great thieves, petty thieves, and rogues," and the source is not Holinshed but the English clergyman William Harrison. This inflated figure came from Gerolamo Cardano who in turn got it from the Roman Catholic Bishop of Lisieux.^[56]

Death and succession[link]

Late in life, Henry became obese (with a waist measurement of 54 inches/137 cm) and had to be moved about with the help of mechanical inventions. He was covered with painful, pus-filled boils and possibly suffered from gout. His obesity and other medical problems can be traced from the jousting accident in 1536 (that had also led to Anne Bolyn's miscarriage) in which he suffered a leg wound. The accident actually re-opened and aggravated a previous leg wound he had sustained years earlier, to the extent that his doctors found it difficult (if not impossible) to treat it. The wound festered for the remainder of his life and became ulcerated, thus preventing him from maintaining the same level of physical activity he had previously enjoyed. The jousting accident is believed to have caused Henry's mood swings, which may have had a dramatic effect on his personality and temperament.^[57]

The theory that Henry suffered from syphilis has been dismissed by most serious historians.^[58] Syphilis was a well-known disease in Henry's time, and although his contemporary Francis I of France was treated for it, the notes left from Henry's physicians do not indicate that the English king was. A more recent and credible theory suggests that Henry's medical symptoms, and those of his older sister Margaret Tudor, are characteristic of untreated Type II diabetes. According to research published in March 2011, his wives' pattern of pregnancies and his mental deterioration suggests that the king may have been Kell positive and suffered from McLeod syndrome.^[59][60]

Obesity specialists at Imperial College London have analysed Henry VIII’s history and body morphology to identify that this was likely as a result of traumatic brain injury after his 1536 jousting accident, which in turn led to a neuroendocrine cause of his obesity. This analysis identifies growth hormone deficiency (GHD) as the source for his increased adiposity but also significant behavioural changes (multiple marriages and war with France) noted in his later years.^[61]

Henry's obesity hastened his death at the age of 55, which occurred on 28 January 1547 in the Palace of Whitehall, on what would have been his father's 90th birthday. He expired soon after allegedly uttering his last words: "Monks! Monks! Monks!",^[62] perhaps in reference to the monks he caused to be evicted during the dissolution of the monasteries.^[63] Henry VIII was interred in St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle, next to his wife Jane Seymour.^[64]Over a hundred years later, Charles I was buried in the same vault.

After his death, his only legitimate son, Edward, inherited the Crown, becoming Edward VI. Since Edward was only nine years old at the time, he could not exercise actual power. Henry's will designated 16 executors to serve on a council of regency until Edward reached the age of 18. The executors chose Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford, Jane Seymour's elder brother, to be Lord Protector of the Realm. In default of heirs to Edward, the throne was to pass to Henry VIII's daughter by Catherine of Aragon, the Princess Mary, and her heirs. If Mary's issue failed, the crown was to go to Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, Princess Elizabeth, and her heirs. Finally, if Elizabeth's line became extinct, the crown was to be inherited by the descendants of Henry VIII's deceased younger sister, Mary. The descendants of Henry's sister Margaret Tudor – the royal family of Scotland – were therefore excluded from succession according to this act. This final provision failed when James VI of Scotland subsequently became James I of England upon Elizabeth's death.

Public image and memory[link]

Henry worked hard to present an image of unchallengeable authority and irresistible power. He executed at will, beheading, often in public, more English notables than any monarch before or since. The roll of heads included two wives, twenty peers, four leading public servants, and six of the king's close attendants and friends, not to mention one cardinal and various heads of monasteries. In addition Cardinal Wolsey died en route to his treason trial.

Henry's appearance in his later years (1646 engraving based on a 1548 engraving)

A strong man, over six feet tall and broad in proportion, he excelled at jousting and hunting. More than pastimes, they were political devices that served multiple goals, from enhancing his athletic royal image to impressing foreign emissaries and rulers, to conveying Henry's ability to suppress any rebellion. Thus he arranged a jousting tournament at Greenwich in 1517, where he wore gilded armour, gilded horse trappings, and outfits of velvet, satin and cloth of gold dripping with pearls and jewels. It suitably impressed foreign ambassadors, one of who wrote home that, "The wealth and civilisation of the world are here, and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such." Henry finally retired from the lists in 1536 after a heavy fall from his horse left him unconscious for two hours, but he continued to sponsor two lavish tournaments a year.^[65] He then started adding weight and lost that trim athletic look that had made him so handsome; Henry's courtiers began dressing in heavily padded clothes to emulate — and flatter — their increasingly stout monarch. Towards the end of his reign his health rapidly declined due to unhealthy eating.

Henry was an intellectual. The first English king with a modern humanist education, who read and wrote English, French, Latin and was thoroughly at home in his well-stocked library; he personally annotated many books and wrote and published his own book. He is also said to have written Helas madam. He founded Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford, in 1546. To promote the public support for the reformation of the church, Henry had numerous pamphlets and lectures prepared. For example, Richard Sampson's Oratio (1534) was a legalistic argument for absolute obedience to the temporal power as vested in divine law and Christian love ("obey my commandments"). Sampson cited historical precedents (now known to be spurious) to support his claim that the English church had always been independent from Rome.^[66] At the popular level theatre and minstrel troupes funded by the crown travelled around the land to promote the new religious practices and ridicule the old. In the polemical plays they presented, the pope and Catholic priests and monks were mocked as foreign devils, while the glorious king was hailed as a brave and heroic defender of the true faith.^[67]

Henry VIII was an avid gambler and dice player. He was an accomplished musician, author, and poet; his best known piece of music is "Pastime with Good Company" ("The Kynges Ballade"). He is often reputed to have written "Greensleeves" but probably did not. The King was involved in the original construction and improvement of several significant buildings, including Nonsuch Palace, King's College Chapel, Cambridge and Westminster Abbey in London. Many of the existing buildings Henry improved were properties confiscated from Wolsey, such as Christ Church, Oxford, Hampton Court Palace, the Palace of Whitehall, and Trinity College, Cambridge.

The only surviving piece of clothing worn by Henry VIII is a cap of maintenance awarded to the Mayor of Waterford, along with a bearing sword, in 1536. It currently resides in the Waterford Museum of Treasures. A suit of Henry's armour is on display in the Tower of London. In the centuries since his death, Henry has inspired or been mentioned in numerous artistic and cultural works.

Royal finances[link]

Henry inherited a vast fortune from his father Henry VII who had, in contrast to his son, been frugal and careful with money. This fortune was estimated to £1,250,000 (£375 million by today's standards).^[27]:13 Much of this wealth was spent by Henry on maintaining his court and household, including many of the building works he undertook on royal palaces. Tudor monarchs had to fund all the expenses of government out of their own income. This income came from the Crown lands that Henry owned as well as from customs duties like tonnage and poundage, granted by parliament to the king for life. During Henry's reign the revenues of the Crown remained constant (around £100,000),^[27]:64 but were eroded by inflation and rising prices brought about by war. Indeed it was war and Henry's dynastic ambitions in Europe that meant that the surplus he had inherited from his father was exhausted by the mid-1520s. Whereas Henry VII had not involved Parliament in his affairs very much, Henry VIII had to turn to Parliament during his reign for money, in particular for grants of subsidies to fund his wars. The Dissolution of the Monasteries provided a means to replenish the treasury and as a result the Crown took possession of monastic lands worth £120,000 (£36 million) a year.^[27]:393 Henry had to debase the coinage in 1526 and 1539 in order to solve his financial problems, and despite his ministers efforts to reduce costs and waste at court, Henry died in debt.

Legacy[link]

Though mainly motivated by dynastic and personal concerns, and despite never really abandoning the fundamentals of the Catholic Church, Henry ensured that the greatest act of his reign would be one of the most radical and decisive of any English monarch. His break with Rome in 1533–1534 was an act with enormous consequences for the subsequent course of English history beyond the Tudor dynasty. Not only in making possible the transformation of England into a powerful (albeit very distinctive) nation; but in the seizing of economic and political power from the Church by the aristocracy, chiefly through the acquisition of monastic lands and assets — a short-term strategy with long-term social consequences. Henry's decision to entrust the regency of his son Edward's minor years to a decidedly reform-oriented regency council, dominated by Edward Seymour, most likely for the simple tactical reason that Seymour seemed likely to provide the strongest leadership for the kingdom, ensured that the English Reformation would be consolidated and even furthered during his son's reign. Such ironies marked other aspects of his legacy.

Silver groat of Henry VIII, minted c. 1540. The reverse depicts the quartered arms of England and France.

He fostered humanist learning and yet was responsible for the deaths of several outstanding English humanists. Obsessed with securing the succession to the throne, he left as his only heirs a young son (who died before his 16th birthday) and two daughters adhering to different religions. The power of the state was magnified. Henry worked with some success to make England once again a major player on the European scene but depleted his treasury in the course of doing so, a legacy that has remained an issue for English monarchs ever since.

Scarisbrick (1968) concludes that Henry was a formidable, captivating man who "wore regality with a splendid conviction." But unpredictably his overpowering charm could turn into anger and shouting, for he was high-strung and unstable; hypochondriac and possessed of a strong streak of cruelty. Smith (1971) considered him an egotistical border-line neurotic given to great fits of temper and deep and dangerous suspicions, with a mechanical and conventional, but deeply held piety, having at best "a mediocre intellect" to hold these contradictory forces in harness.

English navy[link]

Together with Alfred the Great and Charles II, Henry is traditionally cited as one of the founders of the Royal Navy. His reign featured some naval warfare and, more significantly, large royal investment in shipbuilding (including a few spectacular great ships such as Mary Rose), dockyards (such as HMNB Portsmouth) and naval innovations (such as the use of cannon on board ship — although archers were still deployed on medieval-style forecastles and bowcastles as the ship's primary armament on large ships, or co-armament where cannon were used). However, in some ways this is a misconception since Henry did not bequeath to his immediate successors a navy in the sense of a formalised organisation with structures, ranks, and formalised munitioning structures but only in the sense of a set of ships. Elizabeth I still had to cobble together a set of privately owned ships to fight off the Spanish Armada (which consisted of about 130 warships and converted merchant ships) and in the former, formal sense the modern British navy, the Royal Navy, is largely a product of the Anglo-Dutch naval rivalry of the 17th century. Still, Henry's reign marked the birth of English naval power and was a key factor in England's later victory over the Spanish Armada.

Henry's break with Rome incurred the threat of a large-scale French or Spanish invasion. To guard against this he strengthened existing coastal defence fortresses such as Dover Castle and, at Dover, Moat Bulwark and Archcliffe Fort, which he personally visited for a few months to supervise. He built a chain of new 'castles' (in fact, large bastioned and garrisoned gun batteries) along Britain's southern and eastern coasts from East Anglia to Cornwall, largely built of material gained from the demolition of the monasteries. These were known as Henry VIII's Device Forts.

Style and arms[link]

Henry's shield as the Duke of York.

Many changes were made to the royal style during his reign. Henry originally used the style "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Lord of Ireland". In 1521, pursuant to a grant from Pope Leo X rewarding a book by Henry, the Defence of the Seven Sacraments, attacking Martin Luther, the royal style became "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith and Lord of Ireland". Following Henry's excommunication, Pope Paul III rescinded the grant of the title "Defender of the Faith", but an Act of Parliament declared that it remained valid; and it continues in royal usage to the present day.

In 1535, Henry added the "supremacy phrase" to the royal style, which became "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland and of the Church of England in Earth Supreme Head". In 1536, the phrase "of the Church of England" changed to "of the Church of England and also of Ireland".

In 1541, Henry had the Irish Parliament change the title "Lord of Ireland" to "King of Ireland" with the Crown of Ireland Act 1542, after being advised that many Irish people regarded the Pope as the true head of their country, with the Lord acting as a mere representative. The reason the Irish regarded the Pope as their overlord was that Ireland had originally been given to the King Henry II of England by Pope Adrian IV in the 12th century as a feudal territory under papal overlordship. The meeting of Irish Parliament that proclaimed Henry VIII as King of Ireland was the first meeting attended by the Gaelic Irish chieftains as well as the Anglo-Irish aristocrats. The style "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith and of the Church of England and also of Ireland in Earth Supreme Head" remained in use until the end of Henry's reign.

Henry's motto was "Coeur Loyal" ("true heart") and he had this embroidered on his clothes in the form of a heart symbol and with the word "loyal". His emblem was the Tudor rose and the Beaufort portcullis.

As Duke of York, Henry used the arms of his father (i.e. those of the kingdom), differenced by a label of three points ermine. As king, Henry's arms were the same as those used by his predecessors since Henry IV: Quarterly, Azure three fleurs-de-lys Or (for France) and Gules three lions passant guardant in pale Or (for England).

Ancestry[link]