SOURCE: “Dramatic Mode and Historical Vision in Henry VIII, in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer, 1986, pp. 175-89.

[In the following essay, Dean contends that while Henry VIII shares many of the dramatic elements of the late romances, it also adheres closely to its chronicle sources.]

In her recent book Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing, Judith H. Anderson includes a chapter on Henry VIII in which she neatly observes, “Divorce is more than an historical problem and event in Henry VIII. It is a theme in a broader and more conceptual way, involving the disjunction of inner and outer and private and public lives.”¹ Indeed, the two problems which have dominated modern criticism of the play—its authorship and the exact nature of its genre—are both also, in a sense, problems of divorce: Shakespeare versus Fletcher, History versus Romance. A temporary settlement of the first case seems to have been reached, and in the rest of this essay I will refer to the author(s), without prejudice, as “Shakespeare.” The second, generic, argument is less accommodating.² Here both disputants could, equally well, be called “History,” since what is at issue is not whether the play is a history play but what kind of history play it is. “Romance” and “History” are not, after all, mutually exclusive terms: the use of “history” as a synonym for “chronicle history” has blinkered our understanding of Shakespeare's earliest essays in the genre, the Henry VI trilogy,³ and it may do the same for Henry VIII. Thanks to the equating of “Romance” with “Last Play,” and to the neglect of romance history as a form, it has been possible for Henry VIII to be disparaged by one party for not being like Cymbeline⁴ and by another for not being like Henry V.⁵

Source study has established that, while aspects of the dramatic technique of Henry VIII link it with Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest,⁶ it is also exceptionally close to its chronicle sources: R. A. Foakes asserts that “some speeches are little more than Holinshed or Foxe versified,”⁷ while, to J. C. Maxwell, its adherence to a narrow time span (1520 to 1533) and its employment of three main “blocks” of Holinshed make it “one of the least complex of Shakespeare's history plays.”⁸ Certainly, its structure is a retreat from the dazzling dexterity of 1 and 2 Henry IV to the relative simplicity of the Henry VI plays (I shall return to this later), but the question remains: why, if its debt to the chronicles is so straightforward and extensive, does there continue to be uncertainty about its genre?

Further complications occur when the play is viewed in relation to its dramatic analogues. Everyone agrees that when the Prologue warns that

                                                                                                    they
That come to hear a merry bawdy play,
A noise of targets, or to see a fellow
In a long motley coat guarded with yellow,
Will be deceiv'd …

(ll. 13-17)

he is referring to Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me (1605), reprinted and revived in 1613, the same year that Henry VIII seems first to have been produced; but the allusion has been misinterpreted—most puzzlingly by Geoffrey Bullough's markedly farfetched claim that When You See Me “provided a springboard for [Shakespeare's] imagination.”⁹ To doubt whether Rowley's play is a “source” of Shakespeare's in the conventional sense is not, of course, to deny its presence in Shakespeare's mind as he composed;¹⁰ but, as the above quotation from the Prologue makes clear, it served mainly as a mental note of what he did not intend to do with his material. Apart from When You See Me there are a number of earlier plays set in the reign of Henry VIII: Sir Thomas More (1592-93), Thomas, Lord Cromwell (1599-1602), and two lost plays, Chettle's The Life of Cardinal Wolsey (1601) and The Rising of Cardinal Wolsey (1601) by Chettle, Drayton, Munday, and Smith. These in their turn were—or, in the case of the lost plays, were presumably—influenced by Shakespeare's earlier history plays up to and including Henry V, so that, in reacting to them, Shakespeare is reacting at one remove to his own previous practice.¹¹

The most obvious difference between Henry VIII and these earlier plays is its lack of a double plot. The two Henry IV plays had brought to perfection the balanced relationship between serious and light-hearted storylines. This, the most influential of Shakespeare's contributions to historical drama, is specifically rejected by the Prologue quoted above. To omit a comic subplot is to omit opportunities for diversification of mood, to narrow perspective, and to distance the audience from the play by giving them no characters with whom they can easily identify.¹² The single comic scene in Henry VIII (V.iii) is not notably successful as comedy, and as Eckhard Auberlen notes, its main emphasis is on keeping the common people out of the great State occasion rather than on letting them in.¹³ We, as readers and audience, are made to feel remarkably far from the action in much of the play; repeatedly we eavesdrop on reports of events rather than witnessing the events themselves.¹⁴ While this succeeds in making the thematic point that we apprehend history largely through other people's interpretations of it, the result is a detached or even aloof atmosphere; Henry VIII refuses, until its very end, to appeal to the nationalism which earlier history plays—both “romance” and “chronicle”—had successfully tapped. Similarly, the avoidance of a comic subplot eliminates the chance to evoke sympathetic laughter from us. This explains in part why many readers find the play so stubbornly cerebral.

A second difference between Henry VIII and the previous non-Shakespearean plays is that the earlier plays all adopt a “biographical” approach, tracing the career of a single central figure at Henry's court, or, in the case of When You See Me, the actions of the King himself. In this they are “chronicle”-oriented in a basic sense, like their non-dramatic sources. Unity resides in the eponymous character: plot issues from his changing fortunes. Conversely, in Henry VIII “the structure … is more important than the characters,”¹⁵ no single character being allowed to be the focus of interest; attempts to identify Wolsey, Katherine or even Henry as the “central” character are misguided. It is here that the similarity to the Henry VI trilogy, noted above, makes itself felt. If we accept Howard Felperin's distinction between Shakespeare's earlier history plays as being interested in “the rigors of time, which implies cause and effect,” and Henry VIII as interested in “the restitutions of process, which implies only sequence,”¹⁶ we must resist the implication that the play is merely an episodic collection of brief lives. Rather, like the Henry VI plays, it subordinates character to a “wavelike” method of plotting, involving successive cycles of action, each centering temporarily on one character.¹⁷ Not even England herself is the “hero”; the play is not an epic.¹⁸ Its technique is a translation into dramatic terms of the undulations of the Wheel of Fortune which controls the action; as many critics have realized, the sequence of “falls” (Buckingham, Katherine, Wolsey) is not a series of self-contained tableaux but an overlapping of interrelated fates. Neither is the play a dramatized Mirror for Magistrates.¹⁹ Plot exists not as an organic and cumulative movement toward a single concluding point, but as a frieze in which a number of characters are systematically compared and contrasted. Since no single character is indispensable, the dramatist is freed to explore the larger movements of history to which all are subject. It has been rightly said that “the play emphasizes the uncertainties of history in order to question the availability of an ‘omniscient’ perspective on historical events.”²⁰

Third, Henry VIII, unlike its precursors, refuses to be drawn into extensive discussion of ethical, political, and religious controversies, and some critics' attempts to give it topical or allegorical significance seem to me quite misconceived.²¹ The implications of Henry's divorce are restricted to questions of “conscience,” Katherine's appeal to him is on an entirely personal level, and while sectarianism is mentioned in connection with the nobles' dislike of Cromwell and Cranmer, it is not the center of thematic interest. The role of Providence is frequently referred to but never genuinely explored—a feature which recalls Shakespeare's alterations of his sources in King John. Conventional moralizing on divine justice is supplied when characters fall from prosperity, but, as with much else in the play, we are uncertain how far to take the moralizing at face value.

What, then, of the relationship between history and romance in Henry VIII, compared with that in its predecessors? In Henry V, Shakespeare presented his hero as an archetypal romance figure while maintaining an undertone of skepticism about the ability of such an idealized figure to sustain the burdens of government: chronicle, so to speak, kept breaking in.²² In both Thomas, Lord Cromwell and Sir Thomas More, romance is evoked, largely through the medium of comedy. The former play presents us with an episode in which Hodge, a blacksmith, changes clothes with the Earl of Bedford so that the Earl can escape from hostile Bononia to England. Hodge has a wonderful time, marveling, for instance, that the fleas in his new clothes do not bite him, presumably out of instinctive respect for the aristocracy. The playwright does not use this stock situation of the clown and the nobleman changing places to moralize on the class system; his aim is simply to entertain and to hint that politics is not so serious a matter. However, side by side with the Hodge antics is the “chronicle” matter of Cromwell's and Wolsey's rise and fall. Cromwell justifies his ambition early in the play (I.ii.63-73)²³ by reminding himself that Wolsey was also of humble origin. As Cromwell's prosperity begins, a speech by Sir Christopher Hales implicitly warns that the parallel between Cromwell and Wolsey may have its dark side:

O how vncertaine is the wheele of State.
Who latelie greater then the Cardinall,
For feare, and loue? and now who lower lies?
Gaye honours are but Fortunes flatteries,
And whom this day pride and promotion swels,
To morrow enuie and ambition quels.

(IV.i.40-45)

Cromwell and Wolsey, like Hodge, may find themselves transformed in an instant, but for them the outcome will not be comical.

Similarly, in Sir Thomas More, the “chronicle” matter of More's rise and fall is interspersed with comic episodes such as More's aiding and abetting Lifter, a pickpocket, to rob the judge who is about to sentence him, and the tricking of Erasmus by dressing up More's servant Randall to look like the Lord Chancellor. These moments of release and escape in Sir Thomas More, like those in Thomas, Lord Cromwell, have a serious point, however. They emphasize, from a different perspective, the imperative need for social order voiced by More in his great speech to the mob in Act II. Let them imagine that their requests for the expulsion of foreigners had been granted, he says,

And that you sytt as kinges in your desyres,
Aucthoryty quyte sylenct by your braule,
And you in ruff of your opynions clothd;
What had you gott? I'le tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand shoold preuayle,
How ordere shoold be quelld. …

(II.iv.97-102)²⁴

According to More, the Dick Whittington mentality among the Londoners must be discouraged or anarchy will follow.

These qualities derive, of course, from the non-dramatic sources, the biographies of Wolsey and More.²⁵ Nonetheless, the authors of Thomas, Lord Cromwell and Sir Thomas More choose their own emphasis, and they show awareness of the disjunction or divorce that may exist between a “chronicle” view of history with its affinities to tragedy, and a “romance” one with its affinities to comedy. This is something they share with Henry VIII, for, despite its differences from their techniques and from that of Shakespeare's earlier histories, the play reveals a continuing interest in the relationship between apparently antithetical modes of perceiving history. I shall now suggest how we might apprehend this interest.

I

From the outset of Henry VIII it is possible to see a dialectical movement from romance to chronicle history: in this respect the first scene is a paradigm of the first four acts of the play. The Field of the Cloth of Gold was, in fact, a flamboyantly artificial event, a deliberate evocation of the romance world, and Norfolk reports it in appropriate terms, referring to the English and French kings as “suns of glory” (I.i.6), whose alliance unites their separate majesties into a single image of magnificence, “pomp … married / To one above itself” (I.i.15-16), which is celebrated in a masque whose participants included Frenchmen “All clinquant, all in gold” (l. 19) and pages “As cherubins, all gilt” (l. 23). Reality is transcended by this splendor until the limits of human action and imagination, the bounds of history itself, are surpassed:

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

(I.i.35-38)

The heroism of legendary romance is both summoned and authenticated. Buckingham voices incredulity—“O you go far”—but Norfolk insists that “All was royal” (l. 42). Buckingham then mocks the rhetorical high style that Norfolk has been using:

                                                                                Who did guide—
I mean, who set the body and the limbs
Of this great sport together, as you guess?

(I.i.45-47)

and, on being told it was Wolsey, he provides an alternative perspective from which to view the ceremonies: they become “fierce vanities” (l. 54) whose costliness has ruined many noblemen, and all for “communication of / A most poor issue” (I.i.86-87). Romance is banished; political calculation is revealed beneath the outward show, calculation on the part of Wolsey, the outsider, with no high ancestry or personal distinction, relying on “the force of his own merit” (l. 64). It is notable that Buckingham was not himself present at the ceremonies: his dismissal of a dazzling image of royal power is ironically followed by his painful experience of the exercise of that power, as he is arrested for treason. His closing comment—

I am the shadow of poor Buckingham,
Whose figure even this instant cloud puts on
By dark'ning my clear sun …

(I.i.224-26)

—echoes the imagery of the scene's opening only to reverse it, just as the scene's mode has been reversed. The romance of monarchy turns into “device and practice” (l. 204).

Movement between romance and political reality is evident in many other scenes as well. Consider the banquet in I.iv, which dramatizes a real incident of 1527.²⁶ The scene opens with gallantly amorous dialogue between Lord Sands and the ladies, the “sweet society of fair ones” (l. 14). The words “fair” and “noble” are used constantly, Anne Bullen exclaiming at length, “You are a merry gamester, / My Lord Sands,” to which Sands roguishly replies, “Yes, if I make my play” (I.iv.45-46). So far all is courtliness and dalliance. And even when this is interrupted by drum, trumpet, and cannon shot, with Wolsey's reassuring the ladies “By all the laws of war y'are privileg'd” (l. 52), the tone of playful badinage remains unbroken. Indeed, the entrance of a troop of “foreign” shepherd-masquers who take the ladies out to dance heightens the ceremonial. Both Romance and politics are transfigured into formalized ritual.²⁷ When Wolsey intrudes, identifying the King among the masquers,²⁸ the illusion is broken, but the amorous conversation continues; Henry has been smitten by Anne Bullen. The mask is removed only to reveal another image, the image of the King, and again political reality is perceived beneath a glamorous façade.

To clinch the point we can consider two briefer examples. In II.iii, Anne Bullen talks to an unnamed Old Lady about Queen Katherine. Anne expresses pity for the Queen's misfortunes “after / So many courses of the sun enthroned, / Still growing in a majesty and pomp” (II.iii.6-8), and she utters a commonplace sentiment of pastoral romance:

I swear, 'tis better to be lowly born,
And range with humble livers in content,
Than to be perk'd up in a glist'ring grief
And wear a golden sorrow.
.....                                                  By my troth and maidenhead,
I would not be a queen.

(II.iii.19-24)

Anne's pastoral statement is immediately deflated by her companion:

                                                                                                    Beshrew me, I would,
And venture maidenhead for't, and so would you
For all this spice of your hypocrisy.

(II.iii.24-26)

Again, in IV.i, the detailed stage directions indicate that the Coronation of Anne as Queen is to be staged with much elaboration of the trappings of civic, ecclesiastical, and royal office. This Romance splendor is immediately followed by a dialogue between the choric Gentlemen who represent the court. In the dialogue, we are offered an elevated description of Anne as “an angel,” with “the sweetest face I ever look'd on” (IV.i.43-44)—but also an Anne whose body offers the King “all the Indies in his arms”; “I cannot blame his conscience,” says the Gentleman. Of the assembled nobles, we are told that “These are stars indeed,” to which the First Gentleman replies, “And sometimes falling ones” (ll. 54-55). In these scenes, as elsewhere, we see both the evocation of Romance and its undermining by “chronicle” habits of thought as a major feature of the play's structural technique.

Insofar as Wolsey is the architect of political power in the play, he appears profoundly subversive of Romance values. Norfolk objects that

          this imperious man will work us all
From princes into pages: all men's honours
Lie like one lump before him, to be fashion'd
Into what pitch he please.

(II.ii.46-49)

—an objection echoed in Katherine's words to Wolsey and Campeius, “Ye turn me into nothing” (III.i.114). Wolsey's base origins prompt him to try to reduce any potential opponent to even more abject depths, with the paradoxical result that his victims, and eventually he himself, stripped of superfluous worldly dignities, confront their real selves and so rise above adversity.²⁹ Each character who “falls” does so from an idealized self-image to the truth about themselves, a movement analogous to the transition from Romance to Chronicle: every “fall” in outward rank is accompanied by a rise in moral virtue. Honor can, apparently, emerge untarnished even from pitch.

I have referred several times to “reality” and to “the truth”—words which are subjected to profound scrutiny in this play which was also, it seems, known as All is True.³⁰ How do we arrive at historical truth? If the question is not answered by the play it is certainly raised many times, and I want now to examine some of these.

II

As I have mentioned before, I.i is microcosmic of the play in its insistence on the second-hand nature of our acquaintance with historical events. We see this operating at other points in the play. I.ii is devoted to the Surveyor's narration of Buckingham's treasonable behavior. The thematic point of this is thrown into relief by what immediately precedes it, Henry's disconcerted learning, via Katherine, of the taxation Wolsey is imposing on the country in Henry's name. Wolsey disclaims responsibility by insisting that “I know but of a single part in aught / Pertains to th' state” (I.ii.41-42)—that is, he knows only what pertains to himself. Katherine sarcastically denies this:

                                                                                                    No, my lord,
You know no more than others; but you frame
Things that are known alike, which are not wholesome
To those which would not know them, and yet must
Perforce be their acquaintance.(31)

(I.ii.43-47)

—in other words, Wolsey assures the predominance of his views by manipulating the members of the Council. Wolsey in turn reacts by protesting that his actions and motives have been “Traduc'd by ignorant tongues” who are intent on being “The chronicles of my doing” (I.ii.72, 74). “Chronicles” need have no generic connotation, but the use of the word in connection with political double-dealing is striking. Wolsey goes on to say:

                                                                                          what we oft do best,
By sick interpreters (once weak ones) is
Not ours or not allow'd; what worst, as oft
Hitting a grosser quality, is cried up
For our best act.

(I.ii.81-85)

Wolsey's admission of the subjectivity and possible distortion of historical interpretation should warn Henry to attend circumspectly to the Surveyor, but it does not. His next question to Wolsey—“Have you a precedent / Of this commission?” (I.ii.91-92)—suggests why Henry is willing to accept the Surveyor's narration, which turns on the parallel between Buckingham and Buckingham's father during Richard III's time. Meanwhile Shakespeare drives his point home by showing Wolsey actively engaged in the distortion he has just been lamenting, as he instructs his secretary to report that he himself, not Henry, was the instigator of the remission of the hated tax.

Introducing the Surveyor's account, Wolsey acts as an interpreter to Henry, supplying him with stage directions and historical footnotes: “Please your highness note …” (I.ii.138). The Surveyor reports Buckingham as having threatened to play “the part my father meant to act upon / Th' usurper Richard” (ll. 195-96). The reference and the theatrical idiom recall Richard III and in so doing emphasize the very different kind of historical drama Shakespeare is now engaged upon.³² Despite the self-consciously “dramatic” detail of the narration, almost like a scriptwriter's visualization—

After ‘the duke his father’, with the ‘knife’,
He stretch'd him, and with one hand on his dagger,
Another spread on's breast, mounting his eyes
He did discharge a horrible oath. …

(I.ii.203-6)

—we are nonetheless overhearing rather than witnessing this, and are denied the superior knowledge of the truth furnished us in Richard III by our knowledge, gained through Richard's confidential soliloquies and asides, of the real motives he conceals from the other characters.

Similarly with Buckingham's trial. Clearly Shakespeare could not, for reasons of basic theatrical tact, show this and Katherine's trial in the one play. Still, we are told about it by the First Gentleman in II.i, which recalls I.i where Buckingham was the recipient, not the subject, of the report of a great State ceremony. The emphasis in II.i is again on Wolsey and his “trick of state” (l. 44) working behind the scenes. When Buckingham appears in person he draws a contrast between his father's fate and his own, for the explicit moral instruction of his hearers, describing his accusers as people who “never knew what truth meant” (II.i.105). His own insight into the “truth” of his fall is conveyed thus:

My noble father Henry of Buckingham,
Who first rais'd head against usurping Richard,
Flying for succour to his servant Banister,
Being distress'd, was by that wretch betray'd,
And without trial fell; God's peace be with him.
Henry the Seventh succeeding, truly pitying
My father's loss, like a most royal prince
Restor'd me to my honours; and out of ruins
Made my name once more noble. Now his son,
Henry the Eighth, life, honour, name and all
That made me happy, at one stroke has taken
For ever from the world. I had my trial,
And must needs say a noble one; which makes me
A little happier than my wretched father:
Yet thus far we are one in fortunes; both
Fell by our servants, by those men we lov'd most.

(II.i.107-22)

Here Buckingham is doing what old-fashioned critical orthodoxy always told us the Elizabethans did with history: he is drawing an ethically didactic moral from an historical comparison. His tracing of the rise and fall of his family mirrors the structure of the play as a whole. Yet even here his words cast doubt on the accuracy of his report. “I had my trial, / And must needs say a noble one”: the stress on the obligation to vindicate the fairness of his judges is a little disquieting. The concluding moral adds to the disquiet, emphasizing as it does the fickleness of those in whom we put our trust. The “chronicle history” method of recording the past seems to be under troubled scrutiny in this scene, as in I.ii.

In Katherine's trial (II.iv) we see her make similar use of historical precedent (in a way, the arguments about the Divorce were essentially arguments about how to interpret history, and they certainly gave a powerful thrust to developments in educated Englishmen's historical consciousness).³³ Claiming to have been a “true” wife to Henry, she grounds her self-defense partly on his own private knowledge of her fidelity, partly on matters of public record:

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

(II.iv.42-51)

She offers him the chance to sanction recorded history by accepting what, in her view, “is not to be question'd.” Henry, however, remains silent. Instead, Wolsey points to the presence of “the elect o'th'land” (II.iv.58) as Katherine's judges—as wise a council, he implies, as any available to Ferdinand and Henry VII. Wolsey effectively dismisses history, from a standpoint which sees truth, like circumstances, as relative: we are not surprised when Katherine denounces him as “not / At all a friend to truth” (II.iv.81-82). Wolsey replies, as he did in I.ii, by using her own weapon against her, saying his proceedings are “warranted / By a commission from the consistory” (II.iv.89-90) and, in a bold rhetorical move, appealing to Henry, as one who can “wound, / And worthily, my falsehood, yea, as much / As you have done my truth” (II.iv.94-96), to contradict him if he is lying. Henry remains complicitly silent, waiting until Katherine has gone before speaking in praise of her wifely virtues. When the trial proceeds without her, we observe Henry copying Wolsey by referring to others—Wolsey himself, Lincoln, the Archbishop of Canterbury—to support his account of his conscientious scruples about the marriage, and receiving the same tacit or voiced endorsement.

Wolsey's downfall, when it comes (III.ii), exhibits a strongly similar dramatic technique. The scene begins with Norfolk, Surrey, Suffolk, and the Lord Chamberlain plotting against Wolsey; Surrey rejoices “To meet the least occasion that may give me / Remembrance of my father-in-law, the duke, / To be reveng'd on him” (III.ii.7-9: the reference is to Buckingham). It is reported how Wolsey's letters to the Pope fell into Henry's hands; eventually we see Henry reading the papers while Norfolk gives another “stage direction” description of Wolsey's unease. Finally Henry speaks to Wolsey, beginning by recalling “My father lov'd you,” immediately qualifying this with “He said he did” (III.ii.154-55), teasing hyperbolic protestations of loyalty out of Wolsey, then showing his hand by returning the telltale letters. When the four plotters arrest him and demand the Great Seal, Wolsey refuses to surrender it—“words cannot carry / Authority so weighty. … / Till I find more than will or words to do it / … / I dare, and must deny it” (III.ii.233-38). With a rich irony he again appeals to more than secondhand evidence of the truth, showing the kind of respect for properly constituted authority which he scorned in Katherine. The words “true” and “truth” dominate the rest of the scene,³⁴ but by this time we have been prevented from any simpleminded endorsement of these concepts.

By these means we are prepared for IV.ii, in which Katherine asks Griffith, her gentleman-usher, how Wolsey met his fall: “If well, he stepp'd before me happily / For my example” (IV.ii.10-11).³⁵ Griffith gives a glowing report of Wolsey's meekness and resignation, which Katherine counters by criticizing his arrogance and corruption, to be countered in her turn by Griffith's rebuke that “Men's evil manners live in brass, their virtues / We write in water” (IV.ii.45-46).³⁶ Griffith goes on to “speak [Wolsey's] good,” stressing his generosity and final self-awareness. Katherine is swayed by this:

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: peace be with him.

(IV.ii.69-75)

This scene strikingly reduplicates, within the play, our experience of the play. It shows a debate over the character of an historical figure, viewed now as a political Machiavel, now as a notable moral exemplum. The poles of historical interpretation contained in the play are here openly opposed. Katherine's final verdict is a gesture towards Romance, in the sense of an ideal transfiguration of observable fact. This and her vision, which immediately follows, tip the balance of the play toward the “celestial harmony” and “eternal happiness” (IV.ii.80, 90) which are to be re-emphasized at its close, when Cranmer's prophetic vision of Elizabeth's glorious reign will subsume both chronicle and romance modes into an ahistorical vision not dependent on fallible human knowledge.³⁷ In this way Henry VIII uses Romance, as H. M. Richmond says, to “mitigate the sour dichotomy between moral and political distinction which had made Shakespeare's earlier history plays such ominous prefigurations of his great tragedies.”³⁸

III

My discussion in section II has illustrated a paradoxical feature of the play's treatment of history: Henry VIII thoroughly undermines our trust in the existence of “truth” or “fact,” yet it ends with a ringing assertion about the future which we are expected to take on trust. In part this is a kind of trick: the play's future was its original audience's past, and they were bound to assent to Cranmer's prophecy because they had seen its fulfillment. Yet, in another sense, Cranmer's speech is thoroughly prepared for, especially in its retreat from individual to type, from time to eternity. As I have remarked already, plot and characterization in Henry VIII stress pattern at the expense of fully articulated logic or psychology. Examination of its imagery leads to the same conclusion. We do not find individual characters being given idiosyncratic images: rather, phrases and images are echoed from one character to another.³⁹ The effect is to increase our consciousness of the dramatist as it diminishes our surrender to the medium: no single poetic image of the world is adequate to render the play's grasp of experience, just as no one character is substantial enough to dominate the events dramatized by the play. The “wavelike” nature of its structure extends into the smallest details of its verse rhythms. After a while we begin to detect a pattern of language which can, rather clumsily, be described as that of outdoing or overtaking. I shall resort to a selective list:

Till this time pomp was single, but now married
To one above itself. Each following day
Became the next day's master, till the last
Made former wonders, its.

(I.i.15-18)

                                                                                                    We may outrun
By violent swiftness that which we run at,
And lose by over-running: know you not
The fire that mounts the liquor till't run o'er
In seeming to augment it wastes it?

(I.i.141-45)

                                                                                he would outgo
His father by as much as a performance
Does an irresolute purpose.

(I.ii.207-9)

For further life in this world I ne'er hope,
Nor will I sue, although the king have mercies
More than I dare make faults.

(II.i.69-71)

                                                                                          May he live
Longer than I have time to tell his years.

(II.i.90-91)

                                                            But that slander, sir,
Is found a truth now; for it grows again
Fresher than e'er it was. …

(II.i.153-55)

                                                                      With your theme I could
O'ermount the lark.

(II.iii.93-94)

                                                                                          I have ventur'd
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth.

(III.ii.358-61)

                              The king has gone beyond me.

(III.ii.408)

It is no accident that the examples virtually cease after Wolsey's fall, since the play thereafter turns to Katherine's peaceful death and Henry's vindication of Cranmer, whose function in the play is to reverse Wolsey's and to put a halt to the series of “falls.”⁴⁰ The cadence of the passages I have quoted—miming a restless undulating movement, self-exhausting yet self-renewing—reappears, with unmistakably central significance, in symbolic terms during Cranmer's speech at Elizabeth's christening. Here, disclaiming any suspicion of “flattery” and insisting that his words are divinely prompted “truth” (V.iv.16), Cranmer initiates, instead of the rhythmic dying falls we have previously heard, a dynamic and cumulative movement: Elizabeth will be the cause of national blessings “Which time shall bring to ripeness”; she will be “A pattern to all princes living with her, / And all that shall succeed,” all the graces and virtues appropriate to monarchy “Shall still be doubled on her,” and “good grows with her” (V.iv.20, 22-23, 28, 32). Finally,

                                                                                          as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir
As great in admiration as herself,
So shall she leave her blessedness to one
(When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness)
Who from the sacred ashes of her honour
Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix'd.

(V.iv.39-47)

The Phoenix, which inhabits both time and eternity and is both an individual creature and a part of an endless cycle of regenerations, is a tour de force symbol whereby the play can resolve the contradictions of its historical vision.⁴¹ Moreover, this symbol has been foreshadowed in the structure of the play throughout, so that we can dismiss entirely Clifford Leech's verdict that

There could be no tight structure in this play, for it is truly a chronicle, beginning arbitrarily with the fall of Buckingham and ending arbitrarily with Anne's moment of splendour. Nothing is finally decided here, the pattern of future events being foreshadowed as essentially a repetition of what is here presented.⁴²

To regard Henry VIII as an amorphous or open-ended work seems wilfully perverse. It is true that, if we regard history as merely “chronicle,” as a de casibus series of undulating rises and falls, there is no reason why it should ever stop. But Shakespeare knew from the beginning the difficulties posed to the playwright by the lack of teleology in the chronicle form.⁴³ Neither in earlier work nor here is he content to see history as mere accumulating incident. Against chronicle he opposes the form of romance, a form often also thought to be hopelessly open-ended—one remembers the old orthodoxies about Malory—yet one which, because it is independent of temporal sequence, can impose spatial order upon its material. Not only in Cranmer's speech but repeatedly throughout the play this spatial sense of connection and extra-temporal extension of meaning is used to rescue chronicle history from collapse into meaningless subjectivity.

Thus, the final importance of the Phoenix is that it embodies the relationship, not only of the play's two major modes of historical perception, but between the actual form of the play and its subject. Here we have Shakespeare's last word on a problem with which he had been grappling throughout his career: the problem of the accommodation of the open, expansive movement of history within the closed, concentrated, and intensified movement of drama. Henry VIII, like the other “last plays,” demonstrates a fascination with technical experimentation which has been variously regarded as a glory and a curse: but whatever we think of it we cannot dismiss it as the work of an exhausted genius; it shows us the artist, like the Phoenix, ever in search of self-renewal.⁴⁴

Notes

1. (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1984), p. 126.

2. The main contributions to this debate are: Howard Felperin, “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: History as Myth,” Studies in English Literature, 6 (1966), 225-46 (incorporated in Felperin, Shakespearean Romance [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972]); Ronald Berman, “King Henry the Eighth: History as Romance,” English Studies, 48 (1967), 112-21; Hugh M. Richmond, “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: Romance Redeemed by History,” Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1968), 334-49; F. O. Waage, Jr., “Henry VIII and the Crisis of the English History Play,” ShakS, 8 (1975), 297-309; John F. Andrews, “Henry VIII: Shakespeare's Tragicomic Historical Romance,” in The Shakespeare Plays: A Study Guide (La Jolla: Univ. of California at San Diego, 1978), pp. 124-37; T. McBride, “Henry VIII as Machiavellian Romance,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 76 (1977), 26-39; John D. Cox, “Henry VIII and the Masque,” ELH, 15 (1978), 390-409; R. W. Uphaus, “History, Romance and Henry VIII,” Iowa State Journal of Research, 53 (1979), 177-83; E. I. Berry, “Henry VIII and the Dynamics of Spectacle,” ShakS, 12 (1979), 229-46; W. M. Baillie, “Henry VIII: A Jacobean History,” ShakS, 12 (1979), 247-66; Frank V. Cespedes, “‘We Are One in Fortunes’: The Sense of History in Henry VIII,” English Literary Renaissance, 10 (1980), 413-38. In subsequent notes these articles will be cited by author's surname only.

3. See Paul Dean, “Shakespeare's Henry VI Trilogy and Elizabethan ‘Romance’ Histories: The Origins of a Genre,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982), 34-48.

4. For a more sensible view see Bernard Harris, “‘What's Past is Prologue’: Cymbeline and Henry VIII,” in Later Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 8 (London: Arnold, 1966), 203-34.

5. E.g., Felperin. It is interesting that the historical Henry VIII's reign began with apparently conscious attempts to emulate Henry V; he commissioned the translation of Titus Livius's Life, which appeared in 1513 with a preface recommending him to model himself on his predecessor, and on the eve of the opening battle in his first French campaign he rode round the camp encouraging his men, as Henry V had done before Agincourt (J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII [London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1968], pp. 23, 35).

6. See the New Arden edition, King Henry VIII, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1957), pp. xxxvii-xlv, and Clifford Leech, “The Structure of the Last Plays,” Shakespeare Survey, 11 (1958), 19-30. I follow Foakes's edition for all references and quotations in this article.

7. Foakes, p. xxxv.

8. New Cambridge edition, King Henry VIII, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), p. xxx.

9. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, IV (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 441, contested by Foakes, p. xxxvii, n. 1; Maxwell, p. xxix.

10. For the possibility of some links between Rowley's and Shakespeare's portrayal of Henry, see Joseph Candido, “Fashioning Henry VIII: What Shakespeare Saw in When You See Me, You Know Me,” Cahiers Elisabethians, 23 (1983), 47-59.

11. Details of these plays are taken from S. Schoenbaum's revision of A. Harbage's Annals of English Drama 975-1700 (London: Methuen, 1964).

12. Bullough's description of the play as “‘chronicle-pageant’ rather than ‘chronicle-and-comedy’ or ‘epic-and-comedy’” (p. 443) is a lamentable misrepresentation.

13. Eckhard Auberlen, “King Henry VIII: Shakespeare's Break with the ‘Bluff-King-Harry’ Tradition,” Anglia, 98 (1980), 343.

14. See Pierre Sahel, “The Strangeness of a Dramatic Style: Rumour in Henry VIII,” ShS, 38 (1985), 131-43.

15. Foakes, p. xlv.

16. Felperin, p. 228.

17. Bullough, III, 168.

18. As maintained by G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (London: Methuen, 1947). See Foakes, p. xlvii and n. 2.

19. As implied by Frank Kermode, “What is Shakespeare's Henry VIII About?” Durham University Journal, ns 9 (1948), 48-55, and Richmond.

20. Cespedes, p. 417. His later claim that Henry functions as “a restless and amoral historical force” (p. 437) cannot be consistently maintained.

21. See Waage and Baillie (note 2) and Frances Yates, Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).

22. See Paul Dean, “Chronicle and Romance Modes in Henry V,” SQ, 32 (1981), 18-27, and J. Altieri, “Romance in Henry V,” SEL, 21 (1981), 223-40.

23. References are to the edition in C. F. Tucker Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918).

24. Quoted from Brooke. More's real-life reputation as a wit would doubtless have encouraged the dramatists to shape the play in this way.

25. These books receive outstanding treatment in Judith Anderson's Biographical Truth. See pp. 27-39 on Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, and pp. 40-51 on Roper's Life of More. Anderson provides new evidence that Cavendish's work was known to the author(s) of Henry VIII via Stow's Annals of 1592 (pp. 136-42).

26. See Foakes's headnote. Earlier royal incursions into romance (in the literary sense) had occurred in January 1510 when Henry and some of his courtiers, dressed as Robin Hood's men, burst into the Queen's chambers demanding a dance (Scarisbrick, p. 18), and on May Day 1515 when his celebrations included hunting and breakfasting with courtiers who acted the roles of Robin and his men (Carrolly Erickson, Great Harry: A Life of King Henry VIII [London: Dent, 1980], pp. 94-95).

27. Interestingly, Scarisbrick (p. 79) provides a similar interpretation of the Field of Cloth of Gold, which he sees as a formalized combat with the aim of defusing tension which might otherwise have resulted in a real war.

28. This is an alteration of Holinshed, who reports Wolsey as unmasking Sir Edward Nevill (Foakes, note on I.iv.85-86).

29. Cf. Norfolk's statement that “The king will know him [Wolsey] one day” and Suffolk's reply, “Pray God he do, he'll never know himself else” (II.ii.21-22), as well as Wolsey's own statement after his disgrace, “I know myself now …” (III.ii.378). David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 135-36, points out that the play's “falls” are not of the strict de casibus type since they are not seen as tragic within the total dramatic design. However, I am not persuaded by some of Kastan's other arguments, notably his excessively Providentialist reading of the play, which seems to me to oversimplify what Shakespeare purposely left complex.

30. See Foakes, pp. xxvi-xxvii. Kastan, p. 137, holds that “All is True” is not a statement implying the relativity of truth but an assertion of an unchanging extra-temporal truth. Judith Anderson, p. 126, takes the title as ironic.

31. The punctuation of lines 43-44 is Foakes's, following F4: Maxwell retains F's punctuation—“No, my lord? / You know no more than others?”—which seems superior.

32. In light of Richard III, it is notable that the elder Buckingham is here seen as teaching his son a bad example by rebelling, even against a “usurper.”

33. For details of this see Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 171-224.

34. See III.ii.272, 302, 397, 416, 423, 430, 448.

35. Cf. the retrospectively ironic exchange between Sands and the Lord Chamberlain, on Wolsey: “Men of his way … are set here for examples.” “True, they are so; / But few now give so great ones” (I.iii.60-62).

36. Cf. Buckingham on false friends who “fall away / Like water from ye” (II.i.129-30).

37. This is not the first prophecy in the play: for others see I.ii.168-71; III.ii.50-52, 73-74; IV.i.106-13.

38. Richmond, p. 348. On the question of “truth” discussed in this section, cf. R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 173-83, especially his interpretation of Katherine's “religious truth” as both “seeing what is good” in people and events and “the sense of providence operating through” them (p. 179). However I cannot agree with his claim that Henry is the central character whose authority resolves the play's contradictions (pp. 180, 182).

39. See notes 29, 35, and 36 above, and add, e.g., I.i.185-87 compared with I.ii.10-12; III.i.77-78 compared with III.ii.351; III.i.151-53 compared with V.iv.61-62.

40. This is signaled, for instance, by the symbolic contrast between Wolsey's having to render up the Great Seal, and Cranmer's production, before the hostile Council, of the King's ring as a sign of royal favor and protection in V.ii.

41. Cf. Lee Bliss, “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth,” ELH, 42 (1975), 1-25.

42. “The Structure of the Last Plays,” p. 29.

43. For a discussion of the chronicle form by a professional philosopher, which offers much of interest to the literary critic, see Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 112-42.

44. Two essays published since this paper was submitted deserve mention. Glynne Wickham, in “The Dramatic Structure of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth: an Essay in Rehabilitation,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 70 (1984), 149-66, argues that the play was originally staged by the King's Men in 1612 at the Blackfriars, a theatre standing on the actual site of Katherine's trial, and that Shakespeare intended to rehabilitate the reputation of Katherine at a time when James I was contemplating marrying his daughter to Philip III of Spain. This theory leads Wickham into some damaging over-simplifications: for example, he dismisses the Buckingham scenes as “non-events” (p. 159) and sees Wolsey as the diabolical servant of an Antichrist Pope (p. 152). The play's fusion of realism and romance is studied by Alexander Leggatt in “Henry VIII and the Ideal England,” ShS, 38 (1985), 131-43, an essay complementary to my own at several points.