SOURCE: Leggatt, Alexander. “Henry VIII and the Ideal England.” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 131-43.

[In the following essay, Leggatt examines the idealized image of England and its history intimated in the body of Henry VIII and fully expressed in Cranmer's prophecy at the end of the drama.]

At the end of Henry VIII Cranmer delivers a prophecy of the golden age of Queen Elizabeth, in a speech that seems designed both as the last in a series of striking set-pieces and as the culmination of the play's action. The elaborate and sometimes devious historical process the play has shown has been designed, we now realize, to allow Elizabeth to be born and to make this golden age possible. For the characters in the play, however, the age of Elizabeth lies in the future and, we are told, ‘Few now living can behold that goodness’ (5.4.22).¹ For the audience it lies in the past. Like all golden ages it is just the other side of the horizon.² If the author had been content to leave it there we might have been content to accept the convention. But Cranmer extends his idealizing vision to the present, to the reign of James; this too is part of the golden age. At this point the more realistic spectators might have reflected on the difference between dream and reality, and concluded that nothing gold can stay. The same train of thought might have prompted memories of the dark, unsettled end of Elizabeth's reign, memories against which Cranmer's vision could be tested. Cranmer is not just taking his audience somewhere over the rainbow; he is also asking it to see its own present, and its own immediate past, as a golden age. Outside the special conditions of court masque and complimentary verse, that takes some doing. And it was not what Jacobean drama normally did. Cranmer's speech, then, may look like an exercise in nostalgia; but it allows us, even encourages us, to set his ideal vision against our sense of the world as it really is.

There is one respect, however, in which Cranmer's speech might have evoked a simple nostalgia. Whether or not it recalls a past history, it certainly recalls an older drama. The cult of Elizabeth in her lifetime took many forms, and one of them was the custom of ending plays with a tribute to the Queen, often in terms quite similar to those Cranmer uses here. Sometimes the effect is a little perfunctory: when in the Epilogue to The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune Fortune declares,

And sith by Love and Fortune our troubles all do cease,
God save her majesty, that keeps us all in peace,(3)

we may not feel that the entire play has led us to that moment. But references to the Queen can be more than just courteous gestures. A Looking Glass for London and England badgers its audience with threats and exhortations, the last of which is:

Repent, O London, lest for thine offense
Thy shepherd fail, whom mighty God preserve
That she may bide the pillar of his Church
Against the storms of Romish Antichrist.

(5.5.91-4)⁴

And we are warned that only the prayers of the Queen are averting the plague London so richly deserves. In other words, the tribute is put in terms that relate logically to the play's main business. The similar tribute at the end of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is presented as the last use of Bacon's magic, and the only unequivocally good one. In the main play Edward, as part of his development from playboy to prince, becomes a figure of martial prowess. Elizabeth will embody an opposite but complementary princely virtue in a reign of peace:

From forth the royal garden of a king
Shall flourish out so rich and fair a bud,
Whose brightness shall deface proud Phoebus' flower,
And overshadow Albion with her leaves.
Till then Mars shall be master of the field;
But then the stormy threats of wars shall cease.
The horse shall stamp as careless of the pike;
Drums shall be turned to timbrels of delight;
With wealthy favors plenty shall enrich
The strand that gladded wand'ring Brute to see,
And peace from heaven shall harbor in these leaves,
That gorgeous beautifies this matchless flower.

(scene 16, 45-56)

Brute's delight in his new kingdom also connects this tribute to Elizabeth with the note of cheerful patriotism that runs through the whole play. In several respects, then, Bacon's compliment to the Queen is not just in the play but of it.

In the original ending to Every Man out of his Humour Ben Jonson showed Elizabeth as the only power capable of curing the envious Macilente, in the last and most spectacular of the play's dishumourings:

So, in the ample, and vnmeasur'd floud
Of her perfections, are my passions drown'd:
And I have now a spirit as sweet, and cleere,
As the most rarefi'd and subtile aire.

(Epilogue, 12-15)⁵

The last line suggests that Elizabeth has purified not just Macilente but the whole climate in which she moves, and the speech continues with a vision of peace and glory similar to Cranmer's. Jonson was persuaded to change this ending; but he continued to defend it, he preserved Macilente's speech, and he returned to the idea in Cynthia's Revels, where the entrance of the Queen, accompanied by one of Jonson's most graceful lyrics (‘Qveene, and Huntresse, chaste, and fair’, 5.6.1), produces a sudden and dramatic purifying of the play's atmosphere.

We see how far this kind of tribute can go in George Peele's The Arraignment of Paris. The title, and a number of formal statements early in the play, suggest that the subject will be the tragedy of Troy, and up to a point it is. But the story splits two ways. Paris is sent to Troy to endure his fate, accompanied by Apollo's grim prediction,

From Ida woods now wends the shepherd's boy,
That in his bosom carries fire to Troy.

(4.4.169-70)⁶

Meanwhile the Apple of Discord, imagined here as a golden ball, is awarded on appeal to Queen Elizabeth. When it is placed in her hands a number of things happen. The barrier between stage and audience is broken down, so that performers and spectators are aware of being together in a single room. The conventions of theatre are replaced by those of masque or pageant. More important for our purpose, the ball will look, in Elizabeth's hands, like the royal orb; it will be purged of its tragic associations and become simply a sign of her royalty. Paris must endure his destiny; but the Fates lay down their attributes at Elizabeth's feet. At the start of the play Ate's prologue announces a tragedy; the play then abruptly switches to the pastoral mode. So at the end tragedy is again replaced, this time by a court celebration.

Diana first introduces Elizabeth as a nymph who serves and honours her; she dwells in a secluded grove within the play's pastoral landscape. But as Diana describes it the secluded grove becomes

A kingdom that may well compare with mine,
An auncient seat of kings, a second Troy,
Y-compass'd round with a commodious sea.

(5.1.69-71)

England is a magic place of paradoxes: the small, secluded island we hear of in Cymbeline—‘In a great pool a swan's nest’ (3.4.140)⁷—and a majestic kingdom, a second Troy. That last identification is particularly important for the play. The Arraignment of Paris presents not just a compliment to Queen Elizabeth but the redemption of Troy from its own tragic history—just as in The Faerie Queene Arthur is to be redeemed from his tragic story by marrying not Guinevere but Gloriana. The presence of Elizabeth, here as in Spenser, is enough to change the ending of a famous story, enough to change the genre of a work in mid-action.

This reveals one of the most interesting and important features of sixteenth-century drama: its free handling of genre. The function of this freedom, very often, is to reshape reality in quite a radical way, taking us from the world as we know it to a sharply idealized vision. We see how purposeful this can be in John Bale's tragical-historical-polemical morality play Kyng Johan, in which the shifting between historical and allegorical characterization allows a pointed identification of Stephen Langdon with Sedition, and in which King John—for Bale a Protestant martyr—can be destroyed in the world of history and vindicated in the world of allegory. By the desertion of his followers, he is forced to a tragic choice between submitting to the Pope and having England destroyed by war. He submits, for the sake of his country. He is then poisoned by a monk, and dies in the arms of Widow England, a Christ-like figure in a Protestant pietà. He is then replaced on stage by Imperial Majesty, who may be Henry VIII or Elizabeth depending on the date of performance, but who is perhaps best seen as the King's other body. This ideal monarch gets from the Estates figures the obedience John could not command, and sets England to rights. Here, as in The Arraignment of Paris, we see an interplay between an established story with a fixed end—history, in fact, though of a different kind—and an ideal vision of things as they ought to be. This too is background for Henry VIII.

But before turning to Henry VIII we should look at the relation between the ideal and historical visions in some of Shakespeare's earlier history plays. Whatever he may do to the facts Shakespeare generally preserves historical decorum. Nobody seems to know, as even minor characters in Henry VIII seem to know, that Elizabeth is on the way and everything will be all right. There are no magic visions of the future. One exception occurs in Henry VI, Part 3 when King Henry, with the prophetic insight bestowed on him as compensation for his political incompetence, addresses the young Earl of Richmond as ‘England's hope’ and declares, ‘This pretty lad will prove our country's bliss’ (4.6.68, 70). This anticipates the ending of Richard III, in which the hero kills the demon king and we forget the deviousness of the Tudor claim, not to mention the Tudor character, as we contemplate a satisfying picture of England restored and at peace. History at this point stops and is replaced by myth.

There is a much subtler handling of the ideal England in Richard II, in Gaunt's tribute to the royal throne of kings. I call it a tribute because that is how it is remembered. Literally it is a complaint:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulcher in stubborn Jewry
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas'd out—I die pronouncing it—
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat'ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

(2.1.40-66)

As in The Arraignment of Paris, only paradoxes will express the nature of England—a garden, a fortress, a moated country house; fertile, protecting, aggressive; a place enclosed and defensive, a place that sends forth heroes to conquest. But what interests me particularly is the grammar of the speech. With one exception, there are no verbs attached to this ideal England. Gaunt does not say, England was a royal throne of kings but is now leased out like a tenement; he says, this royal throne of kings is now leased out. The effect is that Gaunt's England is not located in the past; it is protected from the sceptical voice that asks if the reign of, say, Edward III, was really that glorious, the voice we may hear at the end of Henry VIII. (The exception that proves the rule is the line, ‘That England, that was wont to conquer others’, which refers to a verifiable historical fact.) All through the history plays people lament the good old days, and Shakespeare could be ironic about this sort of nostalgia—as in Richard III, where the Third Citizen fondly recalls the golden age of Henry VI, when ‘the King / Had virtuous uncles to protect his Grace’ (2.3.21-2). Gaunt's speech is not an exercise in nostalgia. It proclaims an ideal England—the true, inner England, if you like—that does not belong to history at all, but is always elusive and always available.

It is an ideal not just to lament but to live up to. On the whole Gaunt's idea of England as a crusading nation does not seem to touch Shakespeare's imagination very deeply. But Mowbray, who feared that his exile would result in ‘speechless death’ (1.3.172), dies after a noble career as a crusader. When he hears of this the new king Henry IV, for the first time since his return from exile, loses his poise (‘Sweet peace conduct his sweet soul to the bosom / Of good old Abraham!’, 4.1.104-5); and for the rest of his life he is haunted by the dream of leading England to the Holy Land. It is typical of his character that he expresses different motives for this at different times, and he himself may not know which (if any) is the true one; but the desire to give England its ideal role in the Christian world may be one of them. He never succeeds, of course; for Shakespeare the world of history is anything but ideal. The vision of peace and reconciliation we get at the end of Richard III sometimes appears at the beginning of a play—as in Richard III itself, or Henry IV, Part 1—and is immediately eroded by irony. Even the achievement of Henry V is touched by reservations. He orders the garden of England only by ruining the garden of France, and as the Epilogue reminds us his successors destroyed everything he built. When Henry, courting the French Princess, looks to the future—‘Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard?’ (5.2.207-10)—we remember, and are I think meant to remember, that what they got was Henry VI. The condition of man in history is perhaps best summed up in Richard II by York's bitter words, ‘Comfort's in heaven, and we are on the earth’ (2.2.78).⁸

The tributes I have discussed—to an ideal England or an ideal Elizabeth—are, at their most accomplished, relevant to the plays in which they appear, and not just isolated gestures of courtesy. This is certainly true of Greene and Peele, as it is of the more glancing compliments in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But we are also aware of a change of gear, a shift to a different kind of vision. And the sharpness of the transition, as in the last act of Cynthia's Revels, can be an exciting and dramatic effect in its own right. We are learning to enjoy the way Spenser keeps changing the rules in The Faerie Queene; similar pleasures await us in the drama of his contemporaries. According to Clifford Leech, ‘The Elizabethan way of writing is to put things together.’ (One could say, for example, that Gaunt's England is put together with Richard's in the mind of the audience.) Leech added ‘the Jacobean way is to fuse’.⁹ We may now turn to Henry VIII with this question in mind: is it, in Leech's terms, a Jacobean play or an Elizabethan throwback? How, in other words, does it present the relation between the ideal vision and the world of history? Are they put together, or are they fused?

At first glance we seem to have, as in Richard II, juxtaposition, not fusion. While Cranmer speaks of a golden age in which everything is clear and in order the play as a whole shows the world of history to be complex, elusive and rather untidy. Indeed, it goes as far in this direction as any play of Shakespeare's. Following Wolsey's changes of policy is like following the plot of The Way of the World; it can be done, but it requires concentration. He arranges the Field of the Cloth of Gold and then contrives to break the league with France; he encourages the King's divorce and then delays it. At least we can be reasonably sure that he is following what he sees as his own advantage; but his sense of where that lies keeps shifting. What Henry wants is clear: he wants to divorce Katharine and marry Anne. But the question of why he wants it is more elusive. Three minor figures try to help us out:

CHAMBERLAIN.
It seems the marriage with his brother's wife
Has crept too near his conscience.
SUFFOLK.
                                                                                No, his conscience
Has crept too near another lady.
NORFOLK.
                                                                                'Tis so.
This is the Cardinal's doing.

(2.2.16-19)

At different points in his last scene Wolsey attributes his fall to Anne, and to his own ambition (3.2.407-9, 439-42). The effect is of a multiple-choice history exam in which the candidate tries to tick all the answers.

In his long self-defence at Katharine's trial (2.4.165-228) Henry presents the official case for the divorce. His principal evidence of heaven's will in the matter is that the marriage has failed to produce a surviving male heir. Yet when, at the end of the play, Anne produces yet another girl Henry is more than content: ‘Never, before / This happy child, did I get anything’ (5.5.65-6). We might have expected Shakespeare to cover Henry's frustration with a dramatist's tact; instead he calls attention to it, when the garrulous Old Lady—taking her life in her hands, we might think—teases the King by pretending for a moment the child is a boy (5.1.162-6). Motives are mixed, cause and effect are not related in a straightforward way, and our judgement of the characters is often pulled in contrary directions. The clearest example of split judgement is our double vision of Wolsey, whose fall produces both satisfaction and unexpected pity, whose accusers are at once honest Englishmen despatching a nuisance and jackals pulling down a wounded lion. But split judgements are pervasive. We wait for a clear defence of Buckingham's innocence, but it never comes and we begin to wonder.¹⁰ Katharine storms out of her trial in a blaze of pride and anger, and Henry immediately praises her ‘sweet gentleness’ and ‘meekness saint-like’ (2.4.135-6). She refuses the jurisdiction of the English court and announces she will appeal to the Pope. In her next scene she appears as an honorary Protestant heroine, insisting the Cardinals, whom she calls ‘cardinal sins’ (3.1.104), address her in English, not Latin. Then at the end of the scene she submits to their counsel. Anne is a simpler figure, but the Second Gentleman gives two views of her in a few lines:

                                        Heaven bless thee!
Thou hast the sweetest face I ever look'd on.
Sir, as I have a soul, she is an angel;
Our King has all the Indies in his arms,
And more and richer, when he strains that lady.
I cannot blame his conscience.

(4.1.42-7)

We go in a breath from worship to chuckling appreciation. If heaven has anything to do with it it must be ‘A heaven like Mahomet's Paradise’.¹¹

If we did not know that the play was once titled All is True, we would still have the Prologue's claim,

                                        Such as give
Their money out of hope they may believe,
May here find truth too.

(ll. 7-9)

The ‘truth’ the play may claim is not always that of literal historical fact; but it gives us a convincing account of the historical process as a devious, winding current and of historical characters as driven by contradictory motives and inspiring contradictory judgements. We accept the account as true because we recognize that the truth is rarely pure and never simple. In that respect the simplified golden age of Elizabeth seems juxtaposed with the rest of the play rather than fused with it; it belongs to a different order of reality.

But Cranmer prefaces his speech with the claim, ‘the words I utter / Let none think flattery, for they'll find 'em truth’ (5.5.16-17). As in the opening scene of Cymbeline, or the conclusion of The Winter's Tale, there is an insistence that the incredible is true:

SECOND Gentleman.
That a king's children should be so convey'd,
So slackly guarded, and the search so slow,
That could not trace them!
FIRST Gentleman.
                                                                                                    Howso'er 'tis strange,
Or that the negligence may well be laugh'd at,
Yet it is true, sir.
SECOND Gentleman.
I do well believe you.

(Cymbeline, 1.1.63-7)

                                                  That she is living,
Were it but told you, should be hooted at
Like an old tale; but it appears she lives.

(The Winter's Tale, 5.3.115-17)¹²

All is true, not just the historical action but the mythical vision as well. We may ask, jestingly, what is truth? and not stay for an answer. We may say that there are two different kinds of truth, and leave it at that. But on closer inspection we may see that the play, having shown the difference between the two visions, also tries to bring them together in a single reality, so that the claim ‘All is true’ applies in the same way throughout.

In Friar Bacon and A Looking Glass for London and England the final tribute to the Queen picks up material from the play as a whole. The same is true here, but the connections are more subtle and pervasive, and are made at a deeper level. Elizabeth, as I have already suggested, is connected to the rest of the play at the level of action; every important event leads to her birth. James has no such connection, and here the links are established by imagery. Wolsey falls ‘Like a bright exhalation in the evening’ (3.2.226); James ‘Shall star-like rise … / And so stand fix'd’ (5.5.47-8). Henry's worry about overtaxing his subjects is expressed in the image of a damaged tree:

                                        Why, we take
From every tree lop, bark, and part o' th' timber;
And, though we leave it with a root, thus hack'd,
The air will drink the sap.

(1.2.95-8)

James, on the other hand,

                                                  shall flourish,
And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches
To all the plains about him.

(5.5.53-5)

Such echoes might not mean very much by themselves, as the images are commonplace. But some of the speech's most important ideas can be traced earlier in the play. Perhaps the most striking and attractive of Cranmer's pictures of the golden age is that of the peaceful, self-sufficient householder:

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

(5.5.34-6)

The emphasis on domestic happiness is very different from Gaunt's vision of heroic action. The idea that every man should enjoy his own, obviously in a world without tax collectors, has been prepared for earlier in the play. Wolsey's taxation has robbed men of their earnings and forced employers to lay off their workmen (1.2.31-7). Enforced contributions to the Field of the Cloth of Gold have caused similar damage:

ABERGAVENNY.
                                                                                I do know
Kinsmen of mine, three at the least, that have
By this so sicken'd their estates, that never
They shall abound as formerly.
BUCKINGHAM.
                                                                                O, many
Have broke their backs with laying manors on 'em
For this great journey.

(1.1.80-5)

The complaint that land is going into clothing is a familiar Jacobean one; we meet it, for example, in The Revenger's Tragedy. Here it is opposed by Cranmer's vision of the self-sufficient Englishman, contentedly enjoying his estate—whom we have seen before in the person of Alexander Iden in Henry VI, Part 2.

Such greatness and honour as men enjoy in Elizabeth's kingdom, they will enjoy through the Queen herself:

                                        those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honor,
And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.

(5.5.37-9)

This not only suggests Elizabeth's use of ‘new men’ as her most important counsellors but gives us the true form of an ideal that has been perverted by Wolsey, the ‘butcher's cur’ (1.1.120) who apparently rises through the King's favour but really contrives his own career for his own selfish ends. The play as a whole shows the emergence of Henry as the clear centre of authority in his kingdom, and the frustration of Wolsey's attempt to usurp that position for himself. Early in the play everyone is obsessed with Wolsey; and this, as much as his actual power, seems to be crippling and distorting English political life. Suffolk at one point looks beyond this obsession to a healthier state of affairs:

                                                  For me, my lords,
I love him not, nor fear him; there's my creed.
As I am made without him, so I'll stand,
If the King please.

(2.2.49-52)

This does not prevent him from joining enthusiastically in the final attack on Wolsey; Shakespeare understood very well men's inability to act on their own best insights. But Suffolk, if only for a moment, has pointed to the England we hear of in Cranmer's speech, in which the sources of a man's position in the world will be his own independent integrity and the favour of the prince.

We feel King Henry's authority lock into place in his rescue of Cranmer. When he says of Cranmer's enemies, ‘there's one above 'em yet’ (5.2.27) he is actually speaking from a window above, his new dominance established by a striking visual effect. This introduces the question of the Anglican religious settlement, with the monarch as head of the Church, Cranmer's prayer book as the liturgy, and the Bible as the source of all necessary knowledge and belief. As in King John, Shakespeare makes much less of the Catholic-Protestant dispute than most of his contemporaries would have done. But he does make something of it. Cranmer's vision of every man under his own vine echoes, closely and clearly, a recurring prophecy of the peaceable kingdom in Scripture.¹³ It is immediately followed by the words, ‘God shall be truly known’ (5.5.37). The juxtaposition suggests that the source of this truth will be a religion centred on the Bible. The historical Cranmer's contribution to this was to be a liturgy closely based on Scripture, with a thorough and extensive plan of daily readings.

The fact that we are witnessing the birth of the Church of England as well as the birth of Elizabeth, and that the two events are connected, is conveyed largely through suggestion; but the suggestions are clear and reasonably consistent. By a variety of devices Anne and Cranmer are seen as parallel characters. Wolsey's principal reason for opposing the King's marriage to Anne is that she is ‘A spleeny Lutheran’ (3.2.99). In his next breath he complains of the rise of Cranmer (3.2.101-4). He does not make the connection explicit himself, but we are allowed to see it. In the long night sequence of act 5, Anne and Cranmer are endangered together: Anne in a difficult childbirth, Cranmer set upon by his enemies. Henry appears in this sequence both as the King rescuing his archbishop and as an anxious husband waiting for news; he says to Suffolk, ‘Charles, I will play no more tonight. / My mind's not on 't’ (5.1.56-7). The birth of Elizabeth and the rescue of Cranmer, who is then named her godfather, are thus seen as parallel actions, part of the same dramatic movement.

When Cranmer is brought before the Council it is clear that the issues are those of the Reformation. The Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, accuses him of

                                                                                                    filling
The whole realm, by your teaching and your chaplains—
For so we are inform'd—with new opinions,
Divers and dangerous; which are heresies,
And, not reform'd, may prove pernicious.

(5.3.15-19)

When Henry rescues Cranmer and insists on a general reconciliation he does not refer to this kind of question at all;¹⁴ for him the issues are the Council's shabby treatment of Cranmer and, behind that, the all-important question of the King's own authority. But the religious issue has not been altogether forgotten: when we see the King cracking the whip over his bishops we are reminded of his role as head of the Church.¹⁵ Shakespeare does not, however, bring these matters too close to the surface. This may be dramatic tact, or political tact, or both. It may even reflect a desire to probe more deeply than mere sectarian debate would allow. By his ready forgiveness of his enemies Cranmer emerges from the scene as something more important than a Protestant hero; he is simply a good Christian. Henry's slightly bemused appreciation of this, ‘Do my Lord of Canterbury / A shrewd turn, and he's your friend forever’ (5.3.175-6), is among other things a way of indicating that he has picked the right godfather for the new princess. With all this in mind we may see that those five words, ‘God shall be truly known’, draw an extra depth of meaning from the play as a whole.

It is worth noting in this context that while Gaunt imagines an England regularly, heroically, at war, Cranmer's vision (like that of Bacon in Greene's play) is of a kingdom in which every man will ‘sing / The merry songs of peace to all his neighbors’ (5.5.35-6). The Queen will have enemies of course, but they will ‘shake like a field of beaten corn, / And hang their heads with sorrow’ (5.5.32-3). Even the imagery of war is agricultural and lightly touched with pathos. And while James's reign will be marked by the spread of empire, this is seen as a natural organic growth:

Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honor and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and make new nations. He shall flourish,
And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches
To all the plains about him.

(5.5.51-5)

This too is in keeping with the manner of the play as a whole—a history play without battles or even soldiers, in which the conflicts are civil and generally end in reconciliation, and in which there is a recurring interest in the contrast between worldly pomp and inner peace. When Katharine, in a scene parallel to Anne's coronation, sees a vision of heavenly spirits honouring her and presenting her with garlands, she calls them not spirits of glory or honour but ‘spirits of peace’. So Elizabeth will be, in a secular sense, a prince of peace.

Katharine's full speech, however, is

Spirits of peace, where are ye? Are ye all gone
And leave me here in wretchedness behind ye?

(4.2.83-4)

If there is a split between an ideal vision and the world we have to live in, it is reflected not just in the contrast between Cranmer's speech and the rest of the play but in a number of smaller moments that repeat the main effect with variations. What we see, I think, is not a sharp break near the end of act 5 but a series of fissures running all through the work. Katharine's heavenly vision is succeeded by frank reminders of her mortal frailty:

                                        Do you note
How much her Grace is alter'd on the sudden?
How long her face is drawn? How pale she looks,
And of an earthy cold?

(4.2.95-8)

The effect is first introduced in a slightly debased form when Buckingham complains of having to miss the Field of the Cloth of Gold:

                                        An untimely ague
Stay'd me a prisoner in my chamber when
Those suns of glory, those two lights of men,
Met in the vale of Andren.

(1.1.4-7)

It turns out that he has not missed anything worth seeing: in the rest of the scene the language is heavy with the effort to describe the competitive and finally pointless display of worldly pomp, in striking contrast to the smooth flow and easy clarity of Cranmer's speech.¹⁶ But Buckingham's experience, unable through frailty to see the vision, takes more serious forms elsewhere. With clockwork regularity the various characters who fall try to move from this world to the next before they die, and they all find it difficult to do. Buckingham's description of himself, in his farewell speech, as ‘half in heaven’ (2.1.88) is exact: the other half is still on earth. He tries hard to speak charitably of his enemies but cannot keep the bitterness out of his voice: ‘Yet I am richer than my base accusers, / That never knew what truth meant’ (2.1.104-5). Wolsey in his farewell calls his honours ‘a burden / Too heavy for a man that hopes for heaven’ (3.2.384-5) but cannot suppress a flash of irritation at the speed with which the burden of the Chancellorship has been picked up by Sir Thomas More: ‘That's somewhat sudden. / But he's a learned man’ (3.2.394-5).¹⁷ Katharine, having had her heavenly vision and been reconciled with her earthly enemy Wolsey, appears quite ready for the next world; but then she snaps irritably at a messenger who seems to her disrespectful, and will not accept the man's apology (4.2.100-8).¹⁸ Like the others she is half in heaven, but only half.

We are told that Anne at her coronation ‘kneel'd, and saint-like / Cast her fair eyes to heaven and pray'd devoutly’ (4.1.83-4). But she is doing this in the midst of a scene not just of worldly pomp but of vulgar physical energy:

                                        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.

(4.1.76-81)

This double effect in the coronation fits the Second Gentleman's description of Anne as a heavenly angel who must be good in bed. It is also part of the strain of bawdy comedy that runs through the play, and about which Wilson Knight has written so eloquently.¹⁹ It represents, as he suggests, a communal energy—‘all were woven / So strangely in one piece’—which we may set against the isolation of Wolsey, who operates ‘spider-like, / Out of his self-drawing web’ (1.1.62-3). (Richard III, we remember, is also called a spider.) In the golden age every man will sit under his own vine, but he will also sing the merry songs of peace to all his neighbours, and Henry's final instruction to his people to make holiday includes the admonition, ‘This day, let no man think / H'as business at his house’ (5.5.75-6).

That is in the last scene, however; the penultimate scene with the Porter and his man gives us a distinctly coarser view of this communal spirit:

Is this Moorfields to muster in? Or 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 door! On my Christian conscience, this one christening will beget a thousand; here will be father, godfather, and all together.

(5.4.32-7)

We are never allowed to forget that the play's final miracle is the product of an adulterous passion. In Eliot's words, ‘in sordid particulars / The eternal design may appear’.²⁰ And before we get too metaphysical about this we should acknowledge that the force that brings Henry and Anne together is the force that brings Sweeney to Mrs Porter in the spring. They meet at Wolsey's banquet, not one of the play's more salubrious occasions. The atmosphere is set by Lord Sands's jokes about lay thoughts, running banquets and easy penances (1.4.10-18). Anne participates in this atmosphere, letting Sands kiss her and encouraging his jokes:

ANNE.
                                                  You are a merry gamester,
My Lord Sands.
SANDS.
                                                  Yes, if I make my play.
Here's to your ladyship; and pledge it, madam,
For 'tis to such a thing—
ANNE.
                                                  You cannot show me.

(1.4.46-9)

In this atmosphere Henry's infatuation flowers instantly. As Wolsey remarks, ‘Your Grace, / I fear, with dancing is a little heated’ (1.4.100-1).²¹ Some of the bawdy joking is quite clever, as when the Old Lady teases Anne with a reference to two kinds of royal orbs: ‘In faith, for little England / You 'd venture an emballing’ (2.3.46-7). But if we are to judge the final placing of this element in the play we have to notice that it stops short of the last scene. As Autolycus is instrumental in creating the finale of The Winter's Tale but is not present at the unveiling of the statue, so the bawdy energy of Henry VIII in general takes us to the birth of Elizabeth but has no place in the ideal vision that follows. There may be more than simply practical reasons for Anne's absence from the final scene—which, after all, celebrates a virgin. We see a relationship between the earthy vigour of the mob and the high ceremony of the final scene, but they do not finally come together. The Porter and his man have great difficulty keeping the people in their place; but it seems they finally succeed.

In the play as a whole, and in individual scenes, the ideal vision and the mortal world are closely related yet finally separate. It is the condition of the major characters at their highest moments to live in both worlds at once, half in heaven, and to be constantly subject to the incongruities of that condition. In the last scene Henry imagines that even after his death his eyes will be fixed on earth:

This oracle of comfort has so pleas'd me
That when I am in heaven I shall desire
To see what my child does, and praise my Maker.

(5.5.67-9)

In heaven Henry will be half on earth. This double vision, this constant intersection of time and eternity, is pervasive. And however sordid the particulars may occasionally be, there is a design at work. We do not take a sudden leap out of ordinary history and ordinary time in the last scene when Cranmer begins to speak. Even the bawdy comedy contributes to this. It seems at first to put us in touch with low, particular reality; but as the play progresses it acquires an almost visionary force, and the shading from one to another is remarkably subtle. The play's view of history is finally paradoxical: it is, as I suggested earlier, a complex and untidy process. But it is a process with an end, and the longer we look at it the more clearly we discern a pattern. Even a spectator who has slept an act or two will notice the rhythm of alternating rise and fall on which the play is built. The three gentlemen who take us through Anne's coronation remind us that the last time they met was at Buckingham's execution (4.1.4-5). As they talk of Katharine's divorce and her sickness, they conclude, ‘Alas, good lady! / The trumpets sound. Stand close, the Queen is coming’ (4.1.35-6). There is a sharp juxtaposition of the old Queen and the new. The Third Gentleman's difficulty in remembering that York Place is now called Whitehall (4.1.93-8) not only suggests how fast the world is changing²² but reminds us of Wolsey's fall. (We may even remember that it was at York Place that Henry and Anne first met.) As Katharine falls, Anne rises; as Wolsey falls, Cranmer rises.²³ And finally those who fall,

                    and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.(24)

Katharine is reconciled with Wolsey across the barrier of death, and imitates his concern for Cromwell in her concern for her daughter and her attendants. Wolsey and Buckingham, antagonists and opposites in life, are surprisingly similar in their ends.²⁵

The pattern of rise and fall, in which those who fall begin to look alike, is only the most obvious instance of a general sense of predictability that hangs over the play. Characters as powerful as Henry and Wolsey seem at times to be groping in the dark, not really knowing where they are headed; but minor characters who have no particular ends, or characters who have surrendered their wills, can seem almost supernaturally in tune with what is coming. As Richard III is haunted by the past, this play is haunted by the future. The language of Buckingham's farewell anticipates both Katharine's fate and her reward:

Go with me, like good angels, to my end;
And, as the long divorce of steel falls on me,
Make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice,
And lift my soul to heaven.

(2.1.75-8)

Long before Katharine's divorce is anything but a rumour, Norfolk says that she ‘when the greatest stroke of fortune falls, / Will bless the King’ (2.2.35-6). She does; so does Wolsey; so has Buckingham. The Lord Chamberlain is almost embarrassingly prescient about Anne:

                                        And who knows yet
But from this lady may proceed a gem
To lighten all this isle?

(2.3.77-9)

Suffolk has a similar moment:

                                                  I persuade me, from her
Will fall some blessing to this land, which shall
In it be memoriz'd.

(3.2.50-2)

There are some important events that look like sheer fluke—so much so that the characters suspect some power is at work. Wolsey asks,

                                        What cross devil
Made me put this main secret in the packet
I sent the King?

(3.2.214-16)

The fact that Dr Butts just happens to pass by the Council chamber in time to see Cranmer's disgrace and report to the King may give an extra meaning to Henry's line, ‘there's one above 'em yet’ (5.2.27).

The shaping, idealizing vision that produces Cranmer's prophecy is already at work, fitfully but unmistakably, in the main play. The result is that for all the weight of circumstantial detail the England of this play seems suspended a degree or two above ordinary reality, as the England of (say) Henry IV never does. Nor is Cranmer's speech in its turn entirely isolated from time and mortal circumstance.²⁶ In common with others who have discussed this speech I have kept referring to it as a speech about Elizabeth, and have had to remind myself that James is in there too. We all seem to resent his presence, and to resist it instinctively. But he is there. He reminds us of the Queen's mortality, and of the fact that the rhythm of rise and fall we have seen in the play will be repeated even in this golden future. In earlier tributes it was customary to regard Elizabeth as immune from the workings of time. Even Jonson was enough of an idealist to have Macilente pray that the Queen would ‘neuer suffer change’, though he was enough of a realist to change the line, after her death, to ‘suffer most late change’ (Epilogue, 19). Cynthia was a mortal moon after all. Cranmer's speech not only admits this but emphasizes it. At first, through the image of the phoenix, Elizabeth's death is seen as a triumph:

Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir,
As great in admiration as herself,
So shall she leave her blessedness to one,
When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,
Who from the sacred ashes of her honor
Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix'd.

(5.5.40-8)

Here the play's pattern of fall and rise seems to be replaced by two kinds of rising: Elizabeth to heaven (like other characters we have seen) and James to an earthly majesty with heavenly attributes, like Anne.

But Cranmer returns later in the speech to Elizabeth's death, as though to deal with unfinished business. Indeed, at its second appearance Elizabeth's death seems a new idea, as though the first time it had not really been faced at all. Now beneath the idealizing vision we glimpse the old Queen of the 1590s; and Cranmer's voice, for once in the speech, hesitates for a pulse-beat before resuming its normal tone of exultation:

She shall be, to the happiness of England,
An aged princess; many days shall see her,
And yet no day without a deed to crown it.
Would I had known no more! But she must die,
She must, the saints must have her; yet a virgin,
A most unspotted lily shall she pass
To th' ground, and all the world shall mourn her.

(5.5.57-63)

This time, we note, her death is also a fall.

Beneath the confusion of history we sense a deeper order; through the account of the golden age we hear the rhythms of time. And Cranmer's vision of Elizabeth (and James) embodies, I have tried to show, many of the themes and images of the play as a whole. The fusion may not be perfect, but I think it is close enough to make the play, in Leech's terms, a Jacobean work. And through it all we detect the shaping hand of the artist. If we are to consider the play's Jacobean qualities, not to mention its Fletcherian ones, we need to notice its theatrical self-consciousness, its overt manipulation of its audience. Just as in The Arraignment of Paris a mighty kingdom is contained within a sheltered grove, so here a grand and sweeping vision is contained within a small artefact, a stage play for a particular audience. In Henry V the ‘small time’ of the hero's life and the ‘small time’ of the play's duration seem an appropriate match, despite the Chorus's complaints that this cockpit cannot hold the vasty fields of France. In Henry VIII the tension between the great theme and the theatrical occasion is a little more acute, and the sense of the play's artifice is if anything more pervasive. The Prologue has designs on us: ‘I come no more to make you laugh. … Be sad, as we would make ye’ (ll. 1, 25). This emotionally manipulative quality is picked up by some of the characters, notably Buckingham: ‘Farewell! And when you would say something that is sad, / Speak how I fell’ (2.1.134-5). Katharine and Griffith construct a formally balanced obituary for Wolsey, making the play's usual process of split judgement quite conscious and overt. None of this is disturbing; but we may be a little disconcerted by the flippant tone of the Prologue's ending. Having been promised

                                                  Things now
That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,

(ll. 1-3)

we are told

And, if you can be merry then, I'll say
A man may weep upon his wedding-day.

(ll. 31-2)

The author, having offered to make our eyes flow with tears, allows us to see the twinkle in his. This anticipates the surprising light-heartedness of many of the following scenes, which break quite free of the sombre tone promised (or threatened) by the Prologue. The Epilogue seems frankly designed to make us laugh:

'Tis ten to one this play can never please
All that are here. Some come to take their ease,
And sleep an act or two; but those, we fear,
W' have frighted with our trumpets …

(ll. 1-4)

This jocular tone follows naturally from the joyful celebration that ends the play. But if this is the same actor who began the play with the portentous statement, ‘I come no more to make you laugh’—and it seems natural that it should be—then we may suspect that behind all the pomp and grandeur, even the tragedy, there is an author playing tricks on us. Like Wolsey when he started the divorce, like Henry when he impregnated Anne, we do not get quite what we expected.

This final sense of artifice contributes to the play's unity. Tributes to Elizabeth in earlier drama, however well integrated they may be, have also the quality of a freely available convention that comes from outside the play and did not have to be invented by the individual writer. In that they resemble the now abandoned custom of playing the national anthem at the start of a performance; Henry VIII is, as it were, a play in which the author has decided to include the national anthem. The revival of an old custom is something peculiar to the needs of this play, a part of its conscious art. In that sense too Cranmer's vision is contained within the play's world and not extraneous to it. This air of artifice may leave us feeling a little detached. We may feel not that all is true but that all is rather contrived. But if we remember that this is not just a Jacobean play, or a Fletcherian one, but in some measure at least Shakespearian, we may be prepared to see, here as elsewhere in Shakespeare, the truth behind the contrivance. Katharine, at odds with fortune, listens to a song of Orpheus and the power of his art to order a disorderly world, to stop time and remake nature:

Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
          Bow themselves when he did sing.
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung, as sun and showers
          There had made a lasting spring.

(3.1.3-8)

This is an art that coerces reality, changing it virtually by force: the art of Peele when he changes the ending of the Troy story and gives the apple to Elizabeth; the art of Bale when he vindicates King John by taking England out of history; the art of Jonson when Macilente is dishumoured on the spot by the sight of Elizabeth. The ordering power of Shakespeare's art does not refashion the world so radically as this. It shapes and structures familiar material firmly but gently, so that the artifice is not a way of escaping reality but a way of understanding it more closely:

                                        This is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.

(The Winter's Tale, 4.4.95-7)

Henry VIII is the work of a writer fresh from The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Few would put it at the same level; but we see in it the same imagination at work. The Winter's Tale leads to a double vision of Hermione as a miracle of art who is also (like Elizabeth) a mortal woman. Prospero's magic, for all its transforming power, works not through some arcane mumbo-jumbo (like that of Jonson's alchemists) but through the ordinary things of nature: ‘Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves’ (5.1.33). The greatest moments of wonder come when mortal characters look at each other: Ferdinand at Miranda, Miranda at Ferdinand, Caliban at his master when he first appears in ordinary clothes. In Henry VIII the equivalent of this interplay between the familiar and the wonderful lies in the depiction of two different reigns. The reign of Henry seems to belong to ordinary history, the reign of Elizabeth to a world of miracle. Yet each participates to a surprising degree in the nature of the other. The tangle of history reveals an underlying pattern; Cranmer's vision is shaped and coloured by the conflicts and anxieties of the world it seeks to purify. Henry VIII, though it is a late, odd, neglected work, offers one more illustration of Shakespeare's abiding interest in the difficult but close relationship between what we dream of and what we are.

Notes

1. All references to Shakespeare are to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (Glenview, Illinois, 1980).

2. See Frank V. Cespedes, ‘“We are One in Fortunes”: The Sense of History in Henry VIII’, English Literary Renaissance, 10 (1980), 413-38; p. 436.

3. A Select Collection of Old English Plays, ed. Robert Dodsley, revised by W. Carew Hazlitt, 15 vols. (1874-6), vol. 6, (1874), p. 243.

4. References to Greene and Lodge's A Looking Glass for London and England and to Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay are to the texts in Drama of the English Renaissance, I: The Tudor Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York, 1976).

5. References to Jonson are to the texts in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925-52).

6. References to The Arraignment of Paris are to the text in English Drama 1580-1642, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke and Nathaniel Burton Paradise (Boston, 1935).

7. I have discussed the function of Britain as a special, magic place in this play in ‘The Island of Miracles: An Approach to Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Studies, 10 (1977), 191-209.

8. On the significance of this line for the history plays as a whole, see John Wilders, The Lost Garden (London and Basingstoke, 1978), p. 63.

9. The Dramatist's Experience (New York, 1970), p. 159.

10. See Lee Bliss, ‘The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth’, ELH, 42 (1975), 1-25; pp. 4-5.

11. Donne, Elegy 19, ‘Going to Bed’, l. 21.

12. Behind both these moments may lie the waking of Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

    My Oberon! What visions have I seen!

    Methought I was enamour'd of an ass.

    OBERON.

    There lies your love.

    (4.1.75-7)

    See also Cleopatra's debate with Dolabella (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.73-99).

13. 1 Kings, 4: 25; 2 Kings, 18: 31; Isaiah, 36: 16; Micah, 4: 4.

14. See Cespedes, p. 414.

15. On the importance of this theme in the play, see John D. Cox, ‘Henry VIII and the Masque’, ELH, 45 (1978), 390-409; pp. 399-400. This is a necessary modification of Cespides's generally valid claim (n. 14, above) that Henry never speaks as a Protestant reformer.

16. I have avoided—some would say evaded—the authorship question on the grounds that the play is what it is no matter who wrote what. But one reason why there is not the consensus about this play that there is about The Two Noble Kinsmen is that here the changes from a difficult style to an easy one are more obviously deliberate and functional, suggesting either a close collaboration or a single mind at work. On the authorship question see R. A. Foakes, Introduction to the (revised) Arden edition (1964), pp. xvii-xxviii.

17. Douglas Rain, in George McCowan's production at Stratford, Ontario in 1961, made the first words of the passage an unexpected flash of anger, and then showed Wolsey recovering his balance.

18. See G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (1947; repr. 1965), p. 295.

19. Ibid., pp. 304-6.

20. Murder in the Cathedral, in Collected Plays (1962), p. 37.

21. At this point in George McCowan's production Henry's hands were on Anne's breasts.

22. See Bliss, pp. 13-14.

23. Ronald Berman, ‘King Henry the Eighth: History and Romance’ (English Studies, 48 (1967), 112-21; pp. 117-18), compares this pattern to a dance in which individual dancers are expendable and are constantly being replaced.

24. T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (1973), p. 220.

25. See Eugene M. Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven, 1952), pp. 121-2.

26. For a contrary view, see Edward I. Berry, ‘Henry VIII and the Dynamics of Spectacle’, Shakespeare Studies, 12 (1979), 229-46; pp. 242-3.