SOURCE: “The Reformation and Shakespeare: Focus on Henry VIII,” in Shakespeare and the Christian Tradition, edited by E. Beatrice Batson, Edwin Mellen Press, 1994, pp. 83-101.

[In the essay that follows, Noll looks to Shakespeare's Henry VIII for help in understanding the nature of the English Reformation, as well as how the history of the English Reformation informs Henry VIII.]

William Shakespeare was born the year after John Foxe published the first English edition of his famous Acts and Monuments, a work that demonstrated how the testimony of martyrs—from the earliest centuries to the England of Mary Tudor only five years earlier—had been used by God “in preserving his church, in overthrowing tyrants, in confounding pride, [and] in altering states and kingdoms.”¹ Shakespeare's marriage took place at a time when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, was suspended from his duties for allowing Puritans to hold preaching conferences, and at a time when John Whitgift, Bishop of Winchester, who may have had Shakespeare's father arraigned for lending aid to Roman Catholics, was emerging as the favorite to replace Grindal. Shakespeare probably moved from Stratford to London in the year that Queen Elizabeth authorized the execution of Mary Stuart of Scotland, who had been the hope of English Catholics as a potential successor for Elizabeth. Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, died in 1596, only shortly before Richard Bancroft became Bishop of London and from that position directed an increasingly effective war of attrition against England's Puritans. Shakespeare's dramatic company was taken under the patronage of Elizabeth's successor, James I, and so became the King's Men, at the very time that James received the Millenary Petition from about one thousand Puritans who were appealing for a wide variety of religious reforms. Shakespeare marched with the rest of the King's Men in James's festal coronation process only six weeks after the king had squelched the reformist aspirations of the Puritans in a formal meeting at Hampton Court by telling them that an attack on his bishops was the same as an attack on his own royal self. In the same year that Guy Fawkes and his Catholic co-conspirators attempted to blow up Parliament in what James I called “the most horrid and detestable of all treasons either undertaken anywhere in the world within the memory of man or conceived in thought and mind,”² Shakespeare's company performed Henry V, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Merchant of Venice at the court of the king. As even such a brief chronicle indicates, Shakespeare's life was interwoven with the events that made England the kind of Protestant nation it became. His times were the times of the English Reformation.³

Exactly how best to position Shakespeare against the backdrop of the English Reformation, however, remains a puzzle. For many of the other prominent writers of the English Renaissance, by contrast, the bearing of England's larger religious history is more obvious. For Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, or even George Herbert, for example, we have some definite idea as to how personal religious and political allegiances related to their writing. For Shakespeare it is different. As Blair Worden, an outstanding historian of Stuart England has put it, “Alone of the major artists of the Renaissance Shakespeare has no tangible personality outside his art.”⁴ Various of Shakespeare's characters express opinions that fit into well known religious categories—whether classical pagan, pre-Christian British pagan, Roman Catholic, Protestant of a conservative churchly cast, Protestant of a stripe influenced by Continental reformers, and even occasionally—as in Richmond's defense of tyrannicide in Richard III⁵—Protestant of a radical Puritan cast. But which of his characters speaks for Shakespeare himself?

As the work of myriad scholars has shown—especially Richmond Noble, Roland Frye, and Roy Battenhouse⁶—Shakespeare's imagination was richly furnished with the Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Beyond doubt he was also, in Frye's phrase, “a man who seems to have known Christian doctrine intimately, though not on any professional plane.”⁷ But the use of Christian resources and the knowledge of Christian doctrine do not (at least so far as I have been able to decipher) tell us specifically how Shakespeare positioned himself against the Reformation as it had taken shape in England.

The puzzle is complicated by two additional problems. On the historical side, experts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history have been engaged in a rollicking academic donnybrook for at least fifteen years on precisely the question of how to locate the Reformation in England. Just about the only fixed point on the historiographical compass at present is a general agreement that England did in fact eventually become an officially Protestant country in which Roman Catholics were disadvantaged before the law. But when “the Reformation” took place, what it was like, where it took effect, and whether it was a popular or merely a political change—all these questions are being debated by the leading scholars on the field with a disconcerting disregard for the notion of history as a fixed science. In the end, as I try to show below, the question of what exactly the Reformation was is a question that the student of Shakespeare may help to answer.

The second problem that complicates an examination of Shakespeare and the Reformation arises from contemporary literary criticism. Modern modes of analysis have attempted to break the links, which generations of students simply took for granted, between authors and their works, works and their audiences, and authors and their critics. If deconstructive strategies of this sort really were all they are sometimes made out to be, this paper would be over now. But, again with reference to the problem of Shakespeare and the Reformation, I hope to suggest below that, once having exploited the useful insights of the deconstructionists, it is still not only possible, but essential, for both historians and critics to use each others' insights if we would grasp the meaning of Shakespeare's work for his own day as well as our own.

In what follows I do not presume to solve the multiple puzzles of Shakespeare and the Reformation. But by focusing as a historian on Shakespeare's last play, King Henry VIII, I do hope to illustrate how pursuit of historical questions may aid literary analysis, even as an attention to literary questions can assist the historian, and by so doing also suggest something about the value of pursuing literary and historical questions in tandem rather than in opposition. (I should add at the start that I am not going to address the contested question of the play's authorship, but will follow R. A. Foakes and other recent scholars in presuming that the play is substantially Shakespeare's and only incidentally the work of John Fletcher, if at all.)⁸

First, then, the English Reformation informs King Henry VIII in two different ways. Explicitly, the stuff of the play concerns the fall of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey as Henry's chief counselor, Henry's divorce from Katharine of Aragon, his marriage to Anne Boleyn (Bullen in the play), the king's defense of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer against his Catholic enemies, and the birth of Anne's daughter Elizabeth. In other words, it concerns the stuff of what, from at least one conventional angle, is called “the English Reformation,” that is, England's break from the papacy because of Henry's divorce from Katharine, its embrace of Protestant theology and liturgy as crafted by Cranmer, and the solidification of Protestantism under Queen Elizabeth. It goes without saying that to the extent a viewer or reader of the play has independent knowledge of such events, that viewer or reader will be better able to enjoy, as well as to evaluate, the literary creation that Shakespeare crafted from these materials.

But the English Reformation informs the play in a second, implicit sense, since the episodes it depicts were also the first links in a chain of events that stretched into the time of the play itself. In other words, to the play's first audience, the English Reformation of King Henry VIII was contemporary as well as historical. Critics have asked how the prophecy over the cradle of Elizabeth that Shakespeare gives to Archbishop Cranmer in Act Five fits into the general structure of the play, but when Shakespeare extends that prophecy through the reign of Elizabeth to praise also the glories of her successor, he all but compels students of the play to heed the circumstances of that successor's reign. To do so is merely to remember, as Peter Rudnytsky has well phrased it, that “events that lie in the future for the characters of [this] play exist in the past for Shakespeare and his audience.”⁹ To do so is also to open new depths of meaning for the play itself.

The most obvious way that attention to the history of the English Reformation deepens appreciation for King Henry VIII is to note the link between the events of the play and events surrounding its performance that was forged by a common concern for England's Protestant interest. Just as it was clear, in retrospect, how the birth of Anne Boleyn's baby eventually secured the Protestant cause in England during the last half of the seventeenth century, so the marriage of another Princess Elizabeth in 1613, the year of the play, seemed to secure England's Protestant interest at the later period. Although it is probably not true that King Henry VIII was first performed at the nuptials of James I's daughter, Elizabeth, and Elector Frederick of the Palatinate, in February 1613, the play bears unmistakable marks of that event. All knew that this marriage, by binding Protestant England to the most visible Protestant prince in Germany, was a religious and political event of the first order. Critics almost universally consider the procession of Anne Bullen to her marriage with Henry in Act Four, scene one, as well as the elaborate display at the baptism of the baby Elizabeth in Act Five, scene four, as a deliberate reprise of the ceremonial that attended the royal marriage earlier in 1613. The larger meaning of this conjunction of events—the play's pomp surrounding the family of the Elizabeth who became Queen and the contemporary pomp for Princess Elizabeth who bound England to her German Protestant allies—was psychological even more than ceremonial. Shakespeare's audience knew that Queen Elizabeth had secured Protestantism in England despite the malignant opposition of Catholic rulers in France and especially Spain. What that same audience confidently expected in 1613 was that the matrimonial alliance between England and the Palatinate would do the same thing, and against the same foes, for in 1613, as during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the Catholic kings of France and especially Spain were still poised to pounce on England and her Protestant allies on the Continent.

The psychological connection between the world of the play and the world of the playwright was even stronger than first appears. In the play, the baby Elizabeth is surrounded by mortal peril. Buckingham and Wolsey have fallen prey to the king's fickle favor; Cranmer is rescued only in the nick of time; Katharine dies disgraced while her daughter Mary languishes in uncertainty. The audience knew that Elizabeth would survive the wiles of court and the opposition of foreign foes to become a great monarch, but they also knew it was a near thing. So it was also for England's Protestant interest when the play was first performed. Three months before the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Frederick, the eldest son of James I and his Queen Anne, Prince Henry, had died. This prince was capable, energetic, and a manifest champion of Protestantism. His death left a younger brother, Charles, as heir, and Charles at that time was an unknown quantity from a religious viewpoint. England would not discover until after Shakespeare's passing how lightly Charles, this new heir to the throne, took the Protestant interest, but at the time of the play's performance in 1613, the marriage of Elizabeth and Frederick had not only boosted, but measurably restored, hopes for a secure Protestant future. For those who attended the Globe Theater to watch King Henry VIII, the disappointment at Prince Henry's death and the expectation created by the royal marriage, which the play self-consciously recalled, added a resonance to the play that we simply cannot comprehend unless we know something of England's ongoing Reformation in the era of James I as well as in the era of Henry VIII.

As so often with Shakespeare, however, the connection between current events and the events in a play is not simple. If, as some critics have urged, Shakespeare intended to depict the personages of King Henry VIII ambiguously, or even subversively, the play itself, when read in light of current events in 1613, contains ample evidence for such a conclusion.¹⁰ But historical knowledge of what happened between 1536 (when the events of the play come to an end) and 1613 (when it was performed) is essential for exploring the ambiguities or subversions of the play. Three matters illustrate the nature of such possibilities.

First, what play-goers in 1613 knew, because they knew the history of the English Reformation, was that efforts to prop up England's Protestant security by matrimonial alliances with the Continent did not always work out propitiously. In the play, Thomas Cromwell is one of Shakespeare's most interesting secondary characters. Cromwell appears in Act Three, scene two, as Wolsey's faithful attendant. So sincere is his loyalty that by the end of the scene Wolsey must order him to offer his services to Sir Thomas More, who has taken the cardinal's place as the king's chief minister. But as he does so, Wolsey also urges Cromwell to keep his ambition in check, and it is to Cromwell that Wolsey says the famous lines,

Had I but serv’d my God with half the zeal
I serv’d my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.

(3.2.455-57)

The unstated sequel was that Cromwell, who at the fall of Thomas More became Henry's chief minister, negotiated an alliance of his own with Protestant Germany. This alliance, sealed visibly by the ill-fated marriage between Henry and Anne of Cleves, proved to be a disaster for both Cromwell and England's Protestant interest. The German-English alliance collapsed, Cromwell went to the block, and England's Protestants endured a precarious existence from 1540 until Henry's death in 1547. It is impossible to know how much detailed history Shakespeare presumed his audience would command, but by making Thomas Cromwell an important secondary figure in a play linking England's Protestant interest in 1530 with its Protestant prospects in 1613, Shakespeare may very well have intended a note of doubt about England's future as well as affirmation. (In the event, the Protestant alliance of 1613 eventually failed as miserably as Cromwell's Protestant alliance of the 1530s, for the Elector Frederick of the Palatinate was defeated in battle by 1620 and forced to relinquish his place to a Catholic ally of the Spanish monarch.)

Second, what playgoers also knew in 1613, because they knew the circumstances of their own day, was that Cardinal Wolsey's vices bore an uncanny resemblance to vices that some Englishmen were ascribing to the same James I who was hymned so lavishly in the play's last scene. By 1613, James had come under fire from Parliament for several failings, one of the most visible of which was his creation and sale of monopolies, or exclusive franchises for controlling the sale of ordinary commodities. Corruption in the granting of monopolies and their exercise was a growing source of complaint by the time King Henry VIII was staged. As a good survey of the period puts it, “An English man or woman could not wash with soap or starch clothes or purchase a beaver hat or salt food or drink wine or buy playing cards or read the Bible without supporting a monopolist.”¹¹ Whether or not Shakespeare himself felt aggrieved by the corrupt monopolies is difficult to say, but there is at least one hint in the play that he may have been. In Act Two, scene two, Norfolk and Suffolk are cataloguing the evils of Cardinal Wolsey. Chief among them is Wolsey's monopolization of honors from the court. Norfolk says of Wolsey,

We had need pray,
And heartily, for our deliverance,
Or this imperious man will work us all
From princes into pages: all men's honours
Lie like one lump before him, to be fashion’d
Into what pitch he please.

(2.2.44-49)

Did Shakespeare intend his audience to understand something about the corrupt monopolies of James I by this indictment of Wolsey's corrupt monopoly? It is not possible to say for sure, but even the possibility depends upon seeing how much the stage reached by the English Reformation in 1613 shaped interpretation of the English Reformation unfolding in 1530.

Finally and most important, what playgoers knew in 1613, because they knew the history of James's own family, was that the sordid sexual politics of Henry VIII's day had continued unabated to their own. Elizabeth may have been a glorious queen, but her path to the throne was prepared by the rankest lust and political egomania of her father. Cranmer's speech over the baby Elizabeth includes a noble panegyric for the Virgin Queen,

This royal infant (heaven still move about her)
Though in her cradle, yet now promises
Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings,
Which time shall bring to ripeness: she shall be …
A pattern to all princes living with her,
And all that shall succeed: Saba was never
More covetous of wisdom and fair virtue
Than this pure soul shall be.

(5.5.17-25)

Cranmer's words of praise were no less dignified for James I,

Who from the sacred ashes of her honour
Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix’d. Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,
That were the servants to this chosen infant,
Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to him;
Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honour and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and make new nations.

(5.5.45-52)

But those who in 1613 heard these words from the actor portraying Cranmer did not forget the circumstances that had brought these monarchs to the throne. For Elizabeth, it had taken Henry's judicial murder of two wives, his wanton abandonment of two more, his fornication with the later Queen's aunt, his tandem execution of Catholics and sectarian Protestants to demonstrate his own sovereignty over the English church, his cynicism in theological rationalization for divorce, and on and on. Nor would they have forgotten, even as the torrent of rhetoric poured on to praise the glories of James I, that James's path to the throne resembled in striking ways the road that Elizabeth earlier trod. In Peter Rudnytsky's striking phrase, “as Elizabeth I was the daughter of a father who executed her mother, so James—by a macabre symmetry—was the son of a mother who sanctioned the murder of his father.”¹² James, they all knew, was the son of Mary Stuart, who had taken up with a new lover, the Earl of Bothwell, perhaps even while James's father, Lord Darnley, was still alive, and who almost certainly had connived in the death of James's father.

Beyond doubt, the dramatic and hopeful spectacle of the royal marriage in 1613 added depth of meaning to the performance of King Henry VIII, but so also did what Shakespeare refrained from saying about the uncanny parallel of dreadful circumstances, which brought both Elizabeth and James to the throne, resonate in the minds of at least some who first saw the drama performed.

Historical insight, therefore, assists us in understanding the play not simply by reflecting on events in the reign of Henry VIII, but also by examining how events in the ongoing English Reformation added texture to the play's meaning. By realizing how much Shakespeare was still in the English Reformation, we are in a far better position to see how he put the Reformation to use for dramatic purposes.

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It may very well be, however, that Shakespeare offers more help to historians worried about what the Reformation is than they provide for students of Shakespeare concerned about understanding his plays. To show the kind of help that Shakespeare offers historians of the Reformation, however, it is necessary to make a crucial distinction. That distinction is set out superbly by Georges Florovsky, an Orthodox theologian whose own experiences in his native Russia, France, and finally the United States lay behind the following effort to define the nature of historical study:

The ultimate purpose of a historical inquiry is not in the establishment of certain objective facts, such as dates, places, numbers, names, and the like, as much as all this is an indispensable preliminary, but in the encounter with living beings. No doubt, objective facts must be first carefully established, verified and confirmed, but this is not the final aim of the historian. History is precisely, to quote H. I. Marrou …, ‘an encounter with the other’.¹³

In Florovsky's terms, Shakespeare's King Henry VIII is not much help for the “indispensable preliminaries” of verifying dates, names, and the like. Scholarly editions of King Henry VIII regularly point out, for example, that the chronology of the play, as measured against what actually happened, is filled with problems. Buckingham's fall is misplaced chronologically, Henry meets Anne too soon, the crossed letters that precipitate Wolsey's fall happened to someone else, Elizabeth is born at the wrong time, Katharine of Aragon dies too soon, are only a few examples. But such differences between the verifiable facts of the historical record and the presentation of events in Shakespeare's play are beside the point when we look to him for help in understanding the nature of the English Reformation. A dramatist is certainly entitled to license in arranging historical materials for specifically literary purposes.

It is rather in the effort to understand human beings, as Florovsky goes on, “in their mutual relationship, in their conflicts and contacts, in their social intercourse, and in their solitude and estrangement, in their high aspirations and in their depravity,”¹⁴ that Shakespeare helps the historian.

And why do historians need help with these matters? Because for every significant historical judgment on any major figure of the Henrician period, as well as for a general picture of what constitutes the English Reformation, historical conclusions have always been irredeemably contested. Surely, a literary audience might say, I exaggerate the uncertainties of my own discipline.

It is, however, a relatively easy matter to demonstrate the truth of the assertion. At the broadest level of evaluation concerning whether the English Reformation was a good thing or a bad thing, Catholic and Protestant writers have differed from the start, and continue to differ in the twentieth century.¹⁵ To complicate further the clash of interpretations, Anglo-Catholics have frequently opined that neither England's pre-Reformation Catholicism nor its Reformation Protestantism was a good thing, as in the comment by John Henry Newman's friend, Hurrell Froude, that “the Reformation was a limb badly set—it must be broken again in order to be righted.”¹⁶

Given the disparity in these large-scale interpretations of the Reformation, it is no surprise that responsible historians of the era have both condemned and lionized virtually every major player in the Henrician drama. Video adepts know the conniving figure of Henry's secretary, Thomas Cromwell, in The Six Wives of Henry VIII and the equally sinister portrait of the same figure in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Yet to Geoffrey Elton, the great historian of Henry VIII's parliaments, Cromwell is a near demi-god, and to A. G. Dickens, esteemed historian of the English Reformation, Cromwell was “the most loyal and industrious minister ever to serve a King of England.”¹⁷ Jasper Ridley, an extraordinarily competent biographer of sixteenth-century figures, stood the conventional wisdom concerning Sir Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey completely on its head when he wrote in 1982 that, “More stood for almost the opposite of everything for which he is admired today … Compared to More [Wolsey] was tolerant and merciful. … In the last quarter of the twentieth century, our greatest hope is that our fate will lie in the hands of a modern Wolsey and not of a modern Thomas More.”¹⁸ A fine modern textbook on British history calls James I “unwise and incompetent,” but the modern editors of his correspondence suggest that James was wise, judicious, statesmanlike, and “in consequence of the changing moral attitudes of the late twentieth century” not even culpable for his homosexual tendencies.¹⁹ A solid historian of the Tudor period, James A. Williamson, notes defects in Mary Tudor, but even more to praise for her “sincerity … natural kindliness … stoical endurance … a royal quality of command and an active courage,” but to Geoffrey Elton, she is “arrogant, assertive, bigoted, stubborn, suspicious, and (not to put too fine a point on it) rather stupid.”²⁰ For Thomas Cranmer the division of opinion existed from the decade of his death, a “pernicious pestilent prelate” in Catholic perspective, but, from the opposite angle, one of “Christ's martyrs, much more worthy the name of St. Thomas of Canterbury, than Thomas a Beckett whom the pope falsely before did canonize.”²¹ And of Henry VIII there are almost as many contradictory opinions as historians who have studied him thoroughly.

Such contrasting judgments about historical actors and about the general character of the English Reformation have always attended histories of the English Reformation. Together they point to the fact that historical understanding more generally is irrevocably interpretive, dependent, to be sure, on verifiable facts for the skeleton of a historical account, but utterly without life, indeed nonexistent, without interpretation, without, in Florovsky's terms, an interpretive engagement with human beings. Once the interpretive character of historical inquiry is understood, Shakespeare's importance for historical study is also patent, for what he thought about the dramatis personae of King Henry VIII becomes a contribution—and, because of Shakespeare's unprecedented power at encapsulating and shaping the opinions of others, a momentous contribution—to encountering these historical figures.

If we might expect differences of opinion between Protestants and Catholics over the character of the Reformation, and among a wider circle of historians over the character of Henry and his contemporaries, it is more surprising that historians do not even agree on apparently factual questions, such as when the Reformation took place. The recently published second edition of A. G. Dickens's classic, The English Reformation, reaffirms the judgment of the book's first edition from 1964 that the English Reformation, though not finalized, was fully formed during the reigns of Henry VIII and his first two successors, Edward VI and Mary Tudor. If Dickens is acknowledged as the greatest living historian of the Henrician Reformation, Patrick Collinson is as widely recognized as the greatest living historian of Protestantism in the half-century after Henry's death. So it may be surprising to read in The Birthpangs of Protestant England, a book Collinson published the year before the second edition of Dickens's The English Reformation appeared and in fact dedicated to Dickens, that he was ready “to assert, crudely and flatly, that the Reformation was something which happened in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. Before that everything was a preparative, embryonic. Protestantism was present, but as a kind of sub-culture, like Catholicism later.”²² In other words, two of the best living historians of England's sixteenth-century religious history who are, in addition, friends who admire and use each other's work, do not even agree on when the Reformation took place.

The reasons for such disagreement are spelled out with admirable clarity in a recent book, The English Reformation Revised, edited by Christopher Haigh. In this volume Haigh summarizes and presents the work of a generation of revisionist historians who have called into question nearly every feature of what has been the dominant interpretation of the English Reformation brought to a culmination by A. G. Dickens. Drawing on his own research and that of other “revisionists,” Haigh contends that religious discontent was not nearly so widespread at the start of the sixteenth century as Dickens suggests, that the English Catholic hierarchy was far less corrupt than Dickens indicates, that a spiritual Protestantism moved through the English people at a much slower pace than Dickens reported, and that at the “Elizabethan Settlement” of religion in 1559 the English people as a whole were still more Catholic in practice and inclination than Protestant. Before 1560, Haigh finds less of the popular spiritual agitation in England than was driving reform in Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, Switzerland, or even France. The final plank in this revisionist platform is the assertion that, to the extent there was an English Reformation at all, it was a narrowly political Reformation brought about by “factional competition for office and influence.”²³

The difference of historical opinion between Haigh and Dickens is more profound than between Catholics and Protestants over the general character of the English Reformation because it involves a complicated combination of arguments—interpretations over the meaning of events, but also over what counts as relevant evidence, how any one event relates to larger historical patterns, and what weight any one contemporary testimony should receive. Even at this time, the battle over the nature of the English Reformation is being fought out in England's shire archives, in the Public Record Office, in journals, and in conferences devoted to the exchange of scholarly papers. But for this struggle too Shakespeare is relevant, since, again, his depiction of historical epochs as well as individual historical actors is considerably more than the judgment of merely one private person. To be sure, Shakespeare cannot contribute to the search for fresh evidence or to the analysis of evidence against the backdrop of modern interpretations. But he does offer the influential testimony of someone who was, in a broad sense, a contemporary of the Reformation itself. Given his powers of observation, the creativity of his language, and the conviction of his own deliverances, what Shakespeare thought of the Reformation carries considerable weight indeed.

Serious students of King Henry VIII will be able to assess more accurately how Shakespeare interpreted the Reformation and its major actors, but, if I may hazard a straight-forward reading of the play, we can find Shakespeare making a three-fold contribution to the modern historiographical debate.

First, Shakespeare seems to stand with A. G. Dickens in describing a Reformation that was substantially completed, or at least well begun, in the reign of Henry VIII. References in the play to Roman Catholicism and to agents of the pope, if not necessarily to all Roman Catholics, are uniformly negative. The play's professional Catholics, Wolsey before his late repentance and Stephen Gardiner throughout the whole, are singularly loathsome creatures. Henry, about whom the play is at least occasionally ambitious, appears in the most favorable light when he destroys Wolsey and when he defends the Protestant Cranmer against the Catholic Gardiner. Shakespeare does provide not-so-subtle reservations concerning Henry's character, as when the prologue ends with a reference that almost everyone would have associated with Henry's own chaotic married life:

                                         … see
How soon this mightiness meets misery:
And if you can be merry then, I’ll say
A man may weep upon his wedding day.

(prologue.29-32)

Shakespeare also casts doubt on Henry's character even more directly in the words of the gentleman who contradicts the claim that Henry is seeking a divorce from Katharine because he is conscience-stricken at having married his brother's widow. Rather, says the gentleman,

                                         … his conscience
Has crept too near another lady.

(2.2.17-18)

On the other hand, Shakespeare can also give Henry lines that testify to the integrity of his conscience in seeking the divorce from Katharine. Certainly, Henry's protest at least sounds sincere in his words:

For no dislike i’th’world against the person
Of the good Queen, but the sharp thorny points
Of my alleged reasons drive this forward.

(2.4.221-23)

The sum of the matter is that, as he focuses on the consequences of Henry's actions, as perhaps distinct from Henry himself, Shakespeare assumes that Henry brought about a fundamental change in England's religion, and that this change was for the good. So far, therefore, Shakespeare is aligned with A. G. Dickens.

At the same time, Shakespeare also offers some support for the revisionism of Christopher Haigh. A key element in the revisionist thesis is that England's Reformation was more political than spiritual, more an affair of state than an affair of the heart. The kind of religion that Shakespeare describes in the play supports Haigh's picture of English faith in the reign of Henry VIII. None of Shakespeare's characters are given lines that express a distinctly Protestant theology; none speak religious sentiments that auditors in 1613 would have identified with Luther, Calvin, or England's own hot gospelers of the Henrician period like Hugh Latimer, John Bradford, or John Knox. Strikingly absent from the play, in other words, is any display of the distinctly Protestant theology that A. G. Dickens describes as a vital religious complement to the formal ecclesiastical changes brought about by Henry. To be sure, Shakespeare does imply that the rejection of Roman Catholicism was more than just Henry's whim, but he does so by identifying the interests of the kingdom with the choices of the king. For the king to have come out against Rome and for the king to have supported Cranmer over Gardiner seems, for Shakespeare, to have said something about how England as a whole moved away from Rome and how England as a whole benefited from the choice of Cranmer over Gardiner. Shakespeare, thus, implies that England as a whole accepted the kind of Reformation accomplished by Henry, but he totally neglects the popular evangelical Protestantism that Dickens identifies as a key element in the Reformation.

Shakespeare's third contribution to an interpretation of the English Reformation may be even more important for modern historiographical debate, since it squares with neither Dicken's traditional account nor Haigh's revisionism. In the play Shakespeare repeatedly commends a form of sincere Christianity that is not easily identifiable with any of the denominational options present during the reign of Henry or later. This form of faith—which is characterized by trust in divine providence, resolution to live with an integrity defined by divine standards, and renunciation of self-seeking in favor of altruistic concern for the common good—Shakespeare displays in Buckingham before his death, in Wolsey at the end of his life, in Cranmer, and, most of all, throughout the entire first two-thirds of the drama in Katharine. This piety is not Roman Catholic, for it does not require the instrumentality of pope or bishop. It is not Puritan, for it never even raises the possibility that genuine faith could conflict with allegiance to the king. The Puritans of Shakespeare's day certainly were exploring what James I, the patron of Shakespeare's company, called “novelties” that included a willingness to obey God, even if it meant disobeying the king. For such innovations, James waspishly lumped the Puritans with “witches, … dead cats, and hares.”²⁴ Regarding the Puritans, Shakespeare seems to agree entirely with his patron. The piety that Shakespeare commends is Christian, and it is English, but it is not distinctly Protestant or Catholic. The Reformation piety in King Henry VIII, in other words, is a return to broadly Christian standards that might encompass the highest aspirations of an ardent Protestantism or a conservative Catholicism, but not the doctrinal specifics of either. If this is what the Reformation meant for Shakespeare, he is contributing a fresh angle to the modern historical debate which, even at this late date, seems almost as preoccupied with Catholic-Protestant standoffs as were the antagonists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

To summarize, Shakespeare with A. G. Dickens locates the Reformation in the reign of the early Tudors, but with Christopher Haigh he emphasizes its political and national rather than its pietistic character. He also raises the fruitful suggestion that the spirituality of the English Reformation may have consisted in a return to general godliness more than to the religion of any contending ecclesiastical party.

Along the way, Shakespeare's characterizations also contribute forcefully to modern efforts at understanding the principal Henrician figures. Shakespeare's Henry is ambiguous, his Cranmer is solid, and his Katharine a truly noble heroine. From a historian's angle, the most interesting character in the play is Wolsey, for Shakespeare combined in his portrait an extreme Protestant denunciation of Wolsey's excesses with a generous Catholic approval of his late repentance. Such nuanced views of Wolsey have not been common in the historiography of the English Reformation, but Shakespeare is convincing enough to dignify the possibility.

The contributions of Shakespeare's King Henry VIII to an understanding of the English Reformation can never be definitive. But they are helpful, especially for suggesting fresh angles of vision to illuminate the ongoing floodtide of factual research. I hope, however, to have suggested enough to indicate both how the history of the English Reformation can help us understand Shakespeare and also how Shakespeare can help us understand the English Reformation.

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Finally, a last word is in order on the way in which an examination of Shakespeare's play, King Henry VIII, can help us think more clearly about the relationship between historical and literary analysis. History, though always uncertain in its most important deliverances, is about things that really take place. Literature, though distinctly a product of imagination, communicates a vision of how things really are or really ought to be. Modern deconstructionists and some proponents of romantic criticism overestimate the scientific character of non-literary study; historians, for their part, reciprocate by underestimating the strength of the connections between imaginative literature and the lived realities they study. Such misunderstandings between historians and literary scholars are regrettable. When history and literature intersect, as they do so manifestly in Shakespeare's King Henry VIII, the result need not be a discordant clash. It can become, rather, an energizing complexity.

Generations of historians as well as the playwright have been looking at the same thing. That “thing” is the English Reformation. The contrasting conventions with which Shakespeare, on the one hand, and the historians, on the other, approach the Reformation—how the audiences they have in view influence their presentations and what they hope to accomplish by way of illuminating particular or universal realities—do in fact divide the dramatist from the historians. But the Reformation itself, as human experience open to countless, but not infinite, interpretations, is the same for both Shakespeare and the historians. King Henry VIII is a good play to support such an argument, for the way in which Shakespeare's literary vision of Henry VIII and his contemporaries overlaps with interpretations of the era by historians, as also the way that Shakespeare's vision enriches the debates of the historians over the character of the English Reformation, mark Shakespeare and the historians more as friendly allies in a common search for human meaning than as hostile antagonists defending rival domains.

Notes

1. Quoted in A. G. Dickens and John M. Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), p. 45. This book is an essential guide for its subject.

2. James I to the King of Denmark, 11 November 1605, in Letters of King James VI & I, ed. G. P. V. Akrigg (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), p. 276.

3. For the outline of Shakespeare's life, I have relied upon Gerald Eades Bentley, Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), and the “Introduction” to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Irving Ribner and George Lyman Kittredge (Waltham, MA: Xerox College Publishing, 1971). Preparation of this paper was greatly assisted by David L. Edwards, Christian England, Vol. 2: From the Reformation to the 18th Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), especially “Shakespeare's Religion,” pp. 107-25.

4. Blair Worden, “Shakespeare and Politics,” Shakespeare Survey, 44 (1992), 2.

5. Worden, 3.

6. See Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge and Use of the Book of Common Prayer (London: SPCK, 1935); Roland Mushat Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963); Roy W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969).

7. Frye, p. 9.

8. For critical orientation to the play, I have relied on R. A. Foakes, ed., King Henry VIII, 3rd ed., “The Arden Shakespeare,” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), from which all my citations to the play are also derived.

9. Peter L. Rudnytsky, “Henry VIII and the Deconstruction of History,” Shakespeare Survey, 43 (1991), 54.

10. See Rudnytsky's essay for a responsible argument along these lines.

11. Clayton Roberts and David Roberts, A History of England: Prehistory to 1714, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1991), p. 336.

12. Rudnytsky, 57.

13. Georges Florovsky, “The Predicament of a Christian Historian” (1959), in God, History, and Historians, ed. C. T. McIntire (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), p. 418.

14. Florovsky, p. 418.

15. For outstanding recent examples, see the Catholic Phillip Hughes, The Reformation in England, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1951-1954), and the Protestant E. G. Rupp, Studies in the Making of the English Protestant Tradition, new ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966).

16. Quoted in Peter Newman Brooks, ed., Cranmer in Context (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), p. 120.

17. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1989), p. 202. For G. R. Elton's estimation of Cromwell, see Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973).

18. Jasper Ridley, Statesman and Saint: Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More and the Politics of Henry VIII (New York: Viking, 1982), pp. 291-93.

19. Roberts and Roberts, p. 329; Akrigg, p. 15.

20. James A. Williamson, The Tudor Age, 2nd ed. (New York: David McKay, 1957), p. 222; G. R. Elton, Reform & Reformation: England, 1509-1558 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), p. 376.

21. These two are selected from a catena of noteworthy assessments in Brooks, pp. 119, 121.

22. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (New York: St. Martin's, 1988), p. ix.

23. Christopher Haigh, “Introduction,” in The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), p. 10.

24. James to John Whitgift, 29 October 1603, and James to Robert Cecil, early 1605, in Akrigg, pp. 217, 250. To reinforce the sense that the Christianity Shakespeare most preferred was not the Puritan variety, it is striking that Frye in Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine has no entries for “faith” or “grace,” which were predominant Puritan concerns, in his catalogue of Shakespearean theological categories.