SOURCE: “Shakespeare's King Henry VIII and the Triumph of the Word,” in English Studies, Vol. 75, No. 3, May, 1994, pp. 225-45.

[In the following essay, Hunt argues that Henry VIII shares with Shakespeare's late romances an attention to the redemptive function of speech.]

For several decades, critics have recognized that Shakespeare's interest in the proper use of language, most intense during the phase of the great tragedies, extends to the late romances.¹ Recently a paradigm of unusual kinds of speech that either rectify or offset inadequate language has been described in the group of plays beginning with Pericles and ending with The Tempest.² Critics have also identified romance motifs and dramatic methods in King Henry VIII, a play written shortly after The Tempest.³ However, no one has yet directly addressed the question of whether Shakespeare's interest in the radical limits and possibilities of language extends to this final history play.⁴ Throughout Henry VIII, Shakespeare represents deficient and disabling speech entailing confusion and ruin. He stresses the inability of well-intentioned language to guarantee the truth of utterances, the dismantling of auditors' judgments by rhetorical eloquence, the cruel theft of a speaker's authentic voice, and the disaster wrought by slander. Cranmer's fifth-act prophecy amounts to a definitive speech act that ensures that King Henry and his courtiers will enact the design of Providence rather than that of tragedy. The archbishop's oracle constitutes a triumph of the word for speakers previously caught up in the corruption that flawed language has spread.

Initially, Shakespeare implies through the dialogue of Norfolk and Buckingham that ordinary language at times cannot express singular facts and ideas.⁵ Norfolk labors verbally to convey the opulence of the ceremony surrounding Henry VIII's and Francis I's meeting during May-June 1520 at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. His torturing of metaphor to express increasingly greater hyperboles, his thick-packed syntax, and his precious diction of gold and suns strive to do justice to a royal pageant that dazzled the eye:

                                        Each following day
Became the next day's master, till the last
Made former wonders, its. To-day the French,
All clinquant all in gold, like heathen gods
Shone down the English; and to-morrow they
Made Britain Indian: every man that stood
Show’d like a mine. Their dwarfish pages were
As cherubins, all gilt: the madams too,
Not us’d to toil, did almost sweat to bear
The pride upon them, that their very labour
Was to them as a painting. Now this masque
Was cried incomparable; and th’ensuing night
Made it a fool and beggar. The two kings
Equal in lustre, were now best, now worst,
As presence did present them: him in eye
Still him in praise, and being present both,
’Twas said they saw but one, and no discerner
Durst wag his tongue in censure.(6)

(I.i. 16-33)

When the two ‘suns’—Henry and Francis—‘by their heralds challeng’d / The noble spirits to arms’, tilting warriors

                                        did perform
Beyond thought's compass, that former fabulous story
Being now seen possible enough, got credit
That Bevis was believ’d.

(I.i. 33-38)

Norfolk asserts that the nobles' knightly prowess was so great that it validated language that had grown suspect; action that was seen verified the possibly lying words of the romance of Bevis of Southampton. For Norfolk, language cannot authorize its content; self-referential, it lacks an external guarantor. Appropriately, the speech by which Norfolk attempts to express his opinion of the veridical superiority of seen deeds over reported language seems overstrained, even turgid.⁷

Buckingham's response to Norfolk's overwrought portrayal of the pageant is a justifiable, dismissive phrase ‘O you go far’ (I.i. 38).⁸ Detecting sarcasm in Buckingham's remark, Norfolk reaches for extra-linguistic guarantors of his speech:

As I belong to worship, and affect
In honour honesty, the trust of ev’ry thing
Would by a good discourser lose some life
Which action's self was tongue to.

(I.i. 39-42)

The duke swears by his moral character that only ‘action's self’ can adequately ‘tongue’ the ceremony of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The subject would ‘lose some life’ even in the speech of a ‘good’ discourser, whom he (despite his declarations of integrity) implicitly does not claim to be. In short, Norfolk constrains his speech to formulate its own disablement.

In Henry VIII, visual spectacle seems to be a better language than speech. Many critics of the play, including Robert Ornstein, believe that ‘the spectacles of Henry VIII merely feast the eye’, that ‘the glitter of pageantry is its own excuse for being’.⁹ Florence Schreiber-McGee, however, has shown that the numerous spectacles of Henry VIII amount to a visual idiom more liberated and powerful than the ordinary language represented in the play.¹⁰ For example, ‘What cannot be said about Henry's adulterous liaison may be visually presented—played out in pastoral revels’ (195). Moreover, ‘the bent backs of the common people suffering under Wolsey's taxation’—one of Schreiber-McGee's recommendations to directors for realizing the ‘rhetoric of vision’ in Henry VIII—make the point that certain political facts in the play must be beheld rather than heard for full impact. Schreiber-McGee's argument counters Joanne Altieri's assertion that in Henry VIII ‘the preponderance of masque-related material … helps to create a sense of language gone awry, all signs dependent on the unknowable will, the secular deus absconditus’.¹¹ In Henry VIII, Shakespeare thus reiterates a point made by the penultimate scene of The Winter's Tale—that some things must be seen rather than reported to be believed.¹²

Recognizing the limits of language in Henry VIII takes the feverish edge off speech that strains to overcome its inherent limitations. Once he has made his ethical character the guarantor of his words' truth, Norfolk relaxes verbally and stops trying to make words become a vision. Concerning the Field of the Cloth of Gold,

                                        All was royal;
To the disposing of it nought rebell’d,
Order gave each thing view: the office did
Distinctly his full function.

(I.i. 42-45)

An intrinsic failing of well-intentioned speech is one thing; slander, however, is another. When Norfolk's and Buckingham's conversation shifts to the doings of the Machiavellian Wolsey, specifically ‘the private difference’ between the cardinal and Buckingham, the latter character says that the ‘butcher's cur’ is ‘venom-mouth’d’ (I.i. 120)—that is to say, poisonous in his slander of him. ‘I / Have not the power to muzzle him’ (I.i. 120-21), Buckingham admits. Queen Katherine later confirms Buckingham's portrayal of Wolsey when she identifies the cardinal as a source of pestilent speech. ‘No, my lord, / You know no more than others’, she tells Wolsey,

                                        but you frame
Things that are known alike, which are not wholesome
To those which would not know them, and yet must
Perforce be of their acquaintance. These exactions
(Whereof my sovereign would have note) they are
Most pestilent to th’ hearing, and to bear ’em
The back is sacrifice to th’ load; they say
They are devis’d by you …

(I.ii. 43-51)

So portrayed, Wolsey is not only a slanderer himself but also the cause of slander in others, who have become tainted by his arguments.

Buckingham believes that his own honorable word can defeat Wolsey's slander of him. ‘I’ll to the king’, he resolves,

And from a mouth of honour quite cry down
This Ipswich fellow's insolence; or proclaim
There’s difference in no persons.

(I.i. 136-39)

The self-destructive speech act proposed as a remedy for the possible failure of his speech to wrest a victory reveals Buckingham's distrust of his own ‘mouth of honour’, a distrust made understandable later in the apparent truth of the testimony that he once conspired treasonably against King Henry. Buckingham overrides Norfolk's warning against rashly naming Wolsey a traitor: ‘To th’ king I’ll say’t, and make my vouch as strong / As shore of rock’ (I.i. 157-58). Considered in the light of his previous skepticism concerning the truth of Norfolk's narrative, Buckingham's insistence on the absolute veracity of his words is a bit ironic. He seems to think that King Henry will believe that Wolsey is a traitor if the duke simply says so. Claiming to possess information that Charles the Emperor suborned Wolsey to break the new league between France and England because it threatened the Holy Roman Empire, Buckingham believes that he can ‘pronounce’ Wolsey ‘in that very shape / He shall appear in proof’ (I.i. 196-97). But immediate arrest prevents Buckingham from verbally constructing the treacherous Wolsey of his accusation. The duke never gets to pronounce his so-called truth because pestilent speeches, both those made by himself and those made against him, result in his jailing. Suddenly Buckingham is stripped of the ethical character that might guarantee his vulnerable speech.

According to Buckingham's Surveyor,

… it was usual with him, every day
It would infect his speech, that if the king
Should without issue die, he’ll carry it so
To make the sceptre his. These very words
I’ve heard him utter to his son-in-law,
Lord Aberga’nny, to whom by oath he menac’d
Revenge upon the cardinal.

(I.ii. 132-38)

Recollecting that Buckingham's tenants forced the Surveyor out of office, Katherine suggests that his accusation against the duke may be spitefully false (I.ii. 171-76). Lee Bliss has judged that in the royal court of Henry VIII ‘it is impossible to determine the “real” man beneath his verbal facade’.¹³ Nevertheless, the sheer weight of circumstantial detail in the Surveyor's testimony convinces most playgoers that he is largely—if not wholly—telling the truth. In Henry VIII, Shakespeare creates the impression that, with few exceptions, a degree of truth resides in the speeches of all the characters, from the most despicable to the most admirable. Wolsey slandered Buckingham, and Buckingham essentially uttered the foul words attributed to him. In this respect, Shakespeare's strategy gives point to the play's reported subtitle, All is True.¹⁴ Norfolk and Buckingham sought to validate their speech by reference to their ethical characters. But in Henry VIII, few are unequivocally or clearly pure. How can the truth of words be known?

Buckingham's infected speech derived, according to the Surveyor, from a ‘vain prophecy’ of Nicholas Henton, a Chartreux friar who confessed the duke and ‘fed him every minute / With words of sovereignty’ (I.ii. 147-50). Regarded as a powerfully truthful mode of speech, prophecy contrasts with the flawed and slanderous speech represented thus far in Henry VIII. But Henton's seemingly inspired prophecy that neither Henry nor his heirs shall prosper and that Buckingham shall rule England (I.ii. 168-71) is patently false. Elizabeth I flourished as queen for over forty years, and Buckingham will shortly feel the executioner's ax. Henton's utterance amounts to the kind of language that Queen Katherine implies that it is not good to know. “‘Tush, / It can do me no damage’” (I.ii. 182-83), the Surveyor reports Buckingham as foolishly having said when warned against meditating on the friar's so-called prophecy. The notion of knavish words entering the ear like poison became a complex metaphor in Hamlet.¹⁵ By having the Surveyor repeat verbatim whole speeches of Buckingham's tending to treason (I.ii. 193-209), Shakespeare suggests that Buckingham has been fatally poisoned by his own tongue; venom-mouthed, he dreadfully infects himself. Still, Buckingham's death-day rhetoric is a compelling tour de force (II.i. 55-136). Eloquently Buckingham insists upon his innocence and magnanimously forgives his accusers and judges. Doubtful of Buckingham's innocence but deeply moved by his brilliant oratory, playgoers tend to focus on rhetoric's power to mislead and deceive by implying an alternative truth—that of the emotions. Yet despite its pathetic truth, Buckingham's rhetoric joins the other kinds of inadequate and pernicious speech presented in the early acts of Henry VIII. It does so because it is ethically false—misleading as to the ethos of the speaker.

Like Buckingham, ‘a most rare speaker’ whose training has been ‘such / That he may furnish and instruct great teachers’ (I.ii. 111-13), Wolsey is portrayed as a master of speech. ‘Your words / (Domestics to you)’, Katherine admits, ‘serve your will as’t please / Yourself pronounce their office’ (II.iv. 111-13). As regards the queen, however, Wolsey's verbal mastery reveals itself not so much in his own speeches as in his effective substitution of a disabling patriarchal voice for the royal one of Katherine's. Fearful that God has made Katherine barren of male heirs as punishment for his violation of biblical injunction, King Henry submits the question of the sanctity of his marriage to ‘the voice of Christendom’ (II.ii. 87), to, that is, a consistory of prelates. According to Wolsey, all the churchmen enjoy ‘free voices’ (II.ii. 91-93), the privilege to say what they wish on most matters. Rome has sent ‘one general tongue’ to the consistory: Cardinal Campeius (II.ii. 95). As for the queen's case, Wolsey urges that ‘Scholars [be] allow’d freely to argue for her’ (II.ii. 109-12). During proceedings, however, Wolsey steals Katherine's voice from her.

At first Katherine speaks in a private voice as ‘a most poor woman, and a stranger’ (II.iv. 13). She kneels at her husband's feet and tells him that the hearing is both unseemly and unnecessary. Wolsey—not Henry—replies to her plea, however. He tells her that ‘reverend fathers, men / Of singular integrity and learning’ have gathered to ‘plead your cause’ (II.iv. 55-59). In effect, Wolsey tells Katherine to be quiet, that men will speak for her. A patriarchal monopoly of speech plays a major role in damning Katherine. Campeius concludes that ‘His grace / Hath spoken well and justly’ in claiming that Katherine should yield her voice to those of male churchmen (II.iv. 62-66). Wolsey's and Campeius's attempt to appropriate her voice drives Katherine to translate her speech into a fiery idiom. Deprived of her own voice, she unfortunately adopts Wolsey's; her nasty accusations against him amount to the pestilent language that she claims that he has used against her marriage.

Hearing Katherine's tirade against him, Wolsey exclaims, ‘You speak not like yourself’ (II.iv. 83). Speaking like herself for Wolsey would entail either Katherine's silence or a submissive, ‘womanly’ language easily malleable to male purpose (II.iv. 83-86). He urges her ‘to unthink your speaking / And to say … no more’ (II.iv. 102-3). In this context, Katherine invites comparison with Anne Boleyn. Linda Micheli has called attention to Anne Boleyn's relative speechlessness in Henry VIII: ‘On public occasions she is a wordless icon, an object of admiration and desire, a symbol of woman's dynastic role rather than a fully realized individual or a participant in the day-to-day business of the court’.¹⁶ In a play concerned with linguistic subterfuge and inadequacy, few words and distinctive silences might be virtues. As a ‘wordless icon’, who by Hugh Richmond's count ‘speaks barely fifty lines altogether’,¹⁷ Anne Boleyn represents patriarchically muted womanhood. Kim Noling believes that Anne's few words reveal that Shakespeare wishes to spotlight Katherine.¹⁸ In fact, Anne's relative silence constitutes the female plight that Katherine vociferously struggles to avoid during her trial.

Wolsey's campaign to strip Katherine of her voice figures strongly in her decision to abort proceedings by exiting the court, an act that weakens defense of her marriage. After she has left, Henry praises her ‘rare qualities’: her ‘sweet gentleness’, ‘meekness saintlike’, and ‘wife-like government’ (II.iv. 135-36). By commending Katherine's self-control, Henry replaces the unruly wife of the trial with a woman that playgoers have not seen or heard. It is hard to know if Henry is obtuse, or crafty, or if his praise represents a willful male fantasy—of a piece with Wolsey's patronizing treatment of the queen. Whatever the case, Henry joins the other men who deny Katherine her own voice. According to the king, her speech does not express her unique qualities; the qualities themselves—her ‘parts’—‘speak thee out’ (II.iv. 137-38). Yet, in Henry's conceit, even these non-verbal signifiers are only hypothetical—not actual:

                                        … thou art alone
(If thy rare qualities, sweet gentleness,
Thy meekness saintlike, wife-like government,
Obeying in commanding, and thy parts
Sovereign and pious else, could speak thee out)
The queen of earthly queens …

(II.iv. 134-39)

Apparently not even Katherine's gestural language speaks on her behalf.

King Henry exempts Wolsey from responsibility for sowing doubts about the legality of his marriage to Katherine (II.iv. 153-207).¹⁹ He thus demolishes the rumor that the cardinal's malice toward the queen fuels her trial (II.i. 153-61, II.ii. 19-43). By Henry's admission, Wolsey has worked to strengthen the royal marriage. Playgoers later learn that Wolsey fears the queenship of Lutheran Anne Boleyn. G. Wilson Knight judges that ‘Wolsey's attitude to the King's matrimonial adventures is left vague’—an opinion echoed by S.C. Sen Gupta, Tom McBride, and Eckhard Auberlen.²⁰ Alexander Leggatt, however, believes that Wolsey ‘encourages the King's divorce and then delays it’.²¹ As was the case with Buckingham and his Surveyor, all parties speak the truth to some degree. Wolsey spoke pestilently against Katherine, and he later attempted to persuade Henry to place his marriage above question. His linguistic manipulation in the trial scene, however, suggests a further change of attitude.

Wolsey works to rob Katherine of her normal voice because he suddenly realizes that flattering the king's matrimonial doubts best serves his self-interest. This becomes apparent during his second meeting with the queen (III.i). So certain is Katherine that Wolsey means to ruin her that the mere sight of him provokes the pestilent speech that she vents during her trial. Commenting on this scene, Knight judges that ‘the suave cardinal's speeches contrast strongly and not altogether unfavourably with Katherine's impassioned and distraught replies’.²² Ironically Katherine experiences the truth of her earlier belief that Wolsey is the cause of poisonous speech in others. When he asks Katherine to hear him privately, she suspects deceit, shouting ‘Speak it here’:

There’s nothing I have done yet o’ my conscience
Deserves a corner; would all other women
Could speak this with as free a soul as I do.

(III.i. 29-32)

When she commands Wolsey openly to speak his business (III.i. 37-39), he makes the mistake of addressing her in Latin. In the churchman's language, Wolsey says, ‘So great is my integrity toward you, most serene queen’, but his meaning gets lost in Katherine's anxiety. ‘A strange tongue makes my cause more strange, suspicious’, she rightly judges; ‘Pray speak in English; here are some will thank you, / If you speak truth, for their poor mistress' sake’ (III.i. 44-47). Wolsey's self-conceit prompts him to speak Latin without thinking of the negative effect on Katherine. Just as he did during the consistory, Wolsey moves to aggrandize language in Katherine's apartment. She once more rages against Wolsey, accusing him and Campeius of being ‘false professors’ (III.i. 115). Wolsey, in turn, urges her to ‘think us / Those we profess, peacemakers, friends and servants’ (III.i. 166-67). But Katherine distrusts such professions, mainly because the professors have tried to stifle, substitute, and translate her authentic voice. Tragically, Katherine finally agrees to hear patiently Wolsey's and Campeius's advice that she put herself under Henry's protection rather than subject herself to the disgrace of a public trial (where she might have succeeded).

A more active abuse of language on Wolsey's part involves the Lord Chamberlain's accusation that the cardinal ‘hath a witchcraft / Over the king in's tongue’ (III.ii. 18-19). Made at the play's midpoint, this charge is readily accepted by playgoers, even though they have not witnessed a scene of Wolsey misleading or controlling King Henry through the power of rhetoric. How could Wolsey hoodwink Henry if not through manipulative utterances? By his political chicanery, Wolsey causes Henry to become the object of pestilent speeches. Wolsey of his own accord in the royal name has sent commissions for exacting a tax of one-sixth of each subject's goods. While this exaction makes citizens speak bitterly of Wolsey, Henry, according to Katherine, also ‘escapes not / Language unmannerly’ (I.ii. 26-27). The queen tells Henry that Wolsey's dealing ‘makes bold mouths, / Tongues spit their duties out’ (I.ii. 60-61); the people's ‘curses now / Live where their prayers did’ (I.ii. 62-63). The vile language of the populace threatens to overthrow the power inherent in the king's name. As he does in the consistory scene, Wolsey tries to shift the responsibility for the oppressor's voice away from himself to other persons. He answers Katherine's accusations by saying that he has gone no further in the matter of the taxation ‘than by / A single voice, and that not pass’d me but / By learned approbation of the judges’ (I.ii. 69-71). Wolsey seeks to hide his unjust, oppressive voice in the welter of votes by which he attempted to justify his cruel extortion. He terms the people's tongues in the matter ‘ignorant’ and, in a show of bravado, claims that he must act without fear of ‘malicious censurers’ (I.ii. 72, 76-78). One senses that if Katherine had not informed her husband of Wolsey's unfair taxation, the king might now be coping with rebellion. Henry apparently does not enjoy Suffolk's immunity from Wolsey's speech. Wolsey's ‘curses and blessings’, Suffolk tells Norfolk, ‘Touch me alike, th’ are breath I not believe in’ (II.ii. 52-53).²³ The King Henry of acts I and II cannot make a similar statement. When, Shakespeare's audience wonders, will the king inoculate himself against Wolsey's infectious speech?

That event occurs when Henry discovers Wolsey's secret inventory of his personal wealth, included inadvertently among state papers sent to the king. That discovery, according to Norfolk, ‘for ever mars / the honey of [Wolsey's] language’ (III.ii. 21-22). In Henry's opinion, Wolsey's inventory of his riches ‘out-speaks / Possession of a subject’ (III.ii. 127-28). By this unusual phrasing (‘out-speaks’ appears in the canon only here), Shakespeare suggests that Wolsey's speech, transformed into the writing of the inventory, damns him. The words of the paper speak out—proclaim—the outrageous greed of the cardinal. Shakespeare reprises a dramatic method of Much Ado About Nothing. The written words of Beatrice's and Benedick's love sonnets, once discovered, betray and undo the rhetorical eloquence of their speech—their protestations that they can never love the opposite sex. Wolsey's written word also fixes a character trait that his slippery speech has either obscured or explained away. While Beatrice's and Benedick's hands (their handwriting) truly disclose their hearts, Wolsey's hand figuratively tears his tongue from his mouth, in the sense that Henry will never again credit his honied language.

Ignorant of Henry's discovery, Wolsey replies to the king's innuendo—that the cardinal has been running over a mental inventory of his best graces—with expressions of the syrupy speech that once fed the king but which he now finds cloying (III.ii. 143-99). Facetiously Henry interrupts Wolsey's glorifying of himself under the verbal veil of piety with the comment, ‘You have said well’ (III.ii. 149). Hearing sarcasm as a compliment, Wolsey purrs,

And ever may your highness yoke together
(As I will lend you cause) my doing well
With my well saying.

(III.ii. 150-52)

Wolsey's smug self-congratulation allows Henry masterfully to articulate a familiar Shakespearean motif of the relation of words to deeds. ‘’Tis well said again’, Henry mockingly judges,

And ’tis a kind of good deed to say well,
And yet words are no deeds. My father lov’d you,
He said he did, and with his deed did crown
His word upon you.

(III.ii. 153-56)

Throughout his career, but especially in Hamlet, Shakespeare implies that the most truthful or authoritative speech amounts to a kind of deed, virtually physical in its power and purity. At the beginning of All's Well That Ends Well, Bertram's deceased father is eulogized as a wellspring of truthful language, a paragon of expression whose words and deeds perfectly matched one another. Bertram's father's words so precisely foretold his deeds and his deeds so faithfully enacted his words that word and deed fused in the singular language of the former Count of Rossillion (All's Well, I.ii. 26-55).²⁴ Henry VIII likewise praises Henry VII as a standard of language for the world of the late history play. Moreover, King Henry knows what callow Bertram does not—that the times have degenerated and that in the present ‘words are no deeds’. Henry VII's declaration of love for Wolsey encouraged Henry VIII to place the cardinal near his heart. Henry VII's love was truthfully uttered, but its object has grown unworthy of royal affection. One gets the impression that Henry VIII will never again be fooled by words that are no deeds. By tapping into the playwright's deepest exploration of the status of language, Henry's analysis of the trustworthiness of speech appears definitive.

King Henry emulates his father's royal fusion of word and deed when he asks Wolsey, ‘I pray you tell me, / If what I now pronounce you have found true’ (III.ii. 162-63)—if Henry has done otherwise than always act out his promises to Wolsey. Henry's verbal authority exerts itself when Wolsey, ordered to give up the Great Seal and place himself under house arrest, resists. ‘Where's your commission lords’, he asks Norfolk and Suffolk; ‘words cannot carry / Authority so weighty’. ‘Who dare cross ’em’, Suffolk replies, ‘Bearing the king's will from his mouth expressly?’ (III.ii. 233-35). Even in absentia Henry speaks powerfully. But Wolsey still denies the royal command, imputing lies and hollow speeches to the arresting lords. Norfolk, Suffolk, and Surrey then quote verbatim from memory the contents of the written accusations against Wolsey that remain in the king's possession (III.ii. 303-32). By creating the episode so that the lords recite the written articles, Shakespeare underscores the power of Henry's speech, for which the lords are simply amplifiers—distortionless vehicles for a potent tenor. The episode has developed into a grand agon between two speakers, each claiming the definitive word. The flood of the lords' recollected, incriminating speech engulfs Wolsey, drowning him in its truth, rendering him mute until his accusers exit. Afterwards, broken, Wolsey admits to his servant Cromwell, ‘The king has gone beyond me’ (III.ii. 408). So complete is Henry's linguistic triumph over Wolsey that he even proclaims that Wolsey's former palace, York place, be never called so henceforth but be known and spoken of as Whitehall.

In essence, Henry's speech has unmade the man that Wolsey's language fashioned from a butcher's son to a mighty governor. This dramatic fact begs the question of the kind of speech that most virtuously, unshakably makes a man or woman. Katherine and her Gentleman Usher Griffith's remaking of dead Wolsey may provide an answer. ‘Yet thus far, Griffith, give me leave to speak him’ (IV.ii. 32), Katherine states, her final phrase suggesting the power of language to mold identity. The Wolsey who emerges in Katherine's language is the uniformly corrupt Machiavel (IV.ii. 31-44). Not surprisingly, his abuse of language figures prominently in her word picture. In her account, Wolsey ‘would say untruths, and be ever double / Both in his words and meaning’; and ‘his promises were as he then was, mighty, / But his performance, as he is now, nothing’ (IV.ii. 38-39, 41-42). After Katherine finishes making her Wolsey, Griffith asks, ‘May it please your highness / To hear me speak his good now?’ (IV.ii. 46-47). Griffith's Wolsey is a scholar, two of whose three academic virtues involve speech; in addition to being ‘Exceeding wise’, Wolsey was ‘fair-spoken and persuading’ (IV.ii.52). The cardinal's encouragement of learning was so great that, according to Griffith, ‘Christendom shall ever speak his virtue’ (IV.ii. 63). Audiences assume that Shakespeare's strategy in devising two contradictory portraits of Wolsey lies in fostering the belief that the cardinal was woven of mingled yarn, a man deserving neither the blanket slander of courtiers nor the unqualified praise that his real gifts invite. While this awareness is certainly one effect of the playwright's method, Shakespeare in this episode also suggests that speech can remake not only its subject but its hearer as well. Deeply moved by Griffith's elegy, Katherine exclaims,

After my death I wish no other herald,
No other speaker of my living actions
To keep mine honour from corruption,
But such an honest chronicler as Griffith.
Whom I most hated living, thou has made me,
With thy religious truth and modesty,
Now in his ashes honour.

(IV.ii. 69-75)

The transformational power of Griffith's speech recreates Wolsey and Katherine's mind, causing her to honor the man he despised. This revaluation stresses the virtue of words spoken with ‘religious truth and modesty’. Hearing Griffith, Katherine believes near the end of her life that spiritually refined speech can preserve virtue from the ravages of time and slander, from universal ‘corruption’.

The source of modest, religious speech in Henry VIII is Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. Even before the discovery of his secret wealth, Wolsey intuited his own demise. The protestant Cranmer ‘Hath crawl’d into favour of the king / And is his oracle’ (III.ii. 103-4), he laments. The word ‘oracle’ signifies that Cranmer's advice is holy and truthful—everything, in short, that Wolsey's speech typically is not. By the beginning of act V, Cranmer has become ‘the king's hand and tongue’, an agent so strong that none ‘dare speak / One syllable against him’ (V.i. 38-39). Despite this claim, Cranmer's Catholic adversary, Gardiner, has secretly slandered him in the ears of the privy councillors, incensing them and forcing Henry to arrange a private inquiry into Cranmer's truth. Told by the king that charges have been brought against him, Cranmer exclaims,

                                         … I know
There’s none stands under more calumnious tongues
Than I myself, poor man.

(V.i. 111-13)

Naively Cranmer believes that he need not defend himself verbally, that his honesty will somehow show forth silently. Incredibly he concludes that he must lack virtue if his enemies prevail (V.i. 116-26). Shakespeare makes Cranmer's trial a test of Henry and his good servant. Can they protect themselves against courtier-destroying pestilent speech? Henry tells Cranmer that he underestimates the power of slanderous tongues, that he minimizes the ‘ease’ by which ‘corrupt minds’ can ‘procure knaves as corrupt / To swear against you’ (V.i. 131-33).

Nevertheless, Henry has confidence in his ability to control the proceedings against Cranmer and to protect him; ‘They shall no more prevail than we give way to’ (V.i. 143), he tells the archbishop. Henry sanctions the trial in part so that Cranmer might have the opportunity to regain the verbal determination of his political destiny. ‘If they shall chance / In charging you with matters to commit you [to the Tower]’, Henry counsels,

The best persuasions to the contrary
Fail not to use, and with what vehemency
Th’ occasion shall instruct you.

(V.i. 145-49)

Even though he recognizes slander's power, Henry hopes that Cranmer's verbal defense of himself might possibly succeed, setting a valuable precedent of simply truthful speech victorious in the court setting of perpetual intrigue. If Cranmer's protestations fail, Henry assures his servant that the ring he gives him will bail him, directing his appeal from his accusers to the king himself. Essentially, as an expressive symbol, the ring stands for Henry's supreme verbal power. The king rigs proceedings to put language on trial.

Hearing Henry's care of him, Cranmer weeps. In Henry's sight, his tears amount to signifiers more efficacious than ordinary language. ‘He has strangled / His language in his tears’ (V.i. 156-57), Henry judges. More precisely, Cranmer's tears become his language, communicating his inner truth more reliably than any spoken declarations could. Moved by the tears, the king states.

                                        God's blest mother,
I swear he is true-hearted, and a soul
None better in my kingdom.

(V.i. 153-55)

Despite his previous claims to complete belief in Cranmer's honesty, Henry evidently has had some doubts concerning it. Cranmer's ‘speaking’ tears dispel the king's uncertainty, accomplishing what the archbishop's language could not do.

Summoned to the hearing, Cranmer is humiliated by being forced to wait like a groom outside the chamber door, an insult noted by Doctor Butts and communicated instantly to King Henry. The ‘window above’ at which the king and Butts observe Cranmer below dancing attendance provides ocular knowledge more reliable than verbal report of the outrage, and the king's resolve to ‘draw the curtain close’ and secretly ‘hear more anon’ promises auricular knowledge uncorrupted by slander (V.ii. 19-34). Significantly, the charges spoken against Cranmer impute pestilent speech to him, the corrupting of the realm through so-called heretical sermons and protestant teachings. In effect, the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, asks Cranmer to reform his language, both written and verbal (V.ii. 42-53). Bolder than the Lord Chancellor, Gardiner compares Cranmer to a wild horse whose mouth must be stopped with a stubborn bit (V.ii. 54-58). Nevertheless, Cranmer's status as a privy councillor stops his accusers' mouths. ‘You are a councillor’, Suffolk complains, ‘And by that virtue no man dare accuse you’ (V.ii. 83-84). Cranmer's adversaries hope to commit him to the Tower, an imprisonment that would strip him of his intimidating political identity. ‘Where being but a private man again’, Gardiner concludes, ‘You shall know how many dare accuse you boldly, / More than (I fear) you are provided for’ (V.ii. 89-91). Throughout Henry VIII, from the cases of Norfolk and Buckingham to the present instance, Shakespeare suggests that speech gains power and meaning not from the value of words themselves but from non-verbal validators such as the ethical character of the speaker or his political or religious identity. But in Cranmer's case, the derivation works against him. His political persona has grown so fearsome in councillors' minds that it stifles their free speech and distorts, even mutes, in their ears his honest utterances.

Cranmer himself illustrates this phenomenon of inhibition. He begins to reply sarcastically to Gardiner's proposal, but checks himself: ‘I could say more, / But reverence to your calling makes me modest’ (V.ii. 102-3). Cranmer will not make Katherine's mistake of adopting the accuser's pestilent speech. More precisely, Cranmer's respect for the office of Bishop makes him reluctant to savage the spiteful man who holds it. Gardiner's status as the Bishop of Winchester—not his nasty speech—controls Cranmer. Gardiner himself as religious signifier effectively shouts down Cranmer, preventing him from voicing the ‘best persuasions’ of his innocence. While modest, religious speech remakes Wolsey (and indirectly Katherine, too), it does not save Cranmer. Thomas Cromwell, who cannot remain silent, takes up the archbishop's cause. When Gardiner labels Cromwell a protestant, he lashes out with the ‘bold language’ (V.ii. 118) that Cranmer never utters. The inability of Cranmer's and Cromwell's speech to save Cranmer from arrest can be heard in the Lord Chancellor's conclusion:

                                        … it stands agreed
I take it, by all voices; that forthwith
You be convey’d to th’ Tower a prisoner.

(V.ii. 121-23)

The ‘voices’—the votes of Council—drown out Cranmer's and Cromwell's pleas and protestations.²⁵ Language fails the test that Henry has devised. To save himself, Cranmer displays the king's ring, a signifier of royal power superseding honest but ineffective speech.

From his secret vantage point, Henry has seen the councillors' abuse of their peer and heard Gardiner's vicious statements against him. Once he enters the council chamber, Henry hears the oily language of flattery in Gardiner's speech. His past experience with Wolsey has taught him that much. ‘You play the spaniel’, Henry warns him, ‘And think with wagging of your tongue to win me’ (V.ii. 160-61). The king accuses the lords of having strayed from his royal word, expressed in the commission that gives them ‘Power as he was a councillor to try’ Cranmer, ‘Not as a groom’ (V.ii. 177-78). When Sir Thomas More protests that Cranmer's imprisonment ‘was rather … meant for his trial, / And fair purgation to the world than malice … in me’ (V.ii. 184-87), his ‘tongue excuse[s] all’ (V.ii. 183). King Henry accepts the truth of these words, even though they may be falsely spoken. In Shakespeare's age, ‘purgation’ was ‘a normal law term for “the Clearing of a Man's Self of a Crime”’.²⁶ The Lord Chancellor's claim that he supported Cranmer's imprisonment only so that he could (assuredly) be cleared of the crimes attributed to him does not square with his prejudgment of the archbishop in his former speech of accusation. Earlier, the Lord Chancellor said that Cranmer has ‘misdemean’d’ himself, ‘Toward the king first, then his laws, in filling / The whole realm by [his] teaching’ (V.ii. 48-50). If Henry is aware of this tension in the Lord Chancellor's remarks, he does not reveal his doubt. Instead, he accepts the protest of well meaning at face value. The king cannot afford to let the malice of a few men poison the wellspring of government.

Consequently, Henry orders the councillors to embrace each other. He takes care that Gardiner clasps Cranmer: ‘Once more my lord of Winchester, I charge you / Embrace and love this man’ (V.ii. 204-5). In the audience's ears, Gardiner's reply, ‘With a true heart / And brother-love I do it’ (V.ii. 205-6), rings hollow. The revolution of hatred to love is too sudden, too unqualified, too unprepared-for to be believable. In its effect, Gardiner's declaration of brotherly love corresponds to Vincentio's injunction in Measure for Measure that Angelo love Mariana, or, within the context of the late plays, to Antonio's ominous silence after Prospero commands everyone onstage to forgive one another and be joyous. In each case, harmony insisted upon by the protagonist cannot contain all discordant elements, cannot guarantee that future threats to social stability have been defused. Henry has no extra-verbal way of knowing the truth or falsehood of Gardiner's words of brotherly love. Unlike Cranmer, he does not weep in response to Henry's pious magnanimity.²⁷ Even though he gains control of his own and his courtiers' language, Henry concludes his political growth in the play without a reliable gauge of the sincerity of another's words.²⁸ When the king wrests the royal word from Wolsey, playgoers might suppose that his speech will henceforth manifest the potency of a divine-right monarch.²⁹ Act V, however, shows the limits of Henry's verbal kingdom. He can proclaim mutual love and Cranmer's innocence, but he cannot make the words of others match their intentions, which will sometimes mislead him.

Granted these limitations, theater audiences are generally inclined to hear Cranmer's play-ending ‘oracle of comfort’ as the influential speech act that supersedes and in effect redeems humanity's inadequate, untrustworthy utterances. Concerning Cranmer's prophecy, G. Wilson Knight has written: ‘No words in Shakespeare are more potently placed, none so deeply loaded with a life's wisdom rolled within the volumes of a single, yet for ever unfurling, speech’.³⁰ ‘Let me speak sir’, Cranmer begs Henry, ‘For heaven now bids me; and the words I utter, / Let none think flattery, for they’ll find ’em truth’ (V.iv. 14-16).³¹ He has already demonstrated his capacity for holy naming by christening Henry's child ‘Elizabeth’ (V.iv. 9). Cranmer's eloquent prophecy (V.iv. 14-62) invites comparison with the oracles of Jupiter and Apollo in Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale. Like them, Cranmer's prophecy invests the lives of characters with meaning by telling them of a redemptive design in which their mistakes and suffering play important roles. In Henry VIII, this pattern lies in the distant future rather than in the present; at least it does so for the stage characters. They hear that the babe Elizabeth, once grown, will shower England with ‘a thousand thousand blessings’, becoming another Saba (Sheba) for ‘wisdom and fair virtue’, the successful defender of England from foreign foes, and the creator of a near-biblical fruitfulness for her people:

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.

(V.iv. 33-35)

Cranmer saves Elizabeth's best for last—her making the word of God available once more to her subjects:

God shall be truly known, and those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honour,
And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.

(V.iv. 36-38)

In a history play especially concerned with failures of speech, Shakespeare's making Elizabeth I the liberator and protectress of the truest language is appropriate.

The same may be said of Cranmer's portrayal of James I, upon whom his prophecy subsequently falls. Shakespeare compliments the royal patron of his acting troupe by making him Elizabeth reborn—a second phoenix (James's personal symbol) equal to the Virgin Queen in fame, truth, and virtue. Cranmer's oracle encourages playgoers to think of James as Elizabeth's offspring, her child. Earlier, Henry asked an opportunistic Old Lady, ‘Is the queen deliver’d? / Say ay, and of a boy’ (V.i. 162-63). Never one to disappoint, the Old Lady replied,

                                        Ay, ay my liege,
And of a lovely boy: the God of heaven
Both now and ever bless her: ’tis a girl
Promises boys hereafter.

(V.i. 163-66)

At the time of this utterance, the Old Lady's words seem to constitute yet another example of deceiving language in Henry VIII. The amoral Old Lady appears to distort the truth in order to win a hundred marks from the king (V.i. 169-76). Nevertheless, Cranmer's prophecy suggests that the Old Lady spoke truer than she or anyone else could imagine. Judged in retrospect, her speech, like the utterances of other flawed characters in the play, may illustrate the providential word ironically working its way through the statements of humankind.

According to Cranmer, James's greatest deed will involve language, the king's creation of a world from his word—his making through royal proclamation Britain out of England, Scotland, and Wales:

Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honour and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and make new nations.

(V.iv. 50-52)

R. A. Foakes claims that this utterance of Cranmer's is based on Genesis 17:4-6: “‘a father of many nations have I made thee … I will make thee exceeding fruitfull, and will make nations come of thee’” (176). ‘The passage was frequently cited in reference to the marriage of Princess Elizabeth in 1613’, Foakes adds, mentioning the colonizing of Virginia during James's rule as a second illustration of the prophecy (176). But Foakes fails to cite the most obvious application of Cranmer's words—James's effort to bring forth a new Britain out of three hitherto unallied countries. ‘He shall flourish’, Cranmer concludes, ‘And like a mountain cedar, reach his branches / To all the plains about him’ (V.iv. 52-54).

Regarded through Jacobean hindsight, Cranmer's prophecy must have struck some members of Shakespeare's audience who had lived under Elizabeth and into the reign of James as a last—perhaps the paramount—instance of flattering speech in the play. Hearing Cranmer extol Elizabeth's virtues, some persons must have recalled the widespread dissatisfaction with the aged, vain, irritable old woman of the period 1595-1603, when economic inflation was especially rampant.³² Then again, certain protestants must have recalled the queen's frustrating reluctance to reinforce the Dutch rebels to Catholic rule—a major aspect of Elizabeth's ‘peace’—as a negative trait of character. Instead of contentedly eating the fruits of their toil under their own vines, farmers and laborers suffered terribly throughout Elizabeth's reign, being starved off their land or out of their meagerly paid tasks by agricultural enclosures, monopolies, and the high pricing of food—none of which Elizabeth effectively opposed.³³ Moreover, by 1612, James's popularity had sunk to a new low. His heavy drinking and coarse jokes, his dislike of the business of running a country in preference to hunting, his inability to control extravagant spending on court masques and royal luxuries—these facts were well known and resented.³⁴ James may have proclaimed in the royal name that England, Scotland, and Wales were Britain, but Parliament in the king's lifetime would not turn the declaration into law, so strong was members' dislike of James's dictatorial manner before them, of Scots in general, and so perplexing was the problem of reconciling English and Scottish law.

In other words, it is possible to hear Cranmer's oracle as heavily ironic speech, unintended as such by the speaker but not by the playwright.³⁵ After all, the contemporary failure of James's ‘divine’ creation of Britain accords with our doubts about the ability of King Henry's speech to refashion his privy councillors' innermost thoughts and desires. Ironically reading Cranmer's oracle illustrates an idea of the play's prologue. ‘Such as give / Their money out of hope they may believe’, the Prologue asserts, ‘May here find truth too’ (Prologue 7-9). Jacobeans who venerated the memory of Elizabeth but disliked James could take Cranmer's praise of her straightforwardly, hearing irony in the praise of James. Obviously the reverse possibility holds—as does that of playgoers who disapproved (or approved) of both monarchs. This approach to interpreting the oracle turns Shakespeare into a highly relativistic playwright and substitutes What You Will for the play's subtitle All is True.³⁶

But this conclusion ignores the condition of the Prologue's offer. Playgoers who pay to see the play in order to confirm their social prejudices, who ‘give / Their money out of hope they may believe’, these are the members of the audience likely to overlook the triumph of speech in the play, for the play's characters. Shakespeare casts their playgoing narrowly, as a cold financial barter in which they expect to see and hear their prejudices confirmed. For this group of playgoers, drama simply is propaganda from which they learn nothing new. But for those who have come to the theater with minds relatively open to amusement and instruction, Cranmer's oracle is the long-awaited triumph of speech whose appearance the play's details have begged. For these playgoers, the onstage reactions of characters to the oracle validate its creative power. Resembling the divine word that, according to Johannine Gospel, made a world, Cranmer's oracle makes a man—King Henry. It does so by the king's own account. By giving Henry an unalterable sense of his place in a providential design (as the begetter of the rare Elizabeth and the surrogate grandfather of the reborn Phoenix James), Cranmer's utterances make possible the king's self-fulfillment. Katherine's praise of the metamorphic virtue of modest, religious speech is finally justified.

Alexander Leggatt has argued that Cranmer's oracle, like John of Gaunt's tribute to the royal throne of kings in Richard II, ‘proclaims an ideal England—the true inner England’ against which the historical world of fact can be measured.³⁷ Leggatt has shown that Cranmer's prophecy constitutes the utopian corrective to previous political abuses. The image of King James, spreading his branches to the plains beneath him, displaces the mutilated tree that was Henry's metaphor for the overtaxed citizen; and the picture of the householder, free of political persecution, eating and singing happily beneath his vine, supersedes the vision of Englishmen cheated by Wolsey of their material goods (136-137).³⁸ Cranmer's oracle may be thought of not simply as the alternative fulfillment of earlier language and imagery but also as the redemptive meta-statement toward which fallen utterances, like the Old Lady's declaration that Henry has begotten a boy, have been moving characters and events. In the ideal England of Cranmer's prophecy, ‘the sources of a man's position in the world will be his own independent integrity and the favour of the prince’.³⁹ Refashioned by Cranmer's speech, Henry stands poised to begin the Reformation, which will culminate—as Cranmer declares—in everyman's access to the saving word, both in the unchained Bible and the ‘text’ of Queen Elizabeth (V.v. 36-37). One moment of enfranchised speech will make possible later decades of spiritually liberating language. Between these times, sin and disorder will make brazen history, Henry will suffer moral lapses, and Cranmer will die tragically. But for an instant, Cranmer's oracle energizes Henry and his courtiers to play their roles in making real the providential design that gave Shakespeare and his countrymen whatever freedom that they imagined they possessed. If they believed that God was more truly known during Elizabeth's and James's reigns, they enjoyed that benefit, according to Shakespeare's play, because He once, almost eighty years earlier, spoke momentarily through a faithful servant.

By performing this function in the play's final scene, speech marvellously redeems (or at least compensates for) its inadequacies and misuses, as Shakespeare has systematically represented them in all five acts of Henry VIII. For those members of Shakespeare's audience open to the many resonances of Henry VIII, speech finally becomes an ‘oracle of comfort’ (V.iv. 66). To disbelieve in that possibility would involve the wholesale rejection of central documents of Jacobean culture such as the Bible, whose inspired word miraculously creates the new man and woman. Each of Shakespeare's late romances dramatizes the eventual triumph of speech over an impasse that the failure of language has brought about. In Ephesus, Pericles faithfully declares a monarch's faults, overcoming his life-denying resolution to be silent in such matters and thereby discovering his identity to Thaisa. Leontes, at Paulina's prompting, verbally recreates Hermione, reversing the personal tragedy that his mad pronouncement of sexual betrayal began. Prospero, moved by Ariel's word picture of Gonzalo, verbally reasons through his brotherhood with his victims, converting the desire for vengeance into the impulse to forgive, transcending the curses and bitter dialogue with Caliban and Alonzo into which he has been locked. By compensating for the many instances of failed, deceptive, or corrupt language in the play, Cranmer's prophecy represents a victory of speech that links Henry VIII to the late romances.⁴⁰ More so than in the romances, however, one senses that the final triumph of speech is especially hard-earned and fragile—and for those reasons perhaps more valuable.

Notes

1. For a bibliographical overview of the subject, see Michael Taylor, ‘“You speak a language that I understand not”: Language and Structure in the Late Comedies’, Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford, 1990) 164-166, 173-79.

2. Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare's Romance of the Word (Lewisburg, PA, 1990). This study includes bibliographical descriptions of previous analyses of the subject of language in the late romances (147, 159, 164).

3. For the romance features of Henry VIII, see Ronald Berman, ‘King Henry the Eighth: History and Romance’, English Studies 48.2 (1967): 112-21; and H. M. Richmond, ‘Shakespeare's Henry VIII: Romance Redeemed by History’, Shakespeare Studies 4 (1968): 334-49. For a listing of criticism concerned either in whole or in part with the romance elements of Henry VIII, see Paul Dean, ‘Dramatic Mode and Historical Vision in Henry VIII’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 175 n2; and Peter L. Rudnytsky, ‘Henry VIII and the Deconstruction of History’, Shakespeare Survey 43 (1990): 44-45 n7.

4. In The Theatre of Praise: The Panegyric Tradition in Seventeenth-Century English Drama (Newark, 1986) 63-67, Joanne Altieri argues that the ‘privatizing of discourse in Henry VIII’, signalled by characters' pervasive whispering, ‘is the verso of its pageantry, the fact of that verso calling the pageantry into question’ (63-64). Altieri is the only critic of Henry VIII to focus on the play's language in more than a passing way; she does so, however, during the course of an argument concerned with dramatic panegyric.

5. The basic study of this phenomenon in Shakespeare remains Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, NJ, 1968) esp. 22-46, 260-84. But also see Lawrence Danson, Shakespeare's Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language (New Haven, 1974); and James L. Calderwood's two articles—‘Love's Labour's Lost: A Wantoning with Words’, Studies in English Literature 5 (1965): 317-32; and ‘Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words’, Studies in English Literature 6 (1966): 211-24.

6. All quotations of the play are taken from King Henry VIII, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare (London, 1964). Quotations of other Shakespeare plays derive from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston, 1974). I have omitted the square brackets in this text that signal readings varying from the principal text chosen for a play. John D. Cox, in ‘Henry VIII and the Masque’, Journal of English Literary History 45 (1978): 390-409, asserts that ‘Norfolk's precious diction as he describes the Field of the Cloth of Gold is a rhetorical counterpart to the glittering show that Wolsey devised as a concealment of the flimsy peace between Henry and Francis I’ (398).

7. In ‘Henry VIII and the Dynamics of Spectacle’, Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 229-46, Edward I. Berry concludes that Norfolk's narrated vision of the rich splendor of the Field of the Cloth of Gold ‘is an empty show, a kind of antimasque’ (232).

8. In Norfolk's labored account of a singularity and Buckingham's rejoinder, Shakespeare reproduces the opening of Cymbeline. First Gentleman's opaque, disjointed description of Imogen's and Posthumus's thwarted wedding and of Posthumus's great worth prompts Second Gentleman's skeptical utterance ‘You speak him far’ (I.i. 24). For an analysis of the Gentlemen's language in Cymbeline, see Hunt, Shakespeare's Romance of the Word 43-47.

9. Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge, MA, 1972) 205.

10. Florence Schreiber-McGee, ‘“The View of Earthly Glory”: Visual Strategies and the Issue of Royal Prerogative in Henry VIII’, Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 191-200. Schreiber-McGee argues that ‘politicized spectacle’ replaces the fractured ‘single voice of royal proclamation’ as the constructive, reliable communicator of the play (197-99). Dean, 182-83, also claims that narrated report rather than first-hand vision makes the mode of Henry VIII untrustworthy speech.

11. The Theatre of Praise 67.

12. See Hunt, Shakespeare's Romance of the Word 102-5, 163.

13. Lee Bliss, ‘The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth’, Journal of English Literary History 42 (1975): 10.

14. For the probability that this was the play's subtitle, see the summary in Bliss, 23-24, of the details of Sir Henry Wotton's use of it in 1613.

15. See Maurice Charney, Style in ‘Hamlet’ (Princeton, NJ, 1969) esp. 34-36, 39-44, 76-77.

16. Linda McJ. Micheli, “‘Sit By Us”: Visual Imagery and the Two Queens in Henry VIII’, Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 464.

17. Hugh M. Richmond, ‘The Feminism of Shakespeare's Henry VIII’, Essays in Literature 6 (1979): 14. Richmond notes that Anne Boleyn ‘appears in only three scenes: in the first speaking only two half-lines, and in the third none at all’ (13).

18. Kim N. Noling, ‘Grubbing Up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII’, Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 299.

19. On the pervasiveness of rumor in the play, see Pierre Sahel, ‘The Strangeness of a Dramatic Style: Rumour in Henry VIII’, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 145-51.

20. G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Final Plays (London: Methuen, 1948) 279. Also see S.C. Sen Gupta, Shakespeare's Historical Plays (Oxford, 1964) 157; Tom McBride, ‘Henry VIII as Machiavellian Romance’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 76 (1977): 31; and Eckhard Auberlen, ‘King Henry VIII: Shakespeare's Break with the “Bluff-King-Harry” Tradition’, Anglia 98 (1980): 337.

21. Alexander Leggatt, ‘Henry VIII and the Ideal England’, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 135. Also holding this opinion are Richmond, ‘Shakespeare's Henry VIII: Romance Redeemed by History’ 343; and Camille W. Slights, ‘The Politics of Conscience in All is True (or Henry VIII)’, Shakespeare Survey 43 (1990): 59, 62.

22. The Crown of Life 280.

23. Howard Felperin, in ‘Shakespeare's Henry VIII: History as Myth’, Studies in English Literature 6 (1966): 225-46, esp. 238, asserts that ‘Suffolk's anti-clericalism further expresses itself through the Biblical purity and figurativeness of his language (“th’ are breath I not believe in”)’.

24. For more on this idea, see Maurice Hunt, ‘Words and Deeds in All's Well That Ends Well’, Modern Language Quarterly 48 (1987): 320-21.

25. For Shakespeare's use of the word ‘voice’ to signify ‘vote’ in Hamlet and Coriolanus, see D. J. Gordon, ‘Name and Fame: Shakespeare's Coriolanus’, Papers Mainly Shakespearian, ed. G. I. Duthie, Aberdeen University Studies 147 (Edinburgh, 1964) 42-43.

26. Foakes 165.

27. Cranmer's tears once again validate verbal testimony of his piety. ‘Good man, those joyful tears show thy true heart’, Henry exclaims, after he has defeated his enemies; ‘The common voice I see is verified / Of thee, which says thus: “Do my lord of Canterbury / A shrewd turn, and he’s your friend for ever”’ (V.ii. 208-11). Cranmer's ‘speaking’ tears become an absolutely authoritative statement, infusing a common saying with religious truth.

28. The argument that King Henry develops from a dependent, slightly weak monarch to a strong, self-sufficient ruler in the course of Shakespeare's play was first advanced by Paul Bertram, ‘Henry VIII: The Conscience of the King’, In Defense of Reading, ed. Reuben Brower and Richard Poirier (New York, 1963) 153-73.

29. Tudor theory of royal divine-right entailed likening the king's language to God's creative word as described in the Gospels, especially John 1:1-3. James L. Calderwood, in Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad: ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’ (Berkeley, 1979), argues that ‘the original power of the divine Word remained actively at work in the King's English, just as divine authority descending by way of primogeniture was immanent in Richard himself’ (13). Shakespeare never unqualifiedly endorses the theory of the king's creative word. To some degree, all his monarchs are the heirs of Richard II, who learns that his speech cannot shape reality. The late language of Henry VIII, along with that of Henry V perhaps, at least represents an unironic shadow of the ideal language of kingship.

30. The Crown of Life 331. Felperin, 242-43, also interprets Cranmer's oracle as straightforward holy prophecy, as does Robert Uphaus, Beyond Tragedy: Structure and Experience in Shakespeare's Romances (Lexington, 1981) 136-39.

31. Heavenly inspired speech is a subject of Henry VIII, most notably in the prophesizing that the peace issuing from the Field of the Cloth of Gold will be broken and in the prediction of the friar Nicholas Henton, meant for Buckingham's ears alone. While Henton's prophecy proves not simply ‘vain’ but fatal for Buckingham, the ‘general prophecy’ accompanying Henry's and Francis I’s pact appears genuine. Certain dialogue between Buckingham and Norfolk suggests as much:

    Buck.                                                             Every
    man
    After the hideous storm that follow’d, was
    A thing inspir’d, and, not consulting, broke
    Into a general prophecy; that this tempest
    Dashing the garment of this peace, aboded
    The sudden breach on’t.
    Nor.                                                             Which is
    budded out,
    For France hath flaw’d the league, and hath attach’d
    Our merchants' goods at Bordeaux.

    (I.i. 89-96)

    The simultaneity of individuals making the same prophecy, which is later fulfilled, establishes the possibility of divinely inspired speech early in the play.

32. See G. B. Harrison, The Elizabethan Journals, Being a Record of Those Things Most Talked of During the Years 1591-1603 (Ann Arbor, 1955) 1:314, 2:305; Penry Williams, ‘Court and Polity under Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester 65.2 (1982-83): 270; and Jasper Ridley, Elizabeth I: The Shrewdness of Virtue (New York, 1988) 323-24.

33. See Christopher Hill, ‘Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage-Labour’, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA, 1975) 219-38; Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1982) 32-36, 140-42, 172; and Susan D. Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988) 8.

34. See The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman E. McClure (Philadelphia, 1939) 1:201; Samuel R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War (1883-84; rpt. New York, 1965) 1:296; G.P.V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant, or the Court of King James I (1962; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1974) 14, 105-7; and David M. Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence, 1985) 42.

35. Frank V. Cespedes, in “‘We are one in fortunes”: The Sense of History in Henry VIII’, English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 413-38, esp. 416, hears the oracle this way, as does Rudnytsky 55-57.

36. This is Rudnytsky's playwright of Henry VIII: ‘Shakespeare constructs a dramatic universe dominated by “deceptive appearances” and the “relativity of truth”, in which, in Pirandellian fashion, “all is true” means precisely that any interpretation of the past may be true if one thinks it so, and no point of view is allowed to contain or control all others’ (46).

37. ‘Henry VIII and the Ideal England’ 134. Citing similar oracular proclamations of an ideal England at the end of plays such as Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Peele's The Arraignment of Paris, Leggatt implies that by 1612 they may have amounted to a dramatic convention (131-34).

38. Leggatt notes that ‘Wolsey's taxation has … forced employers to lay off their workmen (1.2.31-7). Enforced contributions to the Field of the Cloth of Gold have caused similar damage … (I.i. 80-5)’ (136-37).

39. Leggatt 137.

40. In the present essay, I follow the lead of recent critics of Henry VIII in attributing the play to Shakespeare rather than to Shakespeare and Fletcher. Knight (258-72) and Bliss (1) typically establish this precedent. For a review of the Shakespeare/Fletcher/Henry VIII controversy, see Evidence for Authorship, ed. David V. Erdman and Ephim G. Fogel (Ithaca, NY, 1966) 457-78.