SOURCE: McMullan, Gordon. Introduction to King Henry VIII (All Is True), by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, edited by Gordon McMullan, pp. 1-200. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000.

[In the following excerpt, McMullan concentrates on the characterization of Queens Katherine and Anne in Henry VIII, noting the lack of more than superficial distinctions between the two figures in regard to the play's ambivalent treatment of the English Reformation.]

THE CHARACTER OF THE QUEEN

The crisis of the ‘late plays’ is always, in one way or another, a family crisis, and the breaking of deadlock in each of the plays is effected by or through women: Marina, Imogen, Perdita and Miranda unwittingly, Paulina consciously. As Wotton's emphasis on the problems of the ‘familiar’ might unintentionally suggest, much of the trouble in Henry VIII takes place within or in relation to the institution of the family, yet one crucial difference between Henry VIII and the ‘late plays’ is that the collaboration contains no itinerant, independent heroine. Katherine is perhaps the nearest in quality to a ‘late play’ heroine as she attempts to maintain an independent relationship with the King, yet she is consistently outmanoeuvred and finally effectively incarcerated. Anne appeals to Henry at least in part because of her apparent independence (which we judge, when we first see her, from her ability to evade Lord Sandys's charmless advances (1.4.45-8)), but from the moment of their meeting she is subject to his desires, and her behaviour and morals are quite different from those of a Marina or a Perdita. The child Elizabeth, on the other hand, is the only female figure permitted the promise of agency, but that agency is deferred, remaining unfulfilled within the confines of the play (and arguably within the audience's memory, too). Perhaps, then, the young heroine of the late plays is here divided into three—into Katherine the spiritual exile, Anne the beautiful and productive, and Elizabeth the hope of the future—even as she herself figures an ideal version of the Elizabeth of the Jacobean imagination. But none of the three has the independence of movement and the plot-driving quality of a Marina or an Imogen, or even the circumscribed agency of a Perdita or a Miranda.

Katherine pushes hard, though, both to sustain the original structure of her marriage and to keep things as they are and should be, and her rage for stability is one it is impossible for the audience not to share. Henry's brief reflection after Katherine has stormed out of the courtroom seems to sum her up: ‘Go thy ways, Kate’, he says, admiringly:

That man i'th' world who shall report he has
A better wife, let him in naught be trusted
For speaking false in that. Thou art alone—
If thy rare qualities, sweet gentleness,
Thy meekness saint-like, wife-like government,
Obeying in commanding, and thy parts
Sovereign and pious else, could speak thee out—
The queen of earthly queens. She's noble born,
And like her true nobility she has
Carried her self towards me.

(2.4.130-140)

The audience has little choice, hearing this encomium, but to accept that Katherine is an exemplary woman in the mould of popular ‘lives’ of female saints or model matrons, and her behaviour throughout the play supports this description. Strangely, then, just as the play sets out to represent the process of Reformation and celebrate the birth of the Protestant Elizabeth, it seems to set up her hated sister's mother as a paragon of virtue. The early nineteenth-century critic Anna Jameson describes Katherine in terms that will by now be familiar:

The character [of Katherine] when analysed, is, in the first place, distinguished by truth. I do not only mean its truth to nature, or its relative truth arising from its historic fidelity and dramatic consistency, but truth as a quality of the soul: this is the basis of the character.

(Jameson, 2.274)

Jameson appeals to a romantic understanding of the concept of truth which, though current, indeed culturally dominant, in her own period, would have meant little to the Jacobeans, yet she shares this assessment of Katherine's character—certainly compared with all the other characters in the play—with generations of critics and theatre practitioners. Yet to what, exactly, is Katherine true? On the one hand, as an exemplary wife prepared to stand up to her unreasonable husband in order to sustain their marriage, she is true to a central principle of the reformation of manners; on the other, as a devout Catholic staunchly opposed to Reformation, she is true to Rome and the old order.

This presents a surprisingly complex problem because of the apparent disjunction between the responses to be expected from the audience in 1613 to these two principal aspects of her character. She is, after all, inescapably Roman Catholic: she appeals directly ‘unto the Pope’ (2.4.117) when she runs out of patience with the divorce hearing, and she insistently resists the onset of Reformation as personified in the Lutheran Anne. Yet she is no Gardiner—there was no popular vilification of Katherine after her death as there was of the bishop and of her daughter Mary—and she is set up from the second scene onwards in direct opposition to Wolsey, who embodies all that is corrupt in both court and Church. Perhaps disturbingly, bearing in mind her allegiance to Rome, she has in fact no apparent need for reformation, since her life on earth has been exemplary. She is, in many ways, an ideal embodiment of the reformation of manners as it was applied to the relations between the sexes and specifically to women, sustaining as she does, to the bitter end, the basic social structure, marriage, upon which political stability was held to depend. Her Catholicism, in other words, has more in common with reformed social and personal attitudes (as well, perhaps, as with James I's foreign policy) than it does with the Church of which Wolsey is a prominent member. Moreover, the heavenly vision she is given seems to establish her as a true Christian, welcomed by angels into the body of the elect. Though, as I have suggested, post-Renaissance productions have varied between what might be thought of as a ‘Protestant’ and a ‘Catholic’ version of the vision, the former sparse and internalized, the latter spectacular and externalized, there seems little doubt—at least to judge from the lengthy Folio stage direction—that the original audiences would have seen a spectacular version and therefore have no doubt about Katherine's state of grace.

Yet for some Protestant members of the audience, this vision—grace or no grace—would have been decidedly uncomfortable (just as Leontes' apparent admiration for a graven image in the last act of The Winter's Tale would have worried them), since visions of angels are associated with Catholic tradition in a way they are not with Protestantism. Moreover, as Judith Anderson has suggested, Katherine's vision is not as reassuring as we might initially assume. Though it seems to provide ‘poetic recompense’ for her sufferings, ‘there is also an ironic recollection of her earlier declaration, “nothing but death / Shall e'er divorce my dignities”’, and, by ‘[c]ombining poetic recompense and actual divorce’ in this way, the play ‘gives us cause to wonder whether Catherine's vision is just another anodyne or is true inspiration’. In other words, as far as the audience is concerned, the vision, while ‘appealing’, is also ‘at the very least ambivalent’ (Anderson, 134). Moreover, for all her ostensible detachment from worldly matters, Katherine's final speech (like those of Buckingham and Wolsey) clearly indicates both that she is still aware of material and ideological reality and that (understandably) she has yet to forgive Henry for his actions (4.2.163-4). In a specifically legal context, Katherine's deathbed requests constitute a deliberate, continued rejection both of the divorce and of Henry's legal moves to enforce his control of her property. As Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass note, she is here asserting ‘her right to give away the money … that she is simultaneously asking Henry to give to her’ (Jones & Stallybrass, ‘Griselda’, 19). And the bitter echo of the destruction of Jezebel in her last words (4.2.171-2 and n.) indicates her continued resentment of the King's callousness.

The position Henry's divorce-hearing encomium puts her in—as the ideal conduct-book wife nonetheless abandoned—is a reminder that Katherine is, like all dramatic characters, no matter how ‘proud’ or ‘dignified’, a construct, pieced together from prior textual material, and it is not just conduct books that create the Katherine of the play. Her status, for instance, as a foreign Queen of England—called, diminutively, ‘Kate’ (2.4.130) at a moment of intimacy which is really a political moment—reminds us of Hal's French Kate in the last act of Henry V. But, kneeling before her husband at her first entrance, she also reminds us of another, quite different Kate, as Sarah Siddons clearly realized when, in January 1790, she arranged and starred in a back-to-back performance of Henry VIII and Garrick's Katharine and Petruchio, an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. As Hugh Richmond notes:

Siddons surely perceived the irony of the late play seen as a wry corollary of the early one, since a wife as loyal as Queen Katherine earns only misfortune by meeting the specifications which a reformed Katherina Minola finally offers Petruchio.

(Richmond, 44)

Henry's failure to acknowledge Katherine's status as an exemplar of the reformation of manners would, I am sure, have been just as apparent to the Jacobean audience in view of the continuing interest in The Taming of the Shrew implied by Fletcher's Woman's Prize, first performed just a year or so earlier, and it is a failure which is foregrounded throughout what has become known as the ‘trial scene’. This is also the scene in which the intertextuality of Katherine's characterization is most apparent. We have noted the particular physical significance the divorce hearing would have had for an audience in the Blackfriars theatre, the very hall in which, eighty-four years previously, the papal inquiry into the status of Henry's and Katherine's marriage had taken place (a parallel which might also have led the audience to wonder about the truth of the dramatic proceedings they were witnessing). Other trials would also have sprung to mind, too, some fictional, some actual and recent. The ‘actual’ trials would include those of Arabella Stuart and, as the play was first performed, of Frances Howard, principal players in the two most notorious divorce cases of James's reign; the fictional would certainly include Vittoria Corombona's trial in John Webster's dark and violent tragedy The White Devil, first performed in 1612 at the rival Red Bull theatre in Clerkenwell. The most obvious parallel, however—and one which provides a fine example of the way in which the repertory of a given company developed in relation to those of other companies, since it was itself an influence on Webster's play—is with Hermione's trial in The Winter's Tale.

Katherine's defence of her marriage in the Blackfriars courtroom has strong resemblances to Hermione's resistance to Leontes' irrational jealousy. As Michael Dobson neatly phrases it, ‘the King of Spain was Katharine's father, the Emperor of Russia was Hermione's, but they seem to have attended the same school of rhetoric’ (Dobson, ‘Costume drama’, 22). ‘Good my lords,’ says Hermione, when her husband first accuses her of adultery, ‘I am not prone to weeping, as our sex / Commonly are;. … But I have / That honourable grief lodged here which burns / Worse than tears drown’ (WT 2.1.109-11, 112-14), and at her trial she relies upon her royal nature and the integrity of her past behaviour as her twin defences against false accusation:

                                                                      You, my lord, best know—
Who least will seem to do so my past life
Hath been as continent, as chaste, as true
As I am now unhappy; which is more
Than history can pattern, though devised
And played to take spectators. For behold me,
A fellow of the royal bed, which owe
A moiety of the throne; a great king's daughter,
The mother to a hopeful prince, here standing
To prate and talk for life and honour, fore
Who please to come and hear. For life, I prize it
As I weigh grief, which I would spare. For honour,
'Tis a derivative from me to mine,
And only that I stand for. I appeal
To your own conscience, sir, before Polixenes
Came to your court how I was in your grace,
How merited to be so; since he came,
With what encounter so uncurrent I
Have strained t'appear thus. If one jot beyond
The bound of honour, or in act or will
That way inclining, hardened be the hearts
Of all that hear me, and my near'st of kin
Cry ‘Fie’ upon my grave.

(WT 3.2.31-53)

Katherine, too, resists tears and stands upon her royal blood. ‘Sir,’ she says to Wolsey:

I am about to weep; but, thinking that
We are a queen, or long have dreamed so, certain
The daughter of a king, my drops of tears
I'll turn to sparks of fire.

(2.4.68-71)

And, appealing like Hermione to her husband's degraded conscience, she too calls in her defence her exemplary past:

Sir, I desire you do me right and justice,
And to bestow your pity on me, for
I am a most poor woman, and a stranger,
Born out of your dominions, having here
No judge indifferent, nor no more assurance
Of equal friendship and proceeding. …
                                                                                                    Heaven witness
I have been to you a true and humble wife,
At all times to your will conformable,
Ever in fear to kindle your dislike,
Yea, subject to your countenance, glad or sorry
As I saw it inclined. …
                                                                                                    Sir, call to mind
That I have been your wife in this obedience
Upward of twenty years, and have been blessed
With many children by you. If, in the course
And process of this time, you can report,
And prove it too, against mine honour aught,
My bond to wedlock, or my love and duty
Against your sacred person, in God's name
Turn me away and let the foulest contempt
Shut door upon me, and so give me up
To the sharpest kind of justice.

(2.4.11-16, 20-25, 32-42)

The queens, in other words, emerging from the same mould and sharing the same emotions, surely evoke equal sympathy in the audience for each play.

Yet there are problematic resonances, too, in the conjunction of these two plays. Incest is the darkest of shadows in the earlier ‘late plays’, overtly in Pericles when the protagonist decodes the riddle that tells the truth about Antiochus and his daughter, covertly in The Winter's Tale when (in a sublimated version of the incest plot in Pandosto) Paulina and Leontes clash uncomfortably over his apparent sexual interest in the as-yet-unidentified Perdita (WT 5.1.220-7). And incest reappears in Henry VIII as the ‘tenderness, / Scruple and prick’ in Henry's conscience (2.4.167-8), the belated bar to his marriage with Katherine. As Michael Dobson observes, this ‘play about a succession crisis, involving a man who has married his brother's widow’ would have had a familiar ring for a Shakespearean audience, retracing as it does the relationship of Gertrude and Claudius in Hamlet (Dobson, ‘Costume drama’, 21; see also Rosenblatt). In this return to the earlier play, Henry becomes Claudius—the Satyr to the dead Arthur's Hyperion—and Katherine, Gertrude. Fascinatingly, as Dobson notes, in recalling Gertrude, Katherine, ‘post-menopausal and presented as a dead-end for the future of the Tudor dynasty, … simultaneously recalls the old Queen Elizabeth whom Gertrude partly figured’ (22). Moreover, in pitching together Hamlet and The Winter's Tale in the construction of Katherine, the playwrights effect not the outright contrast you would expect, but a curious, sublimated correlation of Katherine and Anne Bullen. As Dobson observes:

[t]he difference between the two cases is that whereas Hermione is on trial for adultery, Katharine is accused of incest, but the way in which the latter trial seems deliberately to recall the former invites us to parallel or conflate them, and thereby forcibly calls to mind a third famous legal process, the very one which causes Henry VIII to end where it does so that we won't have to see it: the judicial murder of Anne Boleyn on charges of adultery with, among others, her own brother.

(Dobson, ‘Costume drama’, 22-3)¹

Stephen Orgel has argued that Hermione's trial in The Winter's Tale inescapably brings to mind Anne Bullen's trial (so melodramatically staged in the later Virtue Betrayed); in replaying Hermione's experience in Katherine, the playwrights seem quite deliberately—and remarkably—to conflate Katherine with her arch-rival.

It might be expected that the crispest possible distinctions would be drawn between the two queens, and not just in terms of age. Katherine's Catholicism and Anne's Lutheranism provide the principal difference. Furthermore, where Katherine is portrayed as the ideal chaste matron, Anne is presented to us in overtly sexual terms. Her character is determined for us dialogically in the first instance through the debate she has with her experienced, courtly and unscrupulous companion, the Old Lady, a dialogue in which Anne is enabled ostensibly to remain virtuous whilst in fact happily succumbing to the economic and social imperative of the King's offer. The terms of her relationship with the King and the state are clearly economic as well as frankly sexual: Anne is a precious ‘gem / To lighten all this isle’ (2.3.78-9), a ‘fresh fish’, who, unlike her friend, who has ‘been begging sixteen years in court’ and is ‘yet a courtier beggarly’, has her ‘mouth filled up’ before she has opened it (2.3.86, 82-3, 87-8) and whose ‘thousand pounds a year’ is clearly not given ‘for pure respect’ with ‘[n]o other obligation’ (2.3.95-6). The Third Gentleman's description of Anne at the coronation sustains the pornographic tone of these remarks, implying the new Queen's general availability as she ‘oppos[es] freely / The beauty of her person to the people’ (4.1.67-8) and describing her as ‘the goodliest woman / That ever lay by man’ (4.1.69-70).

Yet Anne is so overtly instrumental within the patriarchal frame that it becomes difficult to treat her as a ‘character’ in the traditional sense. She is a ‘creature’, rather, a vehicle for the birth of Elizabeth, barely adequately characterized as a foil for Katherine's virtues and strength of personality, and her negative qualities are repeatedly erased by the unsubtle reminders that, whatever we think of her liaison with Henry, the outcome will be Elizabeth. All that matters is the production of an heir, as Anne herself acknowledges in her words to the Lord Chamberlain—‘More than my all is nothing’ (2.3.67)—if ‘nothing’ connotes ‘vagina’ and therefore sexuality / procreativity. We have seen the dispensability of mothers in Katherine's dismissal for failing to produce a son, and Gardiner callously dismisses Anne, too, assuming that she is about to bear a boy: ‘[t]he fruit she goes with’, he says to Lovell, ‘I pray for heartily, that it may find / Good time, and live. But for the stock, … / I wish it grubbed up now’ (5.1.20-3). This context of the instrumentality of women in a patriarchal culture makes it less curious than it might be that, at a subtextual level, at least, it seems so difficult to make black-and-white distinctions between Katherine and Anne.

The play seems, in fact, perversely to confuse the differences between the two queens, and thus to make the transition from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism, as both symbolized in and provoked by Henry's divorce and remarriage, a much more problematic and unresolved process than might at first appear. On the one hand, we see Katherine as the embodiment of the old, Roman Catholic England and Anne as the embodiment of the new, Reformation England. On the other, we see Katherine as the embodiment of a stability which is in many ways far more comfortable, comprehensible and credible than any new order, and we see Anne as the embodiment of divorce and schism, uncertainty and unpredictability. Moreover, where Anne is portrayed as a Bathsheba figure (though one for whom a wife rather than a husband must be destroyed), Katherine is depicted as a woman of strength and faith. And source study suggests, remarkably, that the climactic deathbed vision which effectively apotheosizes Katherine acts not to outline her transcendent separation from Anne and from the Reformation, but to engage her both with her rival and with the cultural transformation she resists.

While there is nothing in Holinshed to suggest that Katherine was the recipient of divine revelation before she died, two alternative sources have been suggested for her angelic vision. E. E. Duncan-Jones points out that another notable woman of the period, Marguerite of Angoulême, Duchess of Alençon and Queen of Navarre, is reported to have had such a dream just before her death (Duncan-Jones, 142). Marguerite is mentioned at 2.2.40 and 3.2.85-6 as Wolsey's preferred bride for Henry after the divorce from Katherine. The dream she is reported to have had is described in her funeral oration, published in 1550, and clearly draws on Catholic saints' legends: in her vision, she sees ‘une très-belle femme tenante en sa main une couronne qu'elle luy monstroit et luy disoit que bien tost elle en seroit couronnée’ (‘a very beautiful woman holding in her hand a coronet which she showed her and told her that soon she would be crowned’), a scene very close indeed to Katherine's angelic vision in the play (Sainte Marthe, 105).² According to Duncan-Jones, Marguerite's ‘piety … was well known in England during her lifetime’ (143), and it would seem perfectly appropriate to transfer this association to Katherine, particularly as Marguerite was strongly opposed to the divorce (Jourda, 1.172). Interestingly, however, Marguerite was a reforming Catholic, a staunch defender of early French reformers—the young Queen Elizabeth had translated one of her early works as a gift for her Protestant stepmother, Queen Katherine Parr—and, although never herself a Protestant, she was celebrated by French Protestants as a friend of Calvin and Marot. The transfer of her dream to Katherine thus figures Katherine as a reforming Catholic, a far cry from Wolsey or Gardiner; at the same time, the incorporation of the idea of ‘holy incest’ in Marguerite's poem Miroir de l'âme pécheresse as a means for expressing intimacy with God has further, controversial resonances for Katherine's situation. It acts also as implicit criticism of Henry, since John Bale, in his edition of Marguerite's treatise A Godly Meditation of the Christian Soul (1548), ‘eulogized the youthful translator, Princess Elizabeth, as an intellectual descendant of Anne Askew’, a celebrated Protestant martyr under Henry VIII (King, Tudor, 209). And since Anne Bullen herself was believed (in error) to have been a lady-in-waiting to Marguerite and even to have been encouraged in her Protestantism by her, the deployment of Marguerite's dream for Katherine's vision produces a quite remarkable sectarian conjunction.³

This conjunction, in itself unexpected, is outweighed by John Margeson's suggestion that the description of the vision may have been influenced by Holinshed's report of a dream experienced by Anne Bullen herself shortly before her death:

this good queene was forwarned of hir death in a dreame, wherein Morpheus the god of sleepe (in the likenesse of hir grandfather) appeered vnto hir, and after a long narration of the vanities of this world (how enuie reigneth in the courts of princes, maligning the fortunate estate of the vertuous, how king Henrie the eight and his issue should be the vtter ouerthrow and expulsion of poperie out of England, and that the gouernment of queene Elizabeth should be established in tranquillitie & peace …

(Holinshed, 940)

Looking forward to Elizabeth's reign after the death of her daughter Mary, this dream might appear anathema to Katherine, yet there is no doubt that it is a possible source—a dream-vision of impending death which offers a bright future and which offers, too, a connection between Katherine's vision and Cranmer's prophecy (as well, tenuously, as the song which opens 3.1, with ‘Morpheus’ slipping to ‘Orpheus’, whose music induces sleep). If so, it creates a remarkable, and wholly unlikely, conflation of personalities and reputations.

Yet, remarkable though this is, there is a further possible source for Katherine's dream which produces the most unlikely conjunction of all. In Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (first published 1605), subtitled The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth, the young Princess Elizabeth is suffering at the hands of her sister Mary, and she has a dream-vision which shares several features with Katherine's vision in Henry VIII. She dreams of friars ‘offering to kill her’ and of angels defending her, one of whom then ‘opens the Bible, and puts it in her hands’. Waking, she asks her maid Clarentia if she has seen or heard anything and discovers that she has been dreaming. She is comforted by the dream, believing that it was the ‘inspiration’ of ‘heaven’ (D4^v). The parallels between this vision of angels and Katherine's are marked, and the conjunction it creates between Anne Bullen's daughter and the mother of ‘Bloody Mary’ is astonishing. To give Katherine a dream which is composed of visions dreamed by Anne Bullen, Marguerite of Angoulême and the young Elizabeth is to effect through Katherine a conjunction of Catholic saints' lives and a reforming tradition of prophetic dreams, as well as to create a quiet (but quite startling) religious, if not personal, rapprochement between the King's first two wives—implying that Katherine (whether or not she would admit it), in her staunch resistance to the corruption represented by Wolsey and Campeius, is in fact a kind of reformer. Certainly, the dream is more dependent upon the language of Revelation—especially 7.9 and 19.9 (see 4.2.82.3-5n. and 4.2.87-90n.)—than is Cranmer's prophecy.

As the play proceeds, then, the two queens seem to lose their distinct symbolic significance, and we begin to see the essential futility of the Henrician Reformation. The sequence of Henry's wives foreshadows the sequence of post- and counter-Reformation reigns, the apparently cyclical movement from Henry to Edward to Mary to Elizabeth, and underlines fears for the future after James's death (despite, or perhaps because of, James's plan to defuse the situation by marrying a daughter to a Continental Protestant and a son to a Catholic). The restless displacement of queens in Henry's life and reign, each change both conclusive and inconclusive, embodies the long-term process of Reformation: England moves from reign to reign in the hope of a religious resolution just as Henry moves from queen to queen in the hope of a son and heir. And this process comes under its severest metaphoric pressure in a passage early in Act 4 which is apparently without direct source, inserted into a scene otherwise very closely dependent upon the wording in Holinshed:

                                                                                                                                  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.

(4.1.73-81)

The procreative festivity of the scene, with its curious blend of violence and fecundity, embodies the hopes of Henry and his people for a male heir through Anne, but it is the Gentleman's last observation which arguably offers the most radical reading of English Reformation history in the course of the play, a reading which is both the logical corollary of the degradation of ‘conscience’ and a crushing repudiation of the assumption that the individual subject was the product of Reformation. In the moment of Anne's coronation—the first of the series of remarriages, opening the floodgates to a futile quest for a healthy heir—wives become indistinguishable, ‘all … woven / So strangely in one piece’, and this is seen to be especially true of royal wives. The play's characterization of the queens—embodying its uncomfortable attitude both to the reformation of manners and to the Reformation proper—is thus designed to ensure that no-one in the audience, least of all the ‘godly’, is permitted the luxury of a simplistic, black-and-white understanding of the Reformation.

Notes

1. There is further irony in the fact that, when he first began to plan for the marriage to Anne, Henry sought a dispensation from the Pope to marry a woman with whose older sister he had already slept, since his earlier affair with Mary Bullen technically made his union with Anne incestuous. The irony, of course, is that Henry moved from a marriage which he repudiated as incestuous to another which, by sixteenth-century rules, was also incestuous. I am grateful to Maureen Quilligan for discussion of incest, authorship and the significance of Marguerite of Angoulême (see p. 133).

2. Duncan-Jones adds in a footnote that ‘Pepys heard from a Presbyterian minister, Mr. Case, “a pretty story of a religious lady, Queen of Navarre” on 20 Jan. 1668. He does not reveal what it was but since he goes on to say that another member of the company “told a good story of Mr. Newman, the minister in New England … foretelling his death and preaching his funeral sermon, and at last bid the angels do their office, and dies” it seems possible that the “pretty story of the Queen of Navarre” was that of her vision of the angel with the garland’ (143).

3. As it happens, Anne was never a member of Marguerite's household, though she seems to have known her fairly well. According to Ives, ‘Marguerite became a noted—if somewhat eclectic—supporter of religious reform, and it was easy for men like Sander [a recusant exile and polemicist under Elizabeth] to conclude that Anne, the embodiment of heresy, had been first subverted by the duchess’ (Ives, 40).

Works Cited

Judith H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven, Conn., 1984)

Michael Dobson, ‘Costume drama’, draft chapter in Dobson and Nicola Watson, England's Elizabeth: National Fictions of Elizabeth, I, 1603-1990 (forthcoming)

E. E. Duncan-Jones, ‘Queen Katherine's vision and Queen Margaret's dream’, N & Q, [Notes & Queries] 8 (1961), 142-3

Raphael Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles, beginning at duke William the Norman … First compiled by Raphael Holinshed, … Now newly … augmented (1587)

E. W. Ives, Anne Boleyn (Oxford, 1986)

Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical, 2 vols (1832)

Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘(In)alienable possessions: Griselda, clothing and the exchange of women’, draft of chapter forthcoming in Jones & Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory

Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d'Angoulême, 2 vols (Paris, 1930)

John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton, N.J., 1989)

Hugh M. Richmond, Henry VIII, ‘Shakespeare in Performance’ series (Manchester, 1994)

Jason P. Rosenblatt, ‘Aspects of the Incest Problem in Hamlet’, SQ, [Shakespeare Quarterly] 29 (1978), 349-64

Charles de Sainte Marthe, Oraison funèbre de la mort de l'incomparable Marguerite Reine de Navarre et duchesse d'Alençon (Paris, 1550), quoted in Jourda, 1.337