I think it is right to focus on the differences between reading a text and watching it performed. There is a sense, particularly if one is reading as a scholar, in which one feels the need to fully understand a text, to pull out all of its meanings. This in turn can have the effect of making allusions or hidden meanings feel more important. But watching the New Moon speech is a more capricious less controlled experience which makes the allusions, as Sarah suggests, at once more tentative and more dangerous.

This point, I think, raises questions about the audience as community or, indeed, as factions. Far from the solitary experience of the reader, spectators could be especially attuned, or could perhaps utterly miss, various allusions in the play depending on their allegiances, statuses, interests, etc.  There is the potential for comment within the audience - "did you hear THAT?!" - and also for audience members to be watched at particular moments in the drama for their reactions, and not just the King.  I'm thinking perhaps of the danger inherent in the dialogue about the Gentleman's head being chopped off.  There would have been spectators for whom that moment would have felt sickeningly immediate, either because they are currently out of favour, or perhaps because one of their kin is currently in peril, or has been in the past.  How would relatives of Edward Stafford, for instance, have felt during and reacted to the scene if they were present?

Sarah hints at it, but nobody really grapples with the question about who we the audience were meant to be.  Were we ourselves (fairly well clued up specialists, who could be trusted to take most of the allusions), were we 'a modern audience' (whom, it seems, cannot be trusted to understand anything without a lot of fairly heavy nudging and winking — 'early Tudor word for tart'), or were we them (the contemporary court audience whom Eleanor is empathising with)?  This is the basic problem behind all recreations which hope to discover something about the original actor/audience relations.

Absolutely.  It's impossible to recreate the potentially volatile and, I imagine, rumour-riddled atmosphere of court during the Christmas of 1533 - Anne's first as Henry's consort.  Add to that the pressure of providing entertainment suitable for both a commercial and invited academic audience, as was the case in August 2009, and you get two very different forms of laughter from each audience - neither of which probably bore much relation to the laughter of the original audience.  I suppose it would have been expedient to laugh heartily at the replacement of an old, leaky moon in 1533, but we (the academics) might have found the joke distasteful and cruel, and they (the paying punters) may have simply been baffled by the allusion, or unaware that one had been made.

This is indeed the methodological issue with recreations.  Does the value lie in the fact that they bring such matters to the fore and, as Tom says, make us see the plays from a new (and collective) angle than that produced by simply reading?

The key issue, it seems to me, is to separate out the question of who the audience were from a historical perspective from what one is doing with a recreation. I would argue that the issues of anachronism and miss-reading are at least as potentially great when one reads a text like Play of the Weather as they are when one watches it. A performance is nothing more or less then an embodied reading - in an ideal world doing it in front of an audience should mean that one gets a sense of a collective response of the kind that exists in a more nebulous way in relation to books or articles.

I have to admit that I am increasingly convinced that the Play of the Weather is a play for the court but not necessarily for the king - this is a problem since there has been a historical assumption that the court only 'exists' around the king - would there have been a court at Hampton Court when Henry was not there? However, I think we may been to revise this assumption. It seems to me possible that the Play of the Weather could be dated quite precisely to the hiatus casued by the amount of time it tookk Henry and Anne, after leaving Calais, to travle through Kent back to London at the end of 1532. Is Play of the Weather ( and after all weather had been an issue on the King's trip to France ) a kind of news-flash from the royal party back to the court?