SOURCE: “Staging Government: Shakespeare's Life of King Henry the Eighth and the Government of Generations,” in Criticism, Vol. 41, No. 1, Winter, 1999, pp. 41-65.

[In the following essay, Glimp discusses the interaction between political authority and anxieties regarding theatrical representation in the Elizabethan period, particularly in relation to Shakespeare's Henry VIII.]

From the very earliest moments of their emergence in the late 1570s, England's popular stages prompted fears that they were multiplying out of control. This was the case not only insofar as some people—including at one point Queen Elizabeth and her privy councilors—worried that the structures were growing too numerous and consequently that most should be torn down;¹ it was also the case insofar as the theater's most vocal opponents understood the institution to be capable of producing unruly hordes of dissolute persons. The anti-theatricalists argued that the theater did more than simply provide a venue for threatening multitudes to gather and “recreate themselves.”² More pointedly, to their minds England's stages possessed a kind of monstrous fecundity, and thus were responsible for creating numbers of libertines and rogues, idle, disordered and hence dangerous persons who would violate England's laws, or would treasonously betray their monarch, or would give themselves over to sensual abominations, and thereby bring down the wrath of God upon a reprobate nation. By investigating these arguments in relation to Shakespeare's Henry the Eighth, this essay seeks to accomplish two things. First, it works to show how this play acknowledges and explores the limits of the cultural logic informing the above anxieties about the stage—a pedagogic dynamic in which imitative practices effect what is taken to be a kind of reproduction. Second, this essay describes how Shakespeare's attention to these issues represents an effort to consolidate the cultural authority of the popular theater. Engaging and reworking anti-theatrical fears, Henry the Eighth attempts to transform the stage's capacity for ungoverned generation from a deeply troubling threat into a source of pleasure and approval.

Anti-theatricalist Henry Crosse offers a place to begin elaborating this analysis to the extent that his efforts to stigmatize playgoing enable a more detailed specification of the account of the stage as dangerously generative. Those who attend plays, he argues, are “the very scum, rascallitie, and baggage of the people, theeves, cut-purses, shifters, cousoners.”³ According to Crosse, these are nothing other than “an uncleane generation, and spaune of vipers,” a “broode of hell-bred creatures” (Q1);⁴ this genealogical identification situates theater-going as one act among many that transparently registers an unholy descent. As if such a critique were not trenchant enough, Crosse provides an even more damning analysis of the effects of frequenting playhouses, asserting that proximity to the wicked does not simply confirm one's reptilian lineage but itself causes a genealogical reconfiguration. By attending a play, patrons risk becoming demonic offspring; retrospectively as it were, the theater realigns lineages in a way that numbers playgoers among the multitudinous progeny of Hell. Here is his account of what he insists is typical conduct at the playhouse: “doth it not daily fall out in common experience,” he asks, “that there is either fighting, whereof ensueth murther? robbing and theevering, whereof commeth hanging? or spotting the soule with wickednesse, that he becommeth the very sonne of Beliall?” (Q1^r-v). The self-evidence of the causal link Crosse posits between brawling and murder and between theft and execution seeks to lend an obvious inevitability to the idea that the “he” who perhaps innocently wandered into the theater will be transformed into the offspring of a demon, “the very sonne of Beliall.” Recent criticism has drawn important attention to the way the anti-theatrical polemic puts in play fears about inherently unstable or groundless selves, expressing the worry that playgoers would mimetically deform into what they saw.⁵ Crosse's brief description elaborates such concerns into a generative politics of the stage insofar as the retrospective logic underpinning the assertion that the theater makes its viewers demonic offspring effectively invests the theater with a generational capacity, a source for the unsettling multitudes pestering England.⁶ Stephen Gosson advances just such a claim by suggesting that the popular stage serves as the locus of a demonic maternity. Plays are, he argues, milk “suckt from the Devilles teate.”⁷ Philip Stubbes confirms Gosson's point. Whether or not the plays on stage are sacred or profane, “they are quite contrarie to the word of grace, and [are] sucked out of the Devills teates, to nourish us in ydolatrie hethenrie, and sinne.”⁸ Thomas White, preaching at Paul's Cross, offered to list the sins carried out at the stage, “the monstrous birds that brede in this nest.” At the same time he identified the audience as a “multitude that flocketh” to plays.⁹ White's avian metaphorics, consistent with the vitriol of Gosson, Stubbes, and Crosse, implies that the stage reproduces, that it generates both sins and sinners, spawns them and spews them out into the commonwealth to work their satanic designs.

The claim that the English theater possessed a capacity to produce disruptively violent and wicked multitudes did not go unchallenged. Thomas Heywood, one of the few who bothered to intervene in print on behalf of the stage, answered these charges not by denying the theater's fertility, but rather by insisting upon the salutary effects of stage generation.¹⁰ Indeed, according to Heywood, the public stage at its origin was integrally linked to a project of generating numbers. As evidence of the benefits of the theater to the polity, Heywood points to the tactics of Romulus, founder of Rome. Once he had located a suitable place to build “so famous a Citty,” he was faced with the dilemma of

how to people the same, his traine wholly consisting of Souldiers, who without company of women (they not having any in their Army) could not multiply; but so were likely that their immortall fames should dye issueless with their mortall bodies. Thus therefore Romulus devised; After a parle and attonement made with the neighbor Nations, hee built a Theater, plaine, according to the time; yet large, fit for the entertainement of so great an Assembly, and these were they whose famous issue peopled the Cittie of Rome, which in after ages grew to such a height … to which all the discovered kingdomes of the earth after became tributaries.¹¹

According to Heywood, the theater solved a major problem for the Romans, how to extend into the future the accomplishments of the warriors who founded the city. Heywood's narrative transforms the rape of the Sabine women into a policy of national generation of “issue,” and aligns the stage with a program of biological reproduction. The theater makes up for the incapacities of the “mortall bodies” of the military men, and thereby enables Rome to flourish into an empire.¹²

In his account of the contemporary function of the stage, Heywood develops and modifies this originary association between the theater and procreation. Specifically, an understanding of plays as a form of education guides his effort to spell out the means and objectives of the theatrical production of persons. It was a commonplace of English humanist pedagogy, one derived from antiquity, that a child's instructor should be in loco parentis; contemporary educational discourse, however, also authorized its practice by arguing that teaching was not just a supplement to generation, but an alternative form of generation, a non-biological way to produce men.¹³ In contrast to the anti-theatricalists who viewed the stage as a site of “diabolical pedagogy,”¹⁴ Heywood invests the contemporary theater with the capacity for properly educating its viewers, an instructive dynamic that results in the generation of exemplary men for England.¹⁵ Here Heywood appeals to the precedent of the staged education of Hercules: “[T]here was in his nonage presented unto him by his Tutor in the fashion of a History, acted by the choyse of the nobility of Greece, the worthy and memorable acts of his father Iupiter. Which being personated with lively and well-spirited action, wrought such impression in his noble thoughts, that in meere emulation of his fathers valor (not at the behest of his stepdame Juno) he perform’d his twelve labors: him valiant Theseus followed, and Achilles, Theseus” (B3). Rather than account Hercules's labors a punishment by Juno—as was conventional—Heywood recasts them as filial acts of mimetic valor. This ideal of transforming representations into regulated behavior appropriates a technique of personal cultivation from early modern grammar school practice. Just as pedagogical advice recommended the institution of students in a regimen of imitation—of classical models of usage, tropes, stylistics, as well as of the person of the instructor himself—Heywood argues that the stage presented to its audience classical exemplars for emulation.¹⁶ Thomas Lodge explicitly invokes the Aristotelian rationale for this practice in his defense of playing: “men are greatly delighted with imitation,” and thus it is “good to bring those things on stage, that were altogether tending to vertue.”¹⁷ Crosse, though among those who lamented the putative effects of stage education (P4^v), nonetheless rehearsed the argument of the theater's defenders: “when as the comely deedes of good men are feelingly brought to remembrance, it cannot but move other to imitate the like goodnesse” (P3^v). The people not only enjoy the depiction of virtue, but also, because of that very delight, will seek to repeat those things they see represented. As Heywood illustrates, those who insisted upon the merits of the stage understood plays as enabling just such a formative repetition of ideals in the theater, a presentation of the finest examples of men and women from biblical, classical, and English antiquity that would constitute well-governed members of families, of churches, of cities, and of the realm.

In Heywood's argument moreover, the imitation of classical exemplars does not simply supplement paternity but acts as an alternative form of paternity, a self-sufficient form of producing ideal men. According to Heywood, Aristotle followed the precedent of Hercules's theatrical education and staged before Alexander the exploits of Achilles. So moved was the student by the performance, Heywood argues, “that all his succeeding actions were meerly shaped after that patterne, and it may be imagined had Achilles never lived, Alexander had never conquered the whole world” (B3). Heywood's claims here bear direct comparison to Sir Philip Sidney's defense of the effects of poetry. Although nature made only one Cyrus, Sidney contends that, by providing ideals for virtuous action, poetry could “make many Cyrusses.”¹⁸ Similarly, Heywood argues that Alexander was Alexander only by virtue of his mimetic education, his insertion into a lineage of ideal men through a practice of theatrical imitation.¹⁹ The generational dynamic here, in which Achilles is used theatrically to produce Alexander, pointedly answers the specter of monstrous fecundity advanced by the anti-theatricalists. Heywood at once maintains and reworks the use to which Romulus was said to have put the theater, in that Heywood's ideal accomplishes the objective of producing persons, though it imagines a form of generation that seems to require no women, indeed, that is presented as if entirely removed from biological reproduction.

The discussion thus far has sought to demonstrate how the theatrical polemic hinged on a shared understanding of the stage as generational. On one hand, those who defended the theater insisted on its capacity for making exemplary rulers, and for peopling the nation with well-governed persons. On the other, the stage's opponents understood it to be a form of cultural activity that effectively produced unruly numbers, a reptilian spawn of ungoverned multitudes who threatened to lay waste to the nation. While we might imagine that Shakespeare would simply side with Heywood against those who attacked the popular theater, his work undertakes a more complex engagement. I shall explore in what follows the ways Shakespeare broaches, reworks, and attempts to manage the terms of this extended debate in his Life of King Henry the Eighth. At first glance, we can read one way Shakespeare engages with the theatrical polemic in this play's staging of two highly charged moments of political theater. Just as the anti-theatricalists perceived the audiences at the stage to be a volatile mass of people, Shakespeare portrayed the coronation of Anne Bullen and the christening of her daughter, Elizabeth Tudor, as drawing overwhelming numbers of unruly spectators. The christening occasions an extraordinary onslaught of people, and, though we might imagine that the fascination with religious and political spectacle would have been encouraged as a necessary condition of royal authority, the household staff's response to the “multitude” drawn to court tells another story.²⁰ According to the officers and servants of Henry VIII's household, the crowds that descend upon the court to celebrate the birth of the royal offspring possess a force as uncontainable as ocean tides (4.4.16), and they assault the court like an enemy army (4.4.41-44, 72). The coronation of her mother, Anne Bullen, is represented as drawing comparable masses. As the Third Gentleman reports, “Great-bellied women, / That had not half a week to go, like rams / In the old time of war, would shake the press / And make ’em reel before ’em” (4.1.76-79). The fecund regiment of women “shak[ing] the press” to get a view of Anne puzzles the Third Gentleman, leaving him astonished by the singularity of the event (“Such joy / I never saw before” [4.1.75-76], he asserts); the household staff offer a less generous evaluation of the numbers gathered to see Anne's daughter. The good will of the masses notwithstanding, their enthusiasm to get a peek at the child prompts the Porter's Man to speculate that “[t]he devil was amongst ’em” (5.4.55). Just as Satan has no business at a christening, the royal functionaries assert that the crowd is profoundly out of place at the Court. The Chamberlain, concerned by the potential fiasco created by the “rabble” (5.4.66), chastises his men: “Are all these / Your faithful friends o’ th’ suburbs?” (66-67), he asks. While the Chamberlain worries that the crowds treat the Court as a fairground (63-64), the Porter frets that the “rascals” who press for a view have mistaken the royal household for the bear-baiting and bull-baiting pit at “Parish Garden” (5.4.2). Beleaguered, nearly overrun, the household staff understand the multitudes to be not only confused but potentially confusing, capable of transforming the regal space of the Court into a space of popular license, of erasing the cultural distinctions between the seat of royal government and what was perceived to be the ungoverned space of the liberties.

The reactions of the household officials help establish links between their concerns about what they see happening before them and the anti-theatrical anxieties about the effects of England's playhouses. Although the connection between the popular stage and the social sites named by the Chamberlain and the Porter in 5.4 would have been implicit (the popular theaters were located in “the suburbs” and “Parish Garden” was immediately adjacent to the Swan),²¹ the Porter makes the association explicit when he says of the crowds, these are the “youths that thunder at a playhouse and fight for bitten apples” (5.4.57-58). To the extent that here the Court and theater share a common enemy in the unruly “youths” who disrupt the proceedings at each, these lines acknowledge the theatricality of the royal festivities and suggest a structural similarity between the royal household and the popular playhouse. However, this sympathy notwithstanding, the fact that the royal spectacle has attracted the same audience as the theater stands as one measure among many of the magnitude of the crisis the retainers face, and adds descriptive specificity to the pressing anxiety that the multitude will deform the Court and vitiate the conceptual distinctions between Court and suburbs. This interesting evocation of the anti-theatrical fear of the stage gains further resonance when we note the ways that Shakespeare links the royal spectacle to an inordinate and illicit capacity for reproduction. Overwhelmed by the numbers at Court, the Porter exclaims “Bless me, what a fry of fornication is at door! On my Christian conscience this one christening will beget a thousand!” (5.4.33-35). These comments faintly, but perceptibly, echo the Third Gentlemen's observation that Anne's coronation attracted a fecund army of women about to give birth, a teeming multitude that presses in to get a view of the new queen. The Porter's lines similarly insist that Elizabeth's christening possesses a threatening fecundity and promises to occasion the spawning of more multitudes.

Although Shakespeare both implicitly and explicitly acknowledges the concerns of the anti-theatricalists in these passages, his engagement with the controversy surrounding the stage is much more involved than these allusions might suggest. The rubric put forth in this essay's title—“the government of generations”—seeks to clarify what is at stake in the opposition to and defense of the stage, as well as to specify the manner in which Henry the Eighth represents a complex intervention in the theatrical polemic. In order to spell out the relevance of this term it will be helpful to describe its provenance in the work of Michel Foucault, most notably his interest in what he referred to as a general “problematics of government”²² in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. According to Foucault, during this time government in all its many senses—a dispersed array of efforts to ensure the correct management of both self and others—became a focus of intensified and anxious attention. By this definition, government is not the exclusive concern of monarchs; indeed, this approach to questions of rule explicitly seeks to answer an abiding narrative of political analysis that reduces all power relations to the monolithic and voraciously aggrandizing force of the state, an account that corresponds roughly to the “regiocentric” focus of much Renaissance literary criticism.²³ Contrary to a view that would see government—how to manage others, and “how to be ruled, how strictly, by whom, to what end, by what methods”²⁴—as a question for the prince only, Foucault asserts that “there are several forms of government among which the prince's relation to his state is only one particular mode.”²⁵ “‘Government’,” he argues, “did not refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It did not only cover the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection, but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others.”²⁶ Government, by this account, is not a matter of slavery or repression, although the agencies that govern might utilize or resort to such tactics; still less is it characterized by a perpetual agon between forces of subversion and containment; government, instead, is concerned with the “conduct of conduct,” not only with how one conducts oneself, but how one may conduct others.²⁷ Mitchell Dean explains that Foucault's formulation here “marks out a massive domain between the minutiae of individual self-examination, self-care, and self-reflection, and the techniques and rationalities concerned with the governance of the state.”²⁸ Government is not a singular institutional site or a unified activity. As Dean emphasizes, it represents a dispersed network of relations, a ramified collection of relatively autonomous efforts to define and to effect appropriate action in the world.²⁹

Foucault's work offers an especially useful way to understand the theatrical polemic by making it possible to frame the controversy as a debate about the governmental effectivity of the stage. From such a perspective, the two sides of the argument offer competing efforts to define the manner in which the popular theater works mimetically to “structure the possible field of action” of its audiences. The term “government of generations” elaborates this understanding in two ways. First, I take a “generation” to represent an imagined totality of subjects—of the church, of the commonwealth, of the monarch—one either well- or ill-governed. The theater, within this sense of the phrase, produces governmental effects—either order or disorder—among the “generation” of English people. This focus may be understood as all the more urgent for the participants in the debate if we note the profound unrest that marked the decades prior to the opening of England's popular theaters, the religious dissidence, and occasionally, open insurrection of the sixteenth century, as well as the restless and unlicensed movement of numbers displaced from traditional modes of existence. Such recent history reinforced an understanding of numbers of people as always in danger of coalescing into explosive multitudes, a “many-headed monster.”³⁰ This jaundiced view of the English people as inherently unstable also produced a demand to ensure their right government. In general terms, at least, those who opposed and those who defended the stage shared the objective of government; they differed sharply on the role the theater played in achieving governed behavior. Where Heywood insisted upon the theater's capacity for securing government, the anti-theatricalists understood it to be a grave threat to all forms of government, including that of the nation as a whole. Crosse reminded his readers that Kett's rebellion began at a play. Just as it had provided a site for disorderly subjects to gather openly and to begin their revolt, the theater provided a perfect location for the conniving to find like-minded allies, the “discontented people” to make contact and to “attempt some execrable actio[n], commotions, mutinies.”³¹ Thomas White promised that England, in allowing the abomination of stage playing, had equalled already the biblical precedent of a polity destroyed because of the failure of every form of government: “the olde world is matched,” he wrote, “and Sodome overcome.”³²

A second sense of the term “government of generations” places emphasis on the reproductive connotations of the word “generation,” and seeks to draw attention to the ways in which various governmental domains authorized or defended their actions by promising to propagate governed numbers. Most obviously, domestic economies guaranteed their survival into future generations through the production of children. However, other cultural sites either claimed or were understood as having generational effects: generation, that is, constitutes a cultural activity not confined exclusively to the domain of the household. The promise of making well-governed persons for families, for churches, for the monarch, or for the nation, justified a wide array of practices, including those of the popular theater. Alternatively, as we have seen, anti-theatricalists sought to demonize the stage as yielding an excessive generation, capable of a hyper-abundant fecundity that promoted misgovernment and threatened to lay waste to the nation by putting in play the agencies of the wrong kinds of persons.

The depiction of Elizabeth's christening and Anne's coronation underscores the fact that Shakespeare cannot be taken as simply endorsing Heywood's defense of the theater as an agent of governed generation or as an institution capable of producing and guaranteeing governed behavior. To be sure, the mere act of putting on a play represents a kind of implicit defense of playing. However, in what follows I want to suggest that Henry the Eighth does something more. Shakespeare's play represents a complex intervention in the anti-theatrical polemic to the extent that it offers a sustained meditation on the terms of the controversy surrounding the stage, specifically the model of mimetic generation that informs both sides of this dispute, the mechanism through which the popular theater was understood to produce its cultural effects. Shakespeare characterizes two key figures of national government—Elizabeth and Cardinal Wolsey—as formed by and operating through a generative imitation. By exploring the governmental implications of mimetic generation as well as the limits of this dynamic in these two figures, we will be able to read the manner in which Shakespeare defines the social role of the popular stage. In taking this approach, I am mindful that Foucault's account of government emphasizes the need to maintain a sense of the specificity of governmental activities. In the context of the present essay, this means that it is important to recognize the distinction between national government and theatrical government, even when national government operates theatrically.³³ With this caveat in place, we can proceed to an examination of the manner in which Shakespeare broaches questions of the government of generation in relation to Elizabeth and Wolsey. This will enable us to grasp the specific ways Shakespeare understands and justifies the governmental and generational capacity of the popular stage, and thus contributes to efforts to establish the theater's credibility, commercial viability, and sphere of cultural effectivity.

In the scene of princess Elizabeth's christening, the claims of governed generation are central to the adulation heaped upon her as a part of that ceremony, and to the visionary depiction of the reign to come under the future queen. Often taken to be the play's fullest celebration of monarchy's triumphant reconsolidation and extension into the future, the closing prophecy by Archbishop Cranmer promises abundant goodness during the age of Elizabeth. The future monarch will be, Cranmer asserts,

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. All princely graces
That mould up such a mighty piece as this is,
With all the virtues that attend the good,
Shall still be doubled on her. Truth shall nurse her.

(5.5.22-28)

In her important reading of this play, Kim Noling argues that the christening and Cranmer's prophecy participate in a ceremonial displacement of Anne Bullen, perform a kind of discursive caesarian section of the future monarch from a queen beheaded for supposed adulteries.³⁴ Cranmer's account elides reference to Anne and emphasizes the daughter's linkage to her father, suggesting that she is composed of the same virtuous “princely graces” as the king. Queen Anne's attendant, the Old Lady, anticipates this strategy in her announcement to the king and his companions that Anne has given birth to a “lovely boy”—that is, “a girl” who “Promises boys hereafter” (5.1.165-66). She subsequently takes the implication that Elizabeth is a boy in potential a step further, by insisting to Henry that the infant “’Tis as like you / As cherry is to cherry” (5.1.168-69), thus transforming Elizabeth into a mini version of her father. Noling links the Archbishop's visionary celebration of the future Queen and the gender transformations to which Elizabeth is subject to the strategic negotiation around Henry VIII's failure to produce a living male heir with either of his first two wives. As she persuasively argues, Cranmer's prophecy, by figuring Queen Elizabeth as a “maiden phoenix” (5.5.40) out of whose “sacred ashes of … honor” (45) will rise James I, provides Henry with the boy he always wanted, the sign of divine approval he missed within his previous marriage to Catherine of Aragon.³⁵ Such a gesture, moreover, renders James, the sitting monarch at the time of the play's production, essentially Queen Elizabeth's progeny—even though his claims to the throne were much less direct, and his own genealogy was stained by his mother's treason. Non-direct monarchical succession becomes through these dramatic strategies both legitimate and divine.³⁶

Noling's reading of Henry the Eighth indicates both the complexity and the import of issues of generation in the play, the stakes invested in these concerns. However, it is possible to qualify her account somewhat by underscoring the limitations imposed by her understanding of government as royal authority. The ultimate and exclusive horizon for her analysis is the question of monarchical succession, and such an approach substantially narrows her reading of the relations between government and generation in Shakespeare's work. The play, according to Noling, stages the “subversion of queens” (306), and does dramatic obeisance to both James I and Henry VIII insofar as it “[a]uthorizes Henry's will by making the tiny Princess Elizabeth … a means of producing kings of England” (292). This account is consistent with a significant line of criticism of Henry the Eighth, one that views Shakespeare's play as unequivocally reinforcing the monarchy's pretense to absolute rule by coopting all opposition or instability and enlisting it into the service of the king.³⁷ Noling indeed expands such a vision of royal authority by extending the implications of Henry VIII's monarchical generation to characterize patriarchal relations as such; as in her vision of the monarchy, she understands the patriarchy to be perfectly effective, capable of maintaining a stable and seamlessly monolithic gender hierarchy. Such a conclusion implies a totalizing view of power that Cranmer's prophetic claims do not support. The archbishop asserts that both father and daughter are made up of “all the virtues that attend the good,” which suggests a shared relation of subordination to an abstract category of moral value. However, it is also made clear that “good” will flourish under the reign of the daughter: “Good grows with her” (5.5.32), Cranmer promises. Despite Henry's celebration of the future presented to him, we might read incongruities within Cranmer's prophecy, and displace the unquestioning celebration of monarchy or the State that it is taken by critics to represent, by asking if the prelate's version of the generation of Elizabeth is the same as the Old Lady's. Does Cranmer here constitute the Queen to be a perfect copy of her father? (Indeed, might not the Old Lady's account that Elizabeth “’Tis as like you / As cherry is to cherry” work both ways, intimating, perhaps, that Henry is like an infant?) Isn’t the insistence that Elizabeth will double the virtues of her father a left-handed compliment? Doesn’t the image of unsullied and untroubled harmony in the future implicitly critique the present, a present marked by rebellion and treason?³⁸

These questions attempt to trouble the fantasy of monarchical, paternal parthenogenesis, and thus to locate instabilities in the putatively totalized structure of authority that such a generational dynamic would seek to secure and project into the future. By rendering legible rifts in the account of government as monolithically singular and perfectly effective, this line of interrogation prompts a closer examination of the play's representation of Elizabeth's generation and the governmental implications of such representations. To the extent that the future queen is the product of and enables alternative generational dynamics, she interrupts and counters the fantasy of Henry's self-sufficient reproduction of monarchs. For instance, while Cranmer's prophecy asserts that Elizabeth is made up of the same stuff as her father, it also situates her as the product of the pedagogic generation discussed above, created in relation to a model from antiquity, like the Alexander described by Heywood. Cranmer's association of Queen Elizabeth with the biblical exemplar of the Queen of Sheba not only alludes to Elizabeth's contemporary reputation as a scholar and exemplary student, but also constitutes the future monarch as a product of a mimetic generation.³⁹ Cranmer translates Henry VIII's formula for action in governing the commonwealth (“Things done without example, in their issue / Are to be feared” [1.2. 90-91]) into a principle of educational genesis, a well-governed means for producing “issue” derived from the biblical “example,” and valued all the more for surpassing that example. If the play labors to disassociate Queen Elizabeth from her mother, the account here also places Elizabeth within a biblical genealogy of nonpareil women, removing her from association with her father as well as her mother.

This pedagogic form of generation opens out onto a larger cultural terrain. Even as Cranmer's prophecy suggests that Elizabeth is generated humanistically, in relation to her biblical precedent, Queen Elizabeth herself is predicted to generate pedagogically, turning this form of mimetic subjectivation into a strategy of royal government. Not only is Elizabeth to be a “pattern” for rulers of all nations, she is also transformed into an ethical text that makes men. “God shal be truly known,” Cranmer promises, “and those about her / From her shall read the perfect ways of honor, / And by those claim their greatness, not by blood” (5.5.36-38). Queen Elizabeth founds and authorizes a form of humanist generation comparable to the martial pedagogy employed by Shakespeare's Henry V. Having arrived in France, preparing for battle, the king encourages the “noble English” by likening their male progenitors to “so many Alexanders” (HV 3.1.17, 19), and enjoins them to disseminate their courageous heritage down the status ladder through an educational mimesis: “Be copy now to men of grosser blood,” he commands, “And teach them how to war!” (HV 3.1.24-25). The king imagines educationally duplicating an entire army of heroic men, legions of Alexander the Greats. Fluellen's praise of his monarch—setting up an elaborate analogy between Henry and Alexander (HV 4.7.11-48)—casts the king's educational disciplining of his men as a form of self-multiplication, the creation of a whole army of himself. Just so, during her beatific reign, Elizabeth will, according to Cranmer, serve as scripted and scriptive model for those around her. If the archbishop's oration works hard to reinforce prospectively James I's claims to lineal succession to the throne by rendering him a direct descendent of Henry VIII, it also provides a nonlineal form of generation in which men are made through a status advancement authorized not by blood, but by their mimetic merit.

This reading of Henry the Eighth has worked to show how Elizabeth's imbrication within dynamics of imitative pedagogy counter the notion that a unified power structure subsumes the princess's envisioned actions into its overpowering will, or that she exists simply to reinforce royal masculine prerogatives. Though the focus to this point has been on celebrations of Elizabeth's governed mimetic generation, the play also suggests that the future queen possesses a potentially troubling fecundity. As a way of beginning to detail this aspect of the play's representation of Elizabeth and treatment of issues of reproduction, it will be useful to consider a prominent example of ungoverned generation—Cardinal Wolsey. The prelate is relevant to this discussion especially to the extent that he embodies—before the fact, as it were—precisely the kind of mimesis authorized during Queen Elizabeth's rule. Cranmer's vatic account of the dispensation under Elizabeth treats imitation of the queen as perfectly allowed, indeed as a sign and mechanism of the godliness of her reign. This celebration of governed humanist generation and the hierarchy it institutes beyond the claims of lineage, however, stands in tension with the play's elaborate vilification of Wolsey, who “claims … greatness, not by blood.” As if foregrounding this figure's imitation of the monarch, the “king-cardinal” (2.2.18) arrives on stage miming in his very first line Henry VIII's signature exclamation, “Ha!” (1.1.115). Rather than a guarantee of peaceful stability and virtuous government, Wolsey's mimetic stance toward the king and all that entails—namely, Wolsey's extraordinary rise through the avenues of learning from humble origins to the highest levels of royal service—is taken by others in the play to be an indication of his unprincipled ambition and insatiable appetite for power.

Cataloguing a number of the charges leveled against Wolsey provides a way to gauge just how disruptive his imitation of the king is perceived to be. Buckingham provides some of the most trenchant responses to the Cardinal, as is evident in his supercilious complaint that “A beggar's book / Outworths a noble's blood” (1.1.122-23).⁴⁰ Wolsey “outworths” the nobility not only insofar as his privileged access to the king circumvents a traditional hierarchy of lineage, but also insofar as his administrative presence in the nation drains the material resources upon which status hierarchies in part depend. Although his allies praise him for possessing “A hand as fruitful as the land that feeds us” (1.3.56), a “liberal[ity]” that simulates the abundance of the king, his detractors consider him a “fox / Or wolf, or both (for he is equal rav’-nous / As he is subtile)” (1.1.158-60), and attribute to him an overwhelming voracity that promises to devastate all. The prelate's very presence at court at once obscures and siphons off the king's boundless generosity: “I wonder,” Buckingham asks, “That such a keech can with his very bulk / Take up the ray o’ th’ beneficial sun! And keep it from the earth” (1.1.54-57). Wolsey's extraordinary hoarding of “wealth” (3.2.107) and astonishing “expense” (108) amount to an annihilating consumption that promises to unmake men and undermine all government. Norfolk worries that the Cardinal, through his burdenous taxations and sequestration of noble property, will transform noblemen into “pages” (2.2.46); Surrey projects this fear into the future with his complaint that “our issues … if [Wolsey] live, will scarce be gentlemen” (3.2.291-92). Wolsey's contemporary, the poet John Skelton, had gone so far as to liken him to a resident of the biblical city of Sodom,⁴¹ a sodomite insofar as he had fallen into a “wylfull blyndnesse” (l.468) of the heart, an occlusion of spiritual vision evidenced in his luxurious self-indulgence and his indiscriminate sexual escapades (ll.215-26), as well as in the necromancy Skelton hints that Wolsey practices (ll.686-707).⁴² Although Shakespeare does not go so far as Skelton and explicitly name Wolsey a sodomite, the ethical dissolution and universal ruin associated with the prelate—his libertinage (4.2.43; 3.2.294-96), his treasonous allegiance to the pope and Roman Catholic Spain (1.1.156), his misprision in office that effectively produces “loud rebellion” (1.2.29)—recall and recapitulate the apocalyptic vision of destruction advanced by the anti-theatricalists, the vision which Thomas White encompassed under the monitory typology of “Sodome overcome.”

This invocation of the anti-theatrical polemic begs the question of the relation between the strident critique of Wolsey and the assault on the stage. The connection is more than a matter of resemblance. In fact an important aspect of the extended abjection of the prelate is a critique of his role in staging the elaborate spectacles of diplomacy in France, the theater of state concluded immediately prior to the opening of the play. Henry the Eighth in fact begins with an acerbic account of Wolsey's hand in the production of the lavish celebration of accord between France and England at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Evocative of the way in which the anti-theatricalists considered the popular stage the site of a dangerous generation and imagined those who attended to be a satanic spawn that would overrun England, the nobles criticize Wolsey's management of the “fierce vanities” (1.1.54) in France as a kind of dangerous animation. The Cardinal, they report, “set the body and the limbs / Of this great sport together” (1.1.46-47), a spectacular display that in its extravagance “swallowed so much treasure” (1.1.166).⁴³ Commenting on the impact upon those forced to feed Wolsey's creation, Buckingham observes that some of those in attendance were compelled to sell all they had merely to dress for the occasion: “many / Have broke their backs with laying manors on’em / For this great journey” (1.1.83-85).⁴⁴ After the prelate's death, Griffith apologetically reminds the dying Princess Dowager of Wolsey's role in founding two universities, institutions identified as children begot upon Katherine, “Those twins of learning he raised in you, / Ipswich and Oxford” (4.2.57-59). This account of Wolsey's governed generation through largesse memorializes as pious benevolence that which, while the Cardinal lived, was construed as an ungoverned and prodigal degeneration. The nobles treat the Field of Cloth of Gold as an insatiable person made by Wolsey, indeed, an image of Wolsey himself, insofar as it unmakes titled families by devouring their estates.

Certainly, the play maintains an investment in clearly distinguishing the future Queen Elizabeth from the cardinal. Wolsey's behavior and his management of the kingdom are starkly antithetical to the ideal of economic and social harmony Cranmer projects into the reign of the queen to be. And where the nonlineal generation of men through imitation of the future queen founds a just hierarchy of merit, Wolsey's imitation of the king represents an unlicensed and degenerate status advancement, a sign of and means for his dangerous agency. These distinctions notwithstanding, the accusations of abuse and ungoverned generation targeted at the Cardinal are leveled at the princess herself at the very site of the Archbishop's privileged glimpse into the future, the scene of Elizabeth's christening. At that event, as noted above, the young princess occasions an onslaught of people out of control, a “multitude” (5.4.64) so unruly that the Porter's Man speculates that “[t]he devil was amongst ’em” (5.4.55). Especially in light of the Porter's complaint that the crowds treat the regal space of the Court as, among other things, a “playhouse,” such an assertion, as with the account of Wolsey's staging of the Field of Cloth of Gold, recalls the terms of the anti-theatricalist attack on the stage as demonically fecund. Much as Wolsey's critics reviled him as one who generated a destructively voracious person, the staff of the royal household attribute to Princess Elizabeth on the occasion of her christening the capacity for producing unruly numbers. Wondering what all the fuss is about as the crowds press to get a view of Elizabeth, the Porter asks, “have we some strange Indian with the great tool come to court, the women so besiege us?” (5.4.31-32). Foakes directs us to The Tempest in his note to this line, and Trinculo's observation that if he could get Caliban to England, he could make a fortune charging to see his “strange beast” (2.2.30). The connection may be developed in the direction of the questions of generation I have been pursuing. In that play, Caliban claims that, but for Prospero's intervention, he would have with Miranda “peopled … This isle with Calibans” (Tempest 1.2.350-51). This fantasy attributes to the indigenous populations of the new world, in the person of Caliban, a violent and predatory eros, in turn associated with a superabundant fecundity.⁴⁵ Picking up on the Old Lady's characterization of the infant as “this stranger” (5.1.168), the Porter suggestively constitutes Elizabeth herself as the “strange” agent of an ungoverned generation, hyperbolically masculine, outlandishly potent.

The implication that Elizabeth possesses a disruptive fecundity receives further elaboration in the lines immediately following the Porter's question, in an exclamation mentioned briefly at this essay's outset. Exasperated by the crowds muscling their way into a view of the queen to be, the Porter exclaims, “Bless me, what a fry of fornication is at door! On my Christian conscience this one christening will beget a thousand” (5.4.33-35). The Porter's analysis advances the idea that the people pressing their way into a view of Elizabeth are of illicit descent, that they are spawned of sin. It also suggests that they themselves will reproduce—the sanctification of the birth of Elizabeth will put in play actions that will result in the generation of a thousand more. Finally, and most relevant to the understanding advanced within the anti-theatrical polemic, the Porter's locution formulates the christening itself as the agent of generation. Such an account figures this piece of royal theater as capable of producing numbers of people, more births to be celebrated or more “fry” to augment the disordered “rabble.” Presented as a theatrical spectacle, Elizabeth stands not only as a “girl [who] Promises boys hereafter,” but also one whose christening “will beget a thousand,” an excessively fertile generator of unstable multitudes that threaten to overrun the royal household.

In the face of the unregulated reproduction of Elizabeth's christening, as well as of the similarity of Wolsey's monarchical imitation to the ideal located in the reign to come, Cranmer's prophecy works to distinguish the “virgin” queen, the “most unspotted lily” (5.5.60-61), from the Cardinal and his ethically dissolute presence in the nation by directly opposing Elizabeth's rule to the effects supposedly produced by Wolsey. As if answering the litany of complaints against Wolsey's destructive appetite, his exacting taxation and hoarding of the nation's wealth, a self-interest that wastes, Cranmer offers a vision of economic plenitude during the future rule of Elizabeth: “In her days every man shall eat in safety / Under his own vine what he plants, and sing / The merry songs of peace to all his neighbors” (5.5.33-35). In immediate contrast to the specter of Wolsey's degenerative “ill husband[ry]” (3.2.142) that defies to “thrift” (3.2.109), this is a vision of masculine self-sufficiency, of a nation made up of perfectly functioning domestic economies, households with neither lack nor excess. Such an ideal, furthermore, opposes the scene of the coronation of Elizabeth's mother. Recall that Anne Bullen attracted an army of pregnant women who did battle to get a view of the newly crowned queen. The mingling in the crowd was so indiscriminate, as the Third Gentleman reports, that “No man living / Could say ‘This is my wife’ there, all were woven! So strangely in one piece” (4.1.79-81). By this account, the procession marking the reconstitution of the royal family deconstituted the families in attendance. Cranmer, by contrast, envisions a nation of men, each constituting a closed economy, each under his own vine, eating what he needs, needing no more than the abundance generated with and through Elizabeth, secure and happy in “merry” England. Of course, this vision of the future is, in the moment of its staging, a future past, and it is not the least of this passage's creative licenses with this past actively to rewrite the social instabilities that marked Queen Elizabeth's reign—vagabondage, hunger riots, political dissidence, open insurrection.⁴⁶ Such glaring historical erasures underscore the fact that Cranmer's prophecy has the status of one account among many, a limited effort that seeks to manage the effects of potentially destabilizing generations. Although Cranmer celebrates a dispensation in which the merit derived from imitating Elizabeth's virtues underwrites a new hierarchical order, his prophecy arrives only at the last minute, only after the dangers associated with Wolsey have been voiced and linked to pedagogical mobility of the sort Elizabeth will foster, and in opposition to the specter of multitudes out of control at her christening.

By noting the belatedness of Cranmer's prophecy, I do not mean to suggest that Shakespeare subversively embraces the possibilities for deformative generation associated with the pedagogic mimesis enabling and surrounding Wolsey's ministrations and Elizabeth's christening. However, he does offer an alternative effort to manage the disruptive potentials put in play through educational imitation, one that seeks to establish the theater's credibility and sphere of generational effectivity. The Epilogue to the play addresses these issues by bringing attention to bear upon the activity of theatrical “construction.”⁴⁷ Such an emphasis broaches simultaneously questions of, on one hand, the stage's relation to household government, and on the other, the issue of dramatic reproduction. Henry the Eighth will not please, the Epilogue asserts, those who came “to sleep an act or two” (Epi.3) or those who came to hear insults hurled at the city. The Epilogue “fear[s]” that, perhaps, “All the expected good w’ are like to hear / For this play at this time, is only in / The merciful construction of good women, / For such a one we showed’em” (Epi.7-11). The Epilogue combines the generational function imagined for the theater by both pro- and anti-theatricalists with Cranmer's vision of Elizabeth as an epitome of all virtues imitated by those around her; that is, The Life of King Henry the Eighth is a play that both “construct[s]” women by presenting them on stage, and, through the stage's generational capacity “construct[s] … good women” by offering ideals for imitation.⁴⁸ However, the dynamic imagined here clashes with Archbishop Cranmer's vision. Although the Epilogue's statement implicitly counters the anti-theatrical fears of a nation overrun by an ungoverned theatrical spawn, as well as the Porter's account of the riotous “beget”-ing at the royal spectacle of Elizabeth's christening, it cannot be said to endorse the ideal of perfectly regulated generation Cranmer offers. The resistance here can be located in the vagueness of the Epilogue's “one.” Precisely who is the “one” good woman mercifully “construct[ed]”? Is it Queen Elizabeth? The Epilogue's claims might then be read as an elaboration of Cranmer's prophecy. But could the “one” not also be Queen Katherine? The play earlier has endorsed Katherine insofar as she is presented with a masque of fairies to comfort her on her deathbed, a vision of divine sanction that, from the perspective of the Epilogue, would seem to conflict with Cranmer's celebration of Elizabeth.⁴⁹ What about Anne Bullen? Chamberlain asserts that “Beauty and honor in her are … mingled” (2.3.76), and the Second Gentleman proclaims that she is “an angel” (4.1.44). Which should be held up as the “one” exemplar? And since, as I’ve been suggesting, there is more than one woman in the play, what would be the implication if the one were the Old Lady? If the Epilogue's “one” conceivably refers to the Old Lady—a carnivalesque figure who gives voice to “fornication”—we might then take the dynamic of the “merciful construction of good women,” to be a revision of Heywood's ideal, one that defines the theater's role in terms of its capacity to effect a festive generation.

Such an alternative is consistent with a second sense of the activity of “construction,” understood as an act of interpretation. Following this sense of the word, the Epilogue deferentially and self-effacingly suggests that the women of the audience will be the only ones to approve of the play just presented.⁵⁰ The Epilogue thus relies on the women in the audience to provide the most “merciful” and generous reading of the play because they were shown “one” good woman. “If they smile,” the Epilogue states, “And say ’twill do, I know within a while / All the best men are ours; for ’tis ill hap, / If they hold when their ladies bid ’em clap” (Epi.11-14). As I have argued, Cranmer's celebration of the self-sufficient, male “oeconomies” that will flourish under Elizabeth answered the indiscriminate dissolution of domestic relations at Queen Anne's coronation, and Wolsey's unlicensed hoarding and expenditure. The Epilogue responds in turn by linking the success of the stage to a domain of household government in which women are constituted as agents of aesthetic judgment. That is, if Cranmer's prophecy projected a nation of men subsisting within the abundant equilibrium of perfectly regulated domestic economies, and if the play itself might have been staged to celebrate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth—an arranged marriage in which a woman served as a marker in dynastic diplomacy, an international alliance secured through the traffic in women—the Epilogue counters these alternatives by appealing to women, implicitly insisting on a domestic relation which would not simply subsume women into the husband.⁵¹ My point here is not that this is a feminist gesture.⁵² Nor do I see the Epilogue describing the popular theater as a space of radical freedom in which women are afforded a space unmarked by the repression operative elsewhere in the society. My point is rather that the Epilogue's speech describes—and thus seeks discursively to constitute—a specific vision of domestic relations, implicitly values and privileges an understanding of household government distinct from a monolithically patriarchal dispensation endorsed elsewhere in the play. This effort to define and privilege an alternative account of domestic economy underwrites and is a crucial aspect of the Epilogue's effort to define and thus to secure the viability and cultural effectivity of the popular stage. Contrary to the anti-theatrical account of the stage as the hyperfecund antithesis of government, the Epilogue invests the theater's success in a governmental relation that hinges on the two senses of the dynamic of “construction.” Plays both construct and are constructed by the women in the audience, who in turn are able to “conduct the conduct” of their men, or at least the “best” ones, and to direct that conduct into approval of the theater's efforts.

Just how governed is this conduct intended to be? Certainly the Epilogue's linkage of the success of the popular theater to the redefined ideal of household government counters the anti-theatrical polemic's allegations that the stage constitutes a dangerous threat to the household and hence to the commonwealth as a whole. It does not, however, necessarily imply the imposition of a perfectly governed eros. The bawdy pun, “’tis ill hap, / If they hold when their ladies bid ’em clap,” playing on the sense of “clap” as amorous “embrace,”⁵³ or as syphilis, suggests that an ideal of self-control, of ethical containment of desires, presents a risk to the domestic relationship. This, no doubt, is not what Heywood had in mind in his claims on behalf of theatrical generation. Indeed, the Epilogue makes a case for the public stage as a site for the government of generation not by opposing the specter of “fornication” against which the Porter railed, but by playing off it; not by denying the anti-theatrical account of the stage's dissolute production of numbers, but by incorporating it. That is, Shakespeare works to define the stage as a relatively autonomous sphere of governmental practice in which a limited form of unruly conduct and generation does not devastate, but reinforces the theater's cultural authority. According to Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, “[g]overnment is a congenitally failing operation.”⁵⁴ By this they do not mean that governmental activities produce no effects, but that there is an imperfect match between governmental aspirations and governmental outcomes. Government meets with resistance; the objectives and practices of one domain interfere with those of another; they produce unwanted or “unexpected consequences.”⁵⁵ With respect to the government of generations, Shakespeare at once trades on these excesses by taking them as his subject matter, and attempts to enlist them in the task of ensuring the continued viability of the popular theater.

Notes

1. E. K. Chambers reprints the correspondence pertaining to this plan—initiated by complaints of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London in mid-1597, but never carried out by the Justices of the Peace of Middlesex and Surrey—in The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 4:320-33, passim. Richard Dutton briefly discusses this episode in Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 107-8.

2. The quote is from correspondence from the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London to the Privy Council, reprinted in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:321. As Katharine Eisaman Maus has pointed out, the opponents of the stage seemed incapable of envisioning play audiences as anything other than numbers out of control, “an undifferentiated multitude, whose disorder projects the breakdown of hierarchy [the anti-theatricalists] find so threatening.” Katharine Eisaman Maus, “’Playhouse Flesh and Blood’: Sexual Ideology and the Restoration Actress,” ELH 46 (1979): 606-7.

3. Henry Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth: or The Highway to Honour (1603), Qlr.

4. See also John Northbrooke, A Treatise wherein Dicing, Dauncing, and Vaine Playes or Enterluds … are Reproved (London: George Byshop, 1577). Northbrooke's text is also excerpted briefly in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:196-97. Like Crosse, Northbrooke laments the threatening abundance of “infamous persons” (K3^v) pestering England: “ydle Roges … Dicers, Carders, Mummers & Dauncers … and filthy livers [who] are spred about in every quarter” (al^r-v). Although he blames England's fathers for failing properly to educate their children and thus for allowing them to waste their lives and debase the nation with their filthy living, he also provides an alternative genealogy of these “multitudes” who among other things attend the theater. “Ye are of your father the deviil [sic],” insists Northbrooke, addressing all of England's “infamous persons,” “and the lust of your father ye will doe” (B3). Their origins, according to Northbrooke and Crosse alike, explain their actions; the sins of the flesh are bred in the bone.

5. For this view, in addition to Maus's essay, see Laura Levine, Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10-25, esp. 13, where she explicitly addresses the imitative dynamic as formulated by Steven Gosson; and Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994). Howard relates the kind of anxieties about “the self” that Levine argues were discursively produced and managed by opponents of the stage to the social instabilities following the emergence of a nascent capitalist economic order. Jonathan Goldberg, “The Transvestite Stage: More on the Case of Christopher Marlowe,” chapter 4 of Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 105-43, emphasizes the risks of normative understandings of gender and sexuality underlying many accounts of the early modern English stage.

   In addition to the foregoing works, the following also provide important background on the anti-theatrical polemic: Jonas Barrish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Colin MacCabe, “Abusing Self and Others: Puritan Accounts of the Shakespearian Stage,” Critical Quarterly 30.3 (autumn 1988): 3-17; and Jeffrey Knapp, “Preachers and Players in Shakespeare's England,” Representations 44 (fall 1993): 29-59.

6. The figurative dynamic put in play here participates in and localizes the kind of invective Thomas Dekker used to describe the suburbs in general—the location of the popular stages at the outskirts of London: the suburbs were, he asserted, “caves where monsters are bred up to devour cities themselves.” Thomas Dekker as quoted in A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1985) 43.

7. Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London: Thomas Gosson, 1582), B8. Date proposed by Pollard and Redgrave in their Short Title Catalogue, entry 12095.

8. Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), L6.

9. Thomas White, A Sermon preached at Pawles Crosse on Sunday the thirde of November 1577 in the time of the Plague, in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:197.

10. Critics have noticed the shared assumptions of the pro- and anti-theatricalist positions, though they have tended to dismiss this fact as a sign of the putatively anemic quality of the defense of the stage. See, for example, Maus, “Playhouse Flesh and Blood,” 608.

11. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors in 3 Books (1612), Clr.

12. For Gosson, that the theater was the site of the rape of the Sabine women is no defense, but proof plain and simple of the “whoredome” licensed there, evidence that “Theaters are snares unto faire women.” Playes Confuted, G5^v-G6. See also Northbrooke, Treatise, 12^v.

13. On the cultural fantasy of reproduction without women, see Peter Stallybrass, “Macbeth and Witchcraft,” Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 198; Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), 139-43; and Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries, 149. I also have learned much from Elizabeth Pittenger's important essay, “Dispatch Quickly: The Mechanical Reproduction of Pages,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42.4 (winter 1991): 389-408. Pittenger brilliantly links the pedagogic fantasy of generating men to the disciplinary regime, the fantasies of pure multiplication, and the dream of perfect textual and sexual transmission, organized through and around the printing press.

14. This apt characterization belongs to Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (London: Methuen, 1985), 108. Here, I qualify Bristol's dismissal of the defense of the theater as “much weaker” (113) than the assault against it, and his assumption that Stubbes and other anti-theatricalists serve as an unproblematic voice for “the structure of authority” monolithically and univocally constituted as the State, allied against “popular culture” (117) and the “emancipatory potentiality of traditional ideas” (92).

15. Heywood especially insists upon the pedagogic effectivity of the theater for those without access to grammar school education or even basic literacy: “playes have made the ignorant more apprehensive, taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as ca[n]not reade in the discovery of all our English Chronicles” (F3). Ultimately, he insisted, they “teach the subjects obedience to their king” (F3^v).

16. This technique has classical precedent. For example, Quintillian argues that a teacher should both instruct students in things suitable for imitation and should be upright, gentle, and interesting, worthy of the love of his pupils: “it is scarcely possible to say how much more readily we imitate those whom we like.” Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria, 4 vols., trans. H. E. Butler (London: William Heinemann, 1920), 1:215. On the pervasive emphasis on imitation within continental and English humanist theory and practice, see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Timothy Hampton, more recently, has studied exemplarity as a textual strategy for attempting to produce political and moral effects, in Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). On pedagogic mimesis in early modern grammar schools see Goldberg, Sodometries, 79-80; Pittenger, “Dispatch Quickly,” 397-99; and Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 29-38. For a recent consideration of the social function and effects of imitation, see Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), especially her account of “citational reiteration”—as she argues, a mimetic repetition of gender norms through which bodies are materialized as such.

17. Thomas Lodge, A Defence of Plays (1580), C5r.

18. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 3:8. On Sidney's relation to grammar school practice, see Mary Ellen Lamb, “Apologizing for Pleasure in Sidney's Apology for Poetry: The Nurse of Abuse Meets the Tudor Grammar School,” Criticism 36 (fall 1994): 504-5, 512.

19. Though only in passing, Levine perceptively notes the “genealogy of heroes” Heywood provides, Men in Women's Clothing, 144n.21.

20. William Shakespeare, The Life of King Henry the Eighth, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: Viking Penguin, 1977), 4.4.64. All future references will be to this edition, and noted internally.

21. Of course, I here draw upon Steven Mullaney's important study of the location of the stage in the “liberties” of London, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988). On the Swan's proximity to Parish Garden, and for an important discussion of theater audiences, see Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13.

22. See Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87-104. This collection in general provides an important elaboration of Foucault's interests in the latter part of his career; especially helpful are Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” 1-51; and Graham Burchell, “Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing ‘The System of Natural Liberty,’” 119-50. See also Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 1994); Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, “Governing Economic Life,” Economy and Society 19.1 (February 1990): 1-31; and Denis Meuret, “A Political Genealogy of Political Economy,” Economy and Society 17.2 (May 1988): 225-50.

23. This critique of the tendency to relate all questions of power to the rule of the queen or king, especially as manifested in New Historicism, is developed also by Barbara Correll, “Malleable Material, Models of Power: Women in Erasmus's ‘Marriage Group’ and Civility in Boys” ELH 57.2 (summer 1990): 241-42. Two efforts that elaborate upon Foucault's resistance to this understanding of the state are Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government,” British Journal of Sociology 43.2 (June 1992): 173-205; and Dean, Critical and Effective Histories, 141-73.

24. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 88.

25. Ibid. 91.

26. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Afterword to Hubert L. Dreyfuss and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 221. See also Foucault, “Governmentality,” 90.

27. Gordon, “Governmental Rationality,” 2.

28. Dean, Critical and Effective Histories, 176-77.

29. We need go no further than Shakespeare to confirm the dispersal of “government” Foucault posits. Of course, the term refers to the management of a political territory—nation, region, or city—or implicity or explicitly raises the question of any given individual's capacity for such responsibility; as one might imagine, this is the sense most prevalent in the history plays. But government in Shakespeare's work also refers to the conduct of other realms of social existence—like a military unit (1 Henry IV, 4.1.19), or a family. In her speech at the close of The Taming of the Shrew, Kate constitutes a husband as a “governor” (5.2.143); Henry the Eighth praises the virtue of Queen Katherine's “wife-like government” (2.4.136). Shakespeare uses the word as well to describe other activities that necessitate careful direction, such as theatrical presentations. Tamora “govern[s]” the “determined jest” of the masque of Revenge, Rapine, and Murder presented to Titus Andronicus (5.2.139); alternatively, Hippolyta derides Peter Quince's apparently discombobulated prologue to the mechanicals' stage version of Pyramus and Thisby by asserting that “he hath played on this prologue like a child on a recorder—a sound, but not in government” (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.122-23). Finally, government may encompass selves as a terrain of management, as objects that are either ill- or well-regulated. This is the sense used when in Measure for Measure Isabella refers to Angelo's hypocritical sexual advances as indicative of his personal “government” (3.1.191); likewise, this is the tenor of Worcester's warnings to Hotspur about his “Defect of manners” and “want of government” (1 Henry IV, 3.1.182).

30. I allude here specifically to Christopher Hill's study “The Many-Headed Monster in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking,” in From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly, ed. Charles H. Carter (New York: Random House, 1965), 296-324. Brent Stirling provides a survey of contemporary ideas about multitudes in his The Populace in Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947). Also important is Stephen Greenblatt's essay, “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,” Representations 1.1 (February 1983): 1-29. See as well J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 69-70, where he discusses the tendency within political reflection to confuse what he calls the “quantitative” function of the Aristotelian distinction between “the ‘one,’ the ‘few,’ and the ‘many’,” their use as transparently descriptive categories, and what he calls their “qualitative” connotations, the habit of associating value judgments with these putatively value free descriptors, the one or the few valorized in various ways, the many dismissed as incapable of rule.

    In the larger project from which this essay is drawn I situate early modern interest in and concern about numbers of people within a genealogy of modern forms of understanding and governing populations.

31. Henry Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth, Q1. Barbara Freedman provides a startling and impressive discussion of the extent to which the theater was understood by royal and city officials to be a potentially explosive venue, in her recent essay “Elizabethan Protest, Plague, and Plays: Rereading the ‘Documents of Control,’” English Literary Renaissance 26.1 (winter 1996): 17-45.

32. White, A Sermon, 4.197. On Sodom as a privileged biblical locus representing God's judgment on a polity that failed to govern its members, see Michael Warner, “New English Sodom,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 330-58; and Jonathan Ned Katz, “The Age of Sodomitical Sin, 1607-1740,” in Reclaiming Sodom, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (New York: Routledge, 1994), 43-58. See also, Goldberg's discussion of William Bradford's account of sodomy in colonial America in Sodometries, 223-46.

33. Stephen Orgel emphasizes this distinction in The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 8. See also Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle, 4-5.

34. Kim Noling, “Grubbing Up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39.3 (fall 1988): 291-306.

35. Ibid. 305.

36. Such a strategy mirrors James's own manipulations of his genealogy, as discussed by Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Their Contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 16-17; Goldberg notes that, when it suited James, he referred to Elizabeth as his “dearest mother.” See also Stephen Orgel's discussion of James's “insecur[ity]” about his lineage in “Prospero's Wife,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 58-59.

37. See, for example, R. A. Foakes, “Introduction,” to the Arden edition of King Henry VIII, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1957), lv, and Leonard Tennenhouse, “Strategies of State and Political Plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), esp. 124-25.

38. Lee Bliss, “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth,” ELH 42 (1975): 1-25; and Edward I. Berry, “Henry VIII and the Dynamics of Spectacle,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 229-46, stand as relatively rare exceptions in the criticism of the play insofar as they read Cranmer's prophecy as “hortatory” (Bliss 23) in nature, to both Henry VIII and James I, as a vision of what should be rather than what will be or what is.

39. For an account of Elizabeth's reputation as a superb student of Latin and Greek see Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster (1571; New York: AMS Press, 1966, reprint of Edward Arber's 1870 edition), 95-96.

40. That these words come from Buckingham, convicted and executed for putative treasonous designs on the throne, and that Buckingham's learning is both his finest ornament and a reason for the enormity of his crimes (1.2.111-24), is not a matter of mere irony. Despite Buckingham's invective, what he shares with Wolsey establishes an associational complex, a shared terrain within which learning enables a deformation of government.

41. John Skelton, “Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?,” in John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), ll.460-77. I am indebted to Jonathan Goldberg for directing my attention to Skelton's anti-Wolsey poems.

42. In addition to the sources listed at note 32 above, see Goldberg, Sodometries, and Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop Journal 29 (spring 1990): 1-19. As Goldberg argues, accusations of sodomy were never simply about erotic practice; typically overlooked sexual actions became visible as sodomy only when they occurred in relation to other transgressions of social relations (Sodometries 19).

43. Glynne Wickham is perceptive here in describing Wolsey as the “prime begetter” of the entertainments. “The Dramatic Structure of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth: An Essay in Rehabilitation,” Proceedings of the British Academy 70 (1984): 155.

44. These are the very same terms with which Queen Katherine, in the scene following this, assesses the impact of the excessively severe taxation for which Wolsey is blamed, and which has pushed the commons to the brink of rebellion: “The back is sacrifice to th’ load” (1.2.50).

45. For a brilliant discussion of the relation between the representation of Caliban and emergent discourses of colonialism and racial difference, see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 141-53.

46. In addition to the references at note 30, see A. L. Beier, Masterless Men, Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988), and Peter Clark, “A Crisis Contained? The Conditions of English Towns in the 1590's,” in The European Crisis of the 1590's: Essays in Comparative History, ed. Peter Clark (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 4-66.

47. Robert Weimann has recently drawn attention to epilogues as an important place where the playwright seeks to anticipate and to manage audience response and thus to promote the future success of the stage, in “Thresholds to Memory and Commodity in Shakespeare's Endings,” Representations 53 (winter 1996): 1-20.

48. On anxieties about women as agents of imitation at theaters—specifically, city women miming women of higher social status—see Gurr, Playgoing, 8, 82.

49. This is Wickham's thesis in “Dramatic Structure.”

50. On women in theater audiences see Gurr, Playgoing, 56-64, et passim.

51. For the argument that the play was presented as part of celebrations of the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine in February of 1613, see Foakes, “Introduction,” xxviii-xxxiii.

52. This is the argument of Hugh Richmond, “The Feminism of Shakespeare's Henry VIII,” Essays in Literature 6 (1979): 11-20, esp. 12.

53. Eric Partridge identifies this pun in his Shakespeare's Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary (1955; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1947), 87.

54. Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, “Political Power beyond the State,” 190. See also their essay “Governing Economic Life,” 1-31, esp. 10-11.

55. Rose and Miller, “Political Power,” 190.

For their thoughtful and valuable response to early drafts, I wish to thank Jonathan Goldberg, John Guillory, John Paul Russo, Jeffrey Shoulson, Mihoko Suzuki and an anonymous reader at Criticism. I am especially indebted to Lisa Claire Boyle, whose generosity, humor, and patience made this essay possible. Versions of this paper were presented to the Journal Club of The Johns Hopkins University Department of English, and to the 1997 Shakespeare Association of America seminar entitled “The Popular and the Learned in the Works of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries,” co-directed by Robert Knapp and Kent Cartwright. I am grateful for the helpful feedback I received on both occasions.