Introducing Barbara Blatner and her new play,
Jane, Queen's Foole
Staged Reading
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As one of two winners of Broad Horizons' 2025 new plays contest, Jane Queen's Foole will receive a staged reading at:
7:00 P.M.
Monday, June 2, 2025
Pearl Studios, 4th Floor, Room 401
500 8th Avenue, between 35th and 36th Streets​
New York City
Biography
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Barbara Blatner’s verse play No Star Shines Sharper, published by Baker’s Plays, was aired repeatedly on Christmas Eve on NPR stations and was acquired by the Museum of TV and Radio. Her award-winning Years of Sky was produced by Scripts Up! at 59E59 Theatres. Jane, Queen’s Foole took second place in the Julie Harris Playwriting Contest and was a Finalist in the Judith Royer Excellence in Playwriting Contest. Hamlet Leaves England appeared on the Pittsburgh New Works Mainstage. Two Sisters was read in the 2022 Inge Festival’s New Play Lab. Secret Places was produced by New Circle Theatre Company. And Spell, a riff-in-verse on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was presented by Alumnae Theatre’s New Ideas Festival. Light was presented at the 2020 ATHE Conference.
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New York Quarterly Books published Barbara’s two poetry collections, The Still Position (2010) and Living with You (2012). Poetry and reviews have appeared in Beloved on This Earth, Heliotrope, House Organ, Poetry Northwest, The New York Quarterly, Lift, Apalachee Quarterly, 13th Moon, and others. She has written music for plays and for Renaissance fusion band Urban Myth’s CD Ex Urbe.
Playwright's Note about the Play:
Tudor Fools and Jane Foole
In England during the time of Mary Tudor and her father King Henry VIII (early 16th Century), “holy Fools”–who were deranged and wild but strikingly witty and possibly prophetic–might become court jesters. These Fools could be transgressive and provocatively entertaining, but they needed to avoid seriously offending the monarch they served.
The existence of Jane Foole, as she was called, is documented in bursary accounts of Anne Boleyn, King Henry VIII’s second wife, who was famously beheaded by him. Jane is thought to have been the Foole of queens Catherine Parr, Mary Tudor and, perhaps, Boleyn herself.
Since so little is known of Jane, I have invented her as a lame, “crazy” country girl begging on the streets of London. Jane is a radically creative female who rhymes compulsively and is emotionally and physically challenged. She engages Princess Mary Tudor with her wit as well as with her prophecy that Mary will someday rule England. She thereby becomes Mary’s "Jane Foole."