[In the following essay, Cox contends that Henry VIII can be understood “as an experiment in adapting the principles of the court masque to the dramatic tradition of the public theaters.”]

One of the few virtues that has consistently been allowed Shakespeare's Henry VIII is its success on the stage. To be sure, this virtue is usually regarded as compensatory, something a critic can talk about conclusively after giving one more inconclusive opinion on the play's dual authorship. Yet the virtue is real, if we can trust the consensus that traces it to the play's unusual concern with pageantry and spectacle. In the opening conversation between Norfolk and Buckingham we are immediately confronted with an elaborate description of sixteenth-century England's most extraordinary royal show: the Field of the Cloth of Gold. “Now this masque / Was cried incomparable,” remarks Norfolk; and while he clearly uses the term “masque” in a broad generic sense, he nevertheless serves notice of the play's preoccupation with royal entertainment.¹ Late in the first act Henry entertains Wolsey in a rudimentary pastoral masque, accidentally infamous for its theatricality because it was announced with a discharge of small cannon whose wadding fired the thatch of the old Globe during the play's first performance, burning Shakespeare's most important theater to the ground. Later in the play vizarded angels appear in a vision to Katherine, and elaborate royal ceremonies and processions are fully staged for the execution of Buckingham, the trial of Katherine, the coronation of Anne Bullen, and the christening of Elizabeth. No other Shakespearean play is so full of pageantry, not even Richard II, a play whose monarch is characteristically fonder of royal display than Shakespeare's Henry VIII.

Despite the emphasis on spectacle in Shakespeare's last play, no satisfactory explanation has yet been offered for it. To observe that the play succeeds on stage because of its royal pageantry is doubtless true, but as an explanation of the play's effect the observation still fails to account for the unusual dramaturgy that produces that effect. What we lack is a thoroughgoing explanation for Shakespeare's artistic choice of royal spectacle and pageantry in his last play.² External historical reasons have not satisfied this need, though an attractive case has been made for the play's relation to the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine in February 1613.³ For even if this historical occasion were proved to be the play's reason for being—and the proof is by no means established—we would still lack an explanation for the play's procedure in artistic terms. Such an explanation has been convincingly offered for plays like Midsummer Night's Dream or Macbeth quite apart from their possible (but again by no means proven) origin in historical occasion. In short, the kind of explanation we are looking for should be primarily concerned with Shakespeare's development as a dramatist. When Henry VIII is approached in this way, its singular dramaturgy can be seen as an experiment in adapting the principles of the court masque to the dramatic tradition of the public theaters. This thesis at least has the virtue of consistency with Coleridge's cryptic remark that Henry VIII is “a sort of historical mask or shew play.”⁴

Such an approach neither attempts the hopeless Procustean exercise of arguing that the play is a masque, nor, on the other hand, does it see the play as merely appropriating elements of the masque. We can see Shakespeare doing the latter as he tentatively flirted with courtly dramaturgy in his so-called “last plays,” whether he knew they were his last or not. In Pericles we find a pageant of knights with allegorical imprese, clearly inspired by the chivalric revival at court. In Cymbeline a god descends in a machine, offering sententious consolation and leaving behind a cryptic allegorical message. The transformation of Hermione in The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's most ambitious masque-like effect before The Tempest where a complete wedding masque is presented within the play itself and miniature masques accost the survivors of the shipwreck on Prospero's island. In Henry VIII, however, Shakespeare goes beyond flirtation and actually weds the familiar conventions of popular drama with the spirit and principles of the refined court masque. In doing so, he followed his customary procedure in dealing with new dramatic forms: while fully realizing their essential character, he invariably qualifies it by playing if off against other dramatic conventions. When Ovid joins the Goths, or Touchstone marries Audrey, neither stays quite the same.

Though this quintessentially Shakespearean procedure has been commonly observed, a brief illustration of it may be useful before turning our full attention to Henry VIII. Shakespeare's response to the demands of neo-classical decorum is a good example. If The Comedy of Errors fully meets the demands of neo-classical Roman comedy, it qualifies this strict decorum with subordinate but unmistakable elements of native dramatic romance. The neo-classical unities of time, place and action are all observed, but the imaginative scope of the play is as broad as the scope of Pericles, including a shipwreck, a miraculous rescue by fishermen, separation at sea, and an unexpected family reunion after years of sorrow and loss. At the other end of his career Shakespeare openly adopted the conventions of dramatic romance in The Tempest, but qualified them with the unexpected addition of the same neo-classical devices of strict unity and reported action that he had used in his first comedy. The resulting sense of precision and exact timing in the action is brilliantly adapted to Prospero's scheme for the reconciliation of his shipwrecked acquaintances. Moreover, the time scheme of the wedding masque seems to move symbolically from spring to autumn, from “spongy April” to a dance of “sunburned sicklemen, of August weary”; and this movement again recalls the leisurely pace of romance, even while it reverses the archetypal movement of comedy from winter to spring. However one interprets this counter-movement of the wedding masque, it must be acknowledged as somehow qualifying the treatment of time in the rest of the play. In short, the openness to innovation and the endless adaptability of Shakespeare's dramaturgy always enable him to transcend mere convention, though the conventions he worked with can usually be identified fairly precisely. Though he is a playwright of custom, no custom stales his infinite variety.

Let us begin with the innovative influence of the masque on Henry VIII, particularly as it shapes a play that is generally recognized as unlike any other in the canon. These innovations are qualified, as we should expect and as we shall see in due time, but they must first be identified. By 1613, when Henry VIII was first produced, the masque had already emerged as a significant form in the work of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. Though Jonson's best masques were yet to be written, he had been responsible for ten masques at court, as well as sundry entertainments, including the design of the triumphal arch for King James I's arrival in London in 1604. Shakespeare undoubtedly had an intimate knowledge of the masque, as we can see in his use of its techniques and also in his situation as a dramatist at the time he wrote Henry VIII. Increasingly the professional acting companies were orienting themselves to the Court and to the exclusive audiences of the indoor theatres. No one as interested in the theater as Shakespeare could have resisted closer acquaintance with a form as extraordinary and spectacular as the masque, especially given its growing intellectual and artistic integrity in the stage designs of Jones and the poetry of Jonson. The professional actors of Shakespeare's company, moreover, were almost certainly employed to play the parts of the antimasque, an invariable feature of Jonson's masques at Court. We know professional actors were employed for this purpose in any event, and the most obvious company to call on would have been His Majesty's Servants, the King's men.

Now even a brief acquaintance with the masque reveals a fundamental difference between the masque and the play, a difference relating to the audience each assumes. A play could be written for a limited audience, as Alfred Harbage maintains for many Elizabethan plays;⁵ or it could be written for anyone, as Shakespeare's plays all were; but a masque is defined by its exclusive appropriateness to the aristocratic person or persons whom it is designed to honor on a particular occasion. If the play holds the mirror up to everyman, the masque is designed, like the Renaissance portrait, to present an ideal image of great people, usually kings. Since no external evidence exists that any Shakespearean play, including Henry VIII, was written to honor a particular aristocrat on a specified occasion, it follows that Shakespeare never wrote a true masque; for the masque in The Tempest, while it is designed for the royal wedding of Ferdinand and Miranda, is always presented for a fictional occasion. Nevertheless, the techniques of the masque, though deriving from the particular circumstances of its production, can be imitated by a play, especially if the play also imitates the purpose of the masque.

Take, for example, the demand for spectacle in the masque. This demand arises from the masque's purpose in complimenting an aristocrat, because he is assumed to be capable of affording the necessary expense of such an occasion. In other words, the masque celebrates aristocratic wealth and demonstrates it at the same time. This procedure means that the masque always exhibits the virtue that Renaissance princes discovered in their classical forbears: magnificence. Aristotle's survey of the virtues argues that magnificence

is confined to those [actions] that involve spending, but in these it surpasses generosity in scale. For as the very name suggests, it is a “suitable” expenditure on a “grand” scale. … That is why a poor man is unlikely to be magnificent; for he does not have the means for a suitable expenditure of large sums. … [Such expenditure] is suited to persons of high birth and reputation, and so forth, since all these qualities carry greatness and prestige.⁶

Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong have pointed out that magnificence is specifically cited as the virtue of court entertainment by Sebastiano Serlio, author of the influential Architettura, published in England in 1611:

The more such things cost, the more they are esteemed, for they are things which stately and great persons doe, which are enemies to niggardlinesse. This have I seene in some Scenes made by Ireonimo Genga, for the pleasure and delight of his lord and patron Francisco Maria, Duke of Urbin: wherein I saw so great liberalitie used by the Prince, and so good a conceit in the workeman, and so good Art and proportion in things therein represented, as ever I saw in all my life before. Oh good Lord, what magnificence was there to be seene … but I leave all things to the discretion and consideration of the judicious workeman; which shall make all such things as their pattrons serve them, which they must worke after their owne devises, and never care what it shall cost.⁷

Even Jonson, who always maintained an uneasy attitude toward the masque's spectacle, conceded that “the most royal princes and greatest persons, who are commonly the personators of these actions, [are] studious of riches and magnificence in the outward celebration or show, which rightly becomes them.”⁸

If magnificence, then, is the virtue that demands the conspicuous consumption of the masque, we have to ask if a similar demand lies behind the spectacle of Henry VIII. Naturally the demand cannot be expected to present itself in the same way as in the masque, because the play is not a demonstration of the King's wealth—however much the King's Men might have wished to receive their royal patron's support in a more tangible form than prestige. While the play does not directly express the King's magnificence, however, it does delineate the principles of James's rule, thus holding up the mirror to the King's greatness, just as the court masques do. The spectacle of Henry VIII is therefore an essential element in the play's image of contemporary royalty: dramatic pageantry is an imitation of royal magnificence. For as Aristotle points out, magnificence is not a demonstration of wealth for its own sake, but of wealth as an expression of “greatness and prestige.” In the play's image of the King, royal spectacle thus foreshadows Cranmer's prophetic compliment to James, which reads like a catalog of official Jacobean ideals. Complete with a classical apotheosis of the ruler in the Ovidian manner, this prophecy anticipates Rubens' painting of James's apotheosis on the ceiling of the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace, where the court masques were customarily performed.⁹ Neither Cranmer's prophecy nor the royal spectacle are mere decoration in Henry VIII: rather, they are essential expressions of the play's informing purpose as a celebration of Jacobean kingship. To this purpose we must now turn, for it is the clearest evidence of how thoroughly Shakespeare's last play is imbued with the spirit of the court masque.

In Holinshed's account of Henry VIII's early reign Shakespeare found a readily adaptable pattern for exemplifying ideals. If James I was fond of displaying his grandeur in masques, Henry VIII had anticipated him, as Shakespeare discovered in reading the chronicles: his description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold closely follows Holinshed's account, as does his staging of Henry's pastoral disguising at Wolsey's palace. Yet Shakespeare adds a distinctly Jacobean interpretation to what he found in the Tudor historians. “All was royal,” says Norfolk, describing the Field, “To the disposing of it naught rebelled; / Order gave each thing view” (1.1.42-44). That the royal presence was the source of order, sufficient in itself to resolve discord, was a constant Jonsonian theme in praise of James I; in fact it was the basis of Jonson's characteristic procedure in the masque, where a bumptious antimasque (played, as we have noticed, by professional actors) was invariably dispelled or transformed by the mere appearance of courtly masquers.¹⁰ Shakespeare's equation between royalty and order adds a dimension of Jacobean moralism to early Tudor pageantry. Nor, in Shakespeare's interpretation, is Henry's influence confined to the royal presence at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Critics commonly note that Henry's authority is gradually revealed in the course of the play, as he moves away from Wolsey's influence and eventually comes to administer power on his own. The central movement of the play, in other words, is toward a true manifestation of royal power. Our first view of Henry, “leaning on the Cardinal's shoulder” (1.2.1. SD), is significantly altered by the end of the play when we see Cranmer kneeling before the King, awaiting the royal order to arise and proceed with Elizabeth's christening. From dependence on his ministers, Henry moves to firm control of them. Shakespeare takes considerable liberties with Holinshed's account in order to produce this increasing revelation of royal authority, and the consequence of his doing so is to increase the play's masque-like effect in two important respects.

In the first place, the play's movement toward the full display of royal power is a direct imitation of the masque's movement toward royal epiphany. Invariably Jonson's fables suppose a crisis of one sort or another whose resolution is achieved by acknowledging the royal presence—both in the fable and in fact. In this way the masque reveals the King's moral and cosmic power, just as it demonstrates his wealth. In Shakespeare's play the most important step in the gradual revelation of Henry's power is his undoing of Wolsey, the chief veil before the King's true image. Henry's control of his most formidable minister exemplifies a favorite tenet of Jacobean kingship: the godlike power of the King. One of James's most explicit statements of this tenet had been made in a two hour speech before Parliament in 1610, both Houses having been significantly assembled in the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace, where the King was accustomed to attend elaborately staged epiphanies of his power. Part of the king's speech is worth quoting in full:

Kings are iustly called Gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of Diuine power vpon earth: For if you wil consider the Attributes to God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a King. God hath power to create, or destroy, make, or vnmake at his pleasure, to giue life, or send death, to iudge all, and to be iudged nor accomptable to none: To raise low things, and to make high things low at his pleasure, and to God are both soule and body due. And the like power haue Kings: they make and vnmake their subiects: they haue power of raising, and casting downe: of life, and of death: Iudges ouer all their subiects, and in all cases, and yet accomptable to none but God onely. They haue power to exalt low things, and abase high things, and make of their subiects like men at the Chesse; A pawne to take a Bishop or a Knight, and to cry vp, or downe any of their subiects, as they do their money.¹¹

A contemporary account of James's speech describes it favorably, but adds a significant proviso that “the most strictly religious could have wished that His Highness would have been more spareing in using the Name of God, and comparing the Deity with Princes Soveraignty.”¹² Inigo Jones, however, was less guarded in his assessment of the King's main point. Describing the “allegory” of Tempe Restored, a masque he invented and designed for Charles I in 1632, Jones wrote: “In Heroic Virtue is figured the King's majesty, who therein transcends as far the common man as they are above beasts, he truly being the prototype to all the kingdoms under his monarchy of religion, justice, and all the virtues joined together.”¹³ Given a theory of this sort behind the revelation of royal power in Henry VIII, we can see that the play's central masque-like movement is another anticipation of James's apotheosis in the climactic prophecy of Cranmer.

The transformation of Henry's royal image resembles the masque in a second point as well. This concerns a clear division in the play, closely imitating the masque's division between the antimasque and the masque proper. Wolsey again figures prominently in this division, for he completely dominates the first two acts, when the King's power is most obscured. Instances of Wolsey's initiative appear with surprising frequency in the early part of the play; in fact, he is the instigator of virtually every event. When Buckingham asks Norfolk who designed and directed the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Norfolk answers, “All this was ord'red by the good discretion / Of the right reverend Cardinal of York” (1.1.50-51). Wolsey also operates in some capacity to produce Buckingham's subsequent downfall: “Certainly / The cardinal is the end of this,” remarks the Second Gentleman (2.1.40). The banquet where Henry meets Anne Bullen is initiated by Wolsey, who thereby plays an essential, if unintended, part in the play's optimistic conclusion. Finally, Wolsey is credited by the First Gentleman with arousing Henry's scruples about his marriage to Katherine:

                                                                      'Tis the cardinal;
And merely to revenge him on the emperor
For not bestowing on him at his asking
The archbishopric of Toledo, this is purposed.
2. Gentleman
I think you have hit the mark. But is't not cruel
That she should feel the smart of this? The cardinal
Will have his will, and she must fall.

(2.1.161-67)

If Wolsey's ubiquitous influence makes him the controlling factor in the play's early scenes, his control is consistently malignant as well. He is not merely an umbrageous influence on the edges of the King's glory; he is a source of potent harm, arrogating to himself the power that properly belongs to Henry, as Katherine later observes:

                                                                                He was a man
Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
Himself with princes; one that by suggestion
Tied all the kingdom.

(4.2.33-35)

Inevitably Wolsey is therefore characterized as a scion of the bitch goddess:

This is the cardinal's doing: the king-cardinal,
That blind priest, like the eldest son of Fortune,
Turns what he list.

(2.2.18-20)

This characterization associates Wolsey with the world of mutability, ruled by Fortune, a world also represented by the repugnant figures of Jonson's antimasques, who are transcended by the King's Platonic virtue. An even deeper and more malignant world of the antimasque is also suggested in Wolsey's association with devils and hell (1.1.52, 72-74 and 3.2.371). Moreover, his lower-class origin, noted more than once in the play, is analogous to the social inferiority of the professional actors in the antimasque who yield to the nobility in the masque. “A beggar's book / Outworths a noble's blood,” remarks Buckingham bitterly (1.1.120). Clearly the upstart Wolsey's domination of the aristocracy is one of his most potent threats to order, adumbrating his ultimate threat to the King.

No matter how extensive the cardinal's power may be, however, it is qualified from the beginning in a manner that suggests its speciousness and instability. Norfolk's precious diction as he describes the Field of the Cloth of Gold is a rhetorical counterpart to the glittering show that Wolsey devised as a concealment of the flimsy peace between Henry and Francis I. Buckingham manages to formulate a trenchant question concerning the Field, even in his seething contempt for Wolsey: “What did this vanity / But minister communication of / A most poor issue?” (1.1.85-87). Aureate style, golden vanity and cosmetic diplomacy are all expressions of Wolsey's moral impotence: at best the glory he creates is a feeble imitation of the King's, just as the witches who danced grotesquely in Jonson's Masque of Queens derived their perverted choreography from a parody of the revels where Queen Anne presided, suddenly banishing the hags with her mere appearance.¹⁴ If Wolsey attempts to hide the essential weakness of his policy behind extravagant illusion, his effort is contrasted by the King's simple pastoral disguising, whose aim is not to hide but to reveal, since the true nature of the King is to be the shepherd of his people in his role as supreme head of the Church. Henry thus has a truer understanding of the masque than Wolsey, and it is worth noting that the King's masque is his only gesture in the first two acts that takes Wolsey by surprise, especially considering that this effect of the masque anticipates the King's eventual unmasking of the cardinal in the unfolding revelation of royal power.

Indeed, the King's role in his pastoral masque raises a final point about Shakespeare's use of Henry VIII's reign as a model for expressing Jacobean ideals: both Henry and James took their supremacy of the English Church with extraordinary seriousness. In Henry's reign, of course, the divorce of Katherine had been the “great matter” that precipitated England's break with Rome. Though Shakespeare does not present Tudor history in quite this way, his Wolsey embodies all the reasons for paranoia that James associated with seditious Jesuits, especially in the years following the Gunpowder Plot. As J. N. Figgis pointed out long ago, in his classic study of divine right, James I's formulation of the doctrine was made in direct response to Papal claims of temporal sovereignty.¹⁵ For James the fundamental issue was a contest for power of the same kind that Shakespeare depicts in Henry VIII: it is no coincidence that Shakespeare's celebration of James I presents an English king's successful struggle to free himself from the domination of a high-handed Roman Churchman. The issue of power is most clearly stated in the play by Wolsey himself, as he ruminates on his opposition to Henry's marriage with Anne Bullen:

                                                                                What though I know her virtuous
And well-deserving? yet I know her for
A spleeny Lutheran, and not wholesome to
Our cause that she should lie i' th' bosom of
Our hard-ruled king.

(3.2.97-101)

Wolsey's objections to Anne have nothing to do with soteriology, as his reference to Luther might imply: what concerns the cardinal is that Henry will be harder for the Church to control if he marries Anne—even if the Church in this case means Wolsey himself.

If supremacy was important for Henry, however, it was doubly important for James, who not only had Catholics to contend with but Puritans as well. Long before he encountered English Puritans at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604, James had come to recognize Scottish Presbyterianism as a direct threat to his government—and with some cause. James Melville records his uncle's vigorous opposition to the then James VI in 1596. Calling the King “God's silly vassal,” Andrew Melville seized his Sovereign's sleeve and read him a lecture on church and state:

Sir, as divers times before, so now again, I must tell you, there is two Kings and two Kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member! And they whom Christ has called and commanded to watch over his Kirk, and govern his spiritual kingdom, has sufficient power of him, and authority so to do, both together and severally; the which no Christian King nor Prince should control and discharge, but fortify and assist, otherwise not faithful subjects nor members of Christ. And, Sir, when ye were in your swaddling-clothes, Christ Jesus reigned freely in this land in spite of all his enemies.¹⁶

James VI would doubtless have been glad to leave men such as Andrew Melville behind him when he became James I, but Melville pursued the King to London where he continued to speak in the same vein and was finally confined to the Tower. He had only been released two years before Henry VIII was first produced.¹⁷ Such direct assaults on the King's supremacy over the Church are answered in Henry VIII by the concluding tableau of Cranmer kneeling to await the royal bidding. In Jacobean terms this scene depicts the correct relationship between the nation's monarch and its churchmen. Henry's final discovery of royal power is not only personal and moral but religious as well, a point that may account for the play's seemingly irrelevant emphasis on Henry's appropriation of Wolsey's palace and its subsequent change of name from York Place to Whitehall (4.1.94-97). This description of how the English monarchy acquired the palace where Stuart masques were presented is indeed a decorous detail to include in a masque-like play.

If this analysis of Shakespeare's last play has any merit, it is not likely to warm the hearts of most Shakespeareans, especially considering that Henry VIII is seldom mentioned as anyone's favorite play to begin with. Frank Kermode has even gone so far as to argue, quite plausibly, that James Spedding's famous thesis about the multiple authorship of Henry VIII was a way of rationalizing his dislike of the play.¹⁸ To account for the play as an imitation of the masque is to emphasize what most of us find disappointing in it: its lack of sensitivity to political ambiguity, its shallow characterization, its facile religious orthodoxy. It is natural to ask how a playwright who had written Hamlet and Lear, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest could turn to such a simplistic procedure in his last play. Our disappointment is only increased if we consider Henry VIII in its apparent generic context, the history play. Here Howard Felperin probably speaks for most of us:

Shakespeare's early and middle histories are complex inquiries into the morality of politics. A guilty Richard II and the order he represents are played off against a guilty Bolingbroke and his order until that dialectic temporarily resolves itself in the reign of a Henry V painfully self-conscious over the responsibilities of his dubious birthright. The plays are faithful to the ambiguities of history and life, and therein lies their truth. Whatever claim to truth Henry VIII may have resides not in relentless moral and political inquiry or in complexity of portrayal, but in the eternal relevance of the great Christian myth upon which it rests.¹⁹

Felperin's reference to Richard II is particularly apposite. Richard is another Shakespearean monarch who is in love with spectacular displays of his own power and who speaks eloquently on behalf of the divine right of kings. Why did Shakespeare turn from a subtle and searching portrayal of such issues in Richard II to a bland affirmation of them in Henry VIII? Dotage seems the inescapable answer—a process of artistic decline that we recognize in other poets, like Wordsworth, as Felperin suggests (pp. 230-31).

A better answer, as this essay aims to show, is that Shakespeare followed contemporary fashion in his last play by adapting it to the spirit and principles of the court masque. No one but he could explain why he chose to experiment with the masque in the first place, but we can speculate, as Swinburne did long ago, that he was simply following his usual habit of unceasingly exploring new dramatic forms and techniques.²⁰ The experiment of his last play should probably be seen, therefore, as a sign of artistic health, not of dotage; and the question we should be asking ourselves is not whether we like the result, but whether it succeeds artistically, that is, whether the amalgamation of the masque and the play is even possible, and if it is, how Shakespeare achieved it.

We should note at the outset that Jonson's artistic solution for the masque was inherently impossible for Shakespeare in Henry VIII. This is because the masque achieves its perfection in the crucial transition between fable and fact—at that moment when the royal presence itself is recognized as the solution to the fable, and at the same time the fable is seen to reveal the royal nature in a new and unexpected way. “Precisely because the form so directly and intimately includes its audience,” writes Orgel, “any flaw in the transition to the world of the court gives the masque the appearance of tasteless flattery—tasteless, because it involves a violation of artistic decorum; flattery, because it praises a monarch who has never been established as a figure worthy of praise within the masque.”²¹ Clearly Shakespeare could not hope to achieve such a solution because he could not presuppose either the presence of the monarch or a particular occasion. The difficulty he faced, then, was to avoid tasteless flattery and still fulfill the fundamental purpose of the masque—to reveal the essential principles of Jacobean royalty. We have seen that he succeeded in the second, but most of us probably agree that tasteless flattery is precisely the result. I shall argue, on the contrary, that Shakespeare succeeds artistically in Henry VIII by using the play to examine critically the relation between political power and its manifestation in the theater. In short, he qualifies the values of the masque with the values of the play.

Let us again consider, for example, the description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold that stands imposingly at the beginning of the play. We have seen that this description helps to characterize Wolsey's power as a gaudy imitation of the King's, a procedure that imitates Jonson's usual practice of presenting a foil to the King's power before that power itself is revealed. Yet we should also note that a critical analysis of royal entertainment, such as we find in Buckingham's conversation with Norfolk, is inherently impossible for the masque. What we learn from their conversation is that the Field was a false revelation of royal power: it was a mere “vanity,” to use Buckingham's word, arranged by an ambitious power seeker. Moreover, from what we see of Wolsey in the play, we know that Buckingham's analysis is true. What we would have seen, however, had we been at the Field in 1520, would have been a revelation of royal power that appeared to be as true as any other. For the masque is designed to present the abiding principles of kingship, not the political realities that underlie both those principles and the masque itself. The masque, in short, is incapable of examining the mundane truth of its own presentation, because everything it reveals is transcendently true. When we look at Henry VIII in this way, we can begin to see that its presentation of royal power, while fulfilling the technical ends of the masque, tends to qualify them as well. Shakespeare's last play is not the sort of “vanity” Buckingham describes because it examines the temporal truth that underlies the masque's eternal images of royal power. Perhaps the play's subtitle, All Is True, is relevant after all, and Cranmer's warning might be Shakespeare's: “the words I utter / Let none think flattery, for they'll find 'em truth” (5.5.15-16). If we continually measure Henry VIII by Shakespeare's earlier plays, especially the histories, we are bound to find it disappointing—mere flattery. If we measure it by the artistic demands it seeks to meet, however (namely those of the masque), we can see it as a dramaturgically variegated work of the sort we expect from Shakespeare.

Other ways of qualifying the masque appear readily in Henry VIII once we start looking for them. Small ambiguities present themselves to suggest that the business of the kingdom is effected not only by the King's divine body—officially revealed in the play—but by his mortal body as well. The chief of these ambiguities is Henry's marriage to Anne Bullen, mother of the future Queen whom Cranmer praises so highly in the play's final scene. Henry meets Anne for the first time at Wolsey's palace before any mention of a separation from Katherine of Aragon has been made. The bawdy conversation that accompanies Anne's entry clearly prepares us to expect that her virtues are not exclusively Platonic, especially when the salacious Lord Sandys concludes the conversation by kissing her. This is pleasant bawdy of the sort we associate with Shakespeare's much-praised realism, but nothing like it ever modifies the image of impeccable royalty in the court masque.²² The King's immediate infatuation with Anne is in the same vein, revealing the humanity he shares with his subjects as he responds to Anne's physicality exactly as Sandys had done—by kissing her. In this scene Henry does not display, as Ronald Berman suggests, “an impressive kind of innocence” to contrast with the “sordid preceding scenes.”²³ What the pastoral motif reveals is not innocence, but the timeless Arcadian principle: Et in Arcadia ego. Even in his official function as shepherd of his people, Henry is still a man.

Indeed, so convincing is this scene in its portrayal of the King's mortality that we may find ourselves bewildered at the end of the next scene to return to the official interpretation of Wolsey's perverse dominance over Henry; for the first hint of a divorce from Katherine is accompanied by the explanation that Wolsey, for self-serving purposes, has maliciously possessed Henry with a scruple about the Queen (2.1.140 ff.). If we find ourselves wondering about the veracity of this explanation, our doubt is soon allayed by the King's agonies of conscience: clearly Wolsey's pernicious influence has succeeded in deluding his well-intended sovereign. Nothing Henry says allows us to doubt this official interpretation of the divorce, and Katherine's stirring resistance to Wolsey tends to keep us off balance about the possible ambiguity of Henry's motive. Yet the ambiguity remains alive, revitalized in small suggestions such as Suffolk's wry comment that the King's “conscience / Has crept too near another lady” (2.2.16-17), and in the King's generous gift to Anne (2.3). Neither of these suggestions wholly offsets the impression of Henry's uprightness, and therefore neither violates the decorum of the play's masque-like procedure; yet they are small rents in the high-minded façade, allowing us to glimpse the human realities of power behind its Platonic image.

Still other examples might be cited to show how the play qualifies its masque-like assumptions. The humanizing of Wolsey in his decline, for instance, is inconsistent with his earlier role as a quasi-symbolic principle of discord. Moreover, Shakespeare found no precedent for Wolsey's transformation in Holinshed. The injustices suffered by Katherine tend to modify the play's emphasis on the King's transcendent power and beneficence: whatever blessings he may beget can only exist at the expense of this uncommonly courageous and self-respecting woman. Such details are important because they reveal real aspects of the King and his power that are necessarily filtered out by the masque's concentration on the eternal virtues of the monarchy.²⁴ More important than citing numerous details of this sort, however, is the attempt to find a principle that accounts for them all. It might be pleasant to speculate that Shakespeare was really a democrat at heart, or a Jesuit, or an existentialist and that one or the other of these ideological commitments prompted him to pluck at the frayed hem of Jacobean royalty in Henry VIII. But such speculation takes us out of the play and into the vast fog of Shakespeare's non-existent intellectual biography, where scholars wander into circular proofs as inevitably as real travellers wander in circles. If we are to stay with Shakespeare the dramatist, the best solution to his procedure in Henry VIII is to acknowledge the influence of the popular theater in which he had worked all of his professional life.

Establishing this influence in Henry VIII is fortunately not a task that must be undertaken with the same thoroughness as an investigation of the masque's influence. For a well-established critical tradition has long acknowledged the impact of popular dramaturgy on Shakespeare's last play. Sixty years ago C. K. Pooler noticed the conventions of de casibus tragedy in Henry VIII, particularly as they had been represented in The Mirror for Magistrates. Thirty years later Frank Kermode enlarged on Pooler's suggestion, emphasizing the archetypal fall of Wolsey, the variant falls of Buckingham and Katherine, and the arrested fall of Cranmer, who is preserved by the King's godlike power. Most recently Howard Felperin discussed Henry VIII as an amalgam of the old political morality play and the dramatic romance, the mode of Shakespeare's earlier late plays.²⁵ In Felperin's view the play transforms Tudor history into a providential romance that works on explicitly Christian principles. The value of this critical tradition is that it demonstrates Shakespeare's continued interest in archaic dramatic models at the same time that he was experimenting with new forms in the last years of his career. If Henry VIII primarily aims to meet the demands of the masque, it nevertheless retains characteristics of the drama that Jonson eschewed for its “popular errors.” Ironically the errors Jonson cites have a great deal in common with the masque. Though no creaking throne comes down to please the boys in Henry VIII, a miraculous delivery, which the god in the throne usually effected, nevertheless takes place. This delivery, as Felperin points out, is a convention of morality and romance; and if it is achieved in Henry VIII by virtue of a godlike human on the throne, rather than God himself, the imaginative force of the miracle is not thereby reduced. Here the epiphany of masque and drama are indistinguishable, for the masque also turns on miraculous transformation. “How better than they are are all things made / By Wonder!” (157-58), exclaims Fant'sy in Jonson's Vision of Delight, and the exclamation is ultimately directed to King James who is the force behind the masque's transformation:

                                                            Behold a king
Whose presence maketh this perpetual spring,
The glories of which spring grow in that bower,
And are the marks and beauties of his power.

(189-92)

From the masque-like decorum of the romance transformation in Henry VIII we can see Shakespeare's typically assimilative mind at work, combining and recombining conventions in a way that transforms them. Thus some of the conventions of popular dramaturgy are left openly at odds with the masque in Henry VIII. Shakespeare's emphasis on the king's mortal body, for instance, is directly derived from the popular tradition, whose primary impulse is to hold the mirror up to everyman. The resulting image inevitably shows us the mortality of the king, as well as his eternal grandeur, because the king shares the common lot of mankind. Even a king as magnificent as Richard II is driven to admit the reality of his mortal body:

                    for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humored thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence.

(R2 3.2.160-72)

Ironically Richard's greatest dignity is not achieved in royal spectacle and panoply, but in defeat at Pomfret Castle:

                    But whate'er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.

(5.5.38-41)

This kind of dignity is also discovered by Antony, who finally sees himself as most Roman in the failed mess of his bungled suicide, and by Lear, who is every inch a king when he smells of mortality.

These examples demonstrate that Shakespeare's qualification of royal magnificence in Henry VIII does not stem from an egalitarian political tradition. His realism, as Erich Auerbach showed, is finally traceable to the providential context that gave rise to the popular dramatic tradition in the first place.²⁶ For if every man is a creature, no one is finally in charge of his own destiny, and everyone shares the heritage of human fallibility. This is not to say that Shakespearean realism always implies a providential context, or that his portrayal of such a context invariably bespeaks his belief in it. The truth is that we have no way of knowing what he believed, except in the most general terms, and the shifting ideology of the Renaissance renders his realism far more complex than the medieval realism in the miracle and morality plays.

But if we are attempting to account for the unusual dramaturgy of Henry VIII, we would do well to take stock of what the play's popular elements imply. If this is a providential romance, its miracles are not all the king's doing; and if they are not, then the dramatic image of the king and his power is not simply what it is in the masque. There indeed kings exercise godlike power, as James argued they should in his 1610 speech to Parliament, as well as in numerous other places. In Jonson's fables and Jones's staggering stage designs the king's heroic virtue transcends common men as far as they do beasts, as Jones pointed out in explicating his own invention. These principles of royal power are also suggested in Henry VIII, as we have seen; but they are qualified by a dramaturgy that implies the human limitations of kingship. If the King has his power Dei gratia, it cannot originate in himself. This is a principle that James officially acknowledged, of course, but it is not a principle revealed by the masque or by Rubens' painting of James's apotheosis, with its allusions to the classical cult of imperial divinity. The imaginative impact of these adulatory art forms is modified in Henry VIII by Shakespeare's recourse to the popular drama where his deepest roots lay. While fully meeting the masque's demand for royal compliment, Henry VIII explores the ambiguities of divine right and reveals an image whose truth encompasses more things on earth than are dreamt of in the heavenly philosophy of the masque.

Notes

1. The quotation is from Henry VIII, 1.1.26-27. All quotations from Shakespeare's plays are taken from the revised Penguin Edition of the Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage et al. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969).

2. Ronald Berman has come the closest to such an explanation in “King Henry the Eighth: History and Romance,” English Studies, 48 (1967), 112-21. The effectiveness of his argument, however, is reduced by the vagueness of his interpretation (Henry VIII manifests “the art of the inexpressive” [p. 113]), and also by its inaccuracies (some noted below). R. A. Foakes notes the influence of the masque, only to claim it is stronger in the play's “wholesale use of symbolism” than in scenic effects and pageantry. See his New Arden Edition of Henry VIII (London: Methuen, 1957), p. xlii. Geoffrey Bullough offers the unlikely suggestion that the spectacle of Henry VIII is an attempt to outdo Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me (1605). See his Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), IV, 442.

3. The best statement of this case has been made by Foakes, ed., Henry VIII, pp. xxx-xxxv. More ambitious, but less credible, claims about the play's relation to the wedding can be found in Frances Yates, Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).

4. Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1960), I, 214. A brief suggestive comment about the masque is also made by Frank Kermode, “What Is Shakespeare's Henry VIII About?” DUJ [Durham University Journal], 9 (1948), 50. Unfortunately Glynne Wickham's narrow topical preoccupation reduces the usefulness of his recent articles on the late plays. See especially “Masque and Anti-masque in ‘The Tempest’,” Essays and Studies, 28 (1975), 1-14. After this essay was complete I found that some of its suggestions about the relation between public and private theaters had been anticipated by Muriel Bradbrook, The Living Monument (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976).

5. Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (1952; rpt., Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), passim.

6. Nichomachean Ethics, 1122a20 ff., trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1962), pp. 89-91.

7. Quoted by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (London: Sotheby, Parke Bernet; Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), I, 6. My debt to Orgel and Strong will be obvious to anyone who has studied the masque. For more accessible presentations of their ideas, see Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), and Strong, Splendour at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and Illusion (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973).

8. Hymenaei, ed. Stephen Orgel in Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), lines 9-12. All quotations from Jonson's masques are taken from this edition.

9. The best discussion of Rubens' painting can be found in Per Palme, Triumph of Peace (London: Thames and Hudson, 1957), pp. 230-62. See also John Harris et al., The King's Arcadia: Inigo Jones and the Stuart Court (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974), pp. 120-21.

10. For a discussion of the moral and cosmic implications of the antimasque, see Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 35, 74 and 133-35.

11. C. H. McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1918), pp. 307-08.

12. From a letter by Sir John More, reprinted in Robert Ashton, James I by His Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1969), pp. 67-68, emphasis as in the original.

13. Orgel and Strong, eds., Inigo Jones, II, 483.

14. For an incisive discussion of the antimasque in The Masque of Queens, see Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque, pp. 130-41.

15. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (1914; rpt., New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 137-218.

16. From James Melville's diary, reprinted in Ashton, James I, pp. 174-75.

17. DNB, XXXVII, 230.

18. Kermode, “What Is Henry VIII About?”, 48.

19. “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: History as Myth,” SEL [Studies in English Literature], 6 (1966), 246.

20. “We contend that [Henry VIII's] exceptional quality might perhaps be explicable as a tentative essay in a new line by one who tried so many styles before settling into his latest” (A. C. Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare [London: Chatto and Windus, 1902], p. 94).

21. Jonsonian Masque, p. 77.

22. A valuable comment on the unexpected realism of Henry VIII is provided by Muriel St. Clare Byrne's informative review of the 1950 production at Stratford-upon-Avon (“A Stratford Production: Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Survey, 3 [1950], 120-29). Shakespeare's presentation of Henry “warts and all” is also noted by Frederick O. Waage, “Henry VIII and the Crisis of the English History Play,” Shakespeare Studies, 8 (1975), 297-309, though Waage elaborates few particular warts.

23. Berman, “Henry VIII: History and Romance,” 117.

24. The best discussion of how Shakespeare mingles idealism and Realpolitik in Henry VIII is by Lee Bliss, “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix in Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth,” ELH, 42 (1975), 1-25. Bliss details many other ambiguities, besides those I have noted, and he concludes that Cranmer's prophecy is a picture of what might be and ought to be rather than what is (or was). Though Bliss also makes some suggestive comments about the influence of the masque in Henry VIII, he does not see the whole play as governed by a consciousness of courtly dramaturgy.

25. Pooler, Arden Edition of Henry VIII (London: Methuen, 1915) p. xxx; Kermode, “What Is Henry VIII about?”; Felperin, “Henry VIII: History as Myth”; and Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 196-210.

26. Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 312-33. For Auerbach's argument concerning “figural realism” in medieval drama, see Mimesis, pp. 143-73.