SOURCE: “Possible Pasts: Historiography and Legitimation in Henry VIII,” in College English, Vol. 58, No. 2, February, 1996, pp. 192-215.

[In the following essay, Kamps claims that Henry VIII emphasizes the “relative unimportance of individuals in the historical process” and resists the idealizing tendencies of literary history.]

The methods and politics of history writing intrigued Shakespeare throughout his career as a dramatist. Among his earliest plays, Shakespeare's first tetrology already offers a full-blown conception of the shape of English history, interlacing Machiavellian ideas, providentialism, and Tudor ideology (see Rackin 27-9). The second tetrology, culminating in Henry V, successfully dramatized a more complex grasp of the past, tarnishing the popular Elizabethan notion of the “great man” who bends history to his will (see Kamps 94-104). Even in a late romance such as The Tempest we discover that Shakespeare frames the basic conflict between Prospero and Caliban in terms of Prospero's “history” of his tenure on the island and Caliban's account of the same events (see Barker and Hulme). Other examples of Shakespeare's fascination with things historiographical are plentiful in the Roman plays and throughout his oeuvre, but nowhere is his interest in the nuances of the production of historical accounts more pronounced and more thoughtfully treated than in Henry VIII (1613), a dramatic collaboration with John Fletcher. Deeply steeped in the historiographical developments that occurred in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, this play appropriates and dramatizes various contradictory historiographical methods and bespeaks a decisive break with official Tudor ways of thinking about the English past.

I.

In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham represents the view of many Elizabethans when he decrees it to be the task of “historical Poesie” to record the “famous acts of Princes and the vertuous and worthy lives of our forefathers” (54). Arthur B. Ferguson, in his influential study, Clio Unbound, expands on this notion and suggests that Tudor historians cared little about social customs, institutions, and beliefs, and perhaps even less about secondary and largely informal causes, or anything else that reached “beyond the history of states as told in terms of the acts, the ambitions, and the tragic dilemmas of the actors themselves” (4, 5). Alvin Kernan unites these views when he observes that Tudor playwrights appropriate the typical historical pattern for their historical dramas: “a weak or saintly king makes political mistakes and is overthrown by rebellious and arrogant subjects; the kingdom becomes a wasteland and society a chaos in which every man's hand is set against his fellow; after a period of great suffering, reaction against the forces of evil occurs, and a strong and good king restores order” (264). Henry VIII, it has been claimed repeatedly, is an aesthetic failure because it lacks a strong king as well as cohesive philosophy of history (Ribner 191).

It must be conceded that Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII fails to meet expectations raised by both Tudor historiographical practice and historical drama. The king is neither Puttenham's “great man,” nor Kernan's “strong and good king [who] restores order.” Joseph Candido describes him as a “well-intentioned yet strangely inattentive king” who fails “to address himself to the deep religious and political differences that divide his ministers” (56, 57). He is “blithely superficial” in his approach to the “grave and divisive issues of his reign” and too out of touch “to inspire our confidence in quite the same way that Henry V or even Bolingbroke does” (Candido 57). The central question here is whether Shakespeare and Fletcher are trying to portray the traditional “weak ruler” or aiming at something altogether different.

A second question is whether the play's episodic structure is due to a lack of both a consistent dramatic design and “a coherent and meaningful philosophy of history” (Ribner 291), or is instead a deliberate effort to portray history differently. How we answer these questions hinges on how we view the play's final scene and how we read Archbishop Cranmer's speech at the christening of Princess Elizabeth. Ostensibly at heaven's bidding, the Archbishop of Canterbury foretells the Age of Elizabeth as a golden world. She shall shower on England “a thousand thousand blessings”; “every man shall eat in safety / Under his own vine what he plants, and sing / The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours”; and “God shall be truly known” (Henry VIII 5.4.19, 33-35, 35). The nature of this speech is important because after the turmoil portrayed in the play—the opportunistic removal of the loyal Queen Katherine, the equally expedient execution of the Duke of Buckingham, and the timely fall of the powerful and corrupt Cardinal Wolsey—Cranmer tries to restore social order in the Henrician state by proffering a prophetic history of the next seven or eight decades. He links the Elizabethan past (which flows from the Henrician past) to the Jacobean present: “Nor shall this peace sleep with her” because her successor, James I, shall be “as great in admiration as herself,” inherit her “blessedness,” and “He shall flourish, / And like a mountain cedar, reach his branches / To all the plains about him: our children's children [i.e., James's generation] / Shall see this and bless heaven” (42, 43, 52-55). In this decidedly teleological oration it is the promise of the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I which underwrites the appropriateness of Henry's rule. But what is a promise to Cranmer's audience in 1533 is of course history to his audience in 1613. In short, how we respond to the play as a whole depends greatly on how we respond to Cranmer's rendering of Tudor-Stuart history.

Commentators who view the play as an aesthetic success turn to this final scene (and its historiography) to unify its various elements into a meaningful whole. Paul Dean, for instance, contends that while the “falls” of Buckingham, Katherine, and Wolsey and the “rises” of Anne Bullen and Thomas Cranmer are not unrelated, they are best understood “as a translation into dramatic terms of the undulations of the Wheel of Fortune which controls the action” (Dean 177). Dean acknowledges and then unifies the play's episodic structure by invoking the medieval de casibus tradition, thus explaining a Jacobean history play in terms of an essentially medieval theory of history. Frank V. Cespedes argues “that the structure of Henry VIII is designed to force upon its audience an awareness of two things at once: the fortunate march of English history toward the reign of Elizabeth [and James], and the ‘sad,’ ‘woeful’ story … of individuals during Henry VIII's reign who unwittingly helped to shape, and perished in the unfolding of, this historical process” (Cespedes 415). Thus the play presents the Jacobean viewer with “a conflict between historical ends and means” (415) of an essentially “‘good’ historical process” (437). Matthew H. Wikander simply notes that the Buckingham, Katherine, and Wolsey episodes “befog” the “play's historiography,” which really “celebrates the stability and continuity of the monarchy in a manner even more providential than that of the Tudor chronicles” (46, 47). If Cranmer constitutes the standard of historical judgment in the play, then Dean's and Cespedes's readings are compelling; but I think we ought to resist granting the Archbishop such special status. Indeed, I want to do what neither the play's detractors nor those who try to save its reputation do, which is consider the possibility that Shakespeare and Fletcher give us not a disunified play about history but a play about disunified history.¹ The latter alternative, rather than harking back to medieval notions of history, looks to the more “modern” world of Jacobean historiography to illuminate the play. Choosing it allows us to see that despite the christening scene's power and pathos, Cranmer's effort to produce dramatic and historical closure is an ideological move that is undercut by other historical “voices” of the play.

Although Frances A. Yates has eloquently argued that the play depicts a return to the John Foxean way of viewing “Tudor reform of the Church as an imperial reform” carried out here by Henry VIII (68, 67-82), we should not conclude that a nostalgia for things Elizabethan necessarily led a Jacobean audience to embrace uncritically the Archbishop's narrow, medieval, providential conception of history. Since Cranmer is without a doubt the King's mouthpiece (he is instrumental in providing the legal means for the divorce), we do well here to remember Jean Bodin's admonition voiced in the Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (translated into English by Thomas Heywood in 1608) against looking for “the truth of history … in the Commentaries of Kinges, for they are given to speake largely of their own praises, but to make no use of those Observations which are little or nothing interessed in their praise or disgrace” (12). If this edict applies to Henry, it must also apply to his agent Cranmer. Moreover, I will show there is reason to conclude that Cranmer's unifying historiography sounded archaic and unsophisticated not only to more learned Jacobeans but also to those who were raised on the popular histories of Holinshed, Hall, Grafton, and others. From their own reading of the histories, Shakespeare and Fletcher certainly understood that Cranmer's conception of history was dated, and, to make sure the viewer understood the same, they set Cranmer's ideologically driven “good” historical process in competition with other, more recent methods of historical representation. In the episodes detailing the fortunes of Queen Katherine, the Duke of Buckingham, and Cardinal Wolsey, Shakespeare and Fletcher draw on distinct and at times theoretically incompatible “schools” of Renaissance historical thought. The Buckingham episode confronts questions of eye-witness evidence and hearsay; Katherine's divorce and disgrace foreground questions of historical (and legal) precedent versus innovation; while Wolsey's plunge from power in the play is in part facilitated by an antiquarian appeal to evidence that speaks for itself.

One notable effect of dramatizing these historiographies is a highlighting of their acute differences as knowledge-producing practices—differences that produce not historical clarity or certainty but epistemological ambiguity. Such ambiguity was a relatively new phenomenon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As Phyllis Rackin observes, “Historiographic writing no longer had a direct, unequivocal relation with historical truth. Alternative accounts of historical events and opposed interpretations of their causes and significance now threatened each other's credibility, a process intensified by the development of the printing industry and the spread of literacy” (Rackin 13). What is more, the crown itself began to take an increasingly active role in historiographical argumentation. In the Tudor era, we can trace the alliance between royal legitimation and historiography back to Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia (1534), a work commissioned by Henry VIII's father for the construction not only of a history for England but also of a compelling foundation for the Tudor dynasty. Henry VIII was certainly no less aware than his father of history's political utility. For instance, in his 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals—a document produced primarily for the specific purpose of establishing England as an autonomous nation independent from Rome—Henry appeals to the authority of “histories and chronicles” to authenticate the position of the monarch. A passage from the 1533 Act reads: “Where, by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic … be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience …” (Stephenson and Marcham 304). Richard Halpern observes that James had already argued in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies that the kings of Scotland historically (and therefore legally) preceded “any estates or ranks of men … any Parliaments … or lawes.” The kings and no one else, James maintained, erected states, devised and formed governments, and “were authors and makers of the Lawes” (Halpern 223). In the Trew Law, James admits “that in the first beginning of Kings rising among the Gentiles … men choosed out one among themselves … to maintaine the weakest in their right,” virtually conceding that historically speaking the monarch owes his powers to the people. But he then goes on to explain that this scenario hardly applies to Scotland “For as our Chronicles beare witnesse, this Ile, and especially our part of it, being scantly inhabited, but by very few, and they as barbarous and scant of ciuility, as number, there comes our first King Fergus, with a great number with him, out of Ireland, which was long inhabited before us, and making himself master of the countrey, by his owne friendship and force, as well of the Ireland-men that came with him, as of the countrey-men that willing fell to him, hee made himself King and Lord. … Thereafter he and his successors … made and established their lawes. … So the trewth is directly contrarie in our state to the false affirmation of such seditious writers, as would perswade vs, that the Lawes and state of our countrey were established before admitting of a king …” (James I 61-62).

As we witness in Henry VIII, such historiographical pluralism is flexible enough to serve the state as it disposes of a Duke with pretensions to the throne, a Queen who is too old to bear a male heir, and an increasingly powerful and autocratic Cardinal. Yet since James I himself increasingly turned to historical argumentation to assert himself unequivocally on such momentous issues as royal prerogative and the crown's relationship to the law of the land, and since, as J. G. A. Pocock observes, “historical criticism became one of the sharpest weapons of monarchy” (17), it is easy to see how any epistemological ambiguity stemming from historiographical eclecticism could also destabilize the monarch's authority on such matters. Hence in Henry VIII the Henrician state first exploits historiographical diversity and then tries to provide historical closure and clarity by attempting to erase or, at the very least, suppress the ambiguities that sprout from that diversity. In the scene depicting Elizabeth's christening, Cranmer's providential account of royal genealogy appropriates and reorders the discontinuous elements of Tudor (and Stuart) royal history under the all-embracing rubric of God's plan for England. The problem of course is that the historiographical eclecticism of the play strongly resists such a totalizing move. Taken as a whole, therefore, the play focuses not on the inevitable outcome of a historical process, as Cranmer submits, but on the various historiographical strategies that can be employed to make the outcome appear inevitable. Henry VIII draws our attention to the operations by means of which historiography produces a past and the ways in which historiography and historians mystify those operations by sanctifying them.

When Henry VIII is viewed in light of its serious interest in the process of historiographical representation, we can begin to extricate the play from the “Elizabethan” context in which so many critics have deemed it aesthetically inferior, and to which others have tried to make it conform. Although, as several critics have observed, Henry VIII does sporadically seem active behind the scenes, he is a far cry from the protagonist of the Elizabethan history play who, in the words of Leonard Tennenhouse, is able to “seize hold of the symbols and signs legitimizing authority and wrest them from his rivals, thus making them serve his own interests” (121). This presentation of the King, however, is quite deliberate. One of the conclusions of this essay is that far from being a successful or failed Elizabethan heroic play (in which a strong protagonist like Henry V or Henry VII triumphs over historical conflict), Shakespeare and Fletcher's account of the reign of Henry VIII precisely emphasizes the impotence of “powerful” individuals in the face of a network of mostly “invisible” and inscrutable historical forces that beset them from all sides.

II. BUCKINGHAM, KATHERINE, AND WOLSEY: “THE CHRONICLES OF THEIR DOINGS”

The judicial proceedings against Buckingham, Katherine, and Wolsey manifest none of the disinterestedness, uniformity, and stability one might hope to expect in a nation of law. Although conducted—at least in name—on behalf of the state, the three trials reveal a variety of motivations and methods of legal protocol, in particular with regard to the composition and treatment of evidence. The purpose of this variety is to show how radically different legal and historiographical discourses are able to exercise power and claim knowledge (or what passes for knowledge) under a single rubric, that of justice or truth or law.

Although many of the events that bear on the fates of these three characters do not lie in the distant past, common historiographical principles apply because, as D. R. Woolf observes, the kind of accounts of “current events, which would now be deemed journalism, were [then] commonly referred to as histories” (16). In understanding the trials of Buckingham, Katherine, and Wolsey it is therefore significant that Renaissance historians were generally dubious about the construction of reliable accounts of current or recent history. Bodin observes: “Sure those that will write of the present, can hardly write truly, but [because] they must touch the credit and reputation of some men” (11). Annabel Patterson, among others, has argued credibly that Bodin's point about the power of men of reputation was not lost on Shakespeare or his contemporaries (Patterson 52-115). And Raphael Holinshed himself, a principal source for Henry VIII, openly bemoans the historian's inability to be an witness to all that happens himself and the unfortunate need “to inquire of moderne eie-witnesses for the true setting downe” of what he delivers (Holinshed, Preface).

In Henry VIII, the case against the Duke of Buckingham is shaped by the historiographical concerns just described. During a pre-trial hearing held at Cardinal Wolsey's instigation, Henry seals the Duke's fate on the basis of the testimony of a single character, the Duke's former Surveyor. We hear of a formal trial (conducted by the Duke's peers) during which additional witnesses are heard before the Duke is officially sent to the scaffold, but it is the pre-trial hearing before the King that procures the death sentence. The oral testimony of a disgruntled employee is relied on to reconstruct the past speeches and intentions of a character (Holinshed, by contrast, places much greater stress on the “evidence” supplied by other witnesses, and he points out that “inquisitions were taken in diuerse shires of England of him” [Holinshed 658-60]).

Buckingham is arrested on charges of “high treason” against the King's person (1.1.201) only moments after declaring his aim to inform the King of Wolsey's treasonous political stratagems. But before turning to the scene in which the Duke's Surveyor brings the “evidence,” Shakespeare and Fletcher insert another scene—clearly for the purpose of juxtaposition—in which Wolsey himself stands accused of shadowy dealings. And if we compare the case against Buckingham with the initial assault on Wolsey's reputation, we instantly notice alternative ways of handling historical evidence. Early in act 1, when he is accused of levying unprecedented taxes on the people and thereby causing a popular uprising, the Cardinal bitterly complains that he is “Traduc’d by ignorant tongues, which neither know / My faculties nor person, yet will be / The chronicles of my doing” (1.2.72-74). Wolsey has good reason not to want anyone to narrate the history of his activities, for at the court he has few reliable allies and many opponents who would not hesitate to bring him down. But with Henry on his side, maybe Wolsey need not worry how his actions are chronicled. Katherine, who appears in the sympathetic role of the people's advocate, and who has little trouble exposing the Cardinal as the driving force behind the exorbitant “commissions, which compels from each / The sixth part of his substance, to be levied / Without delay” (1.2.57-59), is incapable of convincing her husband to acknowledge that Wolsey's unauthorized levy is a sign of his fundamentally corrupt character. The King immediately rescinds the tax measure and in that respect takes the evidence against the Cardinal seriously, but when it comes to the Cardinal himself, the charges against him are, for all practical purposes, treated as if they were, indeed, but slander from the tongues of ignorant accusers. The contradiction is never resolved.

In sharp contrast, Buckingham's pre-trial hearing before the King—the very next event in the same scene—shows us precisely how devastating an effect oral testimony can have on a person's reputation and fate. The Duke stands accused of treason by a single person, his former Surveyor, a man the Duke believes is now on the Cardinal's payroll (1.1.222-23). The Surveyor claims to have heard the Duke “discharge a horrible oath” in which he swore that, “were he evil us’d,” he would assassinate the King (1.2.206, 207). The Surveyor, however, offers no material or corroborating evidence. His only attempt to bolster his credibility is to relate how the Duke was incited to these villainous thoughts by a “vain prophecy” (149), which promised that “the duke / Shall govern England” (170-71). Queen Katherine is obviously disturbed by the developments, and she (echoing Bodin) points out that the Surveyor may well be motivated by a desire for revenge against his former master, who dismissed him from “office / On the complaint o’ th’ tenants” (172-73). The Queen's observation also recalls the earlier complaint against Wolsey, who, like the Surveyor, was charged with wrongdoings by anguished subjects (56-57). The similarity heightens the contrast between the two “trial” scenes, and the difference between the judges. Under roughly similar circumstances, the Duke dismissed his Surveyor, while the King retains his Cardinal. And to top it off, the King pronounces the Duke a “traitor to th’ height” (214) solely on the basis of the testimony of a man of dubious motivation and reputation.

Holinshed was clearly not convinced of Henry's justice in this matter (even though he enumerates more “evidence” against the Duke). Recalling one of his own guidelines for history-writing, Holinshed concludes his recapitulation of the indictment against Buckingham with the following remarks: “These were the speciall articles & points comprised in the indictment, and laid to his charge: but how trulie, or in what sort prooued, I haue not further to say, either in accusing or excusing him, other than as I find in [Edward] Hall and Polydor[e Vergil], whose words in effect, I haue thought to impart to the reader, and without anie wresting of the same either to or fro” (Holinshed 661). Holinshed does not always show himself such a paragon of historiographical prudence, but here his assessment accords with that of modern historians (see, for instance, Ridley 122-23), and Shakespeare and Fletcher follow the chronicler's lead by inserting a scene in which two gentlemen agree that “By all conjectures” (2.1.41) “the cardinal is the end of this” (40), that is, of the Duke's fall. That the King may be implicated in the biased proceedings against Buckingham is suggested by Henry's words to Cranmer in act 5: “At what ease / Might corrupt minds procure knaves as corrupt / To swear against you? Such things have been done” (5.1.131-33). (The passage is lifted from Foxe's Acts and Monuments, but with an interesting addition. The line “Such things have been done” does not appear in Foxe. The addition suggests that Shakespeare and Fletcher want us to recall the Surveyor's testimony against Buckingham. The relevant passage in Foxe reads: “Do you not consider what an easy thing it is to procure three or four false knaves to witness against you? Think you to have better luck that way than your master Christ had?” [896].)

But there is a further consideration to be reckoned with in assessing the “justice” doled out by the King, one that makes it critically perverse to view this episode as merely a clash between “great men.” Buckingham himself offers a complex reading of his fate. When first arrested, he stoically professes that

The net has fallen upon me; I shall perish
Under device and practice.
It will help me nothing
To plead mine innocence, for that dye is on me
Which makes my whit’st part black. The will of heav’n
Be done in all things: I obey.

(1.1.203-4, 207-10)

There is an intriguing irony at work here. Buckingham is apparently so convinced of the efficiency of Wolsey's plots (“device and practice”) against him that he believes it useless to resist (regardless of his actual guilt or innocence). He also implies, however, that if his impending death is indeed a certainty (and only if it is a certainty), then it must be God's will that he dies. Consequently, in the Duke's world view, the effectiveness of Wolsey's machination becomes equated directly with providence because only providence can be a certainty.

These views do not change as Buckingham's execution draws near. Following the trial he still professes his innocence, but also states that he bears the law (a third facilitator in his downfall) no malice for his death, and that “his vows and prayers / Yet are the King's” (2.1.62, 88-89). The law, he says, “has done upon the premises but justice” (63), and thereby he appears to validate the process which has brought him down, even though he still implicitly challenges the evidence and says he “could wish more Christians” those who have “sought” the judgment against him (64). This dichotomy continues to haunt his final thoughts. “Heaven has a hand in all” (124), he proclaims, but then warns that if you “are liberal of your loves and counsels, / Be sure you be not loose; for those you make friends / And give your hearts to, when they once perceive / The least rub in your fortunes, fall away / Like water from ye” (126-30).

Simultaneously, Buckingham asserts the omnipresence of providence and holds out for the efficacy of an individual's actions. If we posit that the Duke believes his predicament to be shaped by binary powers—divine determinism versus independent human agency—we can only conclude that he has given up on a unified vision of the world in which contradictions are only apparent. This paradoxical view of reality becomes less vexing, however, when we consider Foucault's conception of power as a field of forces without traditional notions of agency, and from which there is no escape: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power” (Foucault 95). The apparent paradox is resolved if we do not insist on situating the Duke's views in the context of a binary clash between freedom and determinism. Although Buckingham clings to the prospect that his fate might be an effective example to others—and even implies that if he had known then what he knows now things might be different—this hardly means that if he had not trusted his Surveyor and if he had not been convicted of treason, providence would have been altered in any way. As far as he or any human being can know, that would have been providence in all its inscrutable inevitability. The Duke's dilemma rests in his desire to hold out for some form of human agency while he is unwilling to assert his independence of God's ways. Hence, his vision of resistance in the face of Wolsey's plots resides wholly within an always deferred and unknowable providential scheme.

The case against the Duke, then, is conducted according to established legal principles, some of which overlap with those of humanist historians. Henry's divorce proceedings against Queen Katherine—who “like a jewel has hung twenty years / About his neck, yet never lost her lustre” (2.2.31-32)—are of a distinctly different character. In the Duke's trial, we saw the prosecution try hard to follow entrenched principles—although without great rigor vis-à-vis witnesses and evidence—and the Duke saw fit to sanction the trial in the narrow legal context, as well as in terms of providence. In the legal procedures against Katherine, however, law, church, and history all fail the King, leaving him to his own ingenious devices.

Founded generally on the principle of custom and (religious and secular) authority, English society demanded some type of legal precedent in cases of divorce. If the appropriate precedent was not immediately apparent, a historical search for one could follow. Historical inquiry of some sort, therefore, was a routine aspect of most legal cases (many humanist scholars fed right into this ancient practice by arguing that the primary function of history was to guide legal, moral, and political conduct in the present). Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry explicitly confirms this basic principle in his response to the Wolsey-taxation case. When notified of the Cardinal's scheme, the King instantly revokes his secretary's actions and asserts that

Things done without example, in their issue
Are to be fear’d. Have you a precedent
Of this commission? I believe, not any.
We must not rend our subjects from our laws
And stick them to our will.

(1.2.90-94; emphasis added)

The argument can be expressed simply: nothing can be done without a historical precedent because we, like our subjects, must observe the law. This view, while it gains him admiration from his subjects, does not serve Henry once he has decided to divorce Katherine and marry Anne Bullen. There is no historical precedent upon which the divorce can be granted. Katherine has borne him an heir, and there is no doubt she has been obedient and faithful to him in every conceivable way. Neither Henry's desire for a male heir, nor the burden of a guilty conscience, nor his desire to marry another woman constitute a precedent for divorce in Renaissance England. Therefore, what is required, if the divorce is to take place, is an act of innovation. Traditional legal avenues must be abandoned in favor of unknown territories. But such ventures are not without peril. As J. G. A. Pocock notes apropos of Machiavelli's political historiography, “nothing was more difficult than innovation; if ancient customs existed, they were almost impossible to change; if they did not, they were almost impossible to create” (285). Faced with Rome's refusal to grant special dispensation for the divorce (which was not surprising, since Rome had granted special permission for the marriage between Henry and his late brother's wife), Henry resorts to the creation of “a precedent of wisdom” (2.2.85) by commissioning written opinions on the matter from the theologians of Oxford, Cambridge, and a host of European universities.

The Queen, on the other hand, has the authority of history and custom on her side. Not only does she make a convincing case for having been the perfect Queen and wife (2.4.11-42), she also unwaveringly invokes the historical events and figures that authorized her marriage to Henry.

The king your father [Henry VII] was reputed for
A prince most prudent, of an excellent
And unmatch’d wit and judgment: Ferdinand
My father, King of Spain, was reckon’d one
The wisest prince that there had reign’d by many
A year before. It is not to be question’d
That they had gather’d a wise council to them
Of every realm, that did debate this business,
Who deem’d our marriage lawful …

(2.4.43-51)

To Katherine (or to anyone in concord with Tudor law, culture, and decorum), the case against her can only be profoundly baffling. Henry VII—patriarch and founder of the Tudor dynasty—and the King of Spain were the architects of her marriage, Rome gave it its blessing, and an international council imparted its judicial approval. Therefore, with “history” so overwhelmingly on her side, it is not surprising that Katherine rejects what is to her the most unseemly of proceedings and departs from the court prematurely and dramatically (ignoring the King's summons), refusing to submit herself while contending that she has “here / No judge indifferent, nor no more assurance / Of equal friendship and proceeding” (2.4.14-16). Katherine only barely fits the typical Renaissance category of the heroine as patient victim; she endures her fate, but she also boldly defies her King and judge, stretching the definition of the heroine to the breaking point, and remaining noble and sympathetic throughout.

The King's claim consists of a guilty conscience (resulting from a change of heart about the legitimacy of his marriage), the possibility that the absence of “male issue” is evidence of God's censure of the marriage, and the opinions collected by Thomas Cranmer. In other words, in a clear departure from his ruling in the Wolsey-taxation matter, Henry counters Katherine's perfectly solid, legally sound, and traditional defense with an intangible appeal to conscience, providence and manufactured “evidence.” Appropriately, it is precisely at the moment of legal stalemate that we first learn of Henry's desire for the return of “well-beloved Cranmer.” “With thy approach, I know / My comfort comes along,” he asserts (2.4.236-38). “Approach” here means Cranmer's physical return to the court, but it also denotes his new and alternative “approach” to the divorce, the invention of which is often credited to him.

The innovation lies in the King's method, not in the grounds on which he seeks the divorce. At Blackfriars, he implicitly draws on biblical precedent when he attributes the lack of issue in his marriage to God's disapproval of the union. This type of explanation is a direct allusion to the punitive consequences promised to all who violate Leviticus's prohibition against a union between a man and his deceased brother's wife. However, Henry does not cite his source—which is essential if the argument is to have the force of a precedent—nor is he, sensing “the dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome” (2.4.235), any longer content to have the matter adjudicated by the Pope. Partially, he therefore does seek the divorce on conventional grounds. Yet his actions take the controversy out of the ecclesiastical courts (where it traditionally belongs, thus circumventing the authority of Rome), and transform the King's great matter into a “direct” appeal—legitimized by commissioned opinions—to God's law.

In this way, it is not established authority or church law or custom but individual will and disputation produced by selected university theologians which constitute the legal basis for the King's decision to press ahead with the divorce. The abandonment of both the humanist predilection for precedent and the Catholic deference to authority (as well as Henry's rejection of Katherine's direct appeal to the Pope for judgment [2.2.117]) in favor of theological wranglings here inevitably results in a rewriting of the past: the marriage that was first deemed politically desirable, legal, and holy turns out to be really politically dangerous, illegal, and incestuous.

Buckingham's conviction, then, is based on tainted testimony and the Queen's removal is facilitated by acts of legal and historical innovation. The fall of Thomas Wolsey, however, requires neither the unscrupulous handling of evidence, nor the creation of it. In fact, the removal of Wolsey calls for only the most minimal participation by King or state authority because the Cardinal himself has committed to paper an incriminating chronicle of his doings: an inventory of his inordinate wealth (which extends beyond “possession of a subject”), and a piece of correspondence in his hand “writ to th’ Pope against the king” (3.2.124, 287). These documents come into the King's possession and initiate a process of law against the Cardinal that differs greatly from the proceedings conducted against Buckingham and Katherine. The King's use of these written artifacts invokes an antiquarian approach to the past. Antiquarians typically set themselves the task of describing the physical remains (documents, monuments, coins, and other artifacts) of former times. Unlike Renaissance humanist historians, they were unwilling, or at best reluctant, to engage in the writing of narrative history. If it was the humanist's fundamental aim to proclaim history's utility as a pedagogical tool, it was the antiquarian's primary purpose to resuscitate and preserve the past in order to learn about the past itself, not about its relevance to the present. Hence, when an antiquarian like William Camden did try his hand at something that resembles a narrative—“an Historical Account of the first Beginnings of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth” (Camden 3)—he provoked Wallace T. MacCaffrey to charge him with exercising too much interpretive restraint. Camden's

book is conceived as a monument to the achievement of Queen Elizabeth and her government. This purpose he seeks to accomplish not by praising her merits but more obliquely, more delicately, by laying out the record of her reign. To him that record is self-evident; its very recital will command the admiration of the world and posterity. What Camden did not quite grasp is that the record by itself, unadorned by interpretation or examination, is intellectually unassimilable by his readers. The relentless flow of historical facts informs their minds without illuminating their understanding. (MacCaffrey xxxi)

Aside from the value judgment implied in this passage, it is undeniable that Camden's history, and the fruits of antiquarian scholarship in general, were no feast for those nourished themselves on the more user-friendly narratives of Hall, Grafton, Holinshed, and others. What is of concern here, however, is the interpretive temperance attributed to Camden, a temperance which marks the essential character—at least in theory—of the antiquarian enterprise.

Henry's handling of the Wolsey documents emulates, at least in its external manifestations, Camden's interpretive forbearance motivated by the desire to let the artifact speak for itself. Henry never directly accuses Wolsey of any misdoings. He interrogates him about his loyalty, duty, and holiness, but never asserts his guilt. Instead, when the Cardinal (who does not know his papers have been intercepted) professes his undying loyalty, the King merely hands him the inculpating documents and leaves. In an emotional soliloquy, it is Wolsey himself who reads the papers and declares his own guilt and fall from glory. In the context given, the evidence speaks for itself. However, the playwrights undercut the antiquarian approach at the very same time that they allow Henry to employ it triumphantly. Peter Rudnytsky shrewdly observes that even though the matter of the “crossed letters” derives from Holinshed, it pertains there not to Wolsey but to Thomas Ruthall, Henry VII's Bishop of Durham (Rudnytsky 49). Moreover, the case against Wolsey, which, if we limit our consideration to the documents themselves, appears just, is equivocal at its very core. The Cardinal's post-dismissal repentance and regeneration have led many commentators to put a positive spin on his fate by viewing his rise and fall in terms of the de casibus genre, but if we consider that Henry may well be turning against Wolsey not because of his indiscretions in general—the King was apparently not all that distressed over the taxation measures—but for a particular indiscretion: opposing the divorce—then we have to abandon a morality-play version of history.

In the proceedings against Wolsey, Katherine, and Buckingham, then, we have three different legal and historiographical approaches to the recovery of past events. And while it may be tempting to compare these approaches qualitatively and rank them according to their capacity to produce truth or justice, it is important to note that they all hold equal purchase in the Henrician state. Shakespeare and Fletcher do not seem interested in valorizing any particular approach. Indeed, Shakespeare and Fletcher arrange their materials so that it is impossible to tell if any of these trials is held to yield truth or justice, or if they merely serve ulterior motives. Yet judgments are doled out, heads roll, and a Queen abdicates.

Despite the antiquarian restraint that marks the Wolsey episode, elusive providence is invoked to explain the inexplicable (as it was in the trials of Buckingham and Katherine). Commenting on the King's discovery of Wolsey's treasonous papers, the Duke of Norfolk asserts that “It’s heaven's will; / Some spirit put this paper in the packet / To bless your eye withal” (3.2.128-30). Wolsey first attributes the situation to “negligence,” and, subsequently, to a “cross devil” (213-14). The juxtaposition of heavenly “spirit” with “devil” simply demonstrates two ways in which differently motivated characters can construe an act indifferent, an instance of apparent “negligence.”

Throughout the play there are speeches suggesting that God withholds from Henry insight into Wolsey's ways, but the Cardinal's stratagems (the arrest of Buckingham just as the Duke is about to apprise the King of Wolsey's intrigues [1.1.190-202] and his ability to control Henry with the “witchcraft” of his tongue [3.2.15-19]) can just as easily and more revealingly be called on to account for Henry's inaction. Moreover, Henry's first detection of Wolsey's “contrary proceedings” is hardly suggestive of a moment in which God lifts a veil from his eyes. Shakespeare and Fletcher do not give the slightest indication that Henry's new awareness is occasioned by a divine stirring. It simply occurs at the close of the trial of the Queen, when Campeius's refusal to pass sentence after the Queen leaves the court leads Henry's political acumen to conclude that “These cardinals trifle with me” (2.4.234).

In all three legal cases, then, providence is invoked, but its invocation inevitably signals a moment of human powerlessness, an instance in which the players lose control over the circumstances of their situation. Buckingham acknowledges providence because he conceives of his fate as imminent and certain. Neither his innocence (if he is innocent) nor his reason or rhetoric can help him escape Wolsey's net; therefore it must be God's will. Likewise the nobles wait patiently for the moment that God lifts the veil from Henry's eyes (2.2.41-43). They see themselves as impotent in the matter. Henry evokes providence to explain why he does not have a male heir, a situation over which he perceives himself as powerless as long as he is married to Katherine. At a loss for a substantial case against his wife, he also appropriates providence as a cause why the divorce must become a reality.

In its exploration of various historiographies active in the legitimation process, Henry VIII (in the scenes discussed so far) treats providence either as another tool (in Henry's case) in the political process, or as an ultimate but untraceable metaphysical sign to which characters appeal when they are threatened with marginalization to or elimination from the legitimation process. Buckingham, Katherine, and Wolsey all resist, but their “resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (Foucault 95). For them, providence comes to mean something very similar to Foucault's “power.” They acquiesce in the realization that the “multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate” constitutes “their own [inscrutable] organization” (92). They experience these relations as “intentional” but also as “nonsubjective” (94); that is, they do not consider them to be random, but the ultimate inscrutability of God's intention also makes them nonsubjective (in the sense that they do not originate from a knowable subject). Hence, they perceive that “power is [never] exercised without a series of aims and objectives”; yet their surrender to state authority, coupled with a continued dedication to the King, discloses a recognition that the operations of power finally do not result “from the choice or decision of an individual subject” (95), that is, the King's person. Foucault writes that “if it is true that Machiavelli was among the few … who conceived the power of the Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships” (97). Shakespeare and Fletcher, it seems, beat Foucault to it.

III. HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ROYAL LEGITIMACY

Judith H. Anderson astutely observes that “looking back from Cranmer's vision to the rest of the play, even in the absence of an intentional signal from the playwright[s], we should have difficulty not wondering whether so nice a vision is not merely rhetorical” (153). At the christening of the infant Elizabeth, Archbishop Cranmer's exalted historical vision of a Golden Age to come is plainly intended to erase the historiographical eclecticism and the inscrutability of history itself that the play has given voice to up until that point. As behooves the king's impromptu historian, the divinely inspired Cranmer presumably affords special insight into the “deep structures” of history by suggesting that while certain historical moments and figures may fade, essential patterns and attitudes remain (see Kastan 137). He craftily links James I to Henry VIII and Elizabeth I through the image of the phoenix, declaring that when “The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, / Her ashes new create another heir / As great in admiration as herself” (5.4.40-42). The image certainly constitutes a potent compliment to James, not in the least because it designates him the heir not merely of the Queen's crown but also of her “peace, plenty, love, truth, [and] terror” (46). But if we listen closely to the churchman we notice that even in the speech that most eloquently invokes a providential view of Tudor-Stuart legitimacy and continuity (5.4.14-55), the controlling metaphor employed—that of the phoenix—undermines the very genealogy it is meant to reinforce.

The editor of the Arden edition of Henry VIII notes that the phoenix is “a common image of the royal succession” (Foakes 175-76n). And so it is, but it is vital to note that the phoenix's power to identify the identity of any particular monarch is wholly retroactive or historical and not predictive or prophetic. The coronation behind, the image of the bird that rises from its own ashes bolsters the authority of the new ruler as the one who replaces the deceased one in the never-dying office of the monarch. But the image of the phoenix can never identify the new ruler before he or she has ascended to the throne, not even if the person is designated by law and blood to inherit the crown. The natural body and the corporate body do not merge until after the coronation. The phoenix image denotes an abstraction, a quality, “the Dignity” of the monarch as monarch, and “the singularity of the royal office” (Kantorowicz 384); it is simply not designed to select any particular individual to become king or queen. Yet Cranmer's speech, spoken in 1533 (in historical time), is clearly meant to be prophetic. Therefore, insofar as the phoenix refers to “the Dignity,” it is incapable of designating a natural body for the office and thus of adding any legitimacy to the individual who will possess the crown in the future to which Cranmer alludes (that is, the Jacobean present).

Such added legitimacy might have been welcome because even James I, at least in his own mind, was not completely secure in his right to the crown of England. His harsh treatment of Arabella Stuart and William Seymour, who married in 1610 without the king's blessing, is a telling instance of James's insecurity. Arabella Stuart. S. R. Gardiner points out, was “also descended from Margaret, the sister of Henry VIII, [and] had a better title, as she had been born in England, whereas James had been born in Scotland. It was a maxim of the English law … that no alien court inherit land in England. If, therefore, James was incapable of inheriting an acre of land south of the Tweed, he was still more incapable of inheriting the whole realm” (Gardiner 79). Seymour was a direct descendant of the Suffolk line to which Henry VIII had bequeathed the crown of England in the event his own offspring—Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth—died without a successor. Since none of Henry's children's children survived after March 24, 1603, the union of Arabella and Seymour consolidated a claim of blood and one of law to the throne of England. James forbade the marriage, and when it came out that the young lovers, though apparently without political ambitions, had married anyway, Arabella was taken into custody and Seymour was sent to the Tower (Gardiner 117).

Therefore, had they wished to do so, Fletcher and Shakespeare could have emphasized James's blood connection to Elizabeth Tudor (Henry VIII's sister Margaret was James's great-grandmother). Even though that blood connection was the very reason that Henry's will (made statute by parliament) barred the Stuart line from the throne of England, mentioning it would have given a sense of the rightness and inevitability of James's reign that the image of the phoenix lacks. Instead, the playwrights have Cranmer make a different, highly controversial genealogical move.

Rather than acknowledging the troublesome blood tie through Margaret Tudor, Cranmer exploits the phoenix as “the image of asexual procreation” (Noling 305) to insinuate a mother-son bond between Elizabeth and James. When the queen dies, the phoenix dies, and from its ashes—i.e., not from the queen's—another monarch mysteriously emerges to take her place. In this representational scheme, the reproductive function belongs to the phoenix. Cranmer's deployment of the phoenix image abandons the customary figure of metaphor (which allows for the body politic and body natural to be recognized as distinct even while they are mysteriously one) for the figure of simile. The effect of this rhetorical move is subtle but significant. Cranmer says: “Nor shall this peace sleep with her [Elizabeth]; but, as when / The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, / Her ashes new create another heir / As great in admiration as herself” (5.4.39-42; emphasis added). The choice of simile over metaphor changes the relation between the body natural and the body politic from identification to one of likeness. In the case of metaphor, two entities temporarily coexist in unity, but in the similetic instance certain traits from one entity (the phoenix) are transferred to the other entity (the Queen). In this particular example, then, Cranmer transfers the reproductive function of the phoenix to the body natural of the Queen. It is not the phoenix that creates itself anew, but the Queen who like the phoenix from “Her ashes new create another heir.” Cranmer's linguistic sleight of hand implies that Elizabeth will give birth to James, which is of course quite ironic, since Elizabeth chose to remain single and childless, but also strangely appropriate because so many of her subjects longed for her to marry and produce an heir and stabilize the succession. Cranmer's provocative move may appeal to an audience's wishful memories and lingering regrets over Elizabeth's denial of their wish.

Perhaps a Jacobean audience may not have grasped the intricacies of Cranmer's maneuver, but its general sense—the intimate association between Elizabeth and James—must have been obvious. Some members of the audience may well have been swayed by the speech, but anyone not caught up in the moment Cranmer is trying to create could instantly recognize how it grossly distorts even the most basic understanding of English royal genealogy.

More blatantly damning to Cranmer's efforts to blend Tudor ideology and providence into a unified and compelling whole may be the type or genre of his historiographical speech. Given that Henry VIII draws heavily on historical sources, sometimes simply versifying Holinshed, it may be somewhat alarming to realize that Cranmer's all-important prophecy does not have a historical source. The speech is entirely made up. There are of course many instances in the play where Shakespeare and Fletcher introduce materials for which we have no source, but Cranmer's speech deserves special attention because, by offering its Jacobean audience a summary representation of the previous eighty years, it draws attention to itself as a historiographical representation. To present a fictional speech as history is not necessarily to overstep the legitimate bounds of Renaissance historical representation, but this particular manifestation, we will see, turns out to be suspect.

Driven by a desire to educate their readers, early humanist historiographers studiously imitated the propensity of ancient historians to invent speeches where they felt this was appropriate. Relying on classical precedent, they believed that

The instructional value of history should be increased not only by the exposition of motives but also by the rhetorical manipulation of material in order to emphasize those elements which have the greatest moral or political significance. The most important rhetorical device is the set speech, which gives intensity to the narrative, and so produces a greater effect upon the reader. Long and important speeches should be constructed according to the rules of ancient oratory. Whenever possible, they should be based on factual evidence, but it is permissible to invent them so long as they are probable, are appropriate to the situation and to the character of the speaker, or reproduce the supposed essence of actual speeches. They should normally be introduced only into crucial situations and attributed only to eminent personages. They may serve as dramatic vehicles for the historian's exposition of his character's motives, or, indirectly, for his judgment and opinions. (Leonard Dean 4)

Without a doubt, Cranmer's prophecy is such a set speech. In its prophetic mode, his oration hits stock Tudor and Stuart themes—political and religious—and draws freely on both traditional pastoral imagery, biblical allusions, and the religious imagery associated with the Cult of Elizabeth (Roy Strong draws directly on Cranmer's speech in the opening pages of his The Cult of Elizabeth [15]). Cranmer's brand of history, therefore, although it strictly speaking belonged to an earlier period, would be recognized as historical by a Jacobean audience. And if Shakespeare and Fletcher had opted to shape their play about the reign of Henry VIII wholly in accordance with these early humanist historiographical principles, there would be cause to join with those critics who exalt Cranmer as Shakespeare and Fletcher's official historian.

To embrace any one historiography as true, however, would require us to ignore the competition for privileged historical representation the play dramatizes. Moreover, adopting Cranmer's vision of history means empowering a version of the past that is too simple and omits too much. The Archbishop's Tudor-Stuart genealogy fails to stand up under even the most basic scrutiny. His history pictures an uninterrupted connection between Henry, Elizabeth, and James, tacitly posits Henry's actions leading to the birth of Elizabeth as the original impulse of the Reformation, and links them gracefully to the Jacobean Church of England. His seamless genealogy is silent about the reigns of both Catholic Mary (1553-1558) and Edward VI (1547-1553), nor does it mention that the historical Henry VIII (who declares his daughter's birthday a “Holy-day” [5.4.76]) was to execute her mother and declare Elizabeth a bastard, legally barring her from the succession—all in pursuit of the elusive male heir. The latter events do not take place within the historical parameters of the play, but Shakespeare and Fletcher do allow Katherine a poignant deathbed petition to Henry on behalf of their daughter Mary. She commends, she says, to “his goodness / The model of our chaste loves, his young daughter / (The dews of heaven fall thick in blessings on her)” (4.2.131-33). The mere acknowledgment of Mary's existence challenges the ideological and genealogical continuity of Cranmer's pro-James historiography. But the ultimate irony is of course that Cranmer himself, as everybody knew from Foxe's fantastically popular Acts and Monuments, was burned at the stake by Bloody Mary for his heretical Protestant beliefs. The Archbishop's history of England erases his own tragic death.

Another reason not to valorize Cranmer's providential model of history is that, although early humanist historiography still enjoyed some credibility, a number of its essential characteristics had fallen largely in disrepute in the playwrights' day. Despite historiography's erratic development, historians like Francis Bacon, John Selden, William Camden and others became increasingly sophisticated in their methods precisely by bracketing questions of divine truth from historical inquiry, not because they did not value them, but because they considered them neither appropriate nor especially helpful to the fields of human, civil, and political history. The liberal usage of invented speeches had come under constant attack from all but the most old-fashioned historians. In Heywood's translation of the Method, Jean Bodin finds fault with “many Historiographers, who in the midst of their discourses, fall off from their entended Narrations, to play Orators or Rhetoritians, so deluding the expectations, and confounding the memories of their readers” (16). Even earlier, in 1574, Thomas Blundeville had published his translation of the Italian treatise on history by Francisco Patrocio and Accontio Tridentio. It is the historiographer's office, Blundeville translates, “to tell things as they were done without either augmenting or diminishing them, or swaruing one iote from the truth. Whereby it appeareth that the hystoriographers ought not to fayne anye Orations nor any other thing, but truely to reporte euery such speach, and deede, euen as it was spoken or done” (Blundeville 164). Similar quotations can be drawn from antiquarians like Camden or even from popular historians like Holinshed and Grafton.

Notwithstanding these various challenges to Cranmer's brand of historiography, Henry VIII never rejects the possible existence or power of providence. Nor, however, does it illustrate or exalt that power, or even show a definite instance of its involvement in human history. In a perverse way, providence—the ultimate truth of Christian history—becomes as abstract and remote a concept as Foucault's idea of power, which is so inscrutable that it has to be defined only in terms of its effects or in terms of what it is not. Shakespeare and Fletcher are not interested in the origins of power or the meaning of God's providence. Their conception of history is not one that calls for a justification of God's ways to humanity. On the contrary, in Henry VIII, when a character turns to providence it is always to escape a particular conception of history that seems suddenly to have been rendered futile and powerless or simply inconvenient. Nonetheless, Shakespeare and Fletcher do not appear to promote a nihilistic view of life; the play never indicates that there is no “actual” history that exists behind or beyond linguistic representation—just that that history is not accessible. In Henry VIII, they explore how the manipulations of historical discourses, and the nearly inscrutable complex of motives and forces that drives those manipulations, can bring characters to just such a moment in which they feel only the unknown can account for (though not explain) particular historical circumstances. And since providential history by definition extends to the end of human history, it is significant that it manifests no prophetic power in Henry VIII. Cranmer divines the future but, even aside from his historical errors, he is in fact rewriting history for a Jacobean audience. Providence becomes history—ideological history—after the fact, and subsequently takes on a life of its own.

This does not make Henry VIII a subversive text in the ordinary sense. The play is not overtly embroiled in specific political controversies of its day (but see Hamilton 163-90), but this hardly makes it an apolitical text. It eschews micropolitics for a more profound and far-reaching consideration of the relationship between political authority and historiography. The theatrical appropriation of historiographical practices and their simulation on stage constituted a potential, if not actual, threat to any party or individual intent on accruing power on the basis of historical argumentation. Shakespeare and Fletcher's drama, for all its complexity, must have had a general demystifying effect. As such, Henry VIII must be considered not a flawed imitation of an Elizabethan genre but a uniquely Jacobean response to and enactment of the complex historiographical discourses of its own historical moment.

Notes

1. I follow the Oxford edition in assuming that Shakespeare and Fletcher share the play's authorship (Wells et al.). And I follow Frances Yates in maintaining that Fletcher and Shakespeare would have seen “eye to eye” on “the general approach to historical and contemporary problems in Henry VIII” (67). What is more, I share Yates's conviction “that it is not a matter of great importance whether the whole play is actually written by Shakespeare or whether part of it is written by Fletcher.” Whether the play—a play about disunified history—is the result of harmonious collaboration or of cross purposes, a Jacobean audience would be presented with the play as it is, not with authorial intention(s).

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