SOURCE: Cook, Albert. “The Ordering Effect of Dramatized History: Shakespeare and Henry VIII.” The Centennial Review 42, no. 1 (winter 1998): 5-28.

[In the following essay, Cook examines the moral and political concerns of Henry VIII and contends that the play is a “historiography that interprets history by organizing it in the process of evoking it.”]

1

Henry VIII at its most powerful, like Shakespeare's other history plays, redeploys a meditation on and reenactment of actual history on the special, itself tensed space of the stage. It recombines into fulfillment the charged constituents of its themes, rather than just pointing toward any single theme. The fullness of effect comes through the managed combination of contradictory ideological elements as these undergo a represented supersession on stage.

In the domain of public action, which preoccupied Shakespeare through all of his histories and most if not all of his tragedies, a sense of Realpolitik is brought to dramatic realization as one constituent, but only one, of his presentation. We may call this element the Machiavellian, so long as that term may be understood to compass a somewhat broader sense of power actions than those discussed by the important Italian theoretician who shadows this stage. The term “Machiavellian” in this larger sense can be made to include the political realism of an Augustinian tradition; it would include the prudential deductions of the lawyer Montaigne and the historian Plutarch, as well as the presence of fortitude before such challenging actions as the play presents, a fortitude that derives from the Stoicism of the time, and from the emphasis on it of stage representation.¹

It is tempting, from a modern and Marxian viewpoint, to oversimplify the force of this “Machiavellian” element and erect it to a dominance against which all other considerations are simply ideological rationalizations before the indefeasible rawness of power. But such a “closed power” reading, however amplified by the illustrative dialectical analysis of socially conditioned actions of the time, would not hold even for the more relaxed discourses of Montaigne, who is indebted to Machiavelli but affirmatively Christian as well as Stoic. The range of possibilities for Shakespeare in this larger sense can be compared to the syncretism of someone like Rabelais, whose doctrinal strains, as Lucien Febvre has taught us, are inextricable from the global ideological concerns evinced in his novel.² As a constituent the “Machiavellian” in this larger sense, while it might be assimilable to the Stoic, stands in patent implicit contradiction before the Christian. And yet this worldly Realpolitik and otherworldly Christian piety can be reconciled, or at least described as separable foci of attention, as Augustine's definitions of worldly questions implies, as does the expressed piety of Machiavelli himself. The ongoing dramatic intrication of the political with the religious fuses all of these in a dialectic that finds issue only in a play's ending, in “story” (Hamlet 5.2.341). It is not only for Hamlet that the moral (or Christian) and the political (or Machiavellian) are both mutually subverting and mutually reinforcing.³

Both the political and the religious are caught in action; they are dramatized and subjected to judgments of political effectiveness and religio-moral justification, with contradictions emerging from them in process. So, for example, in Henry VIII the declared repentance and the recounted pious end of Wolsey counterbalance the tough, duplicitous, and arrogant behavior of his prior actions. The appeal to religious values and principles so pervades Shakespeare's plays generally that it can no more be qualified out of them than it can be assigned a particular locus of doctrinal affiliation, though in Henry VIII Roman Catholic machination is exhibited through the clerics, while Roman Catholic virtue is exhibited in the person of Katherine. And the charge of heresy against Cranmer is dismissed not so much by proof as by the support of the king, even though the vacillations of that archbishop in the years that follow, leading up to his execution under the Roman Catholic Mary, must be fraught with associations of the grave consequences of doctrinal positioning in the changing ascendancies of the decades preceding the performance of the play. This must be the case, too, for the mention of Wolsey's replacement as Chancellor by Sir Thomas More (3.2.392-93), a figure otherwise uninvolved in the play. When Katherine's divorce is on the way and Wolsey begins pushing the Catholic Duchess of Alençon against Anne, denigrating her as a “Lutheran” (3.2.90), the play is intricating religious factors that are still in the process of permuting for this audience. In its retrospect Lutherans are possible allies in the Anglican solution, rather than heretics, even if some Puritans might be thought heretics. Henry, as titular head of the Church of England, is conceived of as having initiated the Anglican solution for an England where James is an established theologian as well as monarch and head of the church. Moreover, the play might well be paying one of various hinted compliments to James's daughter the Princess Elizabeth by associating the Lutheranism of her new husband with that of her great great uncle's second wife as well as her name with that of the previous queen.⁴

Religion is an unstable factor in these plays, and yet also a transcendent one, in keeping with the integrative overall dramatic management of fluid ideological constitutents. On the one hand the Christian Henry VI, early on, is shown as too virtuous for political action. To see this presentation as skeptical or even ironic, rather than as a puzzle, would oversimplify the ideal half of the puzzle and undo the dramatic force of his and England's quandary. On the other hand even the use of devotion by other than corrupt clerics for the purposes of power, notably by Richard III, is treated with a double irony: at the dramatic moment, and in the long range of the play, when virtue tends to right the most disastrous situations, and not only in this tetralogy. Complications between policy and religious virtue are constantly arising in the intermediations of action, as Gloucester expresses them when he accedes to Richard III's entry into power:

Will you enforce me to a world of cares?
Call them again. I am not made of stones
But penetrable to your kind entreaties,
Albeit against my conscience and my soul.
Cousin of Buckingham, and sage grave men,
Since you will buckle fortune on my back,
I must have patience to endure the load;
But if black scandal or foul-fac'd reproach
Attend the sequel of your imposition,
To bear her burden, whe'er I will or no,
Your mere enforcement shall acquaintance me
From all the impure blots and stains thereof;
For God doth know, and you may partly see,
How far I am from the desire of this.

(Richard III 3.7.222-36)

Gloucester's intrication in past and future events ironizes his lack of “desire” expressed here. Irony is never simple as it plays across such events, even in such a confrontation as that between the virtuous but already superannuated Katherine of Aragon and the corrupt cardinals who cross-examine her (Henry VIII 3.1.95ff). Here, though, the complications are with events prior and posterior; at the moment of the play there comes through a pure and simple Machiavellianism concealed in the cardinals' oily pleas but not caught in tensile ideology-relations, while Katherine's statements are contrastingly blunt and modestly pious, but themselves also simple, “Is this your Christian counsel? Out upon ye. / Heaven is above all yet; there sits a judge / That no king can corrupt.” There has to be, of course, an assumption in the audience that this appeal is proper and consonant with their own religiosity, beyond their presumed dissociation from the Roman Catholicism of Katherine. Otherwise the sharp shock would be blunted when later it is reported that Anne is seen openly going to chapel as queen (3.2.402-05).

In the second tetralogy, too, Richard II ends with the new Henry IV's projected pilgrimage which is both ironic in the context of the power-events and straight in his own persistent belief and intent. This guilty king's purpose of going on a pilgrimage overlaps and provides the link between Richard II and 1 Henry IV, faintly echoed, of course, in the name of the room that in the next play becomes his deathroom, “Jerusalem.”

Virtue is restorative under the most horrible conditions—undoing even either Aristotle's or Donatus' formulations about tragedy⁵—in all these English history plays, in the significantly titled All's Well That Ends Well, in the problem play also significantly titled Measure for Measure, in King Lear and Cymbeline and all the late comedies. In plays where virtue is not restorative, in Othello and in Hamlet, the Christian setting grounds the measure of the action in a distinctly Christian template of assumptions about the determinants of virtue.⁶ These are, to be sure, largely absent from some, but not all, plays that take place outside the domains that are or will later become Christian domains, plays like Troilus and Cressida, Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens, and Antony and Cleopatra.

Typical in the evolution from heated Machiavellianism to deep piety is Buckingham's final repentance in Richard III, “Come lead me, officers, to the block of shame” (3.5.27). There is an interaction of self-assessment, repentance, and sorrow in this play, and in many others. Here especially the women, who—like the men—feel and bemoan their guilt through the whole tetralogy, are not accepting submission to an “anointed” king whose anointing here they happen not to recognize. Yet the dynamics of this gesture are stalled in final powerlessness; at various points in earlier scenes, and then in a group lament, the three wronged and wronging women are shown in antiphonal threnodies (4.4.1-134).

The religion of Henry VI is at once a purifying element for his charitable character and a hindrance for his political effectiveness. Edmund enunciates and acts on Machiavellian principles, but in the end he attributes these to his illegitimate birth and makes the final gesture of a reconciling bid for forgiveness, “Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature” (King Lear 5.3.243-44). In the dramatic sequence this assertion would be meaningless if one thought of the play as grimly casting it in an ironic light. The same may be said about the final statements of Wolsey in Henry VIII in his long penitential interview with Thomas Cromwell (3.2.373-459).⁷ For much of the play, of course, Wolsey has been using his religion hypocritically as just another Machiavellian tool. But then he suffers a sudden downfall through the strange oversight of leaving important incriminating papers where the king can see them, enunciating his awareness in the all-but-culminating speech, “So farewell, to the little good you bear me. / Farewell? a long farewell to all my greatness” (3.2.350-51). In that speech he comes forward as an exemplum of the fall of illustrious men, the Boccacian topos which itself is another constituent and component of the drama here and elsewhere, just as Katherine of Aragon illustrates a type that sorts well with The Legend of Good Women.

However, Katherine goes offstage in a strongly self-assured, virtuous posture to reappear in a withdrawn approach to death balanced against the public glory of Anne's coronation that underscores what had been the political inevitability of her erasure. Just so Wolsey is not finished as he comes through this purgation. There remains for him a penitence which makes sense taken not as ironic vacillation before his death, repentance as the last refuge of the scoundrel, but rather as the sort of genuine restoration of the unforgivable man rising to forgiveness both active and passive, a sequence that serves as still another topos in Shakespeare.⁸ This strong Christian note, however, is not the final one in the play. It resolves itself, as typically in his histories, through a paean of national affirmation—a template of ideas that may involve the other ideas (Christian, political, etc.) but is not identical with them. The final affirmation comes to its climax in the baptism of Elizabeth.

2

The moral and political concerns combine their confrontations and evasions in all of Shakespeare's history plays. Their mode of doing so comes through strongly in Henry VIII, where what the play affirms, finally, overmasters what it deplores. As in the earlier tetralogies, and also in the tragedies—oriented, as they tend to be, towards political action—the sinister or Machiavellian power plays yield, finally, to a plain assertion of a predominant national order. All the tensed permutations of gesture before the king's divine right in the light of his specific interactions get resolved in the overall forward thrust of the play.

In Shakespeare's histories, characteristically, the more dedicated to evil the actions as they unfold, the stronger is the likelihood of the restoration of order.⁹ Henry V gets past all the sleights of his own Machiavellian byplays when he comes through to his triumph at the end of the final play in the tetralogy. So in the earlier tetralogy the weakness of Henry VI, for all his anointed presence, generates vacillations through three plays, leading into tensely schematized horrors in Richard III. Yet these do culminate in Richard's defeat and death at the hands of a victorious Henry VII, leading to the sense of a long-range and obscurely providential righting. In Henry VIII condensations of all these political, religious, and personal activities emanate from the nearly impenetrable king, and from the highly adaptable others, including the innocent / hypocritical Anne Boleyn in her converse with the Old Lady, who herself characterizes Anne's statements as “hypocritical” (2.3.26). Anne emerges into the spotlight as the mother of Elizabeth, who is proleptically adduced in a prophecy, “Beauty and honour in her are so mingled / That they have caught the king: and who knows yet / But from this lady may proceed a gem / To lighten all this isle” (2.3.77-79); and a little later, “I persuade me, from her / Will fall some blessing to this land, which shall / In it be memoriz'd” (3.2.50-55).

In harmony with the even, assertive tone of this play, the king at his first appearance is introduced (1.4.60) among masquers, “habited like shepherds,” in a kind of play within a play, setting a further tone of national courtly contentment to match the international one of the Field of the Cloth of Gold evoked in the first scene. It then shows him at once in a festive dalliance with Anne. We are far from Holbein's famous anamorphic portrait of Henry VIII and his ambassadors. This self-satisfied contentment plays into “real” vested pageantries at key ceremonial moments (2.4; 4.1; 5.4). Still, the evenness of presentation in Henry VIII has the quality not of the linear glories of pageantry or the simplifications of masque, both of which it thus successfully incorporates, but rather of a condensed understanding of the derivations of managed contradiction from all the previous history plays, and even of the other plays involving politics.¹⁰ As Frank V. Cespedes well shows, the overall conception of this play works against the romance pattern or other simple schematizations.¹¹

In this play Shakespeare has returned to a relatively recent England, it may be said, from the more remote Englands of the King Lear set historically in a very early pre-Christian Britain of about 800 b.c. and of a Cymbeline that confronts England and Rome at the moment of the birth of Christ.¹²Henry VIII moves forward to the time after the other two tetralogies and abandons exotic locales to return to England. Once again, interestingly, Shakespeare does not address French politics, as Chapman did in Bussy d'Ambois—unless All's Well That Ends Well be counted, or the interactions with France in Henry VI, Part One and Henry V; nor does he ever approach Spain for a major plot. Thus he has avoided the two main powers on England's horizon in his time. France is now brought together with England, however, for the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and Spain is brought in through Katherine. In that respect, as in others, the fullness of glory in a remembered past goes beyond the contradictions of divine right versus power, and piety versus Machiavellianism, contradictions that are variously factored out in the tetralogies.¹³

In Henry V the contradiction lingers between the callous duplicities of Hal and the staged and culminating glories of King Henry V—and yet there, too, characteristically, the deep contradictions dissipate in resolved celebration for the very fact that they have been canvassed.¹⁴ Idealization, and a sense of the Machiavellian dimensions behind a successful ruler like Henry V as Greenblatt has traced them, do not stand exactly in contradiction, though they are contrary positions that cannot be assimilated to one another. In the dramatic presentation they are faced and subsumed before and in one such ruler as Henry V, with a look backwards to other, equally contradictory gestures in the actions of the tetralogy. The brief words of the epilogue offer a look also ahead to the very different management of what are inescapably the same factors and constellations of motive in Henry VI.

The deepening in the second tetralogy may be measured by the varied presentation of Falstaff. In the first tetralogy he is simply a coward, and the rejection of his cowardice is a transient, manageable gesture in the midst of other gestural complexes less transient and manageable—the threat of death, the more-or-less concealed purposes of powerful principals. In the last three plays of the second tetralogy Falstaff is presented, of course, as having a complete modus vivendi and sense of himself that is factored into the political equation as an endlessly puzzling contradiction. His friendship with Hal and Hal's subsequent rejection of him, can be taken as a necessary act on the part of the Prince in the process of becoming king, or as a Machiavellian showing of the hand, or as a presentation of irreconcilable phases or aspects, or as all three or four of these, contradictorily but subsumptively caught up in the celebration that blinks no difficulties but succumbs to none either.

Now in Henry VIII we begin with a glory preceding nearly a century of troubles in the real time of the viewer, but after nearly two centuries of different interactive troubles in the two tetralogies that can be taken to precede it. The glory of the Field of the Cloth of Gold asserts its presence in the very first scene beyond the ironies that will later control the memory of it in the disgrace of Katherine, in the play itself therefore, and by proleptic anticipation in the life of Jacobean England. Two great monarchs, kings of England and France, are brought into a momentary harmonious conjunction that remained subject to vast, interactive conjunctions and disjunctions of duplicity and alliance from the time of Henry VIII right through and beyond the time of the presented play. As the play opens, this mighty conjunction at the Field of the Cloth of Gold has already taken place, and the alliance has begun to fray. It is seen as a long retrospect by Norfolk (1.1.6-45). This retrospect within the play lightly sets up a frame for the retrospect, back ninety years, that the play constitutes. Spain, too, has been party, through Wolsey, to these arrangements, as Buckingham, alleging the Cardinal's effectual treason, interprets his role in the visit of the Spanish Emperor Charles V to his aunt, the English queen (1.1.174-93). By implication the immediately ensuing description of Cardinal Wolsey's power evokes the whole machinery, religious and political, of the papacy, here still central and active for a church not yet mutated into the Church of England. These complications transcend the conclusion of Henry V where a defeated French king abuts a much less complicated matrimonial picture.¹⁵ Yet at the same time the complications are so foreshortened, digested, and indirect in their implications that the action is made to move rapidly forward in a way that is reminiscent of the speed of King John, or even of Macbeth, without the turbulence of either play. In this light and at this stage it cannot be conceived that a tetralogy would be necessary.

Hangovers of revealed duplicity, to be sure, lead to the arrest of Buckingham, whose plot is shown with none of the schematic comprehensiveness given to the plot against Bolingbroke in 1 Henry IV—or for that matter to plots mounted by the father of this Buckingham, executed by Richard III after long-range and varied power interactions presented by the first tetralogy.

In Marlovian, or even quasi-Brechtian, simplicity, Henry VIII brings the glory to which its actions are causally unconnected into countervailing power. So too, the final glory of the play, the christening of the infant Elizabeth, looks ahead to her future glories, with the divine right buried into the tonality of the play and effectually subverting the shadows, also dramatized, of unjust divorce and hypocritical lust that have led to the displacement of the noble Katherine by Anne Boleyn. Anne, too, is presented as innocent in a way that is at once unbelievable to the audience and incontrovertible.

As the play's alternate title All Is True can be taken to suggest, the audience is enjoined to contemplate the king back at the moment when the Tudor succession it has recognized and lived under was about to be assured, and the praise of Elizabeth at the end of the play reverberates with the assurance that the Stuart dynasty of James under which they are living will retain a continuity with the grandness of her father. The mastery of the king in this play is celebrated more than it is scrutinized, where all his predecessors had been scrutinized in the two tetralogies that assert a final, balancing success from the long change through the Wars of the Roses into the always precariously established hegemony of the Tudors. The divine right of kings here has passed beyond the political tests of the earlier tetralogies; it leaves behind the mighty tensions of the tragedies. Henry VIII easily handles rebellions, and the power is celebrated publicly as predominantly having accrued to him. The king's two bodies are in full evidence, so gloriously, it might be said, that one of them can be celebrated, a natural, sexually vivid body guaranteeing an heir in the political sphere—while the dalliance leading to it cannot fail to suggest transgression in the religious sphere. The issue about his marriage, of course, involves both the legitimacy of the Church of England and the dynastic purity of Elizabeth through her father. It is of such great import that it cannot be faced head on,¹⁶ whereas Henry V is seen only at the end of his tetralogy managing the contradictions of dynastic marriage. The Machiavellianism of a woman comes out in the pretended modesty that will attain a seductive demureness, here in the posture of Anne Boleyn. But her future execution is banished from the purview of the play, if not of the audience, just as all the contradictions leading through and around the king's wooing are drowned at the end in the celebration of the future of the baby whose christening concludes it.

History is at the center of the play, but a schematized history from the time of the great-grandparents of the audience, while the history of the present cannot but be reflected in its overtones: the spectrum of conflicts between Catholic and Protestant, the memories of the execution of the mother of James through that of the mother of Elizabeth, the presence once again of a strong male king who still has a popular legitimate heir.

The force of schematization is indicated by the beginning of Henry V, “Turning th'accomplishment of many years / Into an hour-glass” (1.1.30-31); and also by the end, “In little room confining mighty men” (Epilogue 3). In the Prologue of Henry VIII the schematization is characterized differently, and still more powerfully, not as a condensation but as a transmutation into terms that accord more with tragedy than with history, and also as a contrast with comedy:

I come no more to make you laugh; things now
That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe;
Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow
We now present. Those that can pity, here
May (if they think it well) let fall a tear

In this formulation the access to tears is said to come after thought, and it takes some thought to find the occasion for tears here. Doing so points to further schematization, and also for transpositions from disproportionate presentation. Since the play celebrates the mastery of the king and the christening of Elizabeth, and does not mention the later death of Anne Boleyn, candidates must be sought for tears who are shown suffering either undeservedly, like Katherine, or as a result of their own political intrigue, like Buckingham and Wolsey. “See / How soon this mightiness meets misery” (Prologue 29-30). These culminating lines of the Prologue locate the action of the play in the de casibus topos, but at the same time they subject it to the principle of contrast, “And if you can be merry then, I'll say / A man may weep upon his wedding day” (31-32). The king and his new bride are shown as simply glorious. To accord “tears” for important but secondary characters is to adduce a schematism that at once measures them by poetic justice and removes them from it, from the “fierce vanities” (1.1.55) with which Buckingham characterizes Wolsey before the downfall of both men.

In Henry VIII Machiavellian action proceeds according to rule; talk of past treason leads to the arrest of Buckingham for present treason. This complot nests the agency of Wolsey, who spans his agency into the ridding of Katharine, and is then undone himself, dying with dignity. He is replaced by a Cranmer who for the moment survives the formal accusation of being a “sectary” (5.3.70) to be recruited as Elizabeth's godfather—though in the history of the time and doubtless in the oblique reference of the play his religious stance will embroil him for execution under Mary, the other way round, from the Catholic side.

3

These ideological integers as they bear upon a recontextualized history come through in the schematism which Shakespeare so notably employs in his stage presentation. One person, who embodies a stance, is set against another who exhibits a counter-stance for the binary factoring through a scene's confrontation. Then, in the next scene, some other element, or a version of the first, is also set into confrontation globally with the first scene. Now the stage in general can be thought of as implicitly binary: it juxtaposes what is out front and seen, the virtual space, with what is in back and not seen, the actual space the live audience inhabits when it is not immobilized into spectatorship. And Shakespeare's powerful enlistment of pairings goes all the way to the heart of his rhetoric, with his penchant for the figure of “one-through-two” or hendiadys, and with his persistent balancing of doubled terms,¹⁷ and even with his penchant for doubling in his titles (Two Gentlemen of Verona, Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night or What You Will, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, The Phoenix and the Turtle).

So in the opening scene of Richard II, John of Gaunt is given the difficult task of investigating treachery in his own son; the king is mounting a confrontation of one reputed traitor with another, Bolingbroke with Mowbray. The scene ends with a challenge between the two. It gives way not yet to their duel but to a near-duet between old John of Gaunt and the widow of his murdered brother, the old Duchess of Gloucester. In this confrontation John of Gaunt's acquiescence before the king, “His deputy anointed in His sight,” is contrasted with the fury of the Duchess. The next scene presents the delayed duel for vindication, in which neither party carries the day but both are exiled. But this dual disposition of hostile parties will be matched later with their partial allegiance abroad, as one of them, Bolingbroke, takes over the kingdom. The praise of England in the mouth of the dying Gaunt (2.1.40-68) goes beyond schematism to express both nostalgia for the past and a hopeful vision of the future, in accord with the tendency of these plays to look back and ahead from the schematized scene. All Gaunt's piety overmatches Richard's attentiveness, supervening over the king's assertions in the previous scene when Richard showed himself cruelly impatient for this old man to die. The insensitivity of the king, once again, intrudes schematically as he continues to insult a Gaunt borne away on a litter to his death.

Richard III also begins schematically: first Gloucester hypocritically exhibits shock as he consoles his brother Clarence who is being sent into the Tower, actually through his agency. And then he greets Hastings who has just been released from the Tower. In the next scene, by contrast, he woos the widow of the deceased Henry VI in the face of his own patent involvement in the death of all the men she has held dear. A scene of facing down hostility follows upon a scene of concealing hostility.

Sequenced schematizations further the drama, and themselves enter into larger contrast from play to play of the second tetralogy. The earlier forces are exponentialized and combined from their successive inceptions in Richard II. By 1 Henry IV the new king, who has gradually prevailed over the old, faces not single enemies but leagues of enemies whose geopolitical allegiances emerge and merge gradually in the confrontations of the opening of the play. In the North under Northumberland's guidance his son Hotspur's refusal to yield Douglas and the Scotch captives or to deliver his father-in-law Mortimer from the West for supposed fakery about combatting Glendower are all related actions: Northumberland and his family, the Scots, Mortimer, and Glendower are all secretly in league against Henry IV, here gradually revealed as they are schematized into combination. All these powers are in cahoots and trying to manage the show, as the plotting Worcester early summarizes the danger of managing the forces to which they will turn out to go under:

And now I will unclasp a secret book,
And to your quick-conceiving discontents
I'll read you matter deep and dangerous
As full of peril and adventurous spirit
As to o'er-walk a current roaring loud
On the unsteady footing of a spear.

(1.3.188-93)

In Henry VIII such forces are, as it were, put at the remove of a recounted glory, and the forces themselves, embodied in the kings meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, are unrepresented in their full complexity, surfacing first in the expressed contempt for Wolsey before he enters and then, schematically, when he does enter, in the downfall of Buckingham because of his loose claim for the succession (1.2.131). His arrest is presented as the result of Wolsey's Machiavellian machinations, and its injustice is later referred to more than once by Buckingham's son-in-law Surrey, who at the same time turns out not to rebel, but rather to fold into the king's reorganized government. The schematization is pointed up in the first scene when Buckingham, recovered from illness, discusses with Norfolk the power and deceit of Wolsey, who then is shown very briefly crossing the stage in state (115-19), the play asserting the contrast. In the bearing of these schematized events on conduct, the play, like many of Shakespeare's, can be seen as sharing something of the rhetorical register of The Mirror for Magistrates. So other templates of interpretation here are schematized as they converge for exhibition; but the medieval de casibus topos is not confined to serving as just one in a series of illustrations, since Wolsey himself draws the inferences and Christianizes them as he passes on advice. Thus he serves in his pride and errors as a negative example, but also he serves as an example of radical change in his alert coping and in his sage advice to Thomas Cromwell. The strong schematization of the separate scenes as they cumulatively make their mark provides a model in which these oppositions can be distributed and assimilated.

As the alternate title of Henry VIII has it, All Is True. This title is at once a historiographically controlling precept, a conclusion, and a kind of exhortation. Yet while Shakespeare stays close to historiographic sources and is offering an interpretation of signal interconnections among events in the national past, as the historian does, he takes liberties that a modern historicizing poet like Pound or Olson would not take. He conflates the time sequences of events, he transposes their order, and he sometimes even gives actions to one person that were actually performed by another, as in this play he gives Wolsey a speech that was actually delivered by the Bishop of London.¹⁸ Still, he stays faithful to the general political conditions he can infer from his sources. If the model for the small group of powerful advisers in all these plays is the Privy Council under Elizabeth¹⁹ and the Parliament became more prominent under James, that shift is not reflected in the plays; the organization seen in the 1 Henry VI of 1592-93 follows substantially this same model as that still mounted in the Henry VIII of twenty years later.

Holinshed confirms this plot, yet at the same time whether Wolsey was justified in arresting Buckingham is here in effect left hanging, not connected causally to what moves before us on stage. The play presents not so much a point of view as a schematized contrast of factors. The schematizations, however, work like the factorings of Thucydides to present a view of a historical process which stays focused on it over a long-enough range not to admit overall of the simple plot schematisms that organize the individual constituent scenes. Shakespeare also resembles Livy in his putting the histories at the service of a national ideal. In minimal terms, these histories present, in Leonard Tennenhouse's terms for more limited forms like interlude and masque, both ideology and propaganda, both an expression of interpellating convictions and organized briefs of plea for them.²⁰ Yet there is also an objective overview in this play, and in the other histories, as the inferences of Cespedes will point up, “the play is not concerned with apportioning praise or blame” (437); “Shakespeare structures events so as to increase rather than multiply Henry's hypocrisy” (414). And more generally, “historical irony suffuses the entire play” (416).²¹ The effect of the conflations of event and their schematizations is to make the characters and the action exemplary, while the effect of the powerful tendency of the action to draw into its fullness beyond these confrontations is to replot itself into a supervening larger order not dissociable from a vision of providence. René Girard's attention to doubling in the plots of Shakespeare throws light on the function of this subliminal process of at once facing and avoiding deep rivalries in a familial, political, and ontological fix.²² The plays' manipulation of this, and other, deep semiperceptions is a way out of the fix. Only in the indirections of such combinations can fruition come about, as the second tetralogy celebrates, and Henry VIII, in its more restricted compass, does too. Henry VIII culminates a process which begins in the scene-focusing simplifications of 1 Henry VI.

Though Shakespeare's plays, and particularly his histories, reflect and incorporate ideologies, they are not themselves ideological, even to the extent of just examining the contradiction of the conflicts among constituent ideologies. And though their progress from beginning to end of a play is marked by schematic juxtapositions and doublings, they are not schematic. In Henry VIII the oppositions between Wolsey and Buckingham, Wolsey and Katherine, and in a sense that between Katherine and Anne, are all superseded by the deep, relatively unexamined and only loosely intricated control of the King; but they are not exactly juxtaposed to that either, and the Machiavellian, as well as the religious components are exhibited, taken for granted, combined, and bypassed, as the king reorganizes his government, dissolves his marriage, and contracts a new one.

The fall of Wolsey on which the Prologue seems to focus comes about in a way that is not subject to power analysis. It happens through a slip so salient the modern interpreter is tempted to see it only in the light of what it cannot for us escape being, the Freudian petite signature of the guilty. It is also like a bad dream—the examination dream, or the capture dream in which a fatal omission causes one's downfall. Yet we are not given the constituents to interpret this “dream” in the circumstances of Wolsey. It is all “navel” in Freud's terms: the uninterpretable converging center is all that shows.²³

Here Shakespeare's promotion of a psychic slip as the peripeteia of a major action has an extraordinary force. “O negligence / Fit for a fool to fall in! What cross devil / Made me put this main secret in the packet / I sent the King?” (3.212-16). The very disproportion between the seeming triviality of the event and its crucial effect on the life of Wolsey would, I believe, mislead us if we were to insist on foregrounding a Freudian or Lacanian interpretation (though I am convinced that would be quite valid on its own terms). Such an interpretation would return Wolsey's misplaced packet to a deep and unconscious but understandable order, where the purport of the scene would seem to be that the wider order of all that happens in time cannot be manipulated by the actions of one man. Events have already been escaping Wolsey. The discovery of his private inventory among the state papers comes after he is already overreaching mentally about displacing Anne, planning to bring on the Duchess of Alençon after displacing Katharine (3.2.140ff), as his discovered letter to the Pope also shows, when Henry has already secretly married Anne.

The effect of this disproportion between managed mighty forces and a trivial slip is to open the plot panoramically and so to point it toward a larger order. We may take a cue from the acute definitions of Barbara Freedman, “The relation between audience and performer is doubled at the level of narrative when each character seeks in the other its proper reflection. Both tragic and comic narratives stage misrecognition in the quest for recognition. Whereas Shakespeare's tragedies address the need and failure to find a place in another's eyes, the comedies are more concerned with dislocating perspective; they suggest that only a limited perspectival space defined by error constitutes identity.”²⁴ In the histories, however—and in the historical dimensions of most of the major tragedies—a more collective identification takes place than with recognitions among private persons. Both the recognitions and the misrecognitions, on stage and across the stage barrier from characters to audience, connect in a global ongoing and gradual realization for which the term “plot” would suggest too schematic a logical structure. The very schematisms persistently point beyond themselves, and such a political resolution as that with which The Tempest or King Lear concludes offers a future that narrows as a summary of the play, whereas in the histories the future widens out into some version of the collective public events the audience has already witnessed.

The movement is of an even progression among weighty matters too wide for mastery to admit of a tighter plot. So, as typically, by the middle of the second act events have already got beyond Katherine; Anne has been named Marchioness of Pembroke (2.3) before the king convokes Katherine to trial because of the “scruple” (2.4) that leads to the divorce. But there has already been a shift of pacing through the play.

Like figure and ground the two main plots of the play follow each a different tempo—the sudden fall of Wolsey, going from ripe suspicion to fatal error, and the gradual, relentless supplanting of Katherine by Anne, going from the king's dalliance with her after the masque to the christening of their child. The progression of the play, by intricating these two plots in Wolsey's attempt to subvert both women, overarches and orchestrates these two tempos, as may fall into relief if we follow the play's progress.

As it proceeds, the retrospect of the opening scene moves first into a future and then, with the second scene, into the strict present of the trial of Buckingham. The third scene relaxes and varies into gossip about French fashions, which prepares for the fourth scene, the more portentous relaxation of the King's masque and dalliance with Anne.

The second act opens with a report of the immediate past, the trial of Buckingham, which matches the reports of more remote events in the first act. Here it leads to his farewell speech expressing forgiveness (53-137). A schematic summary of the past (105-20) matches a looming future, a “secret so weighty 'twill require / A strong faith to conceal it”—“a separation / between the king and Katherine” (148-49). In the next scene Wolsey suspiciously matches past in gossip about Anne with future in intrigues to controvert her. Then the King, Wolsey, and Campeius set up the trial for Katherine. In 2.3 Anne and Old Lady discuss the forthcoming trial, a scene capped as the Lord Chamberlain enters to announce that Anne has been named Marchioness of Pembroke. This private scene is balanced against the next, the public one of the Queen's trial before a panoply of officials. In the faceoff between Katherine and Wolsey she appeals to the Pope and bolts from the court. Matched are long, self-justifying speeches of the king, Katherine, and Wolsey. The king at the end introduces a new factor by calling for Cranmer.

In the first scene of the third act Katherine laments and listens to the song about Orpheus, and then she faces the hostile cardinals. In the next scene Norfolk, Suffolk, Surrey, and the Chamberlain all pursue Wolsey, and the king is rocked by Wolsey's fatally mislaid packet of letters.

The tempos are combined as one of the letters warns the Pope about Anne, to whom, in the progress of the other plot, the king is already married. This crux comes to a head when after a long, defensive interchange between the King and Wolsey (135-202), the king abruptly hands over the papers and exits with a succinct, capital warning, “Read o'er this, / And after, this, and then to breakfast with / What appetite you have” (3.2.201-03). Wolsey's “Nay then, farewell” comes rhythmically after the long plea of self defense. As a group reenters, he is arrested, and the rhythm slows for a new dialogue with the nobles. The government is reorganized, with More replacing Wolsey, Cranmer named Archbishop of Canterbury, and Anne reported to have gone publicly to chapel as queen (3.2.402-05). The fourth act speeds up in the account of Anne's coronation and Katherine's sickness. This is interrupted by a procession and the confirmed installation of a new administration, Norfolk, Suffolk, Surrey in office with elaborate costumes, as well as Cranmer, Gardiner, and Cromwell. In the next scene the sick Katherine hears of the death of Wolsey. Speeches of retrospect on his vices and virtues are followed, as she sleeps, by a vision of future salvation (matching the procession of 4.1) of “a blessed troop” carrying garlands that “Promis'd me eternal happiness” (86-90), accompanied by a “solemn music” that matches the oboes and trumpets of 4.1. There then enters, in a diplomatic resolution sent by the king, an ambassador from her nephew the Spanish Emperor. She asks about a letter commending her daughter Mary to him. Her eyes “grow dim” and she goes off to bed, giving orders for her funeral.

The first scene of the fifth act is preoccupied with Anne's labor, and with the interaction between the king and Cranmer, whom he cross-examines, summons to the council, and assures of support. The Old Lady announces the birth of Elizabeth. The play continues to intricate politics and the king's marriage, juxtaposing them once more with the trial set against the birth. The king watches the trial from above with his physician Butts. Cranmer is accused of heresy and is ordered to the Tower. But he appeals with his ring to the king, who enters, and after rebuking the council asks Cranmer to be Elizabeth's godfather. This brings the two themes of statecraft and marriage once more into conjunction, and the sinister recent past is canceled by the glorious future. In a last relaxation of tempo the next scene shows the crowd preparing for the christening holiday (5.3). The last scene is devoted to the evenmeasured procession, swelling out with speeches by Cranmer and the king. The restoration of Cranmer after his trial, in the political plot, has balanced the downfall of Wolsey.

4

The shifts of pacing in the play are modified and controlled by the underlying rhythm of the blank verse, which functions as an “emotionally” even measure of, and vehicle for, this progression, The deliberate slowness (then suddenness) of downfalls in their sequence of dissimilarities flows along, at the same time, in the similarity of the measure, heightened at a poignant moment by the briefer lines of the song about Orpheus sung for Katherine at her behest (3.1). “In sweet music is such art, / Killing care and grief of heart / Fall asleep or hearing die (3.1.11-14). This contrasts with the processional pomp at the beginning and end of the previous scene's trial, from which Katherine has withdrawn in dignity.

The modulated rhythms of this progressive action are echoed in, and rise out of, the verse, with especial salience in Wolsey's soliloquy of resigned realization, which stands the more markedly against all the rest of the play for being, along with Wolsey's shorter earlier speech in the same scene, the only soliloquy in the play, and the only other speech made by a solitary speaker on stage—which gives it a choral force against all the rest of the action:

So farewell to the little good you bear me.
Farewell? a long farewell to all my greatness!
This is the state of man; today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes, tomorrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him:
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls as I do. I have ventur'd
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride
At length broke under me, and now has left me,
Weary and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream that must for ever hide me.
Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye;
I feel my heart new open'd. O how wretched
Is that poor man that hangs on princes' favors!
There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to,
That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,
More pangs and fears than wars or women have;
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again.

(3.2.350-72)

The repetition of “falls” in the next-to last line, across a caesura, pulls the whole process, in the breath of the speaker, over and down into the last half-line which concludes the scene—a combination of excess in the three phrases and the deficiency of the incomplete last line. This has started with a tuning-up across the pauses with slight variation of placement in the three “farewell”s of the first two lines. It moves strongly in the categorical “this is the state of man,” which introduces the exposition, conventional in metaphoric structure but much quickened in its mimetic rhythms, of the comparison of a man's life to that of a plant, where only three stages are listed instead of the usual seven of the “ages of man” topos. “Frost,” at its first appearance, induces the ominous pause of repetition, leads to a line with the break of two pauses (“And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely”). The line rides over in an enjambment and yields to an alternate, much stranger metaphor of the boy on the swimming bladder, begun in midline (“And then he falls as I do. I have ventur'd”). In the phantasmagory of this powerful new image the speaker is at once a “little wanton boy” and “weary and old with service.” But then, in a third motion that corresponds both to the rhythm of his own final recovery and the predominantly assertive celebration of the play, he testifies to the healing effect, “I feel my heart new open'd.” He has moved apart from, though at the same time is identified retrospectively with the “poor man that hangs on princes' favours.” He has fallen like Lucifer never to hope again—in this world; but the very realization and confession induces a kind of hope Lucifer cannot be imagined to enjoy, or anyone in the service of Lucifer.

This soliloquy is far more composed than the one he uttered as the king ominously withdrew after showing him the packet of letters. In that earlier, shorter soliloquy the political acuity of Wolsey is applied to his instantaneous assessment of his own situation, summed up before he has got through a line of verse. “The letter, as I live, with all the business / I writ to's holiness. Nay then farewell: / I have touch'd the highest point of all my greatness, / And from that full meridian of my glory / I haste now to my setting. I shall fall / Like a bright exhalation in the evening, / And no man see me more” (221-27). Lucifer is a star, and yet in this earlier metaphor Wolsey is not yet at the point where he can name him in the comparison, and so not face his identification with him. Therefore he cannot face the dissociation the next soliloquy will effectuate. But, without further rhythmic analysis, one can say that the act of psychological dissociation is already spreading out, and stirring, in the accentual hovering through the word “exhalation” as it lightens the rhythms of the line in which it occurs.

But this word, like every one, is at the service of its larger reverberations. The doubling actions, all the schematisms of the progressive structures, combined with the disproportions within and between the intricated plots, at once deeply mediates the retrospective national celebration with which the play concludes and fortifies it by testing it as a reimagined supersession of the forces that might have done it in. Thus this play serves not as an Aristotelian purgation but as a contemplative clarification in the public domain, an acted analogue to historiography that interprets history by organizing it in the process of evoking it.

Notes

1. John D. Cox (Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989) argues for a Machiavellian element in Augustine's political thinking, an element which is echoed in English medieval drama and assimilated as well as countered in Shakespeare's work. Cox points up the contrast between the Augustinian political pessimism, which was always a minority view, and the “Christian idealism” of St. Thomas, based on Aristotle (hence on “pagan thought”) and ultimately on a Plato whom Augustine is refuting (15-17). All these complexes, not just Augustine, pagan as well as Christian, are combined in the actional presentations of Shakespeare. See also Albert Cook, “Shakespeare's Fortifications of Intellectual Syncretism from Montaigne,” forthcoming; “The Transmutation of Heroic Complexity: Plutarch and Shakespeare,” in M. A. McGrail, ed., Shakespeare and Plutarch, Poetica 48 (1997) 83-98; on these general questions, “Some Observations on Shakespeare and the Incommensurability of Interpretive Strategies,” in Soundings: On Shakespeare, Plato, Modern Poetry, and Other Subjects (Detroit: Wayne UP, 1991) 99-114; “Historiography and/or Historicism: Context in the Theoretical [De]-Integration of Renaissance Drama,” Centennial Review, 40 (1996): 31-48. For a general critique of such recent approaches to Shakespeare see Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993).

2. Lucien Febvre, Le Probleme de l'incroyance au seizieme siecle: la religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942).

3. As Cox says (102), “Machiavelli's political realism was called atheism because he did not sacralize the state, and any Elizabethan theorist who followed Machiavelli would have thought the same way. That is why Shakespeare's choice to show centralized power in the process of collapse is so striking, especially given his evident commitment to the existing political system and social scale.”

   A signal distinction, in a discussion of simpler dramatic performances, is made by Leonard Tennenhouse, The Tudor Interludes: “Nice Wanton” and “Impatient Poverty” (New York: Garland, 1984). Tennenhouse raises a key issue when he asserts that “a new notion of secular power decenters orthodox theology” (15), and he goes on to specify, “[forms of] language were frequently converting a contrary relationship [of equal but opposite values] into a contradictory one [where one value replaces another]” (18). Even if this might be said of the documents Tennenhouse cites, like the Reformation Injunctions, 1536-1549 (from E. Cardwell, Documents [Oxford, 1844]), it will not hold without considerable qualification for the function of religiosity (“orthodox theology” would be too specific a term) predominant in the plays throughout Shakespeare's career, wherein it cannot be said that his complex notion of secular power decenters any expression of religious feeling.

4. Princess Elizabeth was married to Prince Frederick, on February 14, 1613. Further details are given by R. A. Foakes, King Henry VIII, Arden Ed. (London: Methuen, 1968) xxx-xxxii.

5. J. V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearian Tragedy (Chicago: Swallow P) 1951.

6. For the tonality of religious feelings in these plays, see Albert Cook, “Evocations of Feeling in Renaissance Drama: Music and Religion,” Soundings 115-24.

7. Jeffrey Knapp, in “Preachers and Players in Shakespeare's England,” Representations (Fall 1993): 29-59, makes the point that from 1 Henry VI through Henry VIII, Shakespeare shows evil prelates; Knapp relates this (oversimply) to the Marprelate controversies. Jonathan Dollimore (Radical Tragedy [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984] 50) makes a comparable simple overassertion in a complicated way, “the attack on Christian providentialism in Jacobean tragedy is inseparable from this effect of decentering man. Taken together, attack and effect comprise nothing less than a subversion of Christian humanism.” The plays offer little substantiation for this strange inference. Their effect may be “inseparable” from such an “attack” (or simply from such an evocation), but it is not identifiable with such an attack. The elements in the large dialectic do not admit of so one-dimensional an ideological ascription—though on the other hand even a Christian should be reluctant to endorse without rigorous qualification an easy, though substantially correct, descriptive motto like “Christian humanism.”

8. Albert Cook, Shakespeare's Enactment (Chicago: Swallow P, 1976) 221, “Leontes … is one of those figures frequent in Shakespeare—the list includes Bertram, Oliver, Parolles, Angelo, Antonio, Edmund, and others—presented as almost scandalously unforgivable, and then forgiven.”

9. For an account of the frequent and dominant references to divine Providence in these plays and their sources, see Henry Ansgar Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970). Phyllis Rackin, however, makes a case for some modification of references to providence, as opposed to power analysis, in historians just prior to Shakespeare like Hall and Holinshed (Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990]).

10. For a general study of masque in this play as related to pageantry, see Ralph Berry, “The Masque of Henry VIII” in Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience (New York: St. Martin's, 1985) 128-41. For the function of masque in the celebration of power, see Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: U of California P, 1975). For a view of Henry VIII that stresses the component of masque, see Leonard Tennenhouse, “Strategies of State and Political Plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII,” Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985) 109-29. Tennenhouse contrasts Henry VIII with Henry V:

    [In Henry V] The king's identity coalesces and his power intensifies as he unifies those territories that are his by hereditary law under his authority. But as this occurs, one finds that the figure of the monarch breaks apart and disappears into many different roles and dialects. He uses the strategies of disguise and inversion to occupy a range of positions from humble soldier to courtly lover and several in between.

    (122)

    In Henry VIII, on the other hand, Shakespeare uses quite different means to idealize political authority. This work of the mature playwright suppresses the discontinuities and contradictions which give Elizabethan history plays, as well as the monarchs which came to dominance in them, their distinctive form. Shakespeare's belated history play consequently resembles more the dramatic romances and masques that come into favor under James than it does the chronicle history play. Operating in violation of the very strategy he so perfectly realized right through the end of the Epilogue of Henry V, Shakespeare makes genealogy one and the same thing as Providence in Henry VIII. Such a strategy for harnessing populist energy clearly maintains the absolute identification of power and genealogy.

    It is no mere accident of history, then, that the ending of Henry VIII presents such a striking contrast to the Epilogue of Henry V. The blessing of the infant Elizabeth heralds the fulfillment of divine prophecy and guarantees the corporate nature of the Crown in perpetuity.

    (125)

    This argument is characteristically perspicacious, and right so far as it goes. Tennenhouse cites a number of articles that stress this simple element in Henry VIII: Ronald Berman, “Henry VIII: History and Romance,” English Studies 47 (1967): 112-27; H. M. Richmond, “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: Romance Redeemed by History,” Shakespeare Studies 4 (1968): 334-49; Lee Bliss, “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth,” ELH 42 (1967): 1-25; Edward I. Berry, “Henry VIII and the Dynamics of Spectacle,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 229-46.

11. Frank V. Cespedes, “‘We are one in fortunes’: The Sense of History in Henry VIII” ELR 10 (1980): 413-38. “The fifth act, however, with the aborted plot against Cranmer, the christening of Elizabeth, and the anachronistic praise of her reign, seems to imply a perspective incompatible with de casibus tragedy” (413).

12. See Albert Cook, “‘What time th'eternall Lord in fleshly slime / Enwombed was’: Christian Elements in Cymbeline,” Soundings 125-42.

13. For a discussion of these interactions in the other nine history plays, see Shakespeare's Enactment 189-204.

14. Particularly challenging and illuminating for the Machiavellian component in this play, and in this theater generally, is Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations; The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley/Los Angeles: U of California P, 1988), especially “Invisible Bullets” 21-65.

    It can well be said, with Greenblatt, that:

    Hal's “redemption” is as inescapable and inevitable as the outcome of those practical jokes the madcap prince is so fond of playing. Indeed, the play insists, this redemption is not something toward which the action moves but something that is happening at every moment of the theatrical representation.

    But it does not simply follow that:

    Hal is the prince and the principle of falsification—he is himself a counterfeit companion, and he reveals the emptiness in the world around him. “Dost thou hear, Hal?” Falstaff implores, with the sheriff at the door. “Never call a true piece of gold a counterfeit. Thou art essentially made, without seeming so.”

    (2.4.491-93) (42)

    Indeed, what Falstaff says here plainly goes against the grain of Greenblatt's interpretation. In pleading that he is not a counterfeit, he says Hal is not one either, but “essentially made.” What is left out of these inferences, which are astute and subtle but at the same time shaky, is the whole set of other ideological components with which they function in a dialectical transcendence that sublates them into their theatrical force. See also the perspicuous, copious, and well documented discussion of Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare 214-72, especially 257-67.

15. Henry V's confrontation with his fiancee the French Kate still imbricates complications of interpellated expectation, as Karen Newman spells out, “Englishing the Other: ‘Le tiers exclu’ and Shakespeare's Henry V,” Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991) 95-108.

16. Judith H. Anderson points out the intrication into Henry VIII of the words “divorce” (2.3.14, 3.1.142, 3.2.25-27) and “conscience” (2.2.142, 2.3.32, 2.2.15-18, 2.1.60-61; 2.4.168, 3.2.396, 4.1.47) (Biographical Truth [New Haven: Yale UP] 126-30).

17. For this feature of Shakespeare's style and syntax, see Shakespeare's Enactment 150-51; Bertram Joseph, Acting Shakespeare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1966.

    For a general discussion of various kinds of doubling in Shakespeare, including hendiadys, see Frank Kermode, “Cornelius and Voltemand: Doubles in Hamlet,” in Forms of Attention (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985) 33-64; René Girard, To Double Business Bound (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP) 1978; William Shakespeare: A Theater of Envy (New York: Oxford UP, 1991).

18. Further details are given by Foakes xxxv-vii.

19. For the detail of how this council interacted with Parliament under Elizabeth, see J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth and her Parliaments 1584-1601, Vol. 2 (London: J. Cape, 1957).

20. Leonard Tennenhouse, The Tudor Interludes, “the moral interlude stands in relation to an art form like the masque much as ideology stands in relation to propaganda.” It assumes (its) truths, while the masque “presents the triumph of an aristocratic community” and shows its “ability to represent the law and its transgression” (4-5).

21. So some of his other assertions could be pointed further in the direction of understanding the historiographic interpretation that Henry VIII and the other histories constitute, Cespedes refers to “the inevitable blindness inherent in historical action” (415), which effectually sees Shakespeare's histories under a condition understood by anyone at all involved in the historiographic enterprise. He goes on to align the historiographic with the de casibus topos, “Both Elizabeth's birth and the saving of Cranmer—the political and religious watersheds of the play's chosen historical pattern—are thus dramatized as reversals of Fortune, the unforeseen consequences of Henry's sexual and political maneuvering” (433).

22. Girard.

23. There is even the possibility that it is borrowed from another actual historical personage. As Foakes points out, “Holinshed reports that Wolsey himself brought about the death of Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham, through a similar accident on this bishop's part in 1508” (xxxvii). But Foxe also reports that some letter of Wolsey did fall into the king's hands—leading to the king's distrust, but not yet to Wolsey's downfall.

24. Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 3.