SOURCE: “Grubbing Up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3, Autumn, 1988, pp. 291-306.

[In the following essay, Noling suggests that through the characters of Queen Katherine and Anne Boleyn, Shakespeare was endorsing kingly authority and the notion that the proper function of queens was to produce male heirs.]

In the romance world of The Winter's Tale, Leontes learns in his widowerhood to “care not for issue” (V.i.46),¹ vowing not to remarry for the sake of the succession; with Paulina's prompting, he concludes that Hermione is irreplaceable. But for anyone dramatizing the reign of King Henry VIII of England, an unavoidable subject is his obsession with begetting male heirs and his repeated substitution of one queen for another as the means to that end. Shakespeare,² preparing his Henry VIII (1613) under the patronage of James I, created a dramaturgy of queens that, although admitting some dissent against such an expedient use of queens, ultimately endorses Henry's patriarchal will. Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me (1605) had already dramatized Henry's bittersweet experience in gaining his one male heir, the future Edward VI, at the cost of his wife Jane Seymour, whom he loved. Shakespeare's Henry VIII, setting itself apart from both the tone and the historical matter of Rowley's “merry, bawdy play” (H8, Prologue, l. 14), instead dramatizes the substitution of queens culminating in the birth of Princess Elizabeth, that glorious failure of Henry's aspirations for a male successor.

To get Elizabeth born legitimately required a husbandry of queens even more ruthless than that advocated by perhaps the most despicable character in the play, Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester:

Gard.
The fruit she [Queen Anne] goes with
I pray for heartily, that it may find
Good time, and live; but for the stock, …
I wish it grubb'd up now.

(V.i.20-23)

This gardener would at least spare the fruit, Princess Elizabeth; King Henry, however, is willing both to grub up the stock and to discard the fruit when he divorces Queen Katherine and has their marriage, which has produced Princess Mary, declared “of none effect” (IV.i.33). But far from simply supporting Henry's dynastic strategies by minimizing Katherine's theatrical power, Shakespeare allows her generous stage exposure and a commanding presence as she resists nullification at the king's pleasure. Katherine's theatrical power should not, however, be misconstrued as a sign of Shakespeare's unalloyed feminism in the play,³ for it must be weighed with a contrasting dramaturgy defining the other queens. He keeps Princess Mary undramatized to avoid arousing sympathy for the daughter cast off by Henry while pursuing his desire for a son. Moreover, Shakespeare roots the dramatized Anne just deeply enough to serve Henry's dynastic purposes, so that by play's end the fruit, Elizabeth, does for the audience supplant the stock. Yet for all her promised glory, the future Queen Elizabeth does not satisfy the patriarch's urge for a male successor, nor does her birth alleviate his anxiety about depending on the female as a means to male heirs. Therefore, through dramatic narration, Shakespeare ultimately authorizes Henry's will by making the tiny Princess Elizabeth—who after a long reign would die a “virgin, / A most unspotted lily” (V.iv.60-61)—a means of producing kings of England.

Testifying during the divorce proceedings, Henry betrays his anxiety about depending on a woman's body to produce his male heir. This anxiety turns the normally life-producing womb into a tomb stifling male children:

                                                                                                    First, methought
I stood not in the smile of heaven, who had
Commanded nature, that my lady's womb,
If it conceiv'd a male-child by me, should
Do no more offices of life to't than
The grave does to th' dead; for her male issue
Or died where they were made, or shortly after
This world had air'd them. Hence I took a thought
This was a judgment on me, that my kingdom
(Well worthy the best heir o' th' world) should not
Be gladded in't by me.

(II.iv.187-97)

When heaven judges a man by the production of his wife's womb, the sex and vigor of that womb's offspring become signs of the husband's worth. As the familiar image of the child's printing of the father shows,⁴ the best judgment coming from that womb would be a perfect duplicate of the father. Such a sign gratifies the father's sense that he himself is pleasing enough to God to bear repeating. As a king, Henry immediately turns to the political ramifications of his failure to have a son:

                                                                                                    Then follows, that
I weigh'd the danger which my realms stood in
By this my issue's fail, and that gave to me
Many a groaning throe.

(II.iv.197-200)

Although in the same speech Henry has mentioned (for the first and last time) his daughter Mary, he now talks of his “issue's fail”; clearly in the political realm—and apparently in the personal as well—a father's failure to have sons is his failure to have issue.⁵ Henry's language of groaning throes signals that, Katherine having failed to produce “issue,” he will appropriate the maternal function and then reassign it to a wife who can succeed.

Although Katherine accepts the traditional wifely role, defending herself at the trial as “a true and humble wife, / At all times to your [Henry's] will conformable” (II.iv.23-24), she nevertheless refuses to be judged by her ability to produce male heirs. Within a conventional understanding of a woman's role in marriage, what she calls “my bond to wedlock” (l. 40), childbearing would usually be considered one of her duties, but in defending herself she does not directly use her production of children as proof of her worth. Instead she says,

                                                                                                    Sir, call to mind
That I have been your wife in this obedience
Upward of twenty years, and have been blest
With many children by you.

(II.iv.34-37)

Here Shakespeare alters the emphasis of Katherine's testimony as recorded by Holinshed, where she declares in her self-defense, “… you have had by me diverse children.”⁶ In this subtle change, producing children becomes not the duty of the wife but the generous gesture of the husband. Taking such a strategic stance, Katherine need not concern herself with the more troublesome matters of her offspring's gender and viability.

Such verbal gymnastics show Katherine resisting in subtle ways Henry's attempts to uproot her from her long-established place as queen, wife, and mother; on a much broader scale, however, it is the dramaturgy defining Katherine that supports her struggle against Henry's nullifying will. The most fundamental benefit with which Shakespeare endows her characterization is that of exposure: at each major step of her movement from earthly to heavenly glory, he places her center stage, both literally and figuratively. In a play that devotes a striking amount of stage time to narrations, be they of the glitter at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the proceedings of Buckingham's trial, or the ceremoniousness of Anne's coronation, it is remarkable that Katherine's characterization is not appreciably enlarged by narration. The rare mention of her when she is offstage either merely informs the audience of her current legal situation (II.i.147-67, III.ii.69-71, IV.i.22-35) or reinforces the initial impression she gives of a devoted, obedient wife (II.ii.29-36, II.iii.1-11, II.iv.134-44). Staged in four scenes—at the height of her political power, at her most eloquent in her fiery denunciation of the court, in the “last fit of [her] greatness” (III.i.78) as queen, and in her yearnings for a different kind of queenship—she is given the theatrical means to prove herself the “queen of earthly queens” (II.iv.142) to the audience's judgment directly.

Her theatrical power comes in part from her command of strong stage positions. To “A noise within, crying ‘Room for the Queen!’” (S.D.I.ii.8), Katherine upon her first entrance boldly takes control of a stage that Henry, from his central spot on the dais, has momentarily dominated: “Enter the Queen, Norfolk, and Suffolk; she kneels. King riseth from his state, takes her up, kisses, and placeth her by him.” By immediately kneeling again, she makes him repeat his theatrical gesture of placing her by him and above Wolsey, “under the King's feet” (S.D.I.ii), in order to dramatize the fact that her place at the seat of power, though at the king's grace, is not given perfunctorily; then she maintains that strong position beside him as she overrides Wolsey below her.⁷

Likewise, at her trial, Katherine seizes a strong stage position in a highly visible way.⁸ The detailed opening stage direction implies a court arranged symmetrically on both sides of the highest authorities: Henry, though nominally a witness at the beck and call of the court, now sits in state alone at the apex of the court's hierarchy, above the judges Wolsey and Campeius. In this arrangement, Katherine's new “place some distance from the King” (S.D.II.iv.0) is off-center, in a weaker position both politically and theatrically. But using the dramatic power of a long, silent cross, Katherine makes a startling move across the stage as she “rises out of her chair, goes about the court, comes to the King, and kneels at his feet” (S.D., l. 12), joining him a second time at his strong stage position. Having literally circumvented the court and gone above her judges to get to Henry's throne, she likewise tries to circumvent the cardinals' jurisdiction by making a personal appeal to the real seat of power. When Henry fails to answer her plea, she remains, I believe, in that potent theatrical position, even though this time she has been blatantly denied a share of its political power. For a time at least, Katherine uses her theatrical position upstage and above her judges to force them to turn awkwardly around and up to address her; she is literally upstaging them. Perhaps she comes down to the cardinals' level in order to confront Wolsey personally with “Lord Cardinal, / To you I speak” (ll. 68-69); however, it is equally possible that she remains at the king's throne throughout her speeches, for the stage direction “She curtsies to the King and offers to depart” (S.D., l. 121) suggests that she may be completing the subject's obeisance begun so pointedly when she kneeled at his feet. While Katherine is using her physical position in her two public scenes to maintain political position, Shakespeare gives her the dramaturgy to make her theatrically great as well.

Katherine's theatrical greatness continues even as her appearances become limited to the private sphere, though the theatrical tools given her are related less to her ability to seize strong stage positions associated with political power, and more to the degree of subjectivity that the playwright exposes in her. Coming after Henry's pat yet potentially convincing testimony, Act III, scene i allows Katherine to “speak [her]self” (l. 125). And she does so to the great discomfiture of the cardinals, for in front of her women she holds forth for nearly ninety lines (ll. 68-153), only once (ll. 93-97) allowing one of the cardinals to interject more than a two-line protest. When she concludes, “[L]ike the lily, / That once was mistress of the field, and flourish'd, / I'll hang my head and perish,” she has brought herself to accept the fact that she has lost; in the meantime, however, she has expressed a succession of attitudes, including confidence in her integrity, defiance, alienation, indignation, and bitter regret. By the time she allows the cardinals to say their piece, she has already relinquished her will; her response, “Do what ye will” (l. 175), merely confirms the resignation she had achieved before they began their persuasions. In what she believes is the “last fit of [her] greatness” (l. 78), Katherine is allowed to outweigh both cardinals theatrically, though not politically, as she speaks herself through to her new position in life.

Katherine's death scene (IV.ii) of course places her center stage again, but the most significant element of her exposure in that scene comes from the playwright's decision to stage her vision.⁹ The staging of an individual's dream endows that character with a dimension rare in drama, for it gives the audience an unmediated perception of that character's mind. Therefore, the audience need not use the caution necessary in evaluating a reported incident; a dream staged rather than reported presents a visible image of a character's inner world with an authority equal to that of action staged.¹⁰ Given the degree of ambiguity surrounding the motivations of most of the characters in the play,¹¹ such access to a major character's psyche is exceptional. For a time a single character's subjectivity is given an objective form as it dominates the action onstage.

But, particularly in a play that abounds in ceremonies and other formal occasions, mere stage exposure, even center stage, does not in itself create a character of active will. In a play like Henry VIII, such formalized proceedings express a political will or a societal consensus institutionalized into forms with their own direction, force, and legitimacy; to conform to such ceremonies takes no individual initiative, while to resist them is to resist vast political or social forces. It is by interrupting ceremonies to turn them to her own purposes, or by creating alternative ceremonies, that Katherine most clearly distinguishes herself as having an independent will able to challenge for a time the patriarchal ideology dominating the play.¹²

Her first moments onstage show her interrupting a formal council convened to investigate Buckingham's alleged treason and turning its attention to a different kind of treason: the taxations imposed by the subtly traitorous Wolsey, who has made Henry seem to betray his “honor … [and] / The dignity of [his] office” (I.ii.15-16). But to achieve influence (at least temporarily) over Henry, she must first counter his pro forma ceremony of raising her to his state with a more explicit drama that endows her publicly with political power. Like Henry, she is a self-dramatizer, acting out her condition at important moments rather than only speaking of it:

Q. Kath.
Nay, we must longer kneel; I am a suitor.
King.
Arise, and take place by us. Half your suit
Never name to us; you have half our power.
The other moi'ty ere you ask is given;
Repeat your will and take it.

(I.ii.9-13)

Henry's claim may already ring hollowly to the audience, which knows Katherine's ultimate fate; however, his assertion here of the efficacy of Katherine's will, which she need only speak to take, raises the hope that in this version of her history she will wield unexpected power before her downfall. Certainly her bold entrance, her changing of the subject to the commons' grievances, and her effectiveness in redressing those grievances imply such power. Her interruption of the proceedings to get her will is, as we have seen, reinforced by the dramaturgy that gives her a strong position onstage. But that position, literally above Wolsey, soon proves to be less powerful politically than it had seemed. As the case of Buckingham proves, she cannot “repeat her will and take it” when it contradicts the king's; all she can say is “God mend all!” (l. 201).

Yet in her next scene (II.iv) Katherine rallies, again disrupting others' ceremonies to her own advantage. After seeming at first a cooperative participant in the court proceedings, taking her place like others in silence, Katherine balks at the ritualized summons into court by refusing to give the formulaic response. Her silence suddenly becomes a rejection of ceremony rather than participation in it, and her silent walk “about the court” is her devastating dramatization of her challenge to the cardinals' jurisdiction. Although her position some distance from the king necessitates her particular route around the court, her self-dramatizing streak impels her to halt the ceremony publicly and then to walk to him rather than address him from her seat. In doing this she dramatizes for others onstage not only her circumvention of the appointed judges but also her demand for a personal response from the man to whom she has been married for over twenty years. In as many ways as she can, she challenges the formal proceedings. Three times she renounces Wolsey as her judge and in the process puts his integrity on trial. Her appeal to the Pope is, of course, a move meant to invalidate this court; having thus nullified it in her own mind, she walks out on it. Her second refusal to obey her summons into court shows her firm in her conviction, as well as “vex[ed] … past [her] patience” (l. 131). Holinshed states that Katherine “never would appear after in any court” (p. 738); Shakespeare turns that recorded fact into the character's stated intention—“I will not tarry; no, nor ever more / Upon this business my appearance make / In any of their courts” (ll. 132-35). In all her dealings with the formal proceedings against her, Katherine is shown exercising her will by refusing to participate in an event scripted to bring about her destruction.

The scene immediately following, which is Katherine's first domestic scene, contrasts with the ceremony of the court; here she appears at her most vulnerable, letting her guard down among her women. The drops of tears that she had turned to sparks of fire in court (II.iv.72-73) well up now in private as heartsickness. When, however, the cardinals pursue her even here, dragging the business of the court into the haven of her huswifery, Katherine rallies enough to exert a measure of control over the meeting. If the cardinals are going to continue the business of the court, Katherine will have that business conducted openly, in front of one jury that will support her: she refuses Wolsey's request to converse in her “private chamber” apart from her women (III.i.29-39). Hoping to turn this minor defeat of theirs into a victory, Wolsey responds to her pronouncement “truth loves open dealing” (l. 39) by speaking in Latin, thereby shutting out Katherine's sympathetic jury of women. Her humorous dismissal of Wolsey's formality gives her momentary ascendancy as she deflates his pompous and high-handed tactics:

Q. Kath.
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, for their poor mistress' sake;
Believe me, she has had much wrong. Lord Cardinal,
The willing'st sin I ever yet committed
May be absolv'd in English.

(III.i.42-50)

Katherine wins this small victory over a formality that would depersonalize her, making her a stranger to her greatest intimates.

Although she has previously tried to mold ceremonies to her will, in falling from power she has removed herself from such institutional forums as the courts of Henry and the papal legate until she lives totally apart from the ceremonial world that legitimizes and discredits people. In her final hours, however, she creates a ceremony entirely in keeping with her will. Her dream, coming in the scene immediately after Anne's coronation procession, constitutes an alternative ceremony aimed at very different ends. As R. A. Foakes observes, the dream is “the spiritual coronation of Katherine”¹³ as she aspires to heavenly rather than earthly glory. Unlike Anne's coronation, which appears to sweep the new queen along with it, Katherine's “coronation” is dramatized so as to seem a function of her own will. Although the dream, because it is given objective reality through staging, might seem an oblique manifestation of divine will, Shakespeare takes several steps to make the dream seem as much as possible an emanation from Katherine's brain rather than an apparition from heaven.¹⁴ First, it clearly grows out of her “meditati[ons] / On that celestial harmony [she] go[es] to” (IV.ii.79-80). Second, the vision appears only to Katherine, even though Shakespeare has pointedly kept other characters onstage; in contrast, Posthumus is alone as he dreams, and Pericles is either alone onstage, or, more likely, left alone in his pavilion.¹⁵ Third, both the stage directions and Katherine's speeches upon awakening stress that the heavenly garland that Katherine says she is “not worthy yet to wear” (l. 92) has vanished with the vision; no god or heavenly emissary leaves palpable evidence of his visitation and favor. Posthumus wakes to find Jove's tablet; Katherine is like (and he is unlike) the “poor wretches” who, he says, “dream as I have done, / Wake, and find nothing” (Cymbeline, V.iv.127-29). Although Katherine finds nothing to substantiate a celestial visitation, she finds in her heart a confidence that she “shall, assuredly” (l. 92) attain that heavenly crown. The workings of her heart and mind have been briefly staged, though after the dream they must be relegated again to report.¹⁶

Shakespeare gives Katherine the theatrical wherewithal to resist Henry's desire to “turn [her] into nothing” (III.i.114); although she cannot override his political will, which legally erases one daughter and twenty years of marriage, she resists his nullification of her until her death in Act IV by remaining a regal heroine of strong individual will.¹⁷ Anne Bullen is, in contrast, so circumscribed by her staging that she cannot fairly compete for the audience's acceptance of her as an adequate substitute for the bold Katherine. Such dramaturgy shows Shakespeare working against Henry's immediate objective of supplanting Queen Katherine with Queen Anne; in Anne's characterization, however, Shakespeare ultimately re-affirms Henry's valuing of a queen according to her ability to produce a suitable heir.

Portraying a Catholic heroine was a ticklish job in a Protestant age, but portraying Queen Elizabeth's mother less than eighty years after Anne had been beheaded for the high treason of adultery posed even more difficult problems. Shakespeare could not entirely ignore the audience's probable awareness of Anne's rapid disgrace, but he dealt with it obliquely in various ways. To give some credibility to the fact that this professedly pure and modest Anne Bullen could later be charged with adultery, not only does he compress history so that Anne is in Henry's favor (to some unspecified degree) before Katherine's trial,¹⁸ but also he initially defines her as a woman at ease in ribald conversation during a luxurious banquet. In addition, the Old Lady's bawdy conversation with Anne suggests that to become Henry's queen she may also have to become a quean, trading her body for power (II.iii.34-37). Shakespeare protects Anne by having her deny all ambition, but he lets the Old Lady challenge Anne's denial as hypocrisy. Moreover, that challenge to Anne's seeming simplicity and purity gains credibility in part because the audience knows that, her protests not-withstanding, Anne will learn to bear the burdens—Henry and his child—that queenship demands.¹⁹

But the mother of Elizabeth must not be compromised overmuch. Shakespeare deals with the possible embarrassment of Anne's untimely and disgraceful end mostly by making Anne a thing of the past even before the play ends. He does so by skimping on her characterization; by rendering her as a sweet, sympathetic, but forgettable young woman; and then by gradually effacing her altogether as a dramatic character, so that she is not printed off but blotted out by her infant daughter.

As with Katherine, the extent and the nature of stage exposure allowed Anne greatly affect her characterization in itself and in relation to that of her rival queen. Although the size of a role is not the most important factor, surely the relative smallness of Anne's—58 lines as compared to Katherine's 374—limits the audience's access to her character.²⁰ In the first of her three appearances (I.iv), she remains onstage throughout the scene but speaks a mere three times, and then only briefly and ambiguously; in her final appearance (IV.i), she merely proceeds wordlessly in pomp across the stage. Moreover, the concentration of most of her speeches in one scene (II.iii) restricts her self-expression to a single moment in her rise to queenship. Indeed, once Anne becomes queen, she becomes a public figure with “no comment”; although the audience has been introduced to her trepidations about the greatness to be thrust upon her, it receives no new insights into her feelings once she has married Henry, conceived his heir, and been crowned Queen of England. Her silent appearance as queen is particularly remarkable since it immediately precedes Katherine's last voluble stand as the “queen of earthly queens.” Even though Anne is in the political ascendant, of the two queens it is Katherine whom the audience sees and hears last.

Anne is certainly visible in those scenes in which she is silent or nearly silent, particularly in her coronation procession; however, her visibility, unlike Katherine's, comes not from positions that she assumes according to her own will, but from positions determined for her by other characters. Although Anne is the only woman with a specific identity at Wolsey's banquet, she makes no dramatic entrance but is one among the many ladies and gentlemen to be greeted and seated by the men who control the night's festivities. Her choice of a place next to another woman at the banquet table is quickly vetoed by the Chamberlain, who insists on seating the randy Lord Sands between the women. From this position she and the other woman are easy targets for Lord Sands's aggressive gallantry, as he wastes no time in kissing them both. And because she has no rightful place beside Henry, it is his actions that place her in a position of prominence beside him: he takes her out to dance and later returns to her side to kiss her (I.iv.94-96). Not all her dramatic interest in the scene depends on Henry's favor—indeed, she is a great deal more interesting when engaging in vaguely ribald repartee than when abashed, as one must assume, into silence—but her distinction as a person bound to have a continuing role in this historical panorama comes from Henry's drawing her to his side as a partner; only then is the audience sure that this is Anne Bullen.

Nor in her silent appearance as queen does Anne gain an identity as a woman of individual will by assuming a place of her own choosing. Here she is entirely subject to ceremony. If her participation in this pageantry reflects her personal will, the audience can only guess at that fact, since her subjective life is entirely remote by this time. When last the audience saw her, she was swearing that she would not be a queen for all the world. Now she appears to be swept along by a ceremony that integrates the will of the king, the nation, and perhaps even divine providence.²¹ Although Anne has reason to comply with such a will at this point, since it raises her to eminence, nowhere is she staged in a way that shows her imprinting her personal character on ceremonies or on the other forms of queenship.

Unlike Katherine, Anne is only predicated as a queen; she passively has “all the royal makings of a queen … / Laid nobly on her” (IV.i.87-90) during her coronation, but the most queenly she ever acts onstage is in her brief appearance after her coronation. Katherine has shown that being a queen, even if only a queen consort whose power depends on the continuing favor of her husband, involves more public activity than wearing the regalia. Anne never tries to exert political power as Katherine has done. She does not, for instance, intervene to change an edict of the council; indeed, while her archenemy Gardiner is plotting to turn the council against Cranmer, one of her “two hands” (V.i.31), she, by the playwright's compression of history,²² is in the throes of labor offstage. Never does she sit by Henry in state, trying to lessen the power of her enemies as Katherine did with Wolsey.

Indeed, a measure of Queen Anne's effacement by the dramaturgy is the distance that always exists between her and Henry, her source of status and power: after he takes her out to dance and later kisses her, they are never again onstage together. Shakespeare follows his sources in omitting Henry from the coronation procession,²³ but for the christening, while he follows sources in omitting Anne, he breaks with his sources to bring Henry onstage.²⁴ Thus a strict fidelity to history does not explain the distance that Shakespeare keeps between them. Moreover, having invented a candid scene between Anne and the Old Lady, he could likewise have invented a private scene between Anne and Henry, had it suited his purposes. Instead, he creates intermediaries to underline the separation between them. Without historical precedent²⁵ he invents an emissary, the Lord Chamberlain, to announce Henry's elevation of Anne to Marchioness of Pembroke. Likewise, he uses Lovell and the Old Lady as messengers between Henry and the laboring queen, a device that allows him to include childbirth in the play, but one that again emphasizes the distance between Anne and the ultimate source of her political power.

For Anne, being queen is more a function of others' perceptions than of her own actions. Long after having been Henry's wife in secret, she becomes queen by being seen as such:

                                                                                          … the Lady Anne,
Whom the King hath in secrecy long married,
This day was view'd in open as his queen,
Going to chapel; and the voice is now
Only about her coronation.

(III.ii.402-6)

Holinshed is explicit about the characteristics of queenship that identified Anne publicly as queen: “After that the king perceiued his new wife to be with child, he caused all officers necessarie to be appointed to hir, and so on Easter even she went to hir closet openlie as queene” (p. 929). The play, however, is noticeably silent in this regard, specifying neither the nature of her retinue nor the obviousness of her pregnancy as the revealing feature. Such silence has the effect of obscuring what Anne may have done in order to be seen as queen; moreover, in keeping with her characterization as a receiver of action rather than a performer of actions, the playwright changes Holinshed's “went … openlie” to “was view'd in open as his queen.” When Shakespeare finally stages Anne as queen, he shows her being viewed in open by the First and Second Gentlemen; in addition, the Third Gentleman reports that Anne's great triumph within the ceremony itself came when she spent half an hour at rest, “opposing freely / The beauty of her person to the people” (IV.i.67-68). It is the reaction of her viewers, and not her actions, that absorbs the playwright's energy and poetic fancy:

                                                                      … which when the people
Had the full view of, such a noise arose
As the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest,
As loud and to as many tunes. Hats, cloaks
(Doublets, I think) flew up, and had their faces
Been loose, this day they had been lost. Such joy
I never saw before. Great-bellied women,
That had not half a week to go, like rams
In the old time of war, would shake the press
And make 'em reel before 'em. No man living
Could say, “This is my wife” there, all were woven
So strangely in one piece.

(IV.i.70-81)

Anne's triumph with the people comes from their judgment of her surface, the beauty of her person. It is all they know of her.

Foakes astutely locates the emphasis on the subjects' reactions as part of two of the “major contrasts by means of which the play is organized, those between private sorrow and public joy, … [and] between the national wellbeing and the individual good” (p. lv); however, I would qualify Foakes's judgment by observing that except in the account of the “great-bellied women,” the approval of Anne expressed throughout the play comes almost entirely from the male half of the public. From her first appearance Anne is the object of male perusal and male desire. She is first defined at a banquet entirely dominated by male expectations and male perceptions; prepared for in the preceding scene by a locker-room conversation about “fiddles,” “stumps,” and the Frenchman's “speeding trick to lay down ladies” (I.iii.40-49), the banquet, for the men, is a place to indulge the appetite and the fantasy. (Since the many female guests are mute, what it means to them is left to the audience's imagination.) Here ladies are made honored guests by such men as Sands so that they might “find a running banket, ere they rested” (I.iv.12) and receive as “easy penance … as a down-bed would afford” (ll. 17-18). In this playground for male desire, Anne is quickly kissed by Sands, and then soon kissed by Henry. The masquers have come “(Out of the great respect they bear to beauty) / … to view these ladies” (ll. 69-71); having touched the hand and viewed the face of the speechless Anne, Henry finds her a “dainty one,” “[s]weet” (l. 94)—to the appetite, no doubt.

Anne is most fully revealed to the audience, however, in the only female assessment of her to balance the widespread male approval of her as the hope of the kingdom. There creeps into this private conversation between Anne and the Old Lady the suspicion that Anne may instead hope for the kingdom: in charging Anne, “In faith, for little England / You'ld venture an emballing” (II.iii.46-47), the Old Lady suggests that Anne's sexuality is not only the male's means to heirs to maintain the patriarchy but the female's means to further her own glory. Were this minority opinion given scope, it would be capable of creating a dialectic with the play's dominant ideology. Yet even though ambition apparently motivates Anne—it is never suggested that love moves her to marry Henry—she is not allowed to claim such ambition herself.

To keep Elizabeth's mother superficially sweet and honorable, Shakespeare has her continually demur as the Old Lady tries to provoke her into admitting her ambition. The Old Lady, in her exultation “[o]'ermount[ing] the lark” (l. 94), finally oversteps Anne's patience and is justly dismissed for her broad mirth; even though at the end of the scene the two characters clearly diverge, earlier the Old Lady serves to express feelings that Anne may share but cannot be allowed to claim bluntly as her own. Although this scene bears a superficial resemblance to Desdemona and Emilia's conversation on women and worldly power (Othello, IV.iii), in that scene Emilia speaks as an obvious foil to Desdemona in her innocence; here the Old Lady instead speaks frankly and humorously what Anne cannot openly admit. Clearly Anne dwells on the glory of queenship; although the play allows her to frame her thoughts as if in kindly pity for Katherine, what Anne actually says reveals her preoccupation with the dangers of rising from obscurity to pomp. Surely such meditations about “growing in a majesty and pomp, the which / To leave a thousandfold more bitter than / 'Tis sweet at first t' acquire” (ll. 7-9) are more relevant to the obscure Anne Bullen than to the high-born daughter of King Ferdinand of Spain; “much better / She ne'er had known pomp!” and “'tis better to be lowly born” (ll. 12-13, 19) quite rightly bring Anne to her own situation, with “I would not be a queen” (l. 24). The Old Lady, presented as a confidante figure to Anne, articulates the motives of a “woman's heart, which ever yet / Affected eminence, wealth, sovereignty” (ll. 28-29), but faced with the charge of hypocrisy Anne still refuses to confide in her confidante. The effect of this scene between the two women is to hint at Anne's hidden desires without ever making her fully responsible for them.

The most sweeping solution to the problem of representing Anne Bullen without tainting Elizabeth is to dissociate her as much as possible from her child, so that the daughter becomes her father's child more than her mother's. When the Lord Chamberlain announces to Anne that she has found favor in the eyes of the king, she responds “[a]s from a blushing handmaid” (II.iii.72), reminding the audience of Christendom's most famous handmaiden, who said at the Annunciation, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord” (Luke l:38). Anne proves to be ancillary to the larger purpose of creating an image of the Father, and fulfills the traditional female role of the vessel, carrying a substance without (in theory) creating it or commingling with it.²⁶ This vessel and its contents are never seen to come in contact onstage: it is unlikely that Anne is meant to look pregnant at her coronation²⁷; in any case, she does not appear with the child in the final scene. Rather, the staging associates Anne in a startling way with Elizabeth, showing the mother's total replacement by her daughter. The coronation and christening processions so resemble each other that the audience can hardly fail to recognize that the tiny, inert bundle “richly habited in a mantle” (S.D.V.iv) has taken the place previously occupied under the canopy by her “richly adorned” mother “in her robe” (S.D.IV.i.36). The old Duchess of Norfolk as godmother now carries the child whose mother's train she recently bore. A realist might object that Anne is absent only because so soon after her delivery she would not have gotten “strength of limit” (The Winter's Tale, III.ii.106)—what Hermione lacks when she appears in court. Though the point might explain Anne's historical absence from the christening, it does not in itself explain Anne's absence from the play's conclusion. Since everyone on-stage exits intent on visiting the queen, Shakespeare might have chosen instead to stage that public audience; he prefers, however, a ceremonial procession that keeps Anne far enough in the background to be blocked out by the tiny princess.

Anne is dissociated from her daughter not only by the staging but also by the language that builds the inanimate stage infant proleptically into an illustrious queen. According to Cranmer's prophecy, not Anne but “Truth shall nurse her” (V.iv.28). It is Henry in his mighty presence, not Anne in her absence, that Cranmer associates with the child:

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

(V.iv.25-28) [Emphasis added]

The queen becomes a mere figure of stock responses “offstage”: “she must thank ye, / She will be sick else” (ll. 73-74). Such characterization cannot compete with either the father's commanding presence or the daughter's prophesied glory. Anne's eclipse is total.

A stage infant seems a fitting substitute for Anne, for if Anne's subjectivity has been obscured by her representation throughout most of the play, the child's subjectivity in this scene simply does not exist. Moreover, the substitute for the passive Anne is a figure without personal will, the inanimate stage infant upon whom others impose their visions and their wills. And the main imposition upon this child is that she is to redeem Henry in making him, for the first time, a real father.

The motif of the redemptive daughter is, of course, one of the most striking connections between this romance-history and Shakespeare's other romances. Critics often see this redemption of the father in the romances as a redemption from the temptation of incest,²⁸ the daughter bringing him out of the “oedipal family of his past” so that “he becomes a father anew, accepting his fatherhood as his identity.”²⁹ Although the motif of father-daughter incest is certainly discernible in some of the romances, as nubile daughters save their fathers and turn to marry elsewhere, in Henry VIII it is not. Henry's daughter Mary is little better than a cipher. Never staged, she is totally effaced by Henry in the last moments of the play when he says of Elizabeth, “never, before / This happy child, did I get any thing” (ll. 64-65). Daughters are threatening to Henry not because they are sexual temptations, but because they are signs of heavenly displeasure and dynastic fragility.

Henry needs to be saved not from incest but from sonlessness. The hope of a son is certainly uppermost in Henry's mind when he greets the Old Lady: “Now by thy looks / I guess thy message. Is the Queen deliver'd? / Say ay, and of a boy” (V.i.161-63). The sly Old Lady, calculating to win a reward, tries as hard as she can to transform bad news into good, a “stranger” female into the desired male:

                                                                                Ay, ay, my liege,
And of a lovely boy. The God of heaven
Both now and ever bless her! 'tis a girl
Promises boys hereafter. Sir, your queen
Desires your visitation, and to be
Acquainted with this stranger. 'Tis as like you
As cherry is to cherry.

(V.i.163-69)

Given the Old Lady's disgruntled admission, “Said I for this [sum], the girl was like to him?” (l. 174), the likening of father and daughter seems an amusing but cynical attempt to minimize the differences that are most important to Henry. Having said it, she will “unsay't” (l. 175) too if it does not achieve its purpose, for it is mere flattering fiction. The Old Lady, motivated perhaps by her friendship for Anne as well as by her greed, is the first, but not the only, character in the play to try to turn this female into a male who resembles Henry. Her pragmatic motives, with their cynical attempts to placate the powers that be, put Cranmer's, and Shakespeare's, grander attempt to mythically transform Queen Elizabeth into King James in an ironic light.

For it is in this move that Shakespeare offers a solution to Henry's anxiety about his dependence on the female's womb to produce the desired son. The new maternal figure is the “maiden phoenix” (V.iv.40), a female with a closed womb; not her womb but “[h]er ashes new create another heir / As great in admiration as herself” (ll. 41-42). Indeed, though she “leave[s] her blessedness” (l. 43) to James, her successor is almost self-created: he “from the sacred ashes of her honor / Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was, / And so stand fix'd” (ll. 45-47). In the phoenix, gender proves irrelevant: if the new phoenix can be male, the old phoenix might just as easily have been so. Transcending gender, the image thus transcends the threatening female body; through narration males can be drawn from females antiseptically, asexually. Significantly, it is the maker of the flattering fiction of the phoenix image, and not the phoenix herself, who gains Henry's greatest gratitude: “O Lord Archbishop / Thou hast made me now a man” (ll. 63-64). Henry “becomes a father anew, accepting his fatherhood as his identity” not directly through a redemptive daughter but through an imaginative fellow male who transforms that daughter into a male replacement.

Stephen Orgel has suggested that James never felt secure about his claim to the English throne. His mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was an embarrassment because of her sexual looseness; moreover, Elizabeth had arrogated the awesome power of the “mother's word,” legitimizing him as her successor simply by claiming his legitimacy.³⁰ In such a context the image of asexual procreation found in the “maiden phoenix” should have appealed not only to the patriarchy within the world of the play, but also to the patriarchy, and the dynastic patriarch, to whom the compliment of the prophecy is paid. Adopting the convention of the masque, Shakespeare breaks out of the world of the dramatic fiction to make a complimentary gesture toward the ruling monarch, who can be considered present in spirit (and perhaps sometimes in fact) at the performance of Henry VIII by his own theatrical company. In loading upon the inanimate stage-representation of the princess not only Queen Elizabeth's but also King James's glory, Shakespeare momentarily turns female absence into male presence. This is the play's final subversion of queens into no more than the means by which kings are produced. Though he creates a dramaturgy for Katherine that temporarily resists Henry's will to legitimize Elizabeth, and through her James, as successors, Shakespeare otherwise defines his queens by a dramaturgy that fully supports the institution of kingly power. He was, indeed, one of the King's Men.

Notes

1. Citations of Shakespeare's plays are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). To avoid confusion with my own interpolations, I have silently removed that edition's occasional square brackets.

2. I refer throughout to Shakespeare as the sole author of the play, and at times have contrasted elements of his canonical plays with parallel elements in Henry VIII, since my own view on this controversy is that Shakespeare was largely if not wholly responsible for the play. My argument in this essay, however, depends not on the identity of the playwright but on the circumstances under which the play was written, i.e., in a patriarchal society and for a theatrical company under King James I's patronage.

3. On the question of the feminism of the play, I differ fundamentally with Hugh M. Richmond, “The Feminism of Shakespeare's Henry VIII,” Essays in Literature, 6 (1979), 11-20; although we both focus on the queens of Henry VIII, I believe the play is centered in the desires and values of Henry, not in the queens.

4. See, for instance, The Winter's Tale, V.i.124-30 and Sonnet 11, l. 14.

5. In III.ii.290-92 Surrey uses issues to refer to male offspring: “As you respect … our issues / (Whom, if he [Wolsey] live, will scarce be gentlemen). …” In Holinshed, Henry clearly links the failure of his “issues male” to a suspicion of “the great displeasure of God” with him (Raphael Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles [London: 1587], p. 907).

6. Holinshed, p. 907.

7. In “‘Sit By Us’: Visual Imagery and the Two Queens in Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 452-466, Linda McJ. Micheli prefers a staging of Katherine that places her in a “position independent of the King” as she protests Wolsey's policy (p. 455). She aptly points out (n. 15) that Henry's “sit by us” at line 124 is at odds with the implication that Katherine sits at line 10, or shortly thereafter. Her preference for a staging consistent with Katherine's energy in the scene is theatrically sensitive, yet the symbolic power of the queen's being raised from Wolsey's level at the king's feet to a place equal to the king's suggests that this staging is not so much static as emblematic.

   Although I disagree slightly with Micheli's interpretation of the staging here, we concur on several points regarding Shakespeare's theatrical representation of Katherine and Anne. Her article became available after I had submitted my own study for publication. Although our methodology at times is similar and is applied to some of the same characters, our critical aims differ; however, her perceptive reading of the visual imagery generally substantiates my contentions about the dramaturgy of Henry's queens.

8. Whereas the staging of this scene follows Holinshed (p. 907), the staging of Katherine's participation in her first scene is the playwright's fabrication. The similarities in the dramaturgy show Shakespeare's interest in establishing the importance of Katherine's ability or inability to get access to Henry. The matter of access to the king is, indeed, a central one, particularly in Wolsey's career in the play (see II.ii.55-80, and III.ii.16-19).

9. E. E. Duncan-Jones, “Queen Katherine's Vision and Queen Margaret's Dream,” Notes and Queries, n.s., 8 (1961), 142-43, suggests that Shakespeare did not invent the dream but modeled it on a dream of Margaret of Navarre, Duchess of Alençon, who is Wolsey's choice as Henry's second queen.

10. Cf. the ambiguity of Antigonus's narrated dream (WT, III.iii.15-41), which might be a personal dream, a ghostly visitation, or an intervention of divine providence.

11. Cf. Lee Bliss, “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth,” ELH, 42 (1975), 1-25, esp. p. 3.

12. Although Micheli applies her findings to matters other than ideology, she clearly demonstrates the contrast between the “strong-minded” Katherine, who “often criticizes or disrupts formal proceedings,” and the “compliant” Anne, who “accepts the ceremonies that sanction her good fortune” (p. 454).

13. The Arden Shakespeare King Henry VIII (London: Methuen, 1957), Introduction, p. 1.

14. It may perhaps be objected that since this is a dream of heaven to come, it is a kind of deflected Christian theophany like the theophanies Kenneth Muir focuses on in the late plays, particularly the plays in pagan settings. (See “Theophanies in the Last Plays,” in Shakespeare's Late Plays, eds. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod [Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1974], pp. 32-43.) As it is called a “vision,” there may be some grounds for the objection; the issue becomes almost moot within a Christian worldview, however, since Katherine's ability to imagine and yearn for the heavenly harmonies of her dream may be taken as the sign that she will be given her desire.

15. An editorial tradition begun by Malone and Dyce and followed by the editors of The Riverside Shakespeare (1974) leaves Pericles alone as he sleeps and dreams. But because such a mass exodus from the stage and the ship's deck that it represents is unmotivated and awkward, it seems to me more likely that the other actors withdraw to the sides of the stage when Lysimachus says, “So leave him all” (Pericles, V.i.237).

16. The dream contains certain details that add to the psychological verisimilitude of this representation of Katherine's psyche: as her treatment of the saucy messenger shows, her desire for reverence is innate and appears in the motif of reverence in the dreamed dance. Also, as is common in dreams, the dreamer is a central character in the dream; Katherine is more active in her dream than Posthumus and Pericles are in theirs.

17. Some nineteenth-century abridgements of the play “for Katherine” sought to make her voice dominant to the end by drawing the final curtain at her death, thereby undermining the dramaturgy that celebrates Henry and his heirs at the end of the uncut play. See the variety of versions compiled circa 1895 by George Becks in “Becks' Henry VIII,” Folger Library Promptbook S.b.20 (Shattuck 58).

18. Bliss, p. 7.

19. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935), pp. 253-58, discusses imagery of burdens in the play but does not mention the specifically female burdens implied in the Old Lady's comment, “If your back / Cannot vouchsafe this burthen [the title of duchess], 'tis too weak / Ever to get a boy” (II.iii.42-44).

20. Richmond's insistence on the play's fundamental feminism leads him to claim, “Anne's romantic role … is no less crucial for being economically expressed. … The moral and psychological sophistication of Anne's role in Henry VIII exceeds in subtlety and providential awareness any other study of romantic sexuality in Shakespeare. Even in so doomed a role as Anne's the importance of feminine influence is fully apparent, though this heroine speaks barely fifty lines” (pp. 13-14).

21. As Northrop Frye says, “… there is … an invisible but omnipotent and ruthless providence who is ready to tear the whole social and religious structure of England to pieces in order to get Queen Elizabeth born” (A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965], pp. 89-90).

22. The Arden Shakespeare King Henry VIII, p. 144n.

23. See Holinshed, pp. 930-933; also Edward Hall, The Union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancasstre and Yorke, (London: Richard Grafton, 1548), Fols. CCxiii^v-CCxv^r.

24. Cf. Holinshed, p. 934; Hall, Fols. CCxvii^v-CCxviii^r

25. Cf. Holinshed, p. 928; Hall, Fol. CCvi^r.

26. See Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (New York: Ballantine, 1981), p. 15.

27. So compelling is the play's emphasis on Anne's sexuality that critics rush to see who can find the earliest evidence that she is pregnant (e.g., Foakes's notes to II.ii.17-18 and II.iii.74; also William H. Matchett's speculation, “Though there is no specific evidence, one has to admit that it adds immensely to the mixture of ironies in Henry VIII if the glorious procession leading from her coronation and probably marriage accompanies an Anne Bullen not only, as the stage directions for the pageant says, ‘in her hair’—which is to say, with her hair down like a bride—but also visibly pregnant” (“Some Dramatic Techniques in The Winter's Tale,” Shakespeare Survey, 22 [1971], 93-107, esp. p. 95). Holinshed (p. 929) and Hall (Fol. CCix^v) imply both that Elizabeth was conceived in wedlock, and that Anne was visibly pregnant by Easter, before her coronation, but the play is silent on the point, as I noted earlier. What is irrefutable is the play's silence about the matter where it most counts: in the dialogue of the three Gentlemen, who are anything but shy in discussing Anne's sexual potential, and in the stage directions for the coronation. In a play containing such full directions, it is hard to believe that such an important detail as a distinctly pregnant queen should be omitted accidentally when less remarkable features, e.g., the jewels in her hair, are mentioned. Elsewhere in his works Shakespeare indicates in the dialogue or stage directions that a woman appears pregnant (e.g., WT, II.i.19-20, 60-62); here, however, he avoids staging Anne as perhaps morally lax and the longed-for heir as prematurely conceived, the play itself never having specified just how long Anne has been secretly married. Since the original staging would have had to commit itself to a new queen who either was or was not perceptibly pregnant, authorial tact cannot explain the silence of the stage directions on this point. Tact may, however, explain the author's refusal to stage historical truth when it might be misinterpreted, to the discredit of the dead queen and to the possible discomfort of her successor, who claimed his throne primarily through her. Instead of compromising Elizabeth's mother any further than she already has been, the playwright deflects the issue into the gentlemen's patter about others at the coronation: the “falling ones” (IV.i.55) are countesses, and the “[g]reat-bellied women, / That ha[ve] not half a week to go” (ll. 76-77) are citizens rather than the queen.

28. See Cyrus Hoy, “Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare's Romances,” in Shakespeare's Romances Reconsidered, eds. Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1978), pp. 77-90.

29. Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 211.

30. See Stephen Orgel, “Prospero's Wife,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 50-64. This legitimation of James as her heir overrode the potent word of Henry VIII's last will, which had established the line of succession. In providing for the possibility that his children should all die without issue, Henry had pointedly excluded the Scottish Stuart line derived from his elder sister, Margaret, in favor of the Greys of the Suffolk line descended from his younger sister, Mary. Thus, in showing Henry rejoice at Cranmer's prophecy of a king known to the audience to be James I, Shakespeare transforms the historical Henry's dying wishes so that they accord with James's will. For an interesting summary of the implications of Henry's passing over the hereditary line of the Stuarts in favor of the Suffolk line, see Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The politics of Shakespeare's genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 75-76.