SOURCE: “‘All Is True’: Negotiating the Past in Henry VIII,” in Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, edited by R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner, University of Delaware Press, 1996, pp. 147-66.

[In the following essay, Patterson explores the relationship of Henry VIII to Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, noting that Shakespeare often modified facts in order to achieve a desired dramatic or thematic outcome.]

Wherein we are to crave pardon that we may plainelie declare and tell the truth: for in all histories the perfect and full truth is to be alwaies opened, and without it the same wanteth both authoritie and credit: … And yet the philosophers are of the opinion, that we ought to reverence so the higher powers in all maner of offices and dueties, as that we should not provoke nor moove them with anie sharpe speeches or disordered languages. … Wherfore it is a dangerous thing to speake evill against him, though the occasion be never so just, as who can foorthwith avenge the same. … It were surelie a verie happie thing, and that which I confesse passeth my reach, if a man intreating of princes causes might tell the truth in everie thing, and yet not offend them in anie thing.

—“Holinshed's” Chronicles (1587), 2:29

LOOKING FOR “AN HONEST CHRONICLER”

Of all the half-truths about Shakespeare that have hardened into dogma, one of the most misleading concerns the relation of his history plays to the work known as “Holinshed's” Chronicles. This essay will set the record straight at least for the last of Shakespeare's English histories, Henry VIII or All Is True. This play has always been something of an embarrassment to Shakespeareans, as is fully admitted and partly circumvented by Samuel Schoenbaum’s canny introduction to his Signet edition.¹ By virtue of its late date, Henry VIII denies to The Tempest chronological finality to add to its sense of symbolic farewell. Because of its emphasis on pageantry and comparatively flat characterization, critics who find Henry VIII unworthy of Shakespeare invoke either the convenient theory of collaboration (John Fletcher becomes responsible for the least interesting scenes), or that of time-serving (Shakespeare was drawn into the competition to celebrate the marriage of James's daughter Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine). Finally, the unusual dependence of the playtext on the actual words of the 1587 Chronicles² raises the frightening specter of creativity in abeyance, or other baser notions incompatible with the premise of genius. Shakespeareans therefore attempt to exorcise this specter by pointing to scenes for which the Chronicles give no mandate (such as Queen Katherine's intervention on behalf of the protesting clothworkers who have been put out of work by Cardinal Wolsey's unconstitutional new taxes), or claiming that the play condenses the disordered largesse of Holinshed into a tightly focused and causally satisfying drama.³

This orthodoxy has survived the discovery that Henry VIII is a cleverer play, more sophisticated and ironic in its approach to court politics and ceremonial, than the collaborationists or occasionalists believed. Since Geoffrey Bullough published his Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare in the early 1960s, no one has reinvestigated the assumptions—indeed, the evidence—on which this defense of Shakespeare's inventiveness was constructed; and almost no one has seriously inspected the conceptual implications of that alternative title, All Is True. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor print the play under the title All Is True and, on the basis of contemporary witnesses to the fatal performance of the play that resulted in the burning of the Globe, reject the Folio's solution that “transforms the play's subject matter into its title.” They do not, however, venture any comment on what the title might mean, or how it might relate to Shakespeare's late return to the material of the chronicles.⁴ Julia Gasper wisely aligns All Is True with a spate of plays about Tudor history that followed the Essex rebellion, Dekker and Webster's Sir Thomas Wyatt, Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, and Samuel Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me, and suggests that its title “may have been meant to suggest that it is less unhistorical than its predecessors.” She notes, however, that “signs of the authors' creative license are visible in it everywhere.”⁵ But both these positions seem to me to be lacking in reach, implying a naiveté on the part of Shakespeare and his audiences on the subject of truth in general, and historiographical veracity in particular, that is most unlikely to have been sustainable by the second decade of the seventeenth century. In place of the Wells and Taylor position, I propose that in choosing “All Is True” as his title Shakespeare himself transformed its true subject matter—the nature of historical truth—into one of those proverbial sayings, like “All's Well That Ends Well,” whose aphoristic status required interrogation. And whereas Julia Gasper disapproves of “unhistorical” elements in the play, especially because of the claims for superior veracity she sees in the title, I suggest that Shakespeare was not only mocking such claims, but selecting a subject that helped to explain, in historical terms, why historical objectivity was (both tragically and comically) hard to come by: that is to say, the coming of the Reformation to England.

There is, however, one significant precedent for thinking in this way. In 1984 Judith Anderson published a long essay entitled “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: The Changing Relation of Truth to Fiction,” in which she observed that “thrice in thirty-two lines, the Prologue to the play mentions ‘truth’ explicitly,” and in such a qualified way, including the phrase “chosen truth,” as to render it suspect. Either, Anderson suggests, the Prologue is at variance with the title, or should the play that follows turn out to have ambiguous or contradictory contents, “the very notion of objective truth [will be] thereby subjected to examination.” “In this last case,” she added, “the claim that ‘all is true’ becomes not false, but ironic, as indeed I take it truly to be.”⁶ This essay, however, was published in her monograph on the art of biography in Tudor-Stuart writing, and seems to have missed the attention of Shakespeareans. Moreover, although our views of Shakespeare's intentions are very similar, the other heroes of Anderson's story are Cardinal Wolsey and his early biographers especially, as we shall see, Cavendish and Stow; while mine are Raphael Holinshed and Abraham Fleming, the chroniclers most directly responsible for constructing the version of the Henrician Reformation that became All Is True, with all its ambiguities.

My epigraph itself derives from the 1587 Chronicles. Originally written by the medieval chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis in his Expugnatio Hibernica, which he presented to Henry II in 1188 and re-presented to King John, it was translated by the lawyer and constitutional historian John Hooker to form part of his continuation of the history of Ireland. Giraldus raises an issue that was no less critical for an Elizabethan chronicler, and its warnings were shown to be well taken in January 1587, when the second edition of the Chronicles was called in by the Privy Council on the grounds that it contained “reporte of matters of later yeeres that concern the State, and are not therfore meete to be published in such sorte as they are delyvered.”⁷

But that Shakespeare at the end of his career was meditating on problems of historiographical veracity that go beyond the merely prudential may be inferred from the conversation between Queen Katherine, now close to death, and her gentleman usher, Griffith, on the subject of Cardinal Wolsey's life and death. As Katherine admits, after she has allowed Griffith to rebalance her own hostile account of Wolsey with some of his virtues and genuine achievements:

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 hast made me,
With thy religious truth and modesty,
Now in his ashes honour: …

(4.2.69-75; italics added)⁸

The Chronicles give no specific mandate for this statement of Katherine's, nor for this dramatic exchange between herself and Griffith. Yet conceptually they provide almost everything else necessary to the scene, its specific vocabulary being only one aspect of the dilemma there represented, in cogent if preanalytic form. For what Shakespeare had before him as he wrote was a lively representation of how historians diverge on the issue of evaluation, and how strenuous is the pull of ideological bias.

In their commentaries for the Arden and Cambridge editions respectively, Reginald Foakes and John Margeson refer to “Holinshed” as if Raphael Holinshed were the author or “writer” of all the material relating to Wolsey; whereas in fact the 1587 edition of the Chronicles that Shakespeare used is a far more complicated production, as a careful analysis of Katherine's exchange with Griffith will demonstrate. Katherine's negative account of Wolsey, which begins her debate with Griffith, is taken from a passage at the very end of the Chronicles' assessment of the cardinal's career:

This cardinall (as you may perceive in this storie) was of a great stomach, for he compted himselfe equall with princes, & by craftie suggestion gat into his hands innumerable treasure: he forced little on simonie, and was not pittiful, and stood affectionate in his owne opinion: in open presence he would lie and saie untruth, and was double both in speach and meaning: he would promise much & performe little: he was vicious of his bodie, & gave the clergie evill example.⁹

Katherine begins her tirade, “He was a man of unbounded stomach,” and Foakes remarks that “stomach” is “Holinshed's word.” Likewise, Margeson annotates “One that by suggestion tied all the kingdom,” by stating that “Shakespeare uses Holinshed's word from the source passage.” In fact, as the marginal note in the 1587 edition makes clear, this passage was imported by Abraham Fleming from Edward Hall's Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York, (194).

When Griffith moderates Katherine's opinion by citing the better aspects of Wolsey's record, he cites a passage for which Raphael Holinshed actually was responsible, secondarily. In the 1577 edition he had followed his brief account of Wolsey's death with an evaluation taken from Edmund Campion's history of Ireland:

I thinke (sayth he) some Princes basterd, no Butchers sonne, exceeding wise, faire spoken, high minded, full of revenge, vitious of his body, loftie to his enimies, were they never so bigge, to those that accepted and sought his friendship wonderfull courteous, a ripe scholeman, thrall to affections, brought a bedde with flatterie, insaciable to gette, and more princely in bestowing, as appeareth by hys two Colledges at Ipswich and Oxeford, the one overthrowen with his fall, the other unfinished, and yet it lyveth for an house of Studentes, considering all the appurtenances incomparable through Christendome, wherof Henry the eigth [sic] is now called founder, bycause he let it stand … in commendum a greate preferrer of his servauntes, an advauncer of learning, stout in every quarrell, never happy till this hys overthrow. Therein he shewed such moderation, and ended so perfectly, that the houre of his death did him more honour, than all the pomp of hys life passed. Thus farre Campion.¹⁰

This passage from Campion (via Holinshed) appears at the beginning of Abraham Fleming's summation of Wolsey's career in 1587, again clearly marked in the margin “The description of cardinal Wolseie, set downe by Edmund Campian” (3:917). And between the Jesuit Campion's positive assessment and the Protestant Edward Hall's hostile one,¹¹ Fleming had inserted a much longer passage about Wolsey, from what is perhaps the most important of all the “sources” of Henry VIII: George Cavendish's Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, which was originally intended, in part, as a refutation of Hall's account of Wolsey. Fleming did not know this early biography as such, however. For immediately after the passage from Campion, he added: “Here it is necessarie to adde that notable discourse, which I find in John Stow …” and proceeded to give his source marginal credit: “Abr. Fl. ex. I.S. pag. 904, 905, &c.” (917)—that is to say, Stow's Chronicles of England, from Brute unto this present yeare of Christ, 1580, where the passage in question appears at the beginning of a biographical account of Wolsey.

John Stow did not claim to be the “author” of this material. In his own Chronicles for the year 1516, he wrote:

And heere I thinke good to set downe some part of the proceedings of this so oft named Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop, his ascending unto honorious estate, and sodeine falling againe from the same, as I have bin enformed by persons of good credite.

(904).

In the middle of his narrative, however, Stow slipped in a parenthesis (“sayeth myne Author,” 939), which reveals him to have been working from a written text.¹² But if one compares his account with Cavendish's own version (of which an autograph manuscript survives),¹³ it is clear that Stow edited as he wrote, omitting not only all traces of Cavendish's personal relationship with Wolsey, but also anything inconvenient to his own stance as the respectable citizen-chronicler of Elizabethan London.

When Richard Sylvester edited Cavendish's Life he noted Stow's version in the Chronicles, but in terms that favor the original and do Stow little credit:

In order that his history might not meet with official censure, the tailor-historian showed himself to be quite adept at drawing a fine seam through the pages of Cavendish's story. Every time Cavendish mentions Anne Boleyn or manifests his dislike for the Protestant cause Stowe very carefully deletes the passage. The result is a somewhat tatterdemalion version of the Life, a story with its core gone and its tragic motif suppressed.¹⁴

There may be another way of interpreting Stow's interventions, however, than merely a desire to “omit anything that might be construed as casting doubt on the good mores of [Elizabeth's] ancestors.” And there is certainly another way of understanding why Stow's version, which retains Cavendish's unmistakable respect for the mores of Katherine of Aragon, was incorporated into the 1587 edition of the Chronicles, where it formed the basis of three of the scenes most crucial to Henry VIII—at least to the theme of the divorce: the masque of shepherds at Wolsey's house, which Shakespeare appropriated from Cavendish, via Stow, via Fleming, and made into the moment where Henry first sees and becomes captivated by Anne Boleyn; the formal trial of Katherine's marriage; and the scene with the two cardinals in her chambers that follows.

Sylvester also remarked in a footnote that “a closer examination of the uses to which the play's author[s] put the Life (a subject which to my knowledge has never been fully investigated) might cast additional light on the composition of the play itself” (271). Since Sylvester wrote this note in 1959, nobody has accepted this invitation except Judith Anderson, who offered an extremely detailed account of what Stow took from Cavendish and what Shakespeare took from Stow.¹⁵ Shakespeareans, however, have continued to speak of Shakespeare's use of “Holinshed” in these three scenes, two of which, in the collaborationist account, are usually assigned to Fletcher.¹⁶

There is, therefore, another point to be made about Katherine's debate with Griffith on the problem of historical fairness. The passage inserted by Fleming from Cavendish via Stow (which contains, among other material, the account of the masque of shepherds) separates by a full six pages in the Chronicles the positive evaluation of Wolsey by Campion and the negative one by Hall. Someone highly intelligent and experienced in reading the Chronicles reversed their order, dramatized their disagreements, and rendered that disagreement, in terms of the philosophy of history, theoretical. None of these conditions obtained for Fletcher.

REDEFINING “AUTHORSHIP” IN THE CHRONICLES

Paradoxically, Shakespeareans who are willing to contemplate authorial collaboration in Henry VIII have imposed on the Chronicles retrospectively the anomalous idea of single authorship, with “Holinshed” standing in for the complex process of compilation, aggregation, and ideological negotiation that, as I have just illustrated, lies behind Cardinal Wolsey's historical postmortem. Still more paradoxically, this oversimplification derives from the entirely different status that Shakespeare's plays and the Chronicles have acquired in the twentieth century. As Stephen Booth wrote in 1968, “we care about Holinshed's Chronicles because Shakespeare read them.”¹⁷ In other words, knowledge of the Chronicles is merely ancillary to Shakespeare studies, since they were merely the raw material on which genius drew. This premise was formulated much earlier by a historian, C. L. Kingsford, who was not unhappy with the notion that the Chronicles have in this century basked in a reputation not their own:

It is perhaps more due to the service which he rendered to Shakespeare than to any merit of his own that Holinshed has long overshadowed Hall and Stow as an historian of the fifteenth century … though his Chronicles were a meritorious compilation … their greatest interest now consists in their literary associations. … We may feel a just pride in realizing that so much of the rude material from which Shakespeare was to construct his chief historical plays was fashioned originally in our native English speech.¹⁸

As a historian of historiography, Kingsford was actually more appreciative of Holinshed than some of his colleagues have subsequently been. More common is the view that the Chronicles were an incompetently designed, incoherent mess. As F. J. Levy put it in 1967, in what is still our most important study of Tudor historiography:

There was [then] no conception of history writing as selective: a historian did not remake the past in his own image or in any other but instead reported the events of the past in the order in which they occurred. The criterion by which a historian was judged was the quantity of information he managed to cram between the covers of his book. …¹⁹

As distinct from Hall and Stow, who showed some restraint, Holinshed “demonstrated most fully the idea that history could be written by agglomeration.” This made him “the ideal source for the playwrights; everything needful (and a great deal more) was included, but the ‘construction,’ the ordering of events, was left to others.”²⁰ Thus in a mirror image of Stephen Booth's assessment, Holinshed's Chronicles are considered useful only for literary purposes, since by the standards by which historians judge each other today they were sadly primitive. Levy was particularly distressed about what he saw as interpretive indecision by Holinshed, a stance that “came close to abdicating responsibility altogether.” “This,” he added, “was to leave the reader to be his own historian.”²¹ In fact, as I have argued at length elsewhere, Holinshed's encouragement of the 1577 reader to be his own historian was not negligence but part of a coherent agenda: to educate Elizabethan citizens in political and legal reality. Today we would align such a program with Enlightenment thought and certain versions of liberalism.²²

As himself a reader of the Chronicles, Levy was, however, aware that they could not be attributed simply to Raphael Holinshed, who was dead by the time the second edition was under way. The story of the two editions, and of those who collaborated in them, is important enough for Henry VIII to deserve rehearsal here. The project originated with a printer, Reyner Wolfe, who had both Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell for patrons, and had been employed as royal printer by Edward VI. It scarcely needs saying that these were distinctly Protestant connections. Wolfe conceived the idea of publishing a universal history, to be illustrated with maps and other images, and to that end acquired a considerable collection of documents in manuscript. He employed Raphael Holinshed, who was university-educated and had taken clerical orders, as an assistant in the project, especially to work on translation, but Holinshed's role evidently expanded to that of major compiler and editor. Biographically we know remarkably little about him; but from the Chronicles themselves we can deduce that he was especially interested in legal and constitutional history. His hands-off historiography seems to have been part of a larger set of principles, which included religious toleration, parliamentary limits to monarchical power, and a generalized theory of justice as fairness, all of which were based on the clearly stated recognition that times and institutions change, thus depriving historians of a basis for evaluative certainty.

When Wolfe died in 1576 the financing of the project was taken over by his son-in-law, John Harrison, Lucas Harrison, who had leased his shop from Wolfe, and George Bishop. No relation to these was William Harrison, who was brought in to write the “Description of England” in some haste, and Richard Stanyhurst, who wrote the matching “Description of Ireland” and completed the history of Ireland on a foundation laid down by Edmund Campion, and who was also brought into the project late in the day. The first edition covered the history of England up to 1572, of Ireland to 1547, and Scotland to 1571. When Holinshed himself died in 1580, plans had already been made to produce a new edition that would bring all three histories up to the present moment: the publishers' team expanded to include Ralph Newberie, Henry Denham, and Thomas Woodcock, while the scholarly team consisted of Abraham Fleming, John Stow, Francis Thynne, and John Hooker. William Harrison's continuing presence is recorded in the substantial alterations he made to his “Description” for the 1587 edition.

Despite some confusion as to who was in charge of the second edition, the typographical practice of marginal attribution seems to support the claims of Fleming as the actual compiler; not only because there are so many insertions marked by his initials, but also because specific materials attributed to Hooker and Stow, the other two for whom editorial status has been claimed, are represented as if by a third party. Thus Fleming typically gives in the margin a page reference to Stow's Chronicles preceded by his own initials, a technique that fails to distinguish Stow from, say, Edward Hall. It is necessary to understand this process, however trivial the details may seem, for the second edition not only brought history up to date, it also carefully supplemented what Holinshed had produced ten years earlier. In some touchy areas, supplementation was also, evidently, a process of negotiation between the disagreements of previous historians and different members of the team. Since many of these disagreements reflected the divisive forces unleashed by the Reformation, no area of history was more dangerous (to use the term deployed by Giraldus via Hooker) for the historian than the reign of Henry VIII, in which Fleming, as editor, was particularly active.

The men who produced the Chronicles (in both editions) illustrate the idea of collaboration as an agreement to disagree. With the complex exception of John Stow, they were inarguably middle class. But they had different social connections, and, more surprisingly, could be found in widely different places on the religious spectrum. Whereas Holinshed himself was urbanely moderate on the subject of religion, William Harrison and Abraham Fleming were polemical Protestants, the former a Grindalian reformer, the latter aggressively anti-Catholic. One of the five booksellers who subsidized the project, Thomas Woodcock, had been imprisoned in 1578 for selling Cartwright's Puritan Admonition to Parliament.²³ He had also, interestingly, transcribed his own manuscript of Cavendish's Life, which suggests that he was rather more than a bookseller.²⁴ Richard Stanyhurst, on the other hand, had been a private pupil of Campion at Oxford, with whom he returned to Ireland, and whose influence undoubtedly affected his religion. On 26 November 1580 Stanyhurst was examined by Robert Beale, secretary to the Privy Council, about a purported plot for conveying Gerald Fitzgerald, Lord Offaley, into Spain at the instigation of a Catholic priest, and briefly imprisoned.²⁵ Shortly afterwards he left England for the Continent, converted explicitly to Catholicism, and conspired with Catholic exiles in Flanders. As for the brilliant Jesuit scholar Campion himself, his views on Wolsey were preserved by Fleming, although it was Fleming who enthusiastically recorded Campion's execution for treason in 1581.

Francis Thynne was the son of the famous editor of Chaucer and a friend of Sir Thomas Egerton, Elizabeth's solicitor-general in the 1580s and the chief prosecutor in the case of Campion. Thynne was essentially an antiquary, a member of the Society of Antiquaries formed around William Camden. Although he has been seen as the dullest and most cautious of the team,²⁶ Thynne was the contributor most directly embarrassed by the censorship of the 1587 edition, during which four of the several massive catalogues of office-holders he had contributed were all deleted. His catalogue of archbishops, though largely translated from Archbishop Matthew Parker's lives of seventy bishops in De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae, presumably fell prey to the Privy Council's sensitivity to religious dispute.²⁷ Ironically, one catalogue that escaped—Thynne's list of the constables of England—contains material that is quite as sensitive, not least because Thynne had prefaced it with the following provocative statement:

The death of this duke of Buckingham, being the last constable of England, dooth present apt place to me wherein to insert the names of all such honorable persons as have beene invested with that title of the constableship of England, an office of great account, & such as sometime was the chefest place of a temporall subject in the relme the (high steward excepted) [sic] whose power did extend to restreine some actions of the kings. Wherefore being now no such office (for there was never anie advanced thereunto since the beheading of this duke) I thinke it not unmeet to make some memorie of those persons possessing so high place, least both they and their office might hereafter grow in utter oblivion.

(3:865-66; italics added)

It has been shown that the ancient feudal office of Constable was recognized during the late sixteenth century as a constitutional tinderbox, one that had attracted the attention of Thomas Starkey, John Ponet, and Francis Legh, another member of the Society of Antiquaries, and that can be linked to efforts by the second earl of Essex in the 1590s to establish the office of earl marshal in similarly dangerous terms.²⁸ But because Thynne's catalogue of the Constables was inserted into the reign of Henry VIII, and therefore not recognized as new material when the new edition was called in January 1587, it survived for the use of Shakespeare, who turned to it with scrupulous attention for Buckingham's farewell speech.²⁹

Finally there was John Stow, who liked to be known as “Citizen,” and who alone of the scholarly team began life below the middle class, as apprentice to a tailor. But he was a formidable autodidact, and soon acquired a reputation as an antiquarian and bibliophile, accepted by the Society of Antiquaries. His 1565 Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles, though addressed to a broad citizen audience, was dedicated to Leicester. On 8 March 1603 James I published Letters Patent commending Stow for his historical labors and authorizing him to “collect, amongst our loving Subjects, theyr voluntary contribution and kind gratuities … having already, in our owne person, of our speciall grace, begun the largesse, for the example of others.”³⁰ On the other hand, Stow had some skeletons in his closet. In 1568 he had been examined by the Privy Council on the charge of possessing Roman Catholic propaganda against Elizabeth; and in February 1569 a search of his house revealed “old fantastical books” with papist tendencies and “a great Parcel of old M.S. Chronicles, both in Parchment and Paper.”³¹ Moreover, in the preface to his Abridgement (1570), and as an aspect of their rivalry as producers of condensed chronicles for wider audiences, Richard Grafton had complained that Stow's Summarie had contributed “to the defacing of Princes doinges,” and that in his account of the past “the gates are rather opened for crooked subjectes to enter into the fielde of Rebellion, then the hedges or gaps of the same stopped.”³²

In fact, although Stow was suspected of Papist tendencies in the late 1560s, his work suggests a more evenhanded sympathy with the underdog, whoever he or she might be in the weathercock religion of the day. Stow was the owner of the manuscript diary now entitled the Chronicle of Queen Jane, now Harley MS 194, whose main focus is the rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger against Mary Tudor, to which the diarist is noticeably sympathetic, and he had followed this in his 1580 Chronicles. Given the extent to which he edited Cavendish's Life, we can infer something of Stow's own sympathies from the fact that he retains, for example, the speech of the captain of the London militia sent to repulse Wyatt, and who instead turned to his support:

We go about to fight against our native Countreymen of England and our native friends, in a quarrell unrightfull. … Wherefore I thinke no English heart ought to say against them, much lesse by fighting to withstande them.

(1079)

This speech stood for the opinions of those who opposed Mary's plans to marry Philip II and hence, it was feared, to bring England under “the rule of the proude Spanyardes.” Holinshed had similarly described how the whitecoats had rebelled, crying out as they did so, “We are all Englishmen, we are all Englishmen,” (4:13); and this, I would argue, was the larger message of the Chronicles as a whole. Since the Reformation had been launched in England by Henry VIII as a political and marital expedient, the chroniclers wished to register how extraordinarily complicated, even dangerous, life had become for subsequent generations, when every change of regime initiated a change in the official religion. What at one moment was loyalty, obedience, and piety could at the next be redefined as treason or heresy. As Francis Thynne ironically summed up the situation from the perspective of 1587 in his (subsequently censored) catalogue of archbishops:

King Edward the sixt being thus dead, his sister Marie obtained the crowne, made alteration of religion, set the before imprisoned bishops at libertie, restored them unto their see, and displaced other appointed thereunto in hir brothers time. Which bishops having now the sword in their hand, and full authoritie, stretched the same to the execution of their lawes, burning some, banishing others, and imprisoning the third sort: whereof, some were in life reserved untill the government of queene Elizabeth, and after advanced to places of great honor.³³

This is, evidently, the world of Henry VIII, and in the early seventeenth century there was more of the same to follow.

ADDING SHAKESPEARE TO THE TEAM

These, then, were the authors, separate and combined, to whom Shakespeare owed the composite account there published of the reign of Henry VIII. Is there any reason to suppose that the dramatist, whose care in reading the Chronicles is generally accepted, regarded himself as different ontologically (a great Author) from those who had collaborated hitherto in constructing the complex profile of the reign? My rhetorical question is addressed both to those who have defended Henry VIII on the grounds of its artistic improvements on the Chronicles and also to those who, like Brian Vickers, have reacted with alarm to Foucauldian attacks on the idea of authorship and the literary ideals of “signification, originality, unity, creation.”³⁴

But I do not intend this essay to be mistaken for any of the postmodern arguments against which Vickers erects his fortifications. My argument is restricted to Shakespeare's deployment of the English chronicle tradition in Henry VIII, a topic that Vickers omits. I propose that, in returning to that tradition at the end of his career, Shakespeare saw himself as merely one of a series of collaborators in a never-ending process of history writing, whose goals were public education, as much freedom of information as the chronicler dared to supply, and a definition of what it meant to be English that was broader and more tolerant of difference than what he had himself imagined at the beginning of his career, in the three plays of Henry VI.

Hence his urbane skepticism (to balance the mysticism of The Tempest) as to where historical truth resides. The word “truth” or “true” is foregrounded not only in the Prologue, in sentences ambiguous enough to require editorial assistance, but several times thereafter in contexts that emphasize truth's elusiveness in the arena of political reputation. So Buckingham, sentenced to death, claims that he is “richer than [his] base accusers, / That never knew what truth meant” (2.1.104-5). Other examples occur in the dispute between Katherine and Wolsey in court, when the Queen accused Wolsey of lying and he defends himself (2.4.88-90, 101-2); in Wolsey's defense of himself against the dukes who come to deprive him of the Great Seal (3.2.264-74); and, perhaps most significantly, in Henry's own warning to Cranmer that “not ever / The justice and the truth o' th' question carries / The due o' th' verdict with it” (5.1.129-31). These instances, one for each of the four historical persons tested by legal trial or accusation, acquire more potency if seen against the background of the Chronicles. The truth of the accusations against Buckingham is left undecided in Shakespeare's play, as it was by Raphael Holinshed, who remarked:

These were the speciall articles & points comprised in the indictment, and laid to his charge: but how trulie, or in what sort prooved, I have not further to say, either in accusing or excusing him other than as I find in Hall and Polydor, whose words in effect, I have thought to impart to the reader, and without anie parciall wresting of the same either to or for. …

(3:864; italics added)

Shakespeare, surely, also assimilated the skepticism about truth that was articulated during Katherine's trial, as told by Cavendish via Stow via Fleming:

The kings councell alleaged the matrimonie not to be lawfull at the beginning, because of the carnall copulation had betweene prince Arthur and the queene. This matter was verie vehementlie touched on that side, and to proove it, they alleaged manie reasons and similitudes of truth: and being answered negatively againe on the other side, it seemed that all their former allegations were doubtfull to be tried, and that no man knew the truth.

(Chronicles, 3:908; italics added)

Because of this indeterminacy (a polite name for what happens when the government has a case to make and somebody disagrees), Henry, in frustration, sends the two cardinals to put pressure on the queen privately to withdraw her opposition to the divorce.

It is to Stow's edited version of Cavendish, we should remember, that we owe the highly sympathetic presentation of Queen Katherine's trial and its sequel in Katherine's chambers. Shakespeareans have been so worried by the dependence of the corresponding scenes in Henry VIII on the text of the Chronicles that they have downplayed how literary was the source here, how much more than the vocabulary of Katherine's speeches Shakespeare inherited, how dramatic the details provided, including the seating in Blackfriars, whereby the queen was symbolically separated from her husband. Even the collaborationists assume that Shakespeare wrote the following stage direction: “The Queen makes no answer, rises out of her chair, goes about the court, comes to the King, and kneels at his feet: then speaks.” Who, then, wrote the following sentence: “And because shee could not come to the king alreadyie, for the distance severed betweene them, shee went about by the court, and came to the king, kneeling downe at his feet, to whom she said in effect as followeth”? Well, Abraham Fleming inserted it and the speech that follows into Holinshed's much briefer account of the trial. He found these identical words in Stow's Chronicles (960), but Stow had edited what he found in his manuscript of Cavendish, where the autograph manuscript reads as follows:

[She] rose uppe incontynent owt of hir chayer where as she satt / And bycause she cowld not come dyrectly to the kyng / for the distaunce whiche severed theme / she toke payn to goo abought unto the kyng knelyng down at his feete in the sight of all the Court & assemble / To whome she sayd in effect / in broken Englysshe, as folowythe / : …³⁵

The disappearance of that phrase, “in broken Englysshe,” seemingly so small an intervention, has the effect of rendering Katherine more English, more a part of the community that now wishes to exclude her.

Shakespeare could not have known of this aspect of Stow's intervention, though he clearly understood that the Chronicles saw Katherine as a sympathetic figure. And he certainly grasped the ideological significance of “English” in the scene that follows (which the collaborationists assign to Fletcher). Here, too, the dependence of the playtext on the narrative that has traveled from Cavendish via Stow via Fleming into the 1587 Chronicles is well known. What is not observed is the series of transformations that make “speaking English” a test of probity. What Cavendish wrote was simply this: “Than began my lord to speake / to hir in latten / Nay good my lord / quod she, speke to me in Englysshe I beseche you / allthoughe I understand latten,” (88). What Stow wrote, and Fleming copied, was this: “Then began the Cardinall to speake to hir in Latine, nay good my Lord (quoth she) speake to me in English” (964). What Shakespeare wrote was this:

Wolsey.
Tanta est erga te mentis integritas, regina serenissima—
[Such is the integrity of my mind towards you, most serene queen]
Katherine.
O, good my lord, no Latin;
I am not such a truant since my coming,
As not to know the language I have liv'd in.
A strange tongue makes my cause more strange, suspicious;
Pray speak in English. Here are some will thank you,
If you speak truth. …

(3.1.40-46; italics added)

As Shakespeare develops the Englishness of Katharine from the barest hint in the Chronicles, he brings to the surface and extends their larger and more generous proposal: a true nationalism will be able to value a Roman Catholic Spanish queen (and one who, incidentally, adopts a most unfeminine unsubmissiveness in her own defense) as much or more as Cranmer, a Protestant archbishop. The English language comes to stand not for Anglo-centrism, but for something close to its opposite: for candor, openness, and fairness—all of which have been sorely scanted in the series of trials on which the play is structured.

As Francis Thynne ironically summed up the end of Cranmer's story in his censored catalogue of archbishops, in Mary's reign “he was consumed to ashes”: “a death not read before to have happened to anie archbishop, who as he was the first that publikelie impugned by established lawes the popes authoritie in England, so was he the first metropolitane that was burned for the same” (4:744). Shakespeare's decision to end his play with the birth of Elizabeth and a prophecy of James I seems a more optimistic version of the rule that history must continue where fiction is free to end. As even Shakespeare's Cranmer remarks as he ends his vision of Jacobean serenity, “Would I had known no more.”

But it is no coincidence that the one Caroline production of the play for which we have a record was “bespoken of purpose” by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, Charles I's dangerous favorite, in July 1628, in the context of parliamentary calls for his indictment and a few days before his assassination. This event belongs to the larger story of seventeenth-century struggles over politics and religion, struggles that also provoked the 1641 publication of Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, accompanied by “A true Description or rather a Parallel betweene Cardinall Woolsey … and William Laud.”³⁶

What, therefore, can we conclude, by the time that Shakespeare has completed his survey and analysis of the available chronicle material, is included in the “All” of All Is True? First, it is evidently true that there is more than one religion in England's recent past with claims to being the one true Church; and that by the late 1630s, if not in 1613, the state religion more resembles that of Wolsey than of Cranmer. Second, that all early modern historians probably believed in, and several dutifully pronounced, the requirement for truth at all costs defined in Cicero's De oratore (2.15.62-63), which as rephrased by Giraldus Cambrensis at the beginning of his account of Henry II, appears as my opening gambit also. But, third, because of the difference in religious beliefs, the early modern historian's task was harder still than that of the medieval one. He or she had, ideally, to represent diversity of opinion. It was not that nothing is true nor that truth is as you like it nor even that all's well that ends well, but that everybody does the best they can at the moment and from their own perspective. And for Shakespeare, who of dramatic necessity held multiple perspectives, returning to the English chronicles at the end of his own career led to the discovery of a title implying that he, at least, was not naive. Thereafter he abandoned the theater.

Notes

1. Samuel Schoenbaum, ed., The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth (New York: New American Library, 1967), xxii-xl.

2. It is well known that the scenes in act 5 that deal with Gardiner's enmity to Cranmer derive from John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. This essay deals only with Shakespeare's debt to “Holinshed's” Chronicles.

3. See, for example, John Margeson, ed., King Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17.

4. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 28-29, 618-19.

5. Julia Gasper, “The Reformation Plays on the Public Stage,” in Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 207. While her reading of the play is far from unsympathetic, she points out that its “sunny picture of an Erastian solution is only arrived at by skirting the whole issue of persecution,” that “the play gives the impression that there was a smooth transition from Henry's reign to that of Elizabeth.” It is not clear whether she thinks that this and other examples of “tactful distortion” were intended to pull the wool over people's eyes or to be noticed as distortions, which would have the opposite effect.

6. Judith Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 126.

7. Acts of the Privy Council, 1586-87, ed. J. R. Dasent (London, 1901), 311-12. For a full discussion of this event and its consequences, see my Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 237-39, 257-63.

8. Anderson also cites this speech. See Biographical Truth, 152.

9. The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1587), 3:922.

10. The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (London, 1577), 3:1556. I assume that Shakespeareans will have the text of Henry VIII in front of them for comparison. It is worth noting that the one phrase notably omitted by Griffith from Campion's assessment, “vitious of his body,” appears in Katherine's, with Hall's Union as its source. The praise and dispraise are therefore more clearly separated than they were in the Chronicles.

11. Edward Hall was the son of prominent Protestant reformers, and although his loyalty to Henry VIII required considerable discretion, the tone of his Union with respect to the Reformation resulted in its being banned by Mary in 1555.

12. Stow's manuscript, now MS. Lambeth 179, was described by Richard Sylvester in his edition of the Life. It was owned by Sir Peter Manwood in 1598, and Stow recorded his role in the transcription on fol. 313v: “Wrytten by my man Rich. I borrowed ye originall of Mr. John Burrowes / John Stow.” See Richard Sylvester, ed., The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959; EETS, o.s., no. 243), 285.

13. British Library Egerton MS Egerton 2402. See Sylvester, ed., Life and Death of Wolsey, ix, xxvi. On the flyleaf of this manuscript Cavendish wrote that he finished his book on 24 June 1558. It was written, therefore, in Mary's reign, and Cavendish might have supposed that a biography so sympathetic to Wolsey could have seen publication, but Mary died in November of that same year. Cavendish had entered Wolsey's service as gentleman usher about 1522, and was therefore in an excellent position to give details about the cardinal's lifestyle, with which the biography is overconcerned.

14. Ibid., 271; see also P. L. Wiley, “Renaissance Exploitation of Cavendish's Life of Wolsey,” Studies in Philology 43 (1946): 130.

15. Anderson also believes that Shakespeare separately consulted Stow's 1592 edition of his chronicle, published under the title of Annales, a suggestion about which I am skeptical, given that it is not supported by the same kind of verbatim borrowing that marks Shakespeare's use of the 1587 Chronicles.

16. See, for example, R. A. Law, “The Double Authorship of Henry VIII,” Studies in Philology 61 (1959): 471-88. Law's position, articulated in his earlier “Holinshed and Henry the Eighth,” Texas Studies in English 36 (1957): 3-11, was that there is much greater dependence on Holinshed in the parts ascribed to Fletcher. I regard this account as untenable.

17. Stephen Booth, The Book Called Holinshed's Chronicles (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1968), 72.

18. C. L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913), 274.

19. See F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967), 168.

20. Ibid., 183-84.

21. F. J. Levy, “Holinshed in Context,” paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, December, 1986.

22. See my Reading Holinshed's Chronicles. In order to keep the documentation of this essay within the required limits, readers are requested to consult the Chronicles, especially for the biographies of the chroniclers.

23. See Ronald B. McKerrow, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland, and Ireland … (London, 1910), 300.

24. The manuscript is now Bodleian MS Jones 14. Woodcock's signature appears on fol. 97. See Sylvester, ed. Life and Death of Wolsey, 280.

25. Colm Lennon, Richard Stanihurst the Dubliner, 1547-1618 (Blackrock, County Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981), 40-41; See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1547-80, 689.

26. Vernon Snow, Holinshed's Chronicles (1:ii) asserts, without giving a reference, that Thynne was “a controversial writer who had been in prison for suspected treason several years earlier.” However attractive this statement is to my thesis, I have been unable to corroborate it. Thynne was in prison for debt and appealed to Burghley for assistance, but this seems more like bad luck than bad judgment.

27. See Elizabeth Story Donno, “Some Aspects of Shakespeare's Holinshed,” Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987): 238.

28. See Richard McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 90-95. McCoy also notes a connection between Essex and Thynne, who as soon as Essex became Lord Marshal prepared for him another of his catalogues defining the office and its previous holders (90). This catalogue now exists as BL Cotton MS, Vespasian 114.

29. Thynne's account ran as follows: “Henrie Stafford, whome our chronicles doo in manie places corruptlie terme Edward, was sonne to Humfrie earle Stafford, & was high constable of England, and duke of Buckingham. This man raising warre against Richard the third usurping the crowne, was in the first yeare of the reigne of the said Richard, being the yeare of Christ 1483, betraied by his man Humfrie Banaster (to whome being in distresse he fled for succour) and brought to Richard the third then lieng at Salisburie, where the said duke confessing all the conspiracie, was beheaded without arreignement or judgement” (869). Henry VIII 2.1.107-11 is a very close versification of this passage. We do not, of course, know whether Shakespeare used a complete or a “castrated” copy of the Chronicles, since some of the former escaped the censorship.

30. A copy of the printed Letters Patent is bound into Harley MS 367, fol. 10, #8. See also John Strype, ed., A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster … by John Stow (London, 1720), 1:xi, xiii.

31. See Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 2:312, where it is recorded that on 24 February 1569 the Bishop of London sent to the Privy Council a list of thirty-eight “unlawful books” found in Stow's possession, including recent recusant works by Thomas Dorman, Thomas Heskyns, Robert Pointz, John Rastell, Richard Shacklock, and Thomas Stapleton. For the “great Parcell” of chronicles, see The Great Chronicle of London, ed. A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley (London: G. W. Jones, 1938), xvi.

32. See C. L. Kingsford, ed., A Survey of London by John Stow, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1908), 1:ix-xii. Kingsford also provided a biography of Stow (1:vi-lxvii).

33. Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (London, 1808), 4:742. Since unexpurgated copies of the 1587 edition are rare, I cite the nineteenth-century edition in which the castrated sections are restored.

34. Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 161-62.

35. Sylvester, ed., The Life and Death of Wolsey, 80.

36. See ibid., 272-73.