SOURCE: Hodgson, Barbara. “Uncommon Women and Others: Henry VIII's ‘Maiden Phoenix.’” In The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradictions in Shakespeare's History, pp. 212-34. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Hodgson argues that women play a crucial role in Henry VIII, noting that “only in Henry VIII do they become such spectacular sites, so to speak, for contesting and confirming royal authority.”]

Come over the borne, Bessy
Come over the borne, Bessy
Sweet Bessy, come over to me;
.....I am thy lover fair,
Hath chose thee to mine heir,
And my name is merry England.

—William Birch, “Come Over the Borne, Bessy”

On 14 January 1559, the day before her coronation, Elizabeth Tudor, “richly furnished, and most honorably accompanied,” rode in an open litter from the Tower through the City of London to Westminster, witness to a resplendent pageant, one of many in which she would be doubly inscribed, presented and re-presented. At Gracechurch Street, she saw a “gorgeous and sumptuous arch” spanning the street, covered with red and white roses and divided into three levels. On the lowest, two children, representing Henry VII, enclosed in a wreath of red roses, and his wife Elizabeth, enclosed in one of white, sat under one cloth of state, holding hands, “with the ring of matrimony perceived on the finger.” Two more children, representing Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, posed on the middle level, where the banked red and white roses converged and surrounded their figures, above which were written their names and titles. At the top, amid mingled white and red roses, stood a single child representing Elizabeth herself—“now our most dread Sovereign Lady, crowned and apparalled as the other Princes were.” “Furnished” with Latin sentences concerning unity and peace, this tableau vivant, as the presenter's verses made clear, celebrated “The Uniting of the Two Houses of Lancaster and York.”¹

For the Princess whose birth had disappointed her father's wishes for a male heir and whose childhood was marked by shifts in favor and power—she was proclaimed illegitimate by an Act of Parliament, imprisoned in the Tower by her half-sister Queen Mary, considered a potential traitor and heretic—the moment embodied an extraordinary rise of Fortune's wheel, of “the coming on of time.” When the procession reached the Little Conduit in Cheapside, she herself said, in reference to the figure emblematized there, “Time hath brought me hither.” Here, too, she smiled, on hearing one say, “Remember old King Henry the Eighth.”² “Prayers, wishes, welcomings, cries, tender words”: every sign in this expressive pageant honored the new Queen, legitimized her succession, and connected her, through blood ties, to a remembered moment of union and peaceful promise. “To succeed happily through a discreet beginning … to have a good eye that there be no innovations, no tumults or breach of orders”: Sir Nicholas Throckmorton's advice to the new Queen voiced the hopes of a realm exhausted by the disorders of Henry VIII's last years, Edward VI's minority, Mary's unsettled reign, domestic division along religious lines, and threats of continental war.³

First performed in 1613, ten years after the accession of Elizabeth's successor, James I, Henry VIII replicates and reinscribes within its close not only the blessings and graces retrospectively associated with Elizabeth's fortunate reign but also a similar cluster of present and represented monarchs inhabiting royalty's “master fiction.”⁴ In both the Gracechurch pageant and the close of Shakespeare's play, in each staging of royal power, Time collapses into an eternal ideological present in which monarch faces monarch, closing the “wide gap of time” (The Winter's Tale, 5.3.154). “King,” asserts the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies, “is a Name of Continuance.”⁵ Variously described as Tudor propaganda, as transcendental culmination, and as purely occasional in its allusions to King James and his newly married daughter, Princess Elizabeth, the past Queen's namesake, that close, like the play itself, eludes generic explanation. Although Folio positions Henry VIII as Shakespeare's final history, its later readers have been less sure of its status. The play, with its highly original collaboration of historical-tragical-pastoral signs, can seem as radically flexible as Hamlet's cloud: a camel, a weasel, a whale, or all three simultaneously. In that it draws on historical materials, it is history; in that a series of de casibus falls pattern its narrative strategy, it verges toward tragedy; in that features associated with masque override tragic signs to reinterpret historical process, it has strong affinities with Shakespeare's “last plays.”⁶ Read from the prospect of the close, however, this peculiar generic hybrid exists solely for generation: its purpose is to produce a child—not just another (however extraordinary) Marina or Perdita but a unique female child, an “honorary male” who will become a sovereign Prince of England.

In all accounts of the play, even that of Sir Henry Wotton, who thought it “sufficient in truth … to make Greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous,”⁷ this “right royal” project works to expose the full social text of monarchical power in order to disclose how, by insisting on its charismatic nature, that power reconstitutes itself. Like Shakespeare's Elizabethan histories, Henry VIII centers on legitimizing succession; unlike them, however, the king's own right, though challenged, is never at issue. Indeed, as Leonard Tennenhouse argues, Henry's body represents a “living icon,” a repository of meaning and value;⁸ for those like Buckingham or Cardinal Wolsey who stand close to the royal center as for the Gentlemen who observe how “mightiness meets misery” (Pro., 30), the only desirable or possible power is his.⁹ And Henry stands, at times quite literally, above all; whether seen or merely spoken of, his prerogatives, though they may be called into question, consistently prevail. Rather quickly, Henry VIII's first half sweeps away Buckingham and Wolsey—the one a potential contender for the crown, the other an ambitiously powerful rival. Both, as Tennenhouse points out, are figures who, in Shakespeare's Elizabethan histories, represented threats to royal power and so were as central to the conflicts shaping the earlier plays' narrative strategies as to their politics.¹⁰ In Henry VIII, however, such conflicts are marginal to Henry's, and the play's, obsession with replicating himself. Instead, what conflict there is centers on women—that is, on their relation to Henry. Although in the earlier histories women play crucial roles in bearing the burdens of succession, only in Henry VIII do they become such spectacular sites, so to speak, for contesting and confirming royal authority. To read Henry VIII through “the Queen's part” reveals what might be called an early Stuart Richard II, a play which not only deposes a rightful Queen but crowns two others and, finally, through a sacramental procession, restores male rule. And, also somewhat like Richard II, this Henry VIII has several guises, varying not between one written text and another but between one performance text and another. None, to be sure, omits Katherine's trial, the analogue to Richard II's abdication, where she refuses to be judged in the matter of the divorce by any authority other than Rome (2.4). Rather, in the theater, the major difference between one Henry VIII and another has to do with how each re-presents the history of its Queens' bodies and whether it is Anne's coronation procession (4.1) or Elizabeth's christening (5.5) that closes the play.

In its Folio form, Henry VIII's narrative strategy interweaves Katherine's fall from royal favor with Anne's rise, leaving no doubt that what occupies the King's conscience is less “the marriage with his brother's wife” than, as Suffolk puts it, that “his conscience / Has crept too near another lady” (2.2.15-17). Rather schematically, the playtext juxtaposes Henry's first two wives, not once but twice: first, Anne, protesting that “By my troth and maidenhead, / I would not be a queen” receives the title of Marchioness of Pembroke (2.3.23) and, in the following scene, Katherine, at her most queenly, protests her wifely obedience (2.4); then double ceremonies stage Anne's coronation procession and Katherine's vision of “a blessed troop” (4.1; 4.2.87). In Henry VIII's gender economy, the making and unmaking of wives, queens, and mothers eroticizes Anne's body and, so to speak, beatifies Katherine to reproduce, however ambiguously, the familiar whore/virgin dichotomy—or, in this case, the difference between a “quean” and a “queen.” Each time she appears, Anne is the object of the desiring male gaze. To Henry, at Wolsey's masque, she is “a dainty one,” a kissable commodity (1.4.94); to the Lord Chamberlain, who muses that “from this lady may proceed a gem / To lighten all this isle” (2.3.78-79), she holds fertile promise; and to the Third Gentleman, reporting the coronation itself, “she is the goodliest woman / That ever lay by man” (4.1.69-70). Indeed, both the procession and the reported coronation position Anne as a site of visual pleasure within a kind of early Stuart pornography; voiceless, she is defined only by her relationship to an absent King and by men who “speak” her body even as they tell of what has passed, is passing, and is to come.¹¹ Prefaced by reminders of Buckingham's trial for treason and Katherine's divorce and illness, the procession crosses the stage, its “sight of honor” giving way to the Third Gentleman's report of the noisy coronation spectators—among them “Great-bellied women / That had not half a week to go” who, “like rams / In the old time of war” (4.1.76-78) overpower the crowd, battering their way into royal space, making of themselves a spectacle that threatens to displace state cermonial with carnival. Not only do these details presage Anne's “divorce,” her future execution for supposed adultery and treason, but they also allude, somewhat diplomatically, through the pregnant women, to Henry's delay in crowning Anne until she had proved capable of childbearing. Moreover, the carnival liberty of warlike wives, fused into a collective Amazonian body, points toward the feminine “misrule” sometimes associated with Elizabeth's reign:¹² to the Third Gentleman's eyes, “all were woven / So strangely into one piece” (4.1.80-81) that no man could recognize his own wife.

What can easily be forgotten is that Henry himself, though absent, presides as the carnival King of Misrule and that the comment glances at his apparent inability to tell one pregnant wife from another—at least until she bears a living male heir. Just as state spectacle authorizes the inversions of this abbreviated antimasque, so too, in the ensuing scene, does a more rarified “royal form,” the pastoral of the masque proper, articulate Katherine's “assumption.”¹³ As the sick Katherine meditates on “celestial harmony,” six “personages” dressed in white robes and wearing golden vizards appear to her, carrying palms (tokens of victory and triumph) and bays (tokens of joy); they curtsey to her and, three times, hold flower garlands over her head as though to crown her (4.2.82.s.d.). In the court masque, such pastoral conventions customarily express the most benign aspects of the ruler's power; in Henry VIII, they cut two ways to suggest, on the one hand, that this royally inspired Platonic vision represents Henry's sanctification of Katherine and, on the other, that she submits, even in imagination, to the form associated with sovereign power.

However contradictorily, Katherine's vision endows her abjection with meaning and value: among those swept away as threats to Henry's genealogy, she is the only one to whom the King sends messages, the only one who actively orchestrates her own death, in a nexus of figures that fold outward to embrace past and future Queens. Obediently commending herself as well as her daughter, the future Queen Mary, to the King's attention, she wishes to be “used with honor”:

                                                                                                                        Strew me over
With maiden flowers, that all the world may know
I was a chaste wife to my grave. Embalm me,
Then lay me forth. Although unqueened, yet like
A queen, and daughter to a king, inter me.

(4.2.168-72)

Both the elliptic allusion to the Catholic Mary and the absence of any reference to Anne Boleyn measure Henry VIII's tactful diplomacy, its awareness that it addresses a society where the Protestant James I occupies a throne recently vacated by the Queen some viewed as Anne Boleyn's bastard, responsible for the execution of another Catholic Queen, Mary of Scotland, James's mother. Equally suggestive, Katherine's emphasis on wedded chastity positions her in relation to the ideal norm for Renaissance women, a norm that restructured gender relations to diminish the power accorded to women by traditions of courtly love and doubly circumscribe them as dependent upon both a husband and a prince.¹⁴ Katherine, in defining herself as “maiden,” “wife,” “queen, and daughter to a king,” also figures Elizabeth's own particularly powerful strategies of self-definition, her sense of herself as England's Virgin Queen, the state's chaste bride.¹⁵ Positioned in their original order, Anne's coronation procession and Katherine's vision not only serve Henry VIII's gender economy but expose the central contradictions of Henry's sexual and political manuevering. It is hardly accidental, in this play, that Katherine's virginlike purity displaces Anne's sexualized body to sweep away erotic carnival with the image of a saintly Queen-Mother. In the structural juxtaposition of these two scenes, Henry VIII condenses the danger and pleasure of feminine power, and subjects both to Fortune, Time, and timing.

That this composite figuring of women has, in the theater, articulated closure writes an equally contradictory footnote to women's history as well as to male desire and male artistic practice. Eighteenth-century producers considered Henry VIII a tragedy that failed to maintain interest following the disappearance of its two “star” performers, Wolsey and Katherine.¹⁶ The entire fifth act, including the churchmen's plot against Cranmer and his reinstatement by Henry, which figures the “birth” of the Church of England as occurring simultaneously with Elizabeth's offstage birth, as well as her christening, were thought unnecessary additions to an otherwise complete structure. Although Bell's widely used 1773 acting edition retains the conversation just before the coronation procession in which the two Gentlemen mention Katherine's “business” (4.1.22-35) and so makes her the subject of the play's “last words,” prevailing theatrical practice absorbed them by staging Anne's coronation, in dumb show, as a spectacular finale. In 1727, the year of George II's accession, for instance, the coronation was such a success at Drury Lane that it was performed as an afterpiece to all other plays in the repertory as well as to pantomimes, apparently in order to make a “close-up” representation of something like George II's own ceremony widely available.¹⁷ If in Henry VIII, Anne's coronation functions as a substitute wedding in which state ceremony authorizes Henry's sexual desire, here its theatrical performance becomes another kind of substitute—a curiously anomalous regendering in which George II perhaps replaces Anne in spectators' imaginations, but one which also, like the original, offers an image of power that “makes Greatness familiar.”

Herbert Beerbohm Tree's 1910 Henry VIII also followed the tradition of omitting the church council proceedings, Cranmer's history, and Elizabeth's christening. Originally, however, Tree had intended to stage the scene where Henry hears of Elizabeth's birth as well as the christening spectacle (5.1; 5.4-5.5). But his plan to adhere to Prologue's “two short hours”—a phrase underlined and annotated in the prompt copy, “The play must be played swiftly … and the waits quite short”—meant cutting both.¹⁸ Two other prompt copy notations reveal a particular, perhaps particularly Victorian, view of Henry VIII and its authorship. The foreword, after mentioning droit du seigneur, comments: “And so the injustice of the world is once more triumphantly vindicated, royal adultery is blessed by the court or Bishops, while minor poets sing in unison their blasphemous paeans—the fool enters weeping in black.” Reversing Henry VIII's representational strategy, Tree positioned Katherine's “unqueening” before Anne's coronation, staged as a full coronation in Westminster Abbey, including an anthem composed by Edward German. After the dimly lit scenes detailing Wolsey's fall and Katherine's assumption, the brilliant light and lavish display of Anne's coronation made a dazzling contrast. Although Stanley Bell's stage manager's book lists 88 persons onstage, the costume plot requires 119 costumes, and a photograph of the scene shows 122 actors and supernumeraries massed in position. Yet in spite of its full realization, reviewers found the spectacle disappointing. One called it a “historical peepshow”; another claimed he had seen better processions in musical comedy—a “higgledy-piggledy, rollicking” crowd in “no apparent order,” “a sort of march past at a fancy dress ball.”¹⁹ But given the prompt copy note condemning royal adultery, Tree's raggedy procession and unruly, carnivalesque crowd may well have been deliberate, a way to reveal how such ceremonial facades mask “the injustice of the world.” If so, reviewers clearly expected, in the year of George V's accession and in anticipation of his own coronation the following year, a “swelling scene” designed to recuperate and reconstitute royal ideology and patriarchal prerogative. After all, following Victoria's triumphant though attenuated reign, the ceremony itself, and its central male, mattered more than an object lesson on domestic fidelity or, for that matter, connecting the new King to a Tudor past that looked forward to the birth of another, equally powerful, Queen.

Tree's intended final image was to have done just that. In order to join offstage and onstage spectators together as communal celebrants for the christening, all on stage were to turn their backs to the audience as, in a (perhaps) more ordered spectacle, Elizabeth was held aloft for the cheering populace. In 1910, such a “sight” might well have worked, as it undoubtedly did for some Stuart spectators in 1613, to recall, variously, a fortunate or threatening image of female rule. Nearly three decades later, with another Princess Elizabeth the heir apparent, Henry VIII once again regained its “Tudor-Stuart” form to close with Elizabeth's christening.²⁰ But these mid-twentieth-century performance texts also rewrote Shakespeare's Tudor body politics, especially in relation to Anne's “state” body. Ben Iden Payne's 1938 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production, for instance, eliminated Anne's coronation, as did Robert Atkins's 1945 Stratford Henry VIII, which prefaced Katherine's “assumption” with the Three Gentlemen's reports of the procession and ceremony²¹—a strategy of nonrepresentation that not only denies Shakespeare's contradictory, composite figuring of women's public and private bodies but confines all state spectacle to Elizabeth's christening, where it marks the passage of theatrical iconography from one sovereign to another.

More radically, in place of the coronation procession, Tyrone Guthrie's 1949 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Henry VIII substitutes a mime between Anne and the Old Lady, who later reports Elizabeth's birth.²² Here, Anne skips onto the stage, sees her throne, and sits on it; horrified, the Old Lady shakes a fist at her, but Anne ignores her, puts on a large brooch, and looks eagerly toward the King's throne; then, frightened by a solemn peal of bells, she runs to embrace the Old Lady. Guthrie's invention rewrites the earlier scene between the two, in which the Old Lady, somewhat like Othello's Emilia (4.3), would “venture maidenhead” for a title while Anne demurs, and in which their exchange tips “queen” toward “quean.” To be sure, the original scene does close, after Anne has been named a Marchioness, with her premonition—“It faints me / To think what follows” (2.3.103-4)—but Guthrie's mime even more strongly prefigures her future history to position her, not as the eroticized center of a symbolic spectacle of state, but, like Katherine, as a potentially tragic figure. And since Guthrie also eliminated the masquers' “blessed troop” to instead have the seated Katherine sway as though in a dream, hold out her hands toward the audience, and finally rise to reach out toward the invisible world she imagines, his representational strategies diminish Henry VIII's emphasis on celebrating the bodies of its three queens, according each a “coronation” that, though in very different ways, turns each into a site of spectacular visual pleasure.

Nearly seventy-five years after Tree's disorderly “historical peepshow,” Howard Davies's 1983 Royal Shakespeare Company Henry VIII,²³ by simultaneously exploiting and undermining royal theatrics, opens a different window onto Anne's coronation procession. As the two Gentlemen speak their prologue commentary, they set roped barriers far downstage, just as they had done for Buckingham's execution procession (2.1), marking off the royal enclosure and further separating offstage spectators from their own, more privileged position at the fringes of power. In preparation for the coming ceremony, servants brings on tailors' dummies draped with coronation robes and a large prop table with maces, staves, and crowns; while the minor functionaries assemble, a Gentleman reads the scene's stage directions from a “Tudor” clipboard while others check to make sure everything is in place. The central participants—Anne, Dorset, Suffolk, the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, and several ladies in waiting—enter hastily, as though late for the occasion; helped into their robes and organized into a loose procession by anxious dressers, they toast each other with hastily gulped glasses of wine, assume appropriate smiles, move downstage toward the audience, and then, accompanied by a trumpet flourish, leave the stage. On a stage quite suddenly empty of bustling anticipation, all look after them before, their tasks completed, the servants are quickly dismissed while the Gentlemen continue their gossip. By revealing the backstage preparations behind this “actorly” political show, Davies's representational strategies not only reveal class and rank distinctions applicable in Stuart as in twentieth-century Britain but, in giving the scene Brechtian distance, deconstruct majesty's spectacle to expose its “hollow crown.” Here, Henry V's “idol Ceremony” turns into a “dress-up” pageant for the nobility, who construct public selves to honor a queen who is herself represented as a construction. In Stuart spectacles of power as in late twentieth-century “media opportunities,” theatrical metaphor both encompasses the ruler's body and compels the beholder's gaze. Said Queen Elizabeth herself, “We princes, I tell you, are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world duly observed.” And James's own Basilikon Doron expresses a similar view: “A King is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly do behold.”²⁴

Punctuated throughout with such staged constructions, rhetorical as well as visual spectacles of rule, Henry VIII devotes its final narrative moves to constructing Elizabeth and re-constructing Henry's absolute power. The play opens with Norfolk's report of the “embracement” of “two suns of glory” at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, positioning Henry as one of two heroic central actors in glittering feudal ceremonies reminiscent of medieval romance—“fierce vanities” planned by Wolsey to “[buy] a place next to the king” (1.1.6, 10, 54, 66); it closes, this time with a represented ceremony, to position him as the future Queen Elizabeth's father. Henry's presence at his daughter's christening, which rewrites history,²⁵ is only one sign of Henry VIII's closural insistence on perfect familial and generational relations. But such perfection is itself a construction, the result of Henry's providential centrality, and it is not without contradictions. For what cannot be represented—Elizabeth's birth—the play substitutes a series of swift reversals of Fortune's wheel: threats to the Queen's life, Henry's luckless game of chance, and Cranmer's potential fall at the hands of the bishops. Finally, Henry himself discovers that Anne has borne, not a male, but a female heir. In a curious, though surely not accidental, coincidence, the “birth” of the Church of England occurs simultaneously with Elizabeth's own,²⁶ and it is that event, not the undesired daughter, that accords Henry godlike status and permits him to resolve the bishops' opposition to Cranmer: “As I have made ye one, lords, one remain: / So I grow stronger, you more honor gain” (5.3.80-81). A “happy winner” in religious politics and still a charismatic royal actor, Henry is, however, not central but tangential to Henry VIII's final, refashioned “embracement” of “suns of glory,” which figures a female infant's body as a fertile site of virtues capable of generating an “imperial” Britain.

The last of Henry VIII's collapsed masques, each of which “reads” a woman's body as a text, this one moves toward royal epiphany through an antimasque filled with carnivalesque inversions—an even more radically contradictory substitute for Elizabeth's christening than was the Church of England's “birth” for her “coming in.” Whereas the play's earlier reporters on the ceremonies of greatness have been “gentlemen,” here a Porter and his Man, occasionally interrupted by the insistent offstage voice of one who belongs to the larder, record the sight of “rude rascals” (5.4.9) who threaten to flood onto the stage, break down the royal enclosure, and, indeed, destroy the barriers separating one London space from another to transform the entire city into a “liberty”—a “Parish Garden” for bear- and bull-baiting or a “Moorfields to muster in” (5.4.2, 31). Made up of those who stand at the greatest distance from power and gape at its ceremonies—“slaves,” watchers of executions, “the limbs of Limehouse,” jailbait, “youths that thunder at a playhouse,” “faithful friends o' th' suburbs”—this May Day rabble, “young or old, / He or she, cuckold or cuckold-maker,” can barely be kept out (5.4.22-23). And like the crowd battering to see Anne's coronation, this one contains unruly women, laying seige, so the Porter imagines, to see “some strange Indian with the great tool”—a prurient “fry of fornication,” bursting with rampant sexuality.²⁷ “On my Christian conscience,” says the Porter, “this one christening will beget a thousand; here will be father, godfather and all together” (5.4.31-34). Nearest the door stands a Bardolph-like fellow with a fiery face and a railing haberdasher's wife whose fashionable “pinked porringer” falls off her head as she shouts for apprentices to join the fray; the Porter even predicts that some of the gang will later be run through the streets and publicly whipped.

This carnival catalogue cuts in a number of ways, and across time. In one reading, it figures Henry's as well as Elizabeth's cultural vitality, counterbalancing his sexuality with traces of her own puzzling composite image, especially insofar as signs of disorderly misrule press into this descriptive display. In another reading, this crowd of marginal women and men absorbs the rude populist energies and erotic desires of Henry VIII's mighty rulers, which are displaced onto them; in yet another, they figure echoes of civil controversies that rose during the early years of James I's reign. Indeed, the play seems here to document—and bring together within London's city spaces—a fantasy record of the Midlands grain riots a few years before where “Levellers,” many of them women, tore down hedge and ditch barriers enclosing land once held in common; of public punishments, such as the Skimmington rides; and of the skirmishes in Stuart London itself in which the city attempted to keep its liberties from Crown control.²⁸ And the play also moves itself forward from Tudor to Stuart London in another way to figure the multitude expecting festival cakes and ale in honor of Elizabeth's christening as similar to the crowds watching James I's triumphal entry into London's city space; so uncontrollable were they that many of the pageant “scenes” planned by Dekker and Jonson could not be performed.²⁹ Here, however, the Lord Chamberlain intervenes precisely in order to make such “performance” possible, accusing the Porters of being drunken “lazy knaves” and of letting in prostitutes returning from the christening for their own use. If the comment seems oddly pertinent to Henry, whose Queen Anne was called by some “the Great Whore,” his daughter “the Little Whore,”³⁰ the Porter's excuse also, perhaps, speaks for him: “We are but men,” he says, “An army cannot rule 'em” (5.4.70, 72).

In the Elizabethan 2 Henry VI, with Jack Cade's rebellion, and in other Stuart plays, notably Coriolanus, Shakespeare does not hesitate to represent an unruly crowd, demanding its rights or protesting against royal abuses. But Henry VIII confines such inversions to its unusually full narrative-reportorial economy. Violating that distinction, Tyrone Guthrie's 1949 performance text brought marginal misrule onto the Old Vic stage in a noisy, swirling bustle of London citizenry.³¹ In the Stuart Henry VIII, however, an unruly crowd is already present. Once the Lord Chamberlain threatens the Porters with prison, the two turn on the Globe's “rude” spectators who themselves press too close to the stage enclosure, and even sit on its rails. In this detail at least—though also in its repeated circulation of court news—Henry VIII insists on itself as a public play, one that perhaps even extends “ownership” of the aristocratic court masque to a public playhouse, now the home of actors who “belong” to James I and are called the King's Men. And in even more central ways, Henry VIII engages with Elizabethan as well as Stuart theatrical politics. Just as it figures the desiring spectators pressing for entrance to Elizabeth's christening as one and the same with the Globe's disorderly audience, so too does it figure the Globe's actors, men who themselves are “of the liberties.” On the one hand, some of the King's own men “riot” just offstage, the same men who are “disguised” as nobles and who will shortly accompany the new Princess Elizabeth at her first public appearance—aptly and oddly enough, on the Globe stage, next to Paris Garden. On the other, those onstage protect its boundaries and keep their fellows as well as audience members from the enclosure that has become, for all intents and purposes, a metaphor for royal space. There is perhaps no better image for the theater as a site where the contradictory forces shaping the culture came into sharp focus than this emblem of negotiation between liberty and containment.³² Yet the emblematic moment passes, as Henry VIII now rechannels its representational strategies toward the culmination of its public masque in a rhetorical and visual spectacle that overturns carnival to subdue and disperse its rude energies and, through Cranmer's incantatory prophecy, safely reintegrate them³³—even those that press toward figuring the “misrule” some associated with Elizabeth—into an idealized royal hierarchy.

As in the close of the Stuart court masque, Henry VIII bridges the gap between carnival-antimasque and masque proper with the appearance of a figure who joins both worlds, transforming chaos and vice into ideal order.³⁴ Like the play's earlier processions, this one prescribes a rigid ceremonial hierarchy that surrounds Elizabeth with city officials, nobles, her two godmothers, and ladies, to position her, as in her later London entry, at the center of a renewed political and, in this case, religious community. In Elizabethan plays as varied as The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (1582), A Looking Glass for London and England (1590), Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589), Every Man out of His Humour (1599), and The Arraignement of Paris (1581), as well as Shakespeare's own Richard III, closure pays tribute to the Queen with flattery and devotion that perpetuate her “invisible visibility” by including her as an imaginative if not an actual witness.³⁵Henry VIII's close alludes to such forms, expands their textual and representational space, and imbeds their suggestions of the Queen's redemptive potential in a vision of England's future under Elizabeth's rule. Whereas in Shakespeare's Elizabethan histories, closure dis-closes royal genealogy as a stable force shaping an uncertain future, Henry VIII's ending triples its generational power to frame Elizabeth between Henry VIII and James I and to marry closural features inherited from Elizabethan drama with those of the Stuart masque, enclosing one strategy for asserting royal power with another to reauthorize and transfigure both. By means of a complex “intertextual” process, the play sanctions corporate kingship, insistently coding and recoding its present and re-presented royal bodies with value. Among these, Elizabeth herself becomes a generative text, subject to and the source of an idealized culture and its cultural ideology.

As in Cymbeline, where the soothsayer Philharmonius deciphers Jupiter's “text” (5.5.435-51), Henry VIII charges a similar “good man” with the office of interpreting Elizabeth's own text. Here, however, he is no ordinary truth-speaker but Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, Elizabeth's godfather and the man whose opinions concerning Henry's divorce made her, if only briefly, a legitimate child. Also as in Cymbeline, he speaks following an exchange filled with closural gestures: Elizabeth's text occurs after the Garter-King-at-Arms has announced the child's presence, after Cranmer has offered prayers for Elizabeth and for Henry, after Henry has kissed his daughter and asked God's protection for her, after Cranmer pronounces “Amen,” after Henry has thanked Elizabeth's godparents for their gifts. Indeed, Henry's own “last” words in this series of signs—“I thank ye heartily: so shall this lady, / When she has so much English” (5.5.13-14)—are a joke that masks Elizabeth's lack of voice; and since at this point Cranmer interrupts the King to complete his verse line with “Let me speak, sir,” the playtext even suggests that he speaks for her. Located, so to speak, beyond time, for not only do the dead Queen's virtues “speak” through Cranmer but his words, “For heaven now bids me,” are divinely inspired. Drawing “truth” and authority from Isaiah II, the first fully developed promise of the Messiah's reign, as well as from other Old Testament references to a universal kingdom of peace and fellowship, Cranmer approaches his subject and his audience, as his sources do, as particular historical entities—“this royal infant”; “this land”; “few now living” (5.5.17, 19, 21)—to position both in relation to a second power of signification.³⁶ Elizabeth's “coming,” if not precisely a virgin birth, analogizes that of the Messiah, her relationship to her kingdom and to her successor figured as a mystical wedding.³⁷ Whether or not Stuart spectators chose to believe Cranmer's disclaimer—“Let none think flattery” (5.5.17)³⁸—the stylistic features of his speech clearly announce it: the closest analogue for Cranmer's parallel phrasing as well as for the additive principle marking his speech is the recently published (in 1611) Authorized Version of the Bible, a resemblance clarified by relineating and repunctuating eight central lines:

All princely graces that mould up such a mighty piece as this is,
With all the virtues that attend the good,
Shall still be doubled on her:
Truth shall nurse her;
Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her;
She shall be lov'd and fear'd
Her own shall bless her;
Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,
And hang their heads with sorrow.

(5.5.25-32)

If, however, this variant lineation suggests that hearing Cranmer's speech may reproduce the cadences of the most famous text associated with James I, its actual lineation, as well as other rhythmic and syntactic features, strains to mask such echoes and accommodate their energies to a different form, a “transfiguration” particularly visible in its central section (emphasis added):

                                                  All princely graces 25
That mould up such a mighty piece as this is,
With all virtues that attend the good,
Shall still be doubled on her. Truth shall nurse her,
Holy and heavenly though still counsel her;
She shall be lov'd and fear'd: her own shall bless her; 30
Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,
And hang their heads with sorrow: good grows with her;
In her days every man shall eat in safety
Under his own vine what he plants, and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours. 35
God shall be truly known, and those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honour
And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.
Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but, as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, 40
Her ashes new create another heir
As great in admiration as herself,
So she shall leave her blessedness to one
(When heaven shall call her from this could of darkness)
Who from the sacred ashes of her honour 45
Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix'd.

(5.5.25-47)

Simple diction as well as the building repetition of balanced monosyllabic phrases—“truth shall nurse her”; “her own shall bless her”; “good grows with her”—give the speech a prayerlike calm and so reinforce its theme of peace, associated with both Elizabeth and James.³⁹ Moreover, these serial elements punctuate a structure that has strong affinities with prose. The rarity of end-stopped lines; the frequent midline syntactic breaks, with syntactic units running across lines; and the dominance of eleven-syllable lines counteract potential end-rhymes (such as “graces” and “is” in lines 25-26), force the biblical phrases into new relationships, and resist poetic closure, producing a structure that constantly regenerates its own strategies. Elizabeth herself “appears,” either through a pronoun reference or an epithet, in all but four of these twenty-three lines. Of these, five privilege “her” as the terminal word of a line; and lines 35, 37, and 45 end with off-rhymes of “her” (“neighbours,” “honours,” “honour”), acoustical echoes that multiply the word's—and Elizabeth's—“closural” force. “Her” also occurs twice as the opening word of a line and twice at a midline break as well as tracing an insistent pattern of internal rhymes elsewhere in the quoted passage. Not only is Elizabeth's presence the inspiration for a speech that is about her: she is, quite literally, the alpha and omega of many of its poetic lines, an effect heightened by continuing the variant lineation suggested earlier. Curiously, in lines 28-37 of the original, where the end-rhyme effect dominates, each “her” (or its off-rhyme) makes up the eleventh syllable of the line. According to poetic conventions, the eleven-syllable line ends with an unstressed syllable—what Shakespeare's era as well as ours calls feminine rhyme. But although the off-rhymes for “her” in this passage are indeed unstressed syllables, the terminal “her” in lines 28-30, 32, and 36 must, in order to make sense, receive a stress. And although the usual explanation for the prevalence of eleven-syllable lines in Henry VIII is “Fletcher-not-Shakespeare” and weakened poetic inspiration, their presence here as stressed rather than unstressed features seems designed not only to “masculinize” the verse structure by adding “one thing to my purpose [something]”—that is, Elizabeth—but to transform a potentially feminine rhyme to a masculine one.⁴⁰ In its play of gendered endings, this “wrenched” rhyme figures the Queen's mysterious, composite image: her female form, her masculine body politic. Furthermore, the passage continues to sustain this play of gendered identity. Although lines 27, 29, and 31 all have ten syllables, and thus stand out from the poetic texture, a cluster of ten-syllable lines (38-39, 41-42), with appropriate masculine rhyme, also accompanies the “birth,” so to speak, of Elizabeth's “heir,” James I, precisely at the midpoint of the speech. In this sequence, only line 40, which introduces the “maiden phoenix,” ends with an unstressed syllable—a poetic politics that, by exchanging unstressed for stressed syllables, suitably feminizes Elizabeth's generative role as “maiden phoenix-mother.”

But at the point where James enters Cranmer's text as a “masculine” presence, he is at first figured as Elizabeth's double. In line 41, for instance—“Her ashes new create another heir”—only the added “i” prevents it from replicating Elizabeth once more, a connection the next line—“As great in admiration as herself”—further supports. And this particular regendering “fixes” James, through the legendary phoenix, the fabulous bird of virtue, within Elizabeth's own mythology. The phoenix, an emblem Elizabeth had appropriated for her own and a common figure for the royal succession as well as for Christ's resurrection, was reappropriated by James I, who drew more specifically than Elizabeth had on its iconographic associations with the renewal of Roman Empire in Britain and the return of a Golden Age.⁴¹ Indeed, Dekker's Nova Arabia Felix Arch for James's triumphal 1603 London entry symbolized England's “new Arabia,” a land of peaceful plenty restored by James's presence as the new phoenix, Elizabeth's successor. The next arch, known as Hortus Euporiae or the Garden of Plenty, figured England as a garden state, revivified by the new King's presence.⁴² Although Henry VIII represents Anne's and Elizabeth's state processions, it also evokes processional memories associated with James. Cranmer's text reproduces, in its references to him, precisely such a succession of emblems, first to figure James as the new phoenix, and then to link him to the pastoral biblical images previously associated with Elizabeth. Just as James inherits Elizabeth's generative and imperial power—“His honour and the greatness of his name / Shall be, and make new nations” (5.5.51-52)—so too does the verse structure emphasize continuity through run-on lines and midline breaks. Indeed, the next verse sentence, which links James to the king of trees, associated with Solomon, the King's chosen archetype,⁴³ begins and ends in the middle of a line:

                                                                                                              He shall flourish,
And like a mountain cedar, reach his branches
To all the plains about him: our children's children
Shall see this, and bless heaven.

(5.5.52-55)

And within that sentence, line 54 contains, not eleven, but thirteen syllables: James's “branches”—“our children's children”—extend past conventional poetic “time” into a future lying beyond Cranmer's text, and the stage.

Spectators at court as well as many in a public playhouse might well have read Cranmer's words as the culmination, if not the close, of Shakespeare's Stuart masque of Princes. In the court masque, similar elaborations of sovereign virtues and allusions to the reigning monarch—“fixed” in the text as well as within the audience—inform its close to assert royal power and incite the ruler to become what he sees, to translate, through his person, the master fiction.⁴⁴ This final transformational apotheosis joins the fabular masque world to the contemporary social reality through the royal presence, now recognized as the solution and re-solution of the masque's riddle. “God gave not Kings the stile of Gods in vaine,” reads the first line of the sonnet prefacing Basilikon Doron, James's manual of kingship; and insofar as Cranmer's text draws on biblical sources of divination, it seems perfectly gauged to negotiate the secular and the sacred and so to express James's desired image of himself as Defender of the Faith. For the players on the stage, within the play, he speaks of the future; for spectators, his words fuse the immediate historical past with the ruler's present. That all—actors and spectators alike—might know better, might recognize the distance between the real King and his imagined self, points the contradictions central to this Mass-like “mystery,” this Stuart translation of the King's Two Bodies. For like that doctrine, Cranmer's text fuses one body with another and masks history to make, and remystify, cultural prerogatives.⁴⁵

Closing by, with, and on the King, the Stuart masque is not at liberty to interrogate itself or to question the “chosen truth” of what it represents. Instead, it can only mystify the power its conventions assert, even to the extent of politicizing divine inspiration, and so resolve cultural indeterminacy. But Henry VIII's “solution” to Cranmer's rhetoric of essentializing power is not, as it would be in the “ideal” masque, James but Elizabeth, and it is Henry, King within the play, who deciphers its message. Indeed, his response to Cranmer's vision of Stuart continuance—“Thou speakest wonders” (5.5.55)—encloses his prophecy within the limits of the dramatic fiction. And when Cranmer continues, he foresees Elizabeth's lengthy reign “to the happiness of England” (5.5.56) and, then, her death: “a most unspotted lily shall she pass / To th'ground, and all the world shall mourn her” (5.5.61-62). Cranmer's text lays to rest the image of Elizabeth as an unruly “woman on top” and absorbs her threatening composite gender into nostalgic, evocative praise that figures her, like Katherine, with attributes of female chastity. But Henry himself never once calls his daughter by name nor refers to her gender. She is simply “this happy child”—a “little one” who “gets” his own power, makes him a man, and turns carnival inversion to “Holy-day.” The final image of self-recognition in the play also belongs to Henry: “when I am in heaven I shall desire / To see what this child does, and praise my Maker” (5.5.67-68). As when he looked down on the churchmen's council to observe their proceedings against Cranmer (5.2; 5.3), it is an image of perfect invisibility and centrality, of seeing without being seen, that figures kingship with godlike power. This, too, was James's self-image. Finally, Henry VIII accords Elizabeth a contradictory generative power. By so tripling its figures of rule, the play both produces and erases Elizabeth to position her, at the close, as the one who connects James I to Henry VIII and as the one who, like her virginal namesake, bears a “miraculous” child. Indeed, the play turns the Virgin Queen into what Parliament, in the early years of her reign, wished her to be: a transition between two male rulers.⁴⁶ Like Shakespeare's Elizabethan histories, Henry VIII ends with succession. But in no history other than Richard II does the close so allusively figure continuance as a paradox and so elusively articulate the ruler's self-recognition of his own mutability. That occurs only in Shakespeare's other “last” play, The Tempest.

And, as in The Tempest, Henry VIII's final closural gesture is an Epilogue. Yet unlike Prospero's Epilogue, this one hardly seems necessary, for the play has already tripled closure—first with a masquelike transformation; next with Elizabeth's epitaph; then with Henry's interpretation of both. It is as though Henry VIII endows each royal presence—James, Elizabeth, and Henry—with a separate convention and deliberately privileges those forms as forms, flaunting each one in turn to interweave Stuart with Elizabethan forms of closure. From Cranmer's Janus-like prophecy, facing past and future at a poised moment of presence, and Henry's response, the playtext now reframes its history with an Epilogue, one of the oldest, and also, at this time, a newly popular terminal convention. And that Epilogue verges on taking a form that reached its highest development during Elizabeth's reign—a sonnet.

'Tis ten to one this play can never please
All that are here: some come to take their ease
And sleep an hour or two; but those we fear
W' have frighted with our trumpets, so 'tis clear
They'll say 'tis naught: others to hear the city
Abus'd extremely, and to cry ‘That's witty,’
Which we have not done neither; that I fear
All the expected good w'are like to hear
For this play at this time, is only in
The merciful construction of good women,
For such a one we show'd 'em; if they smile,
And say 'twill do, I know within a while
All the best men are ours; for 'tis ill hap
If they hold, when their ladies bid 'em clap.

(Ep., 1-14)

Like the opening Prologue, which announces what the play will not do and so divorces what follows from other plays and from other perspectives of history, Henry VIII's Epilogue begins with the conventional apology for the play's inability to please and continues to elaborate on what “we have not done” and so glances at spectator-critics' “abusive” playhouse behavior. Then, at its midpoint, the verse “turns” toward “the expected good” and toward gendering its spectators: only “the merciful construction of good women”—and one in particular—will prompt applause, first from the women and then, at their bidding, from “all the best men.” Although by no means unique in its references to women spectators, who were, in the early seventeenth century, exerting potential influence on staged representations of women, Henry VIII's Epilogue-“sonnet” does exhibit a noticeably deviant rhyme scheme and structure.⁴⁷

Like Shakespeare's twelve-line Sonnet 126—“O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power / Dost hold Time's glass, his sickle hour”—it is composed in rhyming couplets. But because it is also all one sentence, that larger syntactic structure overrides both the end-rhymes and any potential internal division into either quatrains or sestets to block the tendency toward closure characteristic of serial couplets. Given the tension between its informal proselike sentence and the potentially enclosural power of the Epilogue, this “sonnet” seems to be formally featured to figure Elizabeth—one possibility for the “such a one” to whom the speaker refers. Not only do the playtext's final syntactic operations analogize the unity associated with Elizabeth's reign; the Epilogue's chained couplets express the mutuality to which the “sonnet” alludes as an agreement between women and men. And like this “sonnet,” which refuses to conform to its couplets, Elizabeth herself refused the mutuality of marriage but instead transformed the potential submissiveness of that relationship into a powerful rhetorical strategy that repeatedly articulated her relationship with her subjects in a negotiated language of love. Said one of her subjects, “We did all love her, for she said she loved us, and much wisdom she showed in this matter.”⁴⁸ What Henry VIII's Epilogue-“sonnet” figures, so to speak, is indeed a “merciful construction” of Elizabeth that reveals both her inscription within and her independence from the form that had become, in her time as in Shakespeare's, a sign of, if not a synonym for, love within human—and poetic—time.

In the theater, who speaks this Epilogue? Trevor Nunn's 1969 Royal Shakespeare Company performance text, which culminated a season (his first as artistic director) that included Pericles and The Winter's Tale, eliminated it, thereby stressing the resemblances between Henry VIII and the two other plays.⁴⁹ At the close, the entire company at the christening, all costumed in white, advances toward the spectators, chanting Cranmer's characterization of rule—“Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror”—as though simultaneously acknowledging their presence at the staged celebration and threatening them with power's attributes, much as, five years earlier, at the close of Peter Brook's production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, the inmate-actors had seemed about to take their revolution into the audience.⁵⁰ Momentarily, this unsettling challenge to the barrier between stage and audience seems to be “the end,” for the company exits slowly and the stage darkens. At the play's opening, a representation of da Vinci's golden figure of Renaissance man inscribed within a circle had straddled the darkened stage, his arms outstretched; now, in the performance text's final image, Henry strides back into that darkness with the infant Elizabeth in his arms and stands, silent, as the lights fade. For Ronald Bryden, Henry “paus[ed] to stare defiantly into the surrounding oblivion where man finds nothing to lean on but his own strength, his power to bring forth children and build hopes for them”; for Harold Hobson, “his face is very strange; it is blanched and weary, and it seems in some inexplicable way to be questioning the future, questioning it in fatigue and apprehension.”⁵¹ Certainly omitting the Epilogue and closing on Henry and Elizabeth gives Henry VIII's ending a stronger rhyme with the father-daughter restorations of Pericles and The Winter's Tale and, by privileging Henry as the play's final “understander,” returns power to the play's titular King. But Nunn's substitute “epilogue” also expresses, in Bryden's as well as Hobson's reading, Henry's sense of his own erasure, a detail his last speech implies. And whereas the play's original Epilogue speaks exclusively for and of the play on any occasion of its performance and reception by an audience of gendered spectators, Henry's defiant apprehension echoes the earlier challenge of the chanting spectators in Nunn's staging and invites audiences to examine their own social text, their own “succession,” at the end of one decade and the beginning of another.

If Nunn's representational strategies refigure Henry VIII's ending by adding an “open silence”⁵² that continues to tell Henry's story, Howard Davies's 1983 staging strictly observes the playtext's terminal emphasis on conventions rather than on narrative. In Davies's performance text, the stage is stripped to bare, dark boards and backed by a cyclorama of drifting clouds that pattern shadows over the christening scene, its participants all in black, with white touches, like the figures in Dutch genre painting. The central participants in the ceremony—Henry, the woman holding Elizabeth, and Cranmer—occupy stage center; the rest of the crowd, grouped around them, remains in the background. Thus Cranmer's words occupy the space at the center of the social reality and are directed specifically to Elizabeth's spotlit “family,” with the others as privileged listener-onlookers. He speaks very softly, as though telling yet another “story” in a performance text that foregrounds the gentlemen's running commentaries on court news equally with the self-consciously fashioned epitaphs of Buckingham, Wolsey, and Katherine. Like Friar Lawrence's recapitulation of the past in Romeo and Juliet's closing scene (5.3.229-69), this rhetorical spectacle opens up a meditative space that invites spectators to reflect on Cranmer's vision of a future that has and has not come true—a vision that is enclosed by, but also escapes, the staged fiction. And just as Henry himself speaks the Prologue, marching onto the bare stage and tearing up papers, strewing them right and left, as though to destory previous writings of his own story,⁵³ the Epilogue-speaker in Davies's performance text also counters history and, to a lesser extent, convention. She is the woman who has held Elizabeth throughout the christening (fig. 20). Now she gives the child to Henry and steps forward, leaving the final tableau behind, breaking Cranmer's incantatory spell and Henry's quietly spoken thanks to voice the power invested in the playtext's final convention. Her presence figures the “chosen truth” of this Henry VIII not simply as the difference between one history and another but as that between one powerful male ruler and another, who has the voice and body of a woman.⁵⁴

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Rosalind told As You Like It's spectators that “It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue, but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue” (Ep., 1-2). It was, however, fashionable to see the lady, figured as the Queen, in the Epilogue, and Davies's staging seems alert to both these closural regenderings and to the Epilogue's direct appeal to women spectators. But whereas Davies's Henry VIII seems poised to intervene into present-day cultural debates concerning women, for Stuart audiences, the Epilogue could not, in all probability, fully release such meanings. Nor, given James's restrictive views concerning women,⁵⁵ would it be politic to do more than pose the accessibility of such an intervention. Nevertheless, for Stuart as well as for late twentieth-century spectators, such a “construction” can be read as the final sign of the anomalous female phoenix, a closural compliment to the Queen's manly strength and to the surety that an heir would emerge miraculously from the ashes of the sovereign's funeral pyre. Much like Elizabeth's refusal to name her successor, Henry VIII specifies no speaker for the Epilogue, remaining silent about who the good woman—“such a one”—it refers to may be. Although I have argued for Elizabeth, the play accords equally “merciful” (and politic) treatment to her mother, Queen Anne, beheaded for adultery and treason, and to the Catholic Katherine. And if the play were performed at court, details of Cranmer's prophecy might be taken to figure James's daughter Elizabeth, newly married to Prince Frederick, the Elector Palatine, a leader of the protestant union in Germany.⁵⁶ Even James had no way of knowing, no way of objecting to what seems to be Shakespeare's (and Fletcher's) late contribution to the annual celebrations of the accession of Eliza, Queen of Shepherds, which were held during his reign, a form of acclaim never accorded the anniversaries of his own coming-in. Even for the monarch who figured himself with Solomon's wisdom, to know—and to object—would be to deny the power Henry VIII's “maiden phoenix” accords him as the heir who could make all come true.

If not actually performed before James, Henry VIII certainly inscribes his reign and traces of his “imperial” image within its text. At its close, the play negotiates carefully between one successor and another to celebrate, not necessarily the “good women” to whom the Epilogue refers, but the impossibly contradictory construction of one woman, an exception to the Law of Nature, who exceeded her sex. James, who commissioned her Westminster Abbey tomb and, in unexpected homage, had it placed in the north aisle of Henry VII's chapel, also caused to be carved on it an inscription naming Elizabeth “the mother of this her country, the nurse of religion and learning; for perfect skill of very many languages, for glorious endowments, as well of mind as of body, a prince incomparable.”⁵⁷ And Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth's chief minister during the last years of her reign, a man whose political career continued to flourish under James, wrote to her godson, Sir John Harington, after her death:

You know all my former steps: good knight, rest content, and give heed to one that hath sorrowed in the bright lustre of a court, and gone heavily even on the best-seeming fair ground. Tis a great task to prove one's honesty, and yet not spoil one's fortune. You have tasted a little hereof in our blessed Queen's time, who was more a man and, in troth, sometimes less than a woman. I wish I waited now in her Presence Chamber, with ease at my foot, and rest in my bed. I am pushed from the shore of comfort, and know not where the winds and waves of a court may bear me.⁵⁸

As in both these tributes, Elizabeth, the “maiden phoenix,” framed between her father and her successor, presides over Henry VIII's ending as a countervailing image of historic female power—power which, like that between players and audience, between subjects and prince, depended upon and was articulated as a moment of praise.

Notes

1. A full description of this pageant appears in John Nichols's [The] Progresses and Public Processions [of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1823; reprint, New York, 1966)], 1:38-43. See also Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969), 344-59.

2. Nichols, Progresses and Public Processions, 1:48, 58. The reporter remarks: “A natural child, which at the very remembrance of her Father's name took so great a joy, that all men may well think, that as he rejoiced at his name whom this realm doth hold of so worthy memory; so in her doings she will resemble the same.”

3. [Paul] Johnson, Elizabeth I [New York and London, 1974], 63.

4. I borrow the phrase from [Clifford] Geertz, Local Knowledge [New York, 1983], 146.

5. [Ernst H.] Kantorowicz, King's Two Bodies [Princeton, 1957], 23, 407.

6. Howard Felperin's title, “Tragical-Comical-Historical-Pastoral,” for his chapter including Cymbeline and Henry VIII aptly expresses this mixture of genres (Shakespearean Romance [Princeton, 1972], 177-210). For a range of opinion, see G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (1947; reprint, London, 1952), 256-336; Frank Kermode, “What Is Shakespeare's Henry VIII About?” Durham University Journal, n.s., 9 (1948): 48-55; Paul Bertram, “Henry VIII: The Conscience of the King,” in In Defense of Reading, ed. Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier (New York, 1962), 152-73; H. R. Richmond, “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: Romance Redeemed by History,” Shakespeare Studies 4 (1968): 334-49; R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays (Charlottesville, Va., 1971), 173-83; Frederick O. Waage, Jr., “Henry VIII and the Crisis of the English History Play,” Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 297-309; Tom McBride, “Henry VIII as Machiavellian Romance,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 76 (1977): 26-39; John D. Cox, “Henry VIII and the Masque,” ELH 45 (1978): 390-409; William M. Baillie, “Henry VIII: A Jacobean History,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 247-66; Edward I. Berry, “Henry VIII and the Dynamics of Spectacle,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 229-46; Frank V. Cespedes, “‘We Are One in Fortunes’: The Sense of History in Henry VIII,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 413-38; Alexander Leggatt, “Henry VIII and the Ideal England,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 131-43; and Paul Dean, “Dramatic Mode and Historical Vision in Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 175-89.

7. Henry Wotton, letter to Edmund Bacon, Reliquiae Wottoniae (1685), 425-26; quoted in Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, 1987), 226.

8. [Leonard] Tennenhouse, Power on Display [London, 1986], 97.

9. Cf. Geertz's analysis of charisma: “This is the paradox of charisma: that though it is rooted in the sense of being near to the heart of things, of being caught up in the realm of the serious, a sentiment that is felt most characteristically and continuously by those who in fact dominate social affairs, who ride in the progresses and grant the audiences, its most flamboyant expressions tend to appear among people at some distance froom the center, indeed often enough at a rather enormous distance, who want very much to be closer” (Local Knowledge, 143-44).

10. Tennenhouse, Power on Display, 96-97.

11. For the notion of visual pleasure and the initial theoretical work on the gendered gaze, see Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), reprinted in Feminism and Feminist Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York, 1988), 62. Later studies that respond to, extend, or qualify Mulvey's formulations include Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't (Bloomington, 1984); Mary Anne Doane, The Desire to Desire (Bloomington, 1987); and Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much (London, 1988).

12. For a full discussion, see [Leah] Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare [Berkeley, 1988], 51-105. On Elizabeth's Amazonian body, see [Winfried] Schleiner, “Divina virago[: Queen Elizabeth as an Amazon,” Studies in Philology 75 (1978)], 163-80. On the women's roles, see Kim H. Noling, “Grubbing Up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 291-306.

13. On masque conventions, see Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass., 1965) and Illusion of Power [Berkeley, 1975]. On the relationship between Henry VIII and the masque, see Cox, “Henry VIII and the Masque.”

14. On this restructuring, see Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Women, History, and Theory, especially 30-47.

15. See Johnson, Elizabeth I, especially 23-37.

16. See [George C. D.] Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving [New York, 1920], 2:43-44.

17. Ibid., 1:307-8.

18. Prompt copy in the Beerbohm Tree Collection, the University of Bristol Theatre Collection. The Prologue was spoken by a clown, who entered through the curtains while the house lights were full up; the prompt copy notes, “After Wolsey's fall, he sent his fool to Henry as a gift”—perhaps justifying his appearance, which represents a conscious or unconscious homage to Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me (1605). In Rowley's play, Will Summers has a featured role, especially at the close, when he engages in a rhyming match with Henry and Queen Katherine (Parr) as part of a comic finale; see scene 15, lines 3019-94, reproduced in [Geoffrey] Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources [London and New York], 4:508-10. For a full discussion of Tree's production and its surrounding circumstances, see [Michael R.] Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, (London, 1981)], 134-60. Will Barker's Globe Film Company made a film of Tree's Henry VIII, released for distribution on 27 February 1911, which played for five weeks in London and six weeks in the provinces. For full details, see [Robert Hamilton] Ball, Shakespeare on Silent Film [London, 1968], 78-82, 320-22. Seeing the film may have functioned as a substitute for witnessing George V's coronation, held in the same year. All copies of the film were burned in April 1911; Bioscope (20 April 1911) records the event and refers to a cartoon of Tree throwing the reels into a furnace.

19. Both reviews are quoted in Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 154, 155.

20. Though later producers eliminated it, Charles Kean's 1855 production was the first to restore Elizabeth's christening, which included a moving panorama of the Lord Mayor's journey from Greenwich to London. See Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 2:290.

21. Prompt copies at the Shakespeare Centre Library. Although no printed record suggests it, Iden Payne's, and especially Atkins's, performance texts may well have reduced spectacle because of economic constraints.

22. Prompt copy at the Shakespeare Centre Library. For an account of Guthrie's production, see Muriel St. Clare Byrne, “A Stratford Production: Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Survey 3 (1950): 120-29. St. Clare Byrne found the mime “more real” than the ceremonial spectacle and much admired the substitute scene, 127-28.

23. Prompt copy at the Shakespeare Centre Library.

24. Elizabeth is quoted by J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments (New York, 1958), 2:119. For James I, see Political Works of James I [ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (1616; reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 1918)], 43. Present-day rhetorical stagings of power take a slightly different form: for Margaret Thatcher's 1987 campaign, the composer of “Hello Dolly” wrote a song with a refrain that goes, “Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher, / Not a man around to match her.” On Thatcher's “royal” image, see Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens (New York, 1985), 39-45.

25. See Johnson, Elizabeth I, 9-10. On Elizabeth's relation to her father, see Leah Marcus, “Erasing the Stigma of Daughterhood: Mary I, Elizabeth I, and Henry VIII,” in Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore, 1989), 400-417.

26. On this conjunction, see Bertram, “Henry VIII,” 172; Leggatt, “Henry VIII and the Ideal England,” 137; and Cespedes, “‘We Are One in Fortunes,’” 433-45.

27. As in Measure for Measure, which refers to but does not (except for Mistress Overdone) represent its whores, these “marginal women” are symbolically central. See [Jonathan] Dollimore, “Transgression and Surveillance [in Measure for Measure,” in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester, 1985)], 85-86. See also [Barbara A.] Babcock [ed.], introduction, to Reversible World [Ithaca, 1978)], 32.

28. See, for instance, Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 5:456-60, and E. C. Pettet, “Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607,” Shakespeare Survey 3 (1950): 34-42, both cited in Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 204. On Skimmington, see David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion [Oxford, 1985], 102-11. See also Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978), especially 178-204.

29. For these details, see Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd (New York, 1981), 3, 21.

30. See Corally Erickson, The First Elizabeth (London, 1984), 31. See also Alison Plowden, The Young Elizabeth (New York, 1971), 36-40.

31. Prompt copy at the Shakespeare Centre Library. As the christening bells begin to peal, the stage fills with a disorderly crowd and then with a massed procession, flags, and banners waving beside the white and gold canopy covering the Duchess of Norfolk, who carries Elizabeth. Henry is given the child when he enters; as Cranmer comes down from the gallery level to speak the prophecy, Henry ascends and remains there while Cranmer speaks, descending again to thank the assembled crowd, hand Elizabeth back to the Duchess, and blow his nose. As the procession re-forms, the crowd sings Gloria patri filio et Spiritus Sancto in saecula saeculorum as a three-part canon—first sung, then spoken, then whispered, closing with a final whispered “Amen.”

32. See, among others, [Stephen] Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations [Berkeley, 1988], especially 1-20, and [Adrian] Montrose, “[The] Purpose of Playing[: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,” Helios, n.s. 7 (1980): 51-74.]

33. See Parry, Golden Age Restor'd, 49-50.

34. See Orgel, Illusion of Power, especially 40-42. For other strategies of idealization, see O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument (Chapel Hill, 1962), especially 30-57.

35. See Leggatt, “Henry VIII and the Ideal England,” 131-33. See also [Matthew H.] Wikander, Play of Truth and State [Baltimore, 1986], 48. Staging the queen was, however, a different matter. Although in the original conclusion of Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour Queen Elizabeth's silent figure, “us'd to a Morall and Mysterious end,” cures Macilente of envy by “the verie wonder of her Presence,” that ending was later disallowed. For Jonson's original text, the revised conclusion, and his justification, see Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1927), 3:602-4. On this and other stagings of Elizabeth, see Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984), 300-320, especially 306.

36. See especially Isaiah 11:1-2, 4-5. See also 1 Kings 4:25; 2 Kings 18:31; Isaiah 36:16-17; and Micah 4:4. R. A. Foakes notes these references in Henry VIII (London, 1968), 175n. These biblical events—a unified realm, promised delivery from foreign invasion, and a utopian vision of peace—are especially pertinent to assuaging the fears that haunted the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. The allegory of England as a vineyard was a familiar one: Roy Strong cites an undated Queen's Day sermon by Edwin Sandys (1585), which uses figures similar to Cranmer's (Cult of Elizabeth [London, 1977], 124). For useful discussions of biblical prophecy and poetry, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York, 1985), especially 137-62. In contrast to Shakespeare's Protestant emphasis, Caldéron's play about Henry VIII, La cisma de Inglaterra (1626-1627), closes with a scene that “seems to point unhistorically to the reestablishment of Catholicism in England.” See [John] Loftis, Renaissance Drama in England and Spain [Princeton, 1987], 17.

37. In comparing the entire scene to the weddings that close the comedies, Foakes notes that Steevens mentions a possible parody of Cranmer's speech in Beaumont and Fletcher's Beggar's Bush, 2.1 (King Henry VIII, 175n). Even given Fletcher's probable coauthorship, the existence of a parody indicates that the speech was known; writers do not bother to parody unnoticed texts.

38. Cox notes how conventions are modified in order to displace the flattery (“Henry VIII and the Masque,” 407).

39. It also recalls other pastoral images, such as Henry's disguise as a shepherd at Wolsey's masque, prefiguring his role as shepherd of the Church (1.4), and Katherine's vision of eternity (4.2). For a detailed exploration of the ideology of pastoral and its ability to embody assertions of royal power, see, for example, Louis Adrian Montrose, “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” ELH 50 (1983): 415-29.

40. Philip C. McGuire argues that the unstressed syllables that end each line of Sonnet 20 provide additional readerly “pleasure” by adding “one thing” to each of its lines. Thus Sonnet 20 “inverts the process the speaker purports to describe: a person initially created to be feminine is made masculine by the ‘addition’ of ‘one thing’ that, the speaker laments, denies him ‘pleasure’ and is ‘to my purpose nothing’” (“Shakespeare's Non-Shakespearean Sonnets,” [Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987)], 314-15). For a very different view of the play's feminine endings, see Knight, Crown of Life, 258-63.

41. On the phoenix symbol, see Francis A. Yates, Astrea (London, 1975), 58-69, and [Lisa] Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters [Sussex, 1983], 176-79, 194-95. See also Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 88-89. On its association with James, see Parry, Golden Age Restor'd, 18.

42. Ibid., 10-17.

43. Ibid., 26.

44. See Orgel, Illusion of Power, especially 42-58.

45. The process extends even to present-day audiences. In Authors Takes Sides on the Falklands (London, 1982), G. Wilson Knight writes: “I have for long accepted the validity of our country's historical contribution, seeing the British Empire as a precursor, or prototype, of world order. … Our key throughout is Cranmer's royal prophecy … Shakespeare's final words to his countrymen. This I still hold to be our one authoritative statement, every word deeply significant, as forecast of the world-order at which we should aim,” quoted in [Terence] Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag [London, 1986), 68.

46. See Allison Heisch, “Queen Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patriarchy,” Feminist Review 4 (1980): 49. Tyrone Guthrie's 1953 Old Vic revival, which marked Elizabeth II's coronation, cut all the references to James in Cranmer's speech (prompt copy in the University of Bristol Theatre Collection).

47. On women spectators, see my “He Do Cressida in Different Voices,” English Literary Renaissance 20 (1990). See also Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 55-58, 92-94, 102-4. On deviant sonnets, see McGuire, “Shakespeare's Non-Shakespearean Sonnets.”

48. Sir John Harington, Nugae Antiquae, 1:83. On Elizabeth's rhetoric, power, and abjection, see Michael Calvin McGee, “The Origins of ‘Liberty’: A Feminization of Power,” Communication Monographs 47, no. 1 (March 1980): 23-45. See also McGee, On Feminized Power, Van Zelst Lecture in Communication, Northwestern University, May 1985. My thanks to McGee for a copy of this lecture.

49. Prompt copy at the Shakespeare Centre Library.

50. Ronald Bryden describes Henry VIII's close as “a sonorous white hippie mass,” “Tudor Scandals,” Observer, 12 October 1969.

51. Ibid.; Harold Hobson, “A King Afraid,” Sunday Times, 12 October 1969.

52. I borrow [Philip C.] McGuire's term, “open silence,” from his Speechless Dialect [Berkeley, 1985].

53. For an analysis of the souvenir program's emphasis on textuality, see Simon Barker, “Images of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries as a History of the Present,” in Literature, Politics, and Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, and Diana Loxley (London, 1986), 185-86.

54. In Tyrone Guthrie's 1949 Henry VIII, the Old Lady spoke both Prologue and Epilogue, after which she herself initiated applause before mingling with the company for the curtain call. A woman also spoke the Epilogue in Guthrie's 1953 Old Vic revival, on the occasion of Elizabeth II's coronation.

55. See, for instance, [Joan Gadol] Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory [and the Querelle des Femmes, 1400-1789,” in Women, History, and Theory (Chicago, 1984)], 88-91.

56. For the circumstances surrounding the Princess's wedding, an occasion many believe the play addresses, see Foakes, King Henry VIII, xxxii-iv. See also [David M.] Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances [and the Royal Family Lawrence, Kans., 1985], 212, 221-22. Clifford Leech associates the woman with Katherine (“The Structure of the Last Plays,” Shakespeare Survey 11 [1958]: 19-30).

57. Translation of the Latin inscription on Elizabeth's tomb, quoted by Johnson, Elizabeth I, 441.

58. From the text of a 1603 letter from Sir Robert Cecil to Sir John Harington, Nugae Antiquae, 1:345.