am grateful to Elena Woodacre, Editor-in-Chief, for publishing this response to a recent review of History, Fiction, and The Tudors: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic License in the Showtime Television Series, a collection of essays I edited, in Royal Studies Journal 4, no. 2 (2017). Paradoxically, the reviewer accuses me, and by extension my contributors, of "trying to make The Tudors into what [I want] it to be-or what [I think] it should be-rather than what it actually is" (262); however, he reviews the book not for what it actually is but based on what he wants it to be-or thinks it should be-even if he never makes clear what that is. He notes that "The Tudors has garnered limited attention from scholars" but criticizes us for ignoring the "burgeoning field of adaptation studies" (258), fails to acknowledge that we engage with-and have written a good bit of-the relevant literature on the Tudors on film and television, and offers no examples of the "vast scholarship on historical adaptations" he chides us for slighting (261). In any case, though, we are uninterested in conforming our thinking about history and film to the theoretical precepts of any particular sub-discipline. The reviewer upbraids me for "hostility" to The Tudors, though I explicitly disavow that in my introduction, as he notes. As proof of my alleged animus he cites my comment that the series' "apparent promise of concern for historical accuracy is one on which four seasons and thirty-five hours of the hugely popular cable television series largely fail to deliver" (258), yet he offers no contrary evidence and would be hard pressed to do so. 1 He dismisses examples of "anachronism, time compression, distortions, and outright inventions" (my words) as an "unhelpful list" (his words), though why it is unhelpful-or irrelevant-he does not say (258). In a particularly condescending passage, he laments: "Robison's indignation that entertainment value trumped historical accuracy ... is ... frustrating for the many scholars who engage with popular depictions of the past in a meaningful way that moves beyond so-called 'accuracy'" (262). The reviewer claims that hostility reappears "throughout the book" (258), though his own comments on certain chapters, including one of mine, belie that. In fact, some chapters are more critical than others because some aspects of the series warrant more favourable commentary than others, and because as editor I did not seek to impose a unified interpretation on contributors with varying opinions. For