SOURCE: “Shakespeare's Henry VIII Reconsidered in the Light of Boethian and Biblical Commonplaces,” in Shakespeare and the Christian Tradition, edited by E. Beatrice Batson, Edwin Mellen Press, 1994, pp. 51-82.

[In the following essay, Battenhouse traces several parallels between Henry VIII and Boethian philosophy, remarking that the Boethian belief in God and providence reopens the debate regarding Shakespeare's stance toward Tudor-Stuart politics.]

The Prologue to Shakespeare's Henry VIII invokes as the play's frame the tradition of De Casibus tragedy, which scholarship has traced to contexts in Christian tradition and the Consolatio of Boethius.¹ In accord with this framework, Lady Philosophy's theme of the vanity of worldly ambition resonates at the play's climax. “Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye!” cries the fallen Wolsey on realizing that the sea of glory in which he has been swimming has become a rude stream.² Yet today's readers rarely apply to the play as a whole this evaluation of Fortune's favors.³ Why? Apparently because when they see earthly glory exhibited by King Henry and prophesied for Elizabeth and James most of them suppose Shakespeare is endorsing this success. Such a supposition, however, may rest on a confusing of appearance with reality, the ailment which an immature Boethius suffered until Lady Philosophy cured him.

We know that the perspective of Lady Philosophy, which King Alfred and Chaucer endorsed, continued to be available in England. Speght's Chaucer (1598) included a translation of Boethius, and another by “I.T.” was published in 1609. Boethian ideas also percolated through innumerable intermediate channels. Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, for instance, laments King Henry's foolish love of Fortune's goods; and a poem such as Thomas Storer's The Life and Death of Wolsey (1599) tells of an angel warning Wolsey against “Leaving God's favor for the prince's grace” (sig. E2). Boethian philosophy includes belief in God and providence. It therefore was considered an ally of Christian truth, as I. T. makes evident by titling his translation Five Bookes of Philosophicall Comfort, Full of Christian Consolation. His preface to the reader says that “noble, learned and pyous wits” will take most benefit in Boethius since he is truly “a helper and reliever of all innocent and distressed people.” I would add that the Consolatio's ideas are very important for understanding Shakespeare's play. Although of course we can only surmise how many of the Globe's auditors in 1613 drew on the dual legacy of Boethius and the Bible when responding to Henry VIII, yet the play's signals for eliciting reminders of this legacy deserve a careful review—if only thereby to reopen the debate over Shakespeare's stance toward Tudor-Stuart cultural politics.

I

Northrop Frye has aptly remarked of Henry VIII that although it ends with Cromwell, Cranmer, and Anne Boleyn rising in fortune, Shakespeare's audience could remember that Fortune's wheel “went on turning and brought them down too.” In this outcome Frye noted a likeness to Henry V, in which a conquest and royal marriage are followed by an Epilogue reminding us that this king died leaving decades of disaster for England.⁴ For Anne Barton, these two histories are alike in another respect: in both of them the mind and heart of the king “remain veiled behind a series of poses.” An “irony and double focus,” she comments, make these plays deliberately ambiguous and “overtly a puzzle” for the audience.⁵ The double focus of Henry V, we may recall, prompted Norman Rabkin to liken it to a gestaltist's rabbit-or-duck puzzle.⁶ A contradiction between this king's claims to piety and his savage tactics puts his integrity in question. But is this any less the case in Henry VIII? Does not the Tudor king's claim to a tender conscience in dealing with Katherine seem as dubious as the earlier Henry's claim to the grace of God when invading France? Harold C. Goddard, in 1951, argued persuasively that the Hal who ended as Henry V “made himself into something that comes too close for comfort to Machiavelli's ideal prince”.⁷ Similarly, in 1977, Tom McBride termed Henry VIII a “Machiavellian romance” because the means used by the King for bringing a “golden freedom” to England are Machiavelli's and incompatible with Christian virtue. For McBride this presents us with “a moral conundrum.”⁸ But may not a solving of the puzzle in both plays depend on our recognizing that the supposedly golden freedom achieved in the one is as deceptive as the glorious victory in the other? All that glitters is not gold—if we but recall Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.

The truth about the two famous Henrys, as I see it, rests on a double irony: first, that their real motivation is selfish or Machiavellian under the cover of a “Christian” pose; and second that their success is hollow. A counterfeiting of royal virtue gives them a theatrically ambiguous charm. Deceptiveness can of course be “a sort of honest hypocrisy,” as the Rev. H. N. Hudson long ago remarked of Henry VIII while noting how easily an unconscious deceiving of oneself slides into a wilful deception of others.⁹ The portraying of such an ambiguity is realistic, and it accords with the insight of Lady Philosophy that deceived minds are driven by passions which blind them and cause a wasting of their energies on “worthless spoils” (Consol. 1, pr.3). This insight, or a congruent insight of Jeremiah's that the heart of man can be “deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt” (Jer. 17:9), might have prompted at least some auditors of Henry VIII to view with skepticism its concluding prophecy, which Northrop Frye has bluntly termed “a polite fiction” and Robert Ornstein dares to call “fulsome flattery” based on a “facile optimism.”¹⁰

I shall take up Cranmer's prophecy in due time and study it in detail. For now, however, other matters need prior attention—one of which is the objection made against the play's seemingly happy conclusion by several 19th-century critics. Ulrici, for instance, complained of the indignity done to the “manifest justice of God as it is revealed in the history of the world” when a heartless tyrant is shown rewarded with happiness and his beloved is allowed an “undisturbed enjoyment of his unrighteous usurpation.” It must have been well-known, Ulrici remarks, that Henry died in the prime of life “of diseases which were the effect of his mental and bodily excesses” and that Anne was soon to be “accused of levity and put to death.” Shakespeare must have intended to write a second part showing these disasters but had been prevented by some circumstance, Ulrici surmises.¹¹ A similar reasoning, we know, prompted Spedding's attempt to find Fletcher's hand in the design of Henry VIII. For to Spedding this play's concluding with a festive solemnity seemed inappropriate. The effect of the whole is marred, he declared, when a capricious king commits a great iniquity and yet is “crowned with all felicity, present and to come.”¹²

What is wrong with this analysis? Concern for a conspicuous “poetical justice” has caused Ulrici and Spedding to overlook facts of a more subtle kind. Actually, the play does not show Anne rewarded with an “undisturbed” enjoyment. It ends with her kept out of sight; and earlier the reporting of her coronation reveals only her outward glory, nothing of any inner felicity. Rather ominous, moreover, is the comment by the two Gentlemen on “falling” stars (4.1.54-55), since the conventional connotations of “falling” (perhaps unrecognized by these speakers) include moral or sexual fall and fall into death. Is it not significant that we never hear Anne speak after 2.3? There she accepts Henry's gift of a title but confesses to an old lady that “it faints me to think what follows.” This scene has opened with Anne's thinking about the dangers that attend a queen's rising from obscurity to pomp, which prompt her saying she would not be a queen. The scene ends with her feeling a guilt that causes her to ask the old lady not to tell Queen Katherine. Evidently hypocrisy's burden is marring Anne's happiness. An imprisoning silence ensues. When her public glorification is juxtaposed by Shakespeare to Katherine's vision of a heavenly happiness, the drama is asking us to compare opposite kinds of reward.

And is not Spedding mistaken in saying that the play crowns Henry with “all” felicity? An unhappiness is signaled by Henry's treatment of the messenger who tells him (in 5.1.165) that his newborn is a girl. Henry must then hide from the fact that he has neither “got” nor begotten the male heir he wanted. Indeed, he must now contrive to sidetrack anyone's remembering the belief he used when justifying his divorce, namely, that a lack of male issue could be a sign of God's displeasure. So he elicits from Cranmer a “flattering fiction” (as Kim Noling has recently called it), which proclaims the newborn a “maiden phoenix” who will miraculously bequeath to Henry a male heir in the person of King James (despite the fact, as Noling points out, that the historical Henry died leaving a will that disallowed the crown to any Stuart).¹³ In short, Shakespeare's Henry has to pretend to be comforted by what in fact did not comfort him.

In doing so, moreover, this king voices some unorthodox theology. “When I am in heaven,” he declares, “I shall desire / To see what this child does” and “praise my maker” for this (5.4.67-68). Is Heaven a place for contemplating the earthly accomplishments of one's child? Although Henry may be describing truly his idea of heaven, the Bible has a quite different concept of the felicity of heaven's inhabitants. Henry's heaven is a recognizable counterfeit, just as the “Holy-day” he proclaims as he exits in 5.5.77 lacks traditional credentials. Elizabeth's birthday, though it had in its time a voguish celebration, has not become a Holy day in the church's calendar.

A major thesis in the Consolatio of Boethius is that wicked persons are impotent to achieve what they desire. They cannot get what they really want but get instead anxieties and a necessary hypocrisy to cover frustration. “Strip off their coverings of vain honor,” Lady Philosophy says, and “you will see underneath the tight chains they wear.” Lust rules their hearts with greedy poisons, and they are slaves—sometimes to sorrow and sometimes to delusive hope (IV.2).¹⁴ Thus Lady Philosophy can assert the principle (which Dante was to exemplify in his Inferno) that “wickedness itself is the punishment of the wicked” (IV. pr. 3). This is so because anyone who gives himself to evil begins to lose his human nature, by ceasing to participate in the divine nature and becoming beastlike instead. And this disease of soul, worse than any sickness, deserves our pity (IV.4).

Does not this analysis fit well with the facts of Shakespeare's play? And with the Prologue's stated intent to make us sad with its chosen truth? When the Prologue invites us to “let fall a tear” it could be asking our pity for the diminished humanity Henry brings on himself by his beastlike lust and cruelty. Related to this could be a pity for the misery unjustly suffered by a person such as Katherine, and also a tear of gratitude such as the “orphans tears” mentioned in 3.2.399 as a possible reward for Thomas More. (Perhaps the reference to More is intentionally brief—to protect Shakespeare from censorship while yet cueing the auditor to compare More's fate with that of Boethius under Theodoric.) A true human happiness, according to Lady Philosophy, can be enjoyed only “if you possess yourself, have something you will never want to give up and something which Fortune cannot take from you” (II, pr. 4). Specifically, an inner virtue is needed, like that of Socrates [says Lady Philosophy], who “with my help merited the victory of an unjust death” (I, pr. 3). And later she will add that this virtue requires a love of the highest Good, God, mankind's only source of true happiness (III, pr. 9-10). Though as a philosopher she does not cite the Bible, her message accords with the Bible's “lay not up for yourself treasures on earth” and with its injunction to suffer for righteousness' sake.

The dramatist inherited another Boethian doctrine that is evident in his play's design. I refer to Lady Philosophy's surprising contention that misfortune is more beneficial than good fortune. Her explanation is that when Fortune seems to promise happiness with the goods she bestows, she lies, but is truthful when she shows herself unstable and untrustworthy. In sum, “good fortune seduces weak men away from the true good through flattery; but misfortune often turns them around and forcibly leads them back to the true good” (II, pr. 8). There is a paradox here: on the one hand, true happiness is declared to be independent of fortune; on the other hand, God is seen using both good and bad fortune to try us. Good fortune tests how much trust we will yield to it. Bad fortune provides an ordeal for purging the good in human beings. Thus underneath Lady Fortune's capricious awards there resides a mysterious providential order for educating us (IV.6). This consolation, we may note, is virtually the same as that of Augustine when he attributed to the downfall of Rome the providential benefit of a threshing of chaff from the grain to elicit in good persons an unmercenary love (City of God, I.8). That Shakespeare was well aware of the beneficial uses of adversity we know from his As You Like It and other plays.

In Henry VIII a central illustration of providential process is the case of Cardinal Wolsey, the “eldest son of fortune” (2.2.20), who Katherine tells us has risen to power by fortune and Henry's favor (2.4.109). Only the adversity of downfall really benefits him. It undeceives him regarding the glories of fortune, teaching him self-knowledge and repentance. When he comes to beg “a little earth for charity” he has found “the blessedness of being little” (4.2.23, 66). Similarly the Duke of Buckingham, after undergoing an agony of trial, emerges morally a better man, “richer” than his accusers when he stands before us as “poor Edward Bohun.” The anger he showed earlier is replaced by a spirit of forgiveness and a request for prayers. While Holinshed had reported some signs of a deathbed piety in both these men, Shakespeare's elaboration of an emergent self-knowledge in them is absent in Holinshed but represents a Boethian tradition which influenced Christian manuals on the art of dying well.

Numerous critics, without citing Boethius, have noted the spiritual gain that comes to Buckingham and Wolsey in return for their worldly losses. And in regard to Katherine's virtue, they have commented on how her humiliation serves in Shakespeare's story to perfect her patience and consolidate her sense of self-knowledge. In sum, suffering has proved to be beneficial for each of these characters.¹⁵

Going beyond this sense of divine providence, however, there has been a school of Protestant nationalist interpreters who think that King Henry without suffering any downfall emerges as the bringer of betterment to England. Influenced by G. Wilson Knight's reading of Henry VIII as Shakespeare's celebration of the glory of the Tudor monarchy, and by Frank Kermode's reading of Henry as a figure of grace and mercy as God's deputy, R. A. Foakes would see Henry as growing “in spiritual stature” in the course of the play through discovering and punishing the wickedness of Wolsey and then intervening to save Cranmer. Henry develops into a “beneficent controller” like Prospero in the view of the Arden editor. And Geoffrey Bullough, although he rejects the Prospero analogy, agrees in seeing Henry as growing “in wisdom and benevolence” by defying the Pope and saving Cranmer and thus moving toward a “triumph of goodness.” Bullough is assuming that Shakespeare's perspective was that of the Protestant historiographer Edward Hall. Like Hall, he says, Shakespeare saw English history as attaining a glowing heroism in Henry V and then later a resplendent finale of happy augury in Henry VIII.¹⁶

There are serious obstacles to this interpretation. A major one is that none of the so-called just and merciful achievements which its supporters ascribe to Henry is mentioned in the drama's Prologue or Epilogue. The Prologue associates “state” with “woe” and focuses our attention on the pitiful downfall of the mighty into misery; and as for “goodness,” the Epilogue claims it not for Henry but for Queen Katherine:

All the expected good we are likely to hear
For this play at this time is only in
The merciful construction of good women,
For such a one we show'd 'em.

(lines 8-11)

Kermode's reading, unfortunately, belittles Katherine's death scene as a “tear jerker” and goes on to insist that “the tragedy of a good woman must not be allowed to detract from the pleasure the auditors are expected to feel at the end of the play, which of course is related to the happy dynastic progress of English history.”¹⁷ But does dynastic progress create true happiness? Kermode ignores ironies in the play which raise questions about this. Bullough's reading, likewise, is far from adequate when he explains that the “ambiguity” of Henry's attitude to Katherine “is made up for by his youthful love for Anne and his benevolence to his loyal Cranmer.”¹⁸ What kind of love triumphs in these new commitments? And as for ambiguity, should we not note Katherine's expounding of ambiguity when she is assessing this trait in Wolsey:

He would say untruths and be forever double
Both in his words and meaning. He was never
(But where he meant to ruin) pitiful.

(4.2.38-40)

Henry's ambiguity is similar.

It is evident in the play, of course, that Henry's courtiers blame Wolsey for causing the divorce and exculpate Henry. Their choral comments indicate a strong dislike for Wolsey, and a liking for Anne because she is “a gallant creature.” They speak of Wolsey as the “bold bad man” who has enslaved their own honor by his spell over the King, and in 3.2 they rejoice to hear that Henry has found out the cardinal's “contrary proceedings” and defeated his tricks by marrying “the fair lady.” But these courtiers are ignorant of Henry's subtle duplicity in corrupting Anne through the lure of a worldly title, and they seem unaware also of how they themselves are being enticed to his support by their own love of golden honors and worldly spectacle. This king has a flock of committed admirers, just as did Henry V in Shakespeare's earlier play; and in order to be true to this fact the dramatist must present these within his story. Although the naiveté of these spokesmen when estimating the two Henrys should be perceivable by a canny reader, their testimony nevertheless reflects a pervasive popular sentiment adopted (alas) by Hall and Holinshed in their viewing of English history. Shakespeare's contribution, it seems to me, was not to deny that perspective but to qualify it by exposing its moral and cultural costs. At the same time in Henry VIII the Prologue asks us to pity the victims of Fortune's wheel.

We need to keep in mind, moreover, that Boethius did not suppose a complete lack of any goodness in the temporal achievements of evil ambition. Lady Philosophy acknowledged a transitory good in worldly glory, but she rated it hollow at the core and argued further that one begins to escape its burdening influence when one recognizes its limited satisfactions (III, pr. 1 and 8). Her view thereby accords with what we know to have been Augustine's philosophy of human evil, that it is basically a reductive or warped version of mankind's good potential. In Henry VIII this appraisal is voiced by Griffith (a Gentleman-Usher to whom Shakespeare ascribes a perspective like that of Cavendish, who was a Gentleman-Usher). Griffith describes Wolsey as “sweet as summer” to those who sought him while sour toward others, princely in his bestowing while sinful in his getting, and finding true happiness only in his overthrow (4.2.51ff). By this standard, we can concede to King Henry likewise a limited and tinsel goodness—a splendor of worldly display that was superficial and unstable.

By beginning his Henry VIII with a reported Cloth of Gold peace and closing it with a prophesied quasi-messianic peace, Shakespeare has made gilded spectacle a motif for spanning the significance of Henry's life and times. Within this span are the pageants of Anne's wooing and her coronation. And the tone for the whole is initially set by Norfolk's admiring of Andren's “incomparable” masque of “earthly glory.” The French were cliquant in gold, “like heathen gods,” he tells us, while the English showed like gilded cherubins from a mine of India. The similes are Shakespeare's amplification of Holinshed, who had reported simply the “wonder” of the richly appointed participants with their jewels and other ornaments, their valiant tilting, and then alas on the eleventh day a hideous storm, from which many prognosticated the trouble between the princes which was to follow. Shakespeare amplifies also Buckingham's criticism of Andren's cost, having him name it a great sport of “fierce vanities” with a most poor issue since its peace is already dashed. And this judgment is seconded by Lord Abergavenny's calling it a peace purchased at a superfluous rate that has “sickened the estates” of his kinsmen. This outcome can be seen as a paradigm of the cost that will ensue from Henry's subsequent meeting with Anne at Wolsey's banquet.

Shakespeare's depiction of the banquet scene seems to be based on Holinshed, but any reader who looks into Cavendish's Life of Wolsey will discover there Holinshed's unacknowledged source. I cite the following from Cavendish as a brief sample of an extended description that was later reproduced by Holinshed verbatim:

The banquets were set forth with masques and mummeries in so gorgeous a sort and costly manner that it was an heaven to behold. There wanted no dames or damsels meet or apt to dance with the masquers …

I have seen the King suddenly come in thither in a masque with a dozen of other maskers all in garments like shepherds, made of fine cloth of gold.¹⁹

Of significance is the differing context in the two sources. By Holinshed the scene is introduced only after the downfall and death of Wolsey, where it serves as part of a portrait of his former splendor. But Cavendish reports it early in his biography to indicate the cardinal's delight to please his sovereign lord, not reckoning that Fortune would procure Venus to bring the king in love with a gentlewoman who would wreck the cardinal's pleasure. Cavendish then tells of a secret attraction to Anne by Henry as early as 1524 but becoming apparent to the court only later. Wolsey on espying it, says Cavendish, dissembled the matter and to please the king prepared banquets “to entertain them both at his own house.”²⁰ Here we have the basis, I would suggest, for Shakespeare's placing Anne at Wolsey's banquet and implying for this a date not long after Andren's events, whereas Holinshed tells us nothing about Anne until, under a date of 1532, he reports her being created Marchioness of Pembroke. Noteworthy also in Cavendish is that when he chronicles the divorce proceedings he pauses midway to comment (with a perspective Shakespeare may have shared) on the disastrous cost to the whole realm of the “foolish love” of wilful princes:

If eyes be not blind men may see, if ears be not stopped they may hear, and if pity be not exiled they may lament the sequel of this pernicious and inordinate carnal love, the plague whereof is not ceased (although this love lasted but a while).²¹

A similar invitation to see and pity we have noticed in Shakespeare's Prologue.

Shakespeare has Wolsey proclaim his banquet a “heaven of beauty” for guests to revel in (1.4.59). The revelry is spiced, however, with the bawdy talk of Lord Sands, to which Anne responds by calling him “a merry gamester.” When Henry then enters as a masquer she responds to his flirtation. His guise as a French shepherd has pagan implications if we recall from the drama's preceding scene the Chamberlain's talk about the “pagan cut” of French clothes and the juggling mysteries of “the spells of France.” And this implication is reinforced when we are told that Henry is leading shepherds who (unlike those of Luke 2:15) have left their flocks out of respect for the beauty of ladies. The next episode in which we see Anne (2.3) will show her being visited by a gift-bearing messenger from Henry, to whom she returns obedience as from a “blushing handmaid” (recalling for us, by contrast, the non-blushing handmaid in Luke 1:38). An observing Old Lady, who earlier has commented on Anne's stretchable conscience, now chides: “A thousand pounds for pure respect?”

Shakespeare's characterizing of the liaison lets us see also the divorcing of Katherine as a resulting cost. When in 2.2 the Chamberlain reports that it seems a moral scruple has crept too near the King's conscience, Suffolk tells us “No, his conscience has crept too near another Lady.” And when (in 2.4.97) Henry tries to depict his scruple as causing in him “the wild sea of my conscience,” we recognize an omen of tempest like the one foreboding Andren's league-breaking; but the omen's source in this case we surmise to be simply his passion for Anne attested in prior scenes.

Anne's coronation, although draped with Christian ceremony, is definitely reminiscent of the glories at Andren where the English “Made Britain India.” An initial procession of courtiers in ornaments of gold parades before us, while an admiring Gentleman hails the angel-face of the Queen and declares:

Our king has all the Indies in his arms
And more, and richer, when he strains that lady;
I cannot blame his conscience.

(4.1.45-47)

The values of India, evidently, have captivated England. The splendor of a fleshly beauty has drawn Norfolk and his colleagues away from the admiration they earlier professed for Katherine as Henry's angel and jewel (2.2.31-33). Thus is illustrated the truth of Buckingham's comment (in 2.1.125-31) on friends who “fall away” once they perceive a “rub in your fortunes” (the implication also of the Prologue's lines 29-30). Erstwhile friends of Katherine have succumbed to the lure of cloth-of-gold masquerade. And the effect on the general public of Anne's beauty when exhibited from her chair of state is ominous. Like a “stiff tempest,” it stirs the crowd into a sea of reeling bodies, a press in which no man could identify his wife (4.1.72-81). Community orgy is an indicated cultural cost of idolizing Anne—just as comparably in Henry V one of the costs of that King's adventure was a people grown “savage” by meditating on blood.

During the courtyard festivity surrounding the christening of Elizabeth, we hear once again a reference to the wonders of India. A Porter, whose office it is to restrain the crowd, is having a hard time doing so:

Have we some strange Indian with the great tool come to court, the women so besiege us? Bless me, what a fry of fornication is at the door!

(5.3.33-35)

“Tool” has here the double connotation of sexual organ and manipulative power, for which Henry has been notable. What further amazes the Christian conscience of the Porter is the meltdown of functions on the part of the sponsors of this unconventional christening. A thoughtful Christian auditor at the Globe might have seen in this a sign of the culture's enslavement to earthly glory. The play has three times used pagan “India” to characterize Henry's ceremonies.

G. Wilson Knight's logic is precarious when he defends Henry's divorcing, remarrying, and begetting a child as having “the golden quality of Antony's sin,” a warm-blooded humanity that makes him “a superb animal.” The special pleading becomes dizzying when Knight then proposes that we forgive Henry the suffering his lapse caused the good Katherine by recognizing that

his fault is somehow a virtue; that men, or at least kings, cannot live by morals alone; that all ethical roles and religious doctrines are, in the last resort, provisional.

(p. 317)

In support of this relativist perspective, Knight commends the “intellectual charity” which “our raucous crowd” asserts at the christening. It is tied, he explains, to the play's Cloth of Gold aspirations for “a heaven on earth,” a “glistening wonder to which all our values, even our religious idealism, pay homage” because it is an attempt to realize “a transcendental humanism.”²²

But do all our values pay homage to this aspiration? Are not its ethical confusions evident? To call betrayal a virtue defies reason. Charity is a word misused when ascribed to a bawdy-minded crowd. And the animality of Henry which Knight lauds as golden and transcendentally human would be considered by Boethius evidence of a diminished humanity, a less-than-humane goodness that is really self-defeating. Henry's so-called warm blood, moreover, may be akin actually to that of Machiavelli's lion and fox; or, indeed, to the warmbloodedness of Henry V, who (we may remember) cut throats and then draped his success in Christian ceremonial.

II

Was the early Henry a dupe of Wolsey? While this view is indeed voiced in the play, there are contra-indications that actually Wolsey is being used foxily by Henry. In 2.2 we hear the Chamberlain's hope that “Heaven” will one day open the King's eyes regarding Wolsey. But Norfolk and Suffolk soon find that the king resists having his eyes opened. “How dare you thrust yourselves / Into my private meditations? Who am I? Ha!” is Henry's reproof when they attempt to visit him to mitigate the cardinal's supposed influence on him. “Is this an hour for temporal affairs? Ha?” he asks, although his own meditation has been on nothing higher than political business, as becomes evident when he turns from them to welcome “my” Wolsey and a brokered Campeius. Henry is favoring these Rome-approved commissioners (in preference to his English nobles), we can infer, because he expects from them the divorce he has determined on. Their value will be in furnishing an appearance of “unpartial judging”—illustrated adjacently by Wolsey's biased judging of Dr. Pace. Later, when the trial ends without a divorce pronouncement, we hear an angry Henry resolve to scuttle the cardinals for what he terms their “tricks of Rome.” Their usefulness has ended when they fail to pull off the trick Henry desires.

The King has entered the play, we recall, leaning on Wolsey and thanking him for saving him from the treasons of Buckingham. Some readers have seen here a Henry being misled by Wolsey, since they are impressed (rightly) by Buckingham's denial of any guilt of treason. But Shakespeare lets us hear of the Duke's great popularity with the common people, and of his absence from Henry's show in France, and of his once having offended Henry by competing for the services of a William Bulmer—all of which, we can surmise, may be prompting in Henry a desire to be rid of this potential rival. Wolsey is not leading Henry in a direction the King does not wish to go. Katherine's plea to avoid spiteful testimony gets brushed aside. “Go forward,” Henry insists, prodding for testimony he can exploit, yet all the while pretending a naive surprise to discover it:

                              … Ha? What so rank? Ah, ha!
There's mischief in this man; canst thou say further?

(1.2.186-87)

The King's legendary “Ha!,” which Rowley had used to dramatize a guileless but impulsive Henry, is put by Shakespeare into contexts which suggest a staged emotion in pursuit of a calculated strategy.²³ Henry's concluding shout, “He's a traitor to the height!,” effectively seals Buckingham's fate in advance of legal trial, as Henry must have known it would.²⁴ Katherine can only pray, “God mend all.” The plight of Buckingham is thus like that of the historical Boethius—condemned by an ungrateful overlord and the testimony of dishonest accusers. Shakespeare did not take his cue from Holinshed, who views Buckingham as obviously disloyal and ascribes “mercie” to the King.

Henry's relation to Wolsey in the first half of the play is one of tacit collusion. A further instance is in the matter of the tax for the French wars, where we find both men “blamed for it alike” (1.2.38). To dodge blame, Henry pretends ignorance of the tax, while Wolsey poses as having acted only from a general consensus. Wolsey's disclaimer is a ploy as is Henry's. A recent critic has remarked that Henry is here “less innocent than he claims and less candid than he might appear.”²⁵ How can he not know what everyone else is very aware of? To regain popular favor he shuffles the blame onto Wolsey and cancels the tax, while Wolsey angles for a share of the credit too—although to us it is plain the real credit should go to Katherine for her intervention (reminiscent of the biblical Esther's—cf.1.2.10-11 with Est. 7:2), invented by Shakespeare to introduce her to us. An anonymous English drama in 1525-29, Godly Queen Hester, had presented the biblical Esther's situation as analogous to that of Katherine of Aragon. Shakespeare is relying on that tradition.

During Katherine's later trial, Wolsey is shown working hand in glove with the King. Pandering to Henry's “conscience,” he has supported the divorce and procured Campeius to aid it. Henry then calls on “my Wolsey” to see the business “furnished” and concludes by depicting himself as a martyr to conscience:

Would it not grieve an able man to leave
So sweet a bedfellow? But conscience, conscience,
O 'tis a tender place, and I must leave her.

(2.2.141-43)

Even G. Wilson Knight has concluded that this speech, unparalleled in Holinshed, has a “dubious sincerity.” Yet Knight thinks Henry's “good heartedness” evident when he approves Wolsey's suggestion that Katherine be freely allowed the right to legal assistance.²⁶ At the trial, however, we see Wolsey supporting Henry's real wishes by evading Katherine's request to consult her friends in Spain. To protect Henry's pose he answers smoothly that it would be profitless to have other judges than the “reverend fathers” here assembled to “plead your cause.” The reply is false. They have come only because Henry has pressured them to consent to a legal testing of his scruple. Wolsey is voicing Henry's pretense when he says that the trial is to “rectify what is unsettled” in the King. The real purpose is to get Henry's wishes ratified, not rectified.

In Katherine's verbal dueling with Wolsey it is evident that she knows Wolsey to be the King's creature. She describes him as having mounted “by his highness' favors” to where words serve the honor of his person more than his “high profession spiritual” (2.4.109-15). A loss of “high profession” is implicitly Henry's too. Wolsey's defense, of course, is marvelously adroit. Notice, for instance, the skillful duplicity with which he answers Katherine's charge (in 2.4.76) that he “has blown this coal.” He begins with an elaborate praise of her (in order to allege that she is not now speaking with her usual charity and wisdom). Then he declares himself free of any wrong (since he has proceeded only as warranted by his commission). And finally (with what Katherine will rightly call a seeming humble-mouth) he yields to “gracious” Henry the task of removing from Katherine's thought her charge. When later she is out of earshot, Henry will respond to this cue from Wolsey by proceeding to give the court a self-serving account of how he was dutifully attending to business of family and state when a scruple raised by a French bishop pierced his conscience. Very cleverly this answer shifts the question from who has blown the coal to who first set it on fire.

By such evasions Henry and Wolsey mutually polish an image of self-innocence. It is challenged when Katherine rejects Wolsey as her judge. Henry meets this crisis by praising her elaborately. But does he really regard her as the “Queen of earthly queens”? If so, why did he not say so when earlier she circumvented the other judges and made her plea directly to him? His praising her only when her exit has created a diplomatic emergency, we can infer, is a maneuver to cover this embarrassing moment with a show of magnanimity toward a seemingly headstrong wife. Hypocrisy is thus the tribute vice pays to virtue. But Katherine indicates accurately Henry's real feelings in a subsequent scene when the cardinals visit her:

                              Would you have me …
Put my sick cause into his hands that hate me?
Alas, ‘has banish'd me his bed already,
His love too long ago

(3.1.115-20)

She is not here reproaching her husband but simply telling the lamentable truth.

At the same time Katherine's estimate of the cardinals is equally gentle. Beginning with “Ye speak like honest men (pray God ye prove so),” she proceeds to answer their complaint that she wrongs the King's love:

                              Can you think lords,
That any Englishman dare give me counsel?
Or be a know friend ’gainst his highness’ pleasure?

(3.1.83-85)

When they persist in urging that she resign her cause to a “most gracious” Henry, she knows they are counseling her ruin:

Is this your Christian counsel? Out upon ye.
Heaven is above all yet; there sits a judge
That no king can corrupt.

(3.1.99-101)

We may here recall Shakespeare's reference in Hamlet 3.3.61 to the bar of heaven at which there is “no shuffling.” Or we may remember the classic decision of the Apostles in Acts 5:29 to obey God rather than men.²⁷ Katherine's reply implies that Henry is a king who can corrupt justice and is corrupting his agents. “Would that I had never trod this English earth / Or felt the flatteries that grow upon it” is her characterization of England's ethos—a characterization that warrants our recalling in Act 5 when we hear from Cranmer an oracle that has the earmarks of flattery.

Katherine and Buckingham, the Arden editor admits, suffer more than they deserve, but he would claim for Henry's role in the two later trials “a vital dramatic shift” in that now earthly justice “does right.”²⁸ The case for Henry's growing toward an ideal ruler depends on this reading. But evidence for it seems to me ambiguous, at the most. For although it turns out that, from a providential point of view, Henry does good in punishing Wolsey (who when fallen testifies that the king has cured him of pride and ambition), must we not say that Henry intended simply a getting rid of Wolsey, not the cure of converting him to a pious fear of God? Selfish purpose, rather than any moral betterment, continues to be foremost in Henry. Nevertheless, the biblical topos, in which God uses a wicked ruler to punish other wicked persons, as Assyria in Isaiah 10 became God's deputy for punishing a wicked Israel, offers a pertinent analogy. Henry may well belong in this class of justicers while himself remaining as speciously righteous as was the scourging Assyrian. But such a reading of the ironies of Providence seems to be outside the purview of Foakes and Kermode.

What becomes evident in Act 3 of the play is a confrontation between two dissimulators, formerly united against Katherine but now at odds with each other. Henry, we learn, has countered Rome's “tricks” by secretly marrying Anne (a legal trick under cover of the opinions procured by Cranmer), while Wolsey, who has only recently discovered Henry's commitment to Anne, has hidden his abhorrence of this in a secret letter to the Pope. But is it not ironic that his telling the truth about Anne (to the Pope at whose court the case is under appeal) is made a ground for Henry's accusing Wolsey of treachery?

A second ground for Henry's action is a discovered paper of Wolsey's which inventories his wealth. While reading this in the presence of courtiers who have been longing for revenge against Wolsey, Henry expresses amazement at the “piles” of wealth which bespeak a “proud rate” too great for any subject. “I am afraid his thinkings are below the moon,” Henry concludes. But have Henry's own thinkings ever been other than below the moon? And has he not known all along that his patronage was making possible Wolsey's wealth? The King's pose of naive discovery is evidently a pretense calculated to incense Wolsey's enemies and enlist them in bringing him down. The moralizing by Henry casts him as a deliverer of the state from Wolsey's greed, whereas the actual situation is that of the pot calling the kettle black. (A similar pose was used by King Henry V when he lamented the “glist'ring semblances of piety” in the nobles who plotted against his war, when in fact that war had only a semblance of justice supported by a counterfeit sancity.) Further, why has Shakespeare (unhistorically) transferred to Henry an “inventory” incident which Holinshed records as giving great joy to Wolsey in 1523 by providing him a long-sought occasion to bring into disgrace the bishop of Durham?²⁹ The dramatist is implying, I suggest, that Henry's present motive is the same as was Wolsey's when he destroyed a rival bishop. Henry is becoming, ironically, a second Wolsey.

The list of legal charges which Norfolk and Suffolk assemble at Henry's instigation furnishes the pretext for disgracing Wolsey. Kurland has aptly characterized the charges as

apparently trumped up …, most of them extremely technical and specific ones introduced for the first time, which reinforces the impression that Henry selectively countenances activities of questionable legality.³⁰

Not only had these been long countenanced, I would say, but also the major one—that of violating praemunire—we have seen Henry conniving when welcoming in Act 2 Rome's commissioners.³¹ No wonder therefore that he does not himself mention any legal charges but leaves them to others to press, thereby implying (as Kurland notes) that a concern for the state's laws is secondary. Ingratitude becomes the one charge Henry focuses on during a cat-and-mouse interview not chronicled by Holinshed. Wolsey is asked whether the great favors he has received do not oblige him in return to be “more / To me your friend than any” (3.2.189-90). His reply that he has always aimed at “the good of your most sacred person / And the profit of the state” (173-74) does not satisfy a Henry who identifies the profit of the state with his own capricious will. An absolute subservience is expected. Wolsey knows his downfall is certain when the intercepted letter is flung in his face.

Significantly, however, Wolsey when afterwards reviewing his life does not name treason to Henry among his sins. Rather, he ruefully criticizes himself for having served Henry too well by serving him more than God (3.2.455-56). He repents of the ambition which caused him to put too high a valuation on the favor of princes:

                              I feel my heart new open'd. O how wretched
Is that poor man who hangs on princes' favours!

(3.2.366-67)

The double meaning in the word “hangs” is a Shakespearean emphasis. It represents a self-knowledge thematic for Boethius and learned belatedly by Wolsey.

Does the play's final trial, that of Cranmer, depict Henry as the benevolent redeemer supposed by Kermode and Foakes? To protestant nationalists in the Globe's audience he can have seemed so. But let us note the ulterior purpose indicated in Henry's jovial remark at the scene's end:

Good man, these joyful tears show thy true heart;
The common view I see is verified
Of thee, which says thus: ‘Do my lord of Canterbury
A shrewd turn, and he's your friend forever.’

(5.2.208-11)

The trial of Cranmer has been a “shrewd turn” to make sure that he can be relied on to be Henry's “friend” in an unrestricted sense, the point on which Wolsey had wavered. The quoted adage comes not from Foxe, who supposed that the crisis he reported showed the King protecting Cranmer from Catholic partisans who meant “to have him wronged.”³² The deeper implications of that story have been grasped by Shakespeare, who has transferred the episode from 1543 to the night of Elizabeth's birth and the following day in 1533. As there dramatized, the episode serves to reveal what Foxe did not perceive, namely, the entrapment of a naive Cranmer by an astute Henry who needs, as a cover for his female heir, a sponsoring of her by the English church's highest clergyman.

Act 5 opens with news of the queen in an extremity of labor. The King has been playing at primero, a card game of high stakes, but breaks off this chance-taking because “my mind's not on't.” He asks to be left in private so he can think “of that which company / Would not be friendly to.” Does he mean prayers for Anne? No. For although he has sent for Cranmer, no mention is made of Anne's plight when the Archbishop arrives. Rather, Henry's mind is on business of state, and specifically on the permission we hear he has given his council to summon Cranmer to answer on the morrow their complaints of mischief being caused by his heresies. We may indeed wonder why such a trial of Cranmer is being allowed. Would not an evasion of the Council's request be a simpler way for a King to protect his friend? It appears, however, that Henry (although he never tells us this) has been engaging in some advance thinking on the political crisis he may be in if his child is a girl, and to insure his control in such a situation has embarked on a carrot-and-stick strategy toward his Council and a stick-and-carrot strategy toward Cranmer. The King greets Cranmer with a frown and an “aspect of terror” which prompts the archbishop to kneel and declare: “It is my duty / T’ attend your highness pleasure.” To which the King replies, “Come, you and I must walk a turn together.” All of these details (beyond the simple fact of Cranmer's being summoned and appearing) are Shakespeare's amplification of Foxe's account.

During the walk together, Henry tells Cranmer of the grievous complaints against him that will require his being sent to the Tower and put on trial. At this news, Cranmer kneels again, this time to thank the King for giving him an occasion to answer calumnious tongues and demonstrate his integrity. But to Henry such an answer is unsatisfactory. Cranmer needs to be told that his integrity is rooted in “us, thy friend.” So Cranmer is commanded to stand up, take Henry's hand, and do some further walking with Him. “By my holidame,” our pious Henry swears as he now begins chiding the bishop on his lack of political sophistication. The tenor of Henry's lecture is: I expected you to petition me to hear your case. For don't you realize that your enemies are many and can procure corrupt knaves to swear against you, so that the likelihood of truth getting its due verdict is very slim. Do you expect to have better luck than your master, Christ? Go to, you woo your own destruction. At this point (in Shakespeare's account, although not in Foxe's) Cranmer capitulates, saying:

                              God and your majesty
Protect mine innocence, or I fall into
The trap is laid for me.

(5.1.139-41, emphasis added)

This is a Shakespearean irony. Cranmer has here fallen into the King's trap by choosing to save his own skin. Desiring a better luck (or fortune) than Christ's, he is yielding to a Caesaro-papism that will make the final judge of his faith “the King my master” (5.2.135). He even weeps for gratitude over the golden remedy Henry's ring will provide. But actually that ring will make hollow Cranmer's pose of integrity during the Council's interrogation; for how can he honestly challenge his accusers to “freely urge against me” (line 82) and promise that “I shall clear myself” (line 99) when he foreknows that he will be cleared by the King regardless of what those accusers say? He has, so to speak, come down from the cross by Henry's intervention.

Since Cranmer is a bishop, may not an audience properly judge him by the norms for Christian apostleship set forth in Matthew 10? The following admonitions in that chapter's list are especially pertinent:

16 Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. 17 Beware of men; for they will deliver you up to councils, 18 … and you will be dragged before governors and kings. 19 When they deliver you up, … what you are to say will be given you in that hour; 20 … for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. … 28 … And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. … 38 And he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

Cranmer unwisely has failed to rely on the Spirit and instead has allowed Henry to tell him what to say. He has proved himself unworthy of Christ, by being too fearful of those who can kill the body and not fearful enough of those who can cast both the soul and body into hell.

One can understand why a critic such as Foakes has lauded the “humility” of Cranmer, since this judgment assumes that Cranmer's kneeling to Henry “demonstrates the true idea of a protestant kingdom,” a “state of well-being.”³³ By 1613, however, it is likely that many Puritans as well as Papists did not consider England's kingdom to be in a state of well being. Both groups can have shared an aversion to the mode of humility here displayed by Cranmer—as does a twentieth-century critic who terms it “political servility rather than religious meekness,” a servility “befitting the subjects of a despot.”³⁴

Alongside the irony of Henry's “rescuing” of Cranmer from the risk of imitating Christ, there is the further irony that Henry proceeds to judge heresy by a standard of courtly manners.³⁵ A decorous deportment replaces truth as the norm of primary importance. A peace based on a shaking of hands at Henry's bidding resolves theological conflict (in contrast to Mt. 10:22). Because he likes this sort of religion, G. Wilson Knight can praise Henry as having “a genuine religious understanding,” a “sanity above intrigue and theological subtlety”; Henry is “not subdued to religion [but] takes it, as it were, in his stride.³⁶ Here overlooked, however, is the fact that Henry's stride depends on a subtle bribing: “So, I grow stronger, you more honour gain” (5.2.215).

There is a further irony, moreover, in that Henry's distaste for bad manners is one-sided: he calls it shameful in the councilors to have made Cranmer stand and wait, but it was quite all right for Henry to have put the screws on Cranmer and make him wait. In them Henry perceives a malicious desire to try Cranmer to the utmost (5.2.180), and he accuses them of treating Cranmer as a “lousy foot boy.”³⁷ But Henry feels free to make everybody dance to his tune, as if all his lords were base grooms, virtual footboys. Let's say (as a thematic conclusion) that “good breeding” is whatever Henry determines it to be.

At least two recent critics have commented on the violation of justice by Henry in this scene. The court's power to commit Cranmer is invalidated, says Lee Bliss, when he is freed by Henry's ring; and then the king's ban on wagging a finger at Cranmer stifles any legitimate grievance.³⁸ The Council's deliberations are rendered meaningless, Stuart Kurland has observed, when after acquiescing in the Council's plan to investigate Henry reserves the decision to himself and disrupts a consideration of the “fell mischiefs” Gardiner was given to believe Henry cared about. The issue raised by the alleged heresies—the danger of a “general taint of the whole state,” as in Germany—goes unheeded by a judge inattentive to the public interest. Indeed, Kurland sees in Henry throughout the play an attitude toward kingship which resembles that of King James, by whom personal concerns were persistently exalted over concerns of state.³⁹

That the play reflects abuses of the royal prerogative similar to those by King James which were arousing public concern at the time Shakespeare was writing is a point developed by William Bailey in a recent essay. On various issues the actions of James seemed arbitrary. Especially notable was the sudden arrest of Overbury in early 1613 on questionable charges and the manipulating of Archbishop Abbot to obtain a marriage annulment the King desired for a favorite of his. James resembled Henry also in favoring costly masques and a courtly extravagance.⁴⁰ Amid this contemporary background, the praise of James which concludes Shakespeare's play could have seemed suspect to acute observers.

III

Except for those who think Fletcher wrote the play's ending, most of the commentators on Cranmers's oracle have assumed that it voices Shakespeare's hope.⁴¹ It seems to me, however, that Shakespeare is carefully preserving dramatic decorum by presenting us an ideal of Cranmer's, not the dramatist's own but representative rather of the official mythology of the times. In various ways Shakespeare implies that Cranmer's vision is deceptive—perhaps not because Cranmer intends to deceive but because he is self-deceived and therefore deceiving others to please Henry. For this conclusion I would offer an aggregate of congruent evidence as follows:

1. The circumstances suggest a duplicity. Whereas Holinshed reported Cranmer's giving a golden cup as a christening gift, Shakespeare has substituted a cupful of golden testimony prompted by Cranmer's gratitude for the golden ring given him by Henry. We are shown Henry expecting an exchange of favors when, after giving a rescuing testimonial for Cranmer, he immediately mentions a “suit” Cranmer “must not deny me.” Henry's polite “must” is a veiled command; Cranmer is being assigned a godfather's role. Then, after the christening, he is given his cue to speak by Henry's asking, “What is her name?” It is a strange question for a father to ask, unless something more is implied.

We may compare the reciprocity in Henry V between the King and his Archbishop. There a blessing of Henry's war is traded for his relieving the church of taxes. The barter (or bribe) is covered over by Henry's warning verbally against any “wresting” of the truth, while subtly he manipulates exactly that outcome—just as in Henry VIII the Archbishop warns against anyone thinking his words “flattery,” while flattery is the actual effect of his words. Or, we may compare the flattery of Henry V when wooing the French Kate as an “angel,” whereas in fact he is swallowing his earlier dislike for her (3 Prol. 32) in order to obtain a peace treaty naming him heir and providing him thus an appearance of success with which to hide his failure to obtain the French crown. The resulting peace, celebrated as a “Christian-like accord,” proved to be less substantial than the paper it was written on—in this respect like the peace celebrated at Henry VIII's Field of the Cloth of Gold. Irony is a conspicuous feature in both plays.

2. Cranmer's use of hyperbole connotes flattery, if we recall the grammarian Puttenham's naming of hyperbole as “the loud lyar” trope. Is not credibility stretched when we are told that Elizabeth in her cradle promises “a thousand thousand blessings” (i.e., a million)? And an auditor may find it difficult to imagine how “all” the virtues that attend the good can be “doubled” on anyone. When we are told that she models “the perfect ways of honor,” the lack of any named action to illustrate this perfection leaves it rather vaporous—as compared, say, with the way of honor we have seen actualized by Queen Katherine. Or if Elizabeth's perfection is perhaps specified in her making her foes to “shake like a field of beaten corn,” no historical event is foretold which will manifest this triumph, and in any case it can only refer to temporal victory rather than to any triumphing over “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” to which baptism has consecrated her in the Prayerbook ritual. During that off stage event, the godfather and godmothers of the infant would have been asked by the officiating priest: “Dost thou forsake … the vain pomp and glory of the world … ?”⁴² But the pomp of their onstage procession calls in doubt whether they have done any such forsaking.

3. We are told that “the saints must have her” when Elizabeth has become “great in admiration” and “great in fame.” These supposed prerequisites for saintliness, however, have been largely denied to our drama's saintly Katherine, while attained rather by a speciously saintlike Anne. We may recall, moreover, that public honor and fame are rated in Boethius as an unreliable basis for true happiness. His Lady Philosophy cries out in Bk III, pr. 6:

As for glory, how deceptive it often is, and how shameful! The tragic playwright [Euripides] justly cries: ‘Oh Fame, Fame, how many lives of worthless men you have exalted! For many men have achieved a great name based on the false opinion of the masses; and what is more disgraceful than that?

When Cranmer praises James for “the greatness of his name” that shall “make new nations,” he apparently intends to liken James to Abraham. But the Abraham of Genesis 12 was promised the fatherhood of many nations not through any greatness of name but because of a faith in God which committed him to a life of sacrificial pilgrimage, a virtue unnamed in Cranmer's prophecy.

4. Cranmer distorts Scripture when he leans on Micah 4:4 to prophesy that in Elizabeth “God shall be truly known” since

In her days every man shall eat in safety
Under his own vine what he plants, and sing
The merry songs of peace.

(5.4.33-35)

In Micah the passage concludes instead: “And none shall make him afraid” (because he is comforted by the “mouth of the Lord”); whereas Cranmer has declared in a previous line that Elizabeth shall be “feared” because of her own mightiness. Auditors at this point may recall Bassanio's insight when faced by the golden casket of The Merchant of Venice:

                              In religion,
What damned error but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament.

(2.2.77-80; see also 3.95-99)

Micah's text was a messianic one that prophesied a shepherd who would come from “little” Bethlehem, gather the castoffs and afflicted, and give them security by feeding them “in the strength of the Lord” and the majesty of His name. Cranmer wishes to cover Elizabeth with messianic overtones but without the duties biblically required. In listening to him an audience may remember the warning of Micah (in 3:11) against priests and prophets who “teach for hire” and “divine for money” and yet will “lean upon the Lord and say, ‘Is not the Lord among us?’”

5. The phoenix myth is given by Cranmer no Christian application. Historically, the myth had diverse associations: with Osiris in Egyptian mysteries, with metempsychosis in Ovid, with the palm tree in Job 29:18, and (by early Christian writers) with resurrection in general and specifically as an analogy to Christ or as a symbol of Christ's birth from the Virgin Mary.⁴³ The old English poem Phoenix allegorizes the myth as a type of Christ. But Dante in his Inferno 24 describes the punishment of Vanni Fucci as a perpetual phoenix-like transformation, and John Donne in his “The Canonization” uses “the Phoenix riddle” to describe witty phallic resurrections. Shakespeare in his I Henry VI, has an English patriot refer to the phoenix when boasting a secularized immortality for the Talbots (4.7.92-93), and in 3 Henry VI Richard of York predicts that “My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth / A bird that will revenge upon you all (1.4.35-36). The phoenix myth as used by Cranmer ascribes to Elizabeth a miraculous renewing of herself in a star-like James, her secular progeny. An analogy to the Virgin Mary, if perhaps here insinuated, lacks validity since it was not Elizabeth's womb that produced James.

6. While eulogizing Elizabeth as a “pattern to all princes,” Cranmer does not use the adjective “Christian” in connection with her “princely graces” and virtues. He ascribes “blessedness” to her without naming any of the prerequisites for blessedness in Matthew's list of Beatitudes. Humbleness of spirit, being merciful, suffering in Christ's name are unmentioned. And any reader who may remember the traditional seven virtues (the four classical and three theological ones) will find difficulty in finding any of these in Cranmer's paean. Elizabeth is said to be counseled by “Holy and heavenly thoughts,” but these seem lacking any tie to faith, hope, and charity. The nearest Cranmer gets to a listing of virtues is his reference (in line 47) to “Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror” as being the “servants” of both Elizabeth and James, in a context which implies that the named attributes serve the honor and greatness of these individuals, rather than God.

A reader who may be puzzled as to why “terror” is considered a desirable attribute need only recall, I suggest, King Henry's use of frowns and an aspect of terror to impose his royal will (2.2.64; 3.2.203s.d. and 205; 5.1.88; 5.2.147s.d.), a habit akin to the early Wolsey's look of “disdain” (1.1.114s.d.). The other items in Cranmer's list, likewise, may be simply the qualities he has seen exemplified in Henry. Thus the virtue of “peace,” for instance, can have as its orbit of meaning the kind of peace Henry imposes when ordering his councilors to shake hands; and “love” can mean a princely love for unconditional obedience; and “plenty” can simply mean the kind of plenteous honors Henry provided his supporters. Abstract language harbors a latitude of meaning. The motley makeup of Cranmer's total list of virtues suggests, unwittingly, a patchwork competency—somewhat like that of a boy swimming on bladders in a sea of glory beyond his depth. That image, Wolsey's retrospective depiction of folly, can be said to fit Cranmer also. Henry's two archbishops have much in common.

Like Wolsey, Cranmer was to come to a better knowledge through repentance. Everyone in Shakespeare's audience could have heard of Cranmer's deathbed abnegation of trust in the doctrine of princes and his choosing instead a service to Christ—after experiencing a political downfall when Fortune's wheel raised Queen Mary to power. Loss of worldly honor then occasioned providentially for Cranmer an agonizing reappraisal. Up to then he had been, as a twentieth-century biographer (Jasper Ridley) says, “an agent of Tudor despotism” who glorified the King, and who on three occasions had granted Henry a divorce on questionable grounds. Yet Cranmer's evil actions (which this biographer tells us included the applying of torture to suspects and sending heretics to the stake) were not those of a cruel man but of a believer in the state's official teaching regarding Christian obedience. Now, however, a troubled conscience led him through a series of recantations that concluded with his confessing to “things written with my hand contrary to the truth I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death and to have my life if it might be.” So he repented by going to a fiery stake and crying out as he died: “I see Heaven open, and Jesus at the right hand of God.”⁴⁴

The final vision of the historical Cranmer was thus that of St. Stephen in Acts 7:55, and this allies him with Katherine and her deathbed vision in Shakespeare's play. Katherine's dream-vision, a recent investigator has informed us,⁴⁵ was developed by Shakespeare from Queen Marguerite of Navarre's dream of an angel promising her a crown shortly before her death, as reported in the funeral sermon by Sainte Marthe published in Latin and French in 1550, an item of interest to English admirers of this major poetess. Marguerite was the Alencon widow to whom Wolsey wished to match King Henry (in 2.2.41). But actually she sympathized with Katherine and disapproved of Henry's divorce. Her piety was rooted in an Augustinian tradition nurtured by the Bishop of Meaux and his literary circle of French humanists; it was committed to an evangelical reform of inner life through a deep following of Christ. It is significant, surely, that Shakespeare's play presents us, in contrast to the twin politicized ecclesiasticisms of Wolsey and Cranmer before their downfalls, the genuine Christianity of a Katherine whose piety is akin to Queen Marguerite's. Toward this kind of piety Shakespeare's auditors see Wolsey begin to turn on his deathbed, and they could readily recall from latter-day history Cranmer's similar turn to find a truer happiness than earthly princes can provide.

Our recent neo-historicists lack a Boethian or Erasmian sense of history. They seem unable to imagine Shakespeare as a gentle ironist of the politics of his day. One of them has said, for instance, that in Henry VIII the playwright used his art to idealize power and legitimate its authority and “perpetuate the power of blood.”⁴⁶ And another reasons that since Shakespeare wrote under the patronage of James, he “ultimately endorses Henry's patriarchal will.”⁴⁷ But I wonder if these critics themselves feel bound to endorse always the will of the head of the institution at which they teach. Neither Boethius nor Christian tradition would so recommend. Boethius urged a prizing of virtue above Fortune. The Bible asks us to question an erring neighbor. It is a sin to neglect to admonish, says Augustine; and Aquinas reasons that everyone is bound to attempt a “fraternal correction” of a social superior, provided one is gifted in some respect the superior lacks and can offer counsel without scandal and in accord with circumstances of time and place (S.T. I.II-II, 33).⁴⁸ We may say that Queen Katherine on her first appearance in Henry VIII is practicing this virtue. To suppose that Shakespeare lacked it goes against the evidence of many of his plays. Ben Jonson credited him with shaking his spear-lance at eyes of ignorance for all who have “wit to read.”⁴⁹

Notes

1. Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (1936; rpt. Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), pp. 56, 80, 112, 146.

2. I cite from the new Arden Henry VIII, R. A. Foakes, ed., (1957; rpt. London: Methuen, 1968). The burst-bladder image is traced by Foakes to a comment on Wolsey in Speed's History (1611). But Wolsey's “Farewell” speech as a whole (3.2.351-72) contains much other imagery, for which it seems to me Shakespeare's likely immediate source was Cavendish's manuscript Life of Wolsey (1556). Cavendish devotes his final paragraph to moralizing on “the wondrous mutability of vain honors” (compare the play's lines 354-55) and “the inconstancies of princes” (compare lines 367-69) and ends with an outcry against greedy men and their foolish trust in “rolling Fortune.” See the text edited by Richard Sylvester in Two Early Tudor Lives (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), p. 192 and Sylvester's comment, p. xi., on the medieval tradition from which Cavendish wrote. George F. Steiner in “A Note on Cavendish's Life of Wolsey,” English, 9 (1952), 51-54 contends that many of its passages support our concluding that Shakespeare knew Cavendish's text thoroughly. See also Paul F. Wiley, “Renaissance Exploitation of Cavendish's Life of Wolsey,” Studies in Philology, 43 (1946), 121-46. A. C. Kirsch has remarked that Shakespeare was “informed by a Boethian conception of Fate and Providence”; see his Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives (1972), p. 127.

3. Although Frank V. Cespedes has recently argued that the play as a whole dramatizes “the instability of Fortune,” he leans on Derrida and supposes it is questioning the availability of an “omniscient” perspective. See his “We are one in fortunes': The Sense of History in Henry VIII,” ELR, 10 (1980), 417.

4. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 120-21.

5. Anne Barton, “The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History,” in William Shakespeare: Histories & Poems, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 260-62. Michael McInturff has expounded Shakespeare's “double perspective” in King And Country: A Critical Study of Shakespeare's “King Henry VIII,” Diss. Indiana Univ. 1975. F. W. Brownlow, Two Shakespearean Sequences (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 191-200, reviews instances of the “pervasive irony” he finds in Henry VIII.

6. Norman Rabkin, “Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry VI,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 28 (1977), pp. 279-96.

7. Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951), ch. 17, which concludes (p. 267) with the statement I cite. Others who have commented on the irony of Henry V include Roy Battenhouse (1962), C. H. Hobday (1968), and Ralph Berry (1978). My “Henry V in the Light of Erasmus,” Shakespeare Studies, 17 (1985), pp. 77-88 enlarges on and confirms these readings.

8. Tom McBride, “Henry VIII As Machiavellian Romance,” JEGP, 76 (1977), pp. 26-39.

9. H. N. Hudson, Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Character, revised ed. (U.S.: Ginn & Company, 1872), II, 200-01.

10. Frye, p. 121; Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom For A Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), p. 220.

11. Hermann Ulrici, Shakespeare's Dramatic Art, trans. Morrison, (n.p.: Chapman, 1846), pp. 416-22.

12. James Spedding, “Appendix: Shakespeare's Share in Henry VIII,” New Shakespeare Society's Transactions, No. 1 (n.p.: n.p., 1874), pp. 1-3.

13. Kim Noling, “Grubbing Up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), notably p. 305.

14. I am citing from Richard Green's translation, published by Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis and New York, 1962.

15. See Hudson, II, 191-96; Foakes, pp. lviii-lx; Howard Felperin, “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: History as Myth,” SEL, 6 (1966), 244; Edward I. Berry, “Henry VIII and the Dynamics of Spectacle,” Shakespeare Studies, 12 (1979), 233, 236, 239; William M. Bailey, “Henry VIII: A Jacobean History,” Shakespeare Studies, 12 (1979), 253.

16. Frank Kermode, “What is Shakespeare's Henry VIII About,” Durham Univ. Journal, 9 (1947), 48-54; G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (Oxford Univ. Press, 1947, and the reprint I cite by Barnes & Noble, New York, 1966), pp. 256-336; R. A. Foakes, p. lxi; Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1962), IV, 449-51.

17. Kermode, p. 53.

18. Bullough, IV, 448.

19. Sylvester, pp. 26-27. Cf. Bullough, IV, 478.

20. Sylvester, p. 39.

21. Sylvester, p. 81.

22. Knight, pp. 314, 317-18, 321.

23. Joseph Candido, “Fashioning Henry VIII: What Shakespeare Saw in When You See Me You Know Me,” Cahiers Elizabéthains, 23 (1983), 47-60, thinks Shakespeare followed Rowley's portrait of a “bluff King Hal” free of any hypocrisy. I think the “bluff” deceptive.

24. Stuart M. Kurland has noted that Henry's later lecture to Cranmer on how justice can be corrupted (5.1.130) seems to refer to the circumstances of Buckingham's case. See “Henry VIII and James I: Shakespeare and Jacobean Politics,” Shakespeare Studies, 19 (1987), 208.

25. Kurland, p. 208. Candido, pp. 53-54, is puzzled by Henry's strange ignorance of events around him but would attribute this to a boyish lack of subtlety in Henry.

26. Knight, p. 309.

27. Critics who ignore Acts 5:29 misread Katherine's character. Edward Berry, for instance, finds in her reply a “bitter hatred” and lack of spiritual humility (p. 288). Judith Anderson sees “bitter sarcasm” in it and an anger that seems obsessive and not clearly justifiable; see Biographical Truth (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984), p. 147.

28. Foakes, p. liii.

29. Bullough, IV, 453.

30. Kurland, p. 210.

31. A recent historian, M. D. Palmer, tells us that Wolsey's unique dependence on Rome as legate a latere accorded with the policy of a Henry who was extremely keen that Wolsey's candidature for the papacy succeed. See Henry VIII, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1983), p. 13.

32. Bullough, IV, 486.

33. Foakes, p. lxii.

34. A. A. Parker, “Henry VIII in Shakespeare and Calderon,” MLR, 43 (1948), 329.

35. Ornstein has remarked that “the unforgivable sin in Henry VIII is bad form, not bad theology” (p. 218). He therefore argues that Fletcher wrote the play, since “Fletcher makes refinement a cardinal virtue and boorishness a deadly sin” (p. 206).

36. Knight, pp. 314-15 and 307. He seems unaware that a dipthong was very important at Nicaea.

37. Viewed objectively, the council's procedure can be seen as not malicious, if we notice the Lord Chancellor's temperate conduct of the meeting and his defense of its purpose in lines 184-86. Significantly, the Chancellor is unnamed but in 1533 would have been Sir Thomas More.

38. Lee Bliss, “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth,” ELH, 42 (1975), 14.

39. Kurland, pp. 212-13.

40. Bailey, pp. 247-66.

41. Knight: In words “deeply loaded with a life's wisdom,” Shakespeare has outlined the peace England is to serve (pp. 331, 336). Lee Bliss: “Shakespeare offers, in the form of an ideal, a solution to the political world's sickness and corruption” (p. 20). Edward Berry (siding with Lee Bliss): “To idealize the King in this manner is not necessarily to flatter him, as numerous studies of masque conventions have made clear, but to invite him to become ideal” (p. 243). Kim Noling: “Shakespeare breaks out of the world of the dramatic fiction to make a complimentary gesture toward the ruling monarch” (p. 306). Paul Dean: “The artist [Shakespeare], like the Phoenix, [is] ever in search of self-renewal,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), 189. Judith Anderson, however, thinks Cranmer's prophecy raises for us “the question of the credibility of fiction” (p. 153).

42. John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer 1559 (Washington, DC: Folger Library, 1976), p. 273. An audience at the Globe would associate baptism with this ritual.

43. My information is drawn from John Spencer Hill, “The Phoenix,” Religion & Literature, 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1984), 61-66.

44. Jasper Ridley, Thomas Cranmer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 66, 400-10.

45. E. E. Duncan Jones, “Queen Katherine's Vision and Queen Margaret's Dream,” Notes and Queries, 206 (1961), 142-43. The French Queen's piety has been well studied by Gary Ferguson, Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre's Devotional Poetry, Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1992.

46. Leonard Tennenhouse, “Strategies of State and Political Plays,” Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 123-25.

47. Noling, p. 291.

48. An early instance of Shakespeare's offering of fraternal correction to King James, I have argued in CLIO, 72 (1978), 193-212, was the dramatizing of Measure for Measure, a play which realigns and supplements the maxims of James in his Basilikon Doron.

49. A wayside question: I wonder how Shakespeare felt about the burning down of his theatre on June 29, 1613. The immediate cause, we know, was a spark from a theatre cannon shot off to honor King Henry's arrival at Wolsey's banquet. But since June 29 is St. Peter's day in the church calendar, might not a Christian consider the fire an omen of divine displeasure, or in particular a displeasure by St. Peter the church's shepherd, over the giving of honor to Henry's misuse of the shepherd's role? We know that Shakespeare often treats omens seriously in his plays. Did the fire perhaps prompt his retiring from theatre work?