Henry VIII (Vol. 41) | Peter L. Rudnytsky (essay date 1991)
Peter L. Rudnytsky (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: "Henry VIII and the Deconstruction of History," in Shakespeare Survey; An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, Vol. 43, 1991, pp. 43-57.
[In the following essay, Rudnytsky examines the authorship and genre of Henry VIII by reviewing the play 's "juxtaposing Catholic and Protestant. . . views of the divorce" of the king.]
I
Two preliminary problems impose themselves at the outset of any study of Henry VIII In both cases, the issues raised may in a narrow sense be dispatched rather quickly, though their wider ramifications continue to bear on our reading of the play.
The first problem, of course, is that of authorship, which has bedevilled criticism ever since Spedding, in 1850, attempted to substantiate Tennyson's intuition that the play was written by Shakespeare in collaboration with Fletcher. The burden of proof that necessarily...
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