[In the following essay, Pearlman theorizes that despite the prophecy declared by Archbishop Cranmer at the end of Henry VIII which celebrates the perfection of monarchy, the play emphasizes the “fragility, danger, and corruption of human institutions.”]

King Henry VIII stands apart from Shakespeare's other history plays in a number of important particulars. In the first place, it is separated from Henry V by the passing of almost a decade and a half (Henry V is generally dated about 1599, Henry VIII in the spring of 1613). During these years, the drama in general and the plays of Shakespeare in particular had undergone enormous changes. In addition, King Henry VIII is separate from the two sequences into which Shakespeare organized his history plays. In this sense it is similar to that other anomaly King John. But while King John seems to be an unenthusiastic and half-hearted revision of an earlier play, it is a play for which Shakespeare must take full responsibility. Henry VIII, on the other hand, though skillfully designed and fluently written, appears to many thoughtful judges to be composed in the manner of John Fletcher (with whom Shakespeare is known to have collaborated on The Two Noble Kinsmen and perhaps on a second play now lost). If Henry VIII belongs to Shakespeare either in whole or in part, it is to a Shakespeare who was working very much under the influence of a younger but (especially in his own time) highly regarded playwright. Henry VIII also differs from the other histories in its unusual fidelity to the chronicles. Perhaps because these playwrights portray events that took place in the comparatively recent past, they take comparatively few liberties with the general outlines of history. In several instances, the dialogue in Henry VIII is closely modelled on material they found either in Holinshed's Chronicles or in Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Moreover, unlike the greater history plays, in each of which the monarch is a principal figure, King Henry VIII does not center on the king himself. The character of King Henry is less well defined and less interesting than either Buckingham, Katherine, or Wolsey. The King is distinguished only by his quick temper and his employment of a small number of expletives (linguistic tics that Shakespeare may in fact have remembered from an earlier play about Henry VIII written by Samuel Rowley). Although Henry is an absolute monarch to whom all other characters ceremonially defer, he seems to be ignorant of events in his kingdom and in consequence shielded from moral responsibility for state policy. The department of inland revenue seems to function in his ignorance while the Protestant reformation comes to pass so unemphatically that it seems to lack any sort of human impulse. By a similar dramatic sleight of hand, Henry acquiesces to the divorce from his loyal wife without being seen to divorce her. Even such crucial events as the wooing, wedding, and pregnancy of Anne Bullen are represented so incompletely that they seem to take place without royal volition.

A PLAY OF SPECTACLE

King Henry VIII is a truly spectacular play in the sense that it puts great emphasis on ostentatious display—processions, masques, and ceremonials. As a result, the usual components of the Elizabethan drama—plot, language, character—are less highly developed than in the more successful histories (or in the romances of Shakespeare's later years). The poetry is uncharacteristically muted and lacks both syntactic inventiveness and imagistic suggestivity. More than any other play, Henry VIII must be experienced in a fully elaborated performance; otherwise, the reader must make an extraordinary effort to visualize its spectacle and symbolism in the theater of the imagination. In this effort, the attentive reader is aided by the survival of unusually detailed stage directions. The prominence of the visual components of Henry VIII is announced in the Prologue, in which spectators are enjoined to “Think ye see / The very persons of our noble story / As they were living” (25-27). The appeal is not, as in Henry V, to the imagination; this time, the Prologue proclaims the fidelity of the theater to fact, as though the personator were the man personated, and as though this play will be akin to the ingenious perspectives and trompe l'oeil paintings which so delighted the Elizabethans.

The very first scene of the play provides a pretext for an intricate description of the glories of the Field of the Cloth of Gold (where Henry met Francis I “'twixt Guynes and Arde” [1.1.7]). In other history plays, the English defeat the French with cannons and curses; in this play they compete in splendor of display:

                    To-day the French,
All clinquant, all in gold, like heathen gods
Shone down the English; and to-morrow they
Made Britain India-every man that stood
Show'd like a mine. …
                                                  Now this masque
Was cried incomparable; and th'ensuing night
Made it a fool and beggar. The two kings,
Equal in lustre, were now best, now worst,
As presence did present them.

(18-22, 26-30)

Not long afterwards (1.4) Shakespeare enacts a brilliant piece of aristocratic gorgeousness. To the accompaniment of drums and trumpet and with the sound of chambers discharged, King Henry and friends “enter as maskers, habited like shepherds” (64-65 s.d.). The richly costumed scene is reinforced with hautboy and dance and concludes with a formal retreat to the blare of trumpets. This expensive effort is mounted only so that King Henry may exchange a few flirtatious words with Anne Bullen. The masque is immediately succeeded by a formal procession in which Buckingham is led to execution. Then follows the elaborate trial of Katherine of Aragon in which a sixteen-line direction specifies the exact order in which vergers, scribes, bishops, priests “bearing each a silver cross” a gentleman-usher, a sergeant at arms “bearing a silver mace” (2.4.1.s.d.) and many others take their specified places on the stage.

There are other splendid and noble ceremonials scattered throughout the play at each of which the audience is clearly expected to gape and gawk. King Henry VIII ends with neither a pitched battle nor duel but one last and culminating pageant. The christening of the girl Elizabeth is a ceremony that is presumed to resolve all the puzzles and ambiguities of Henrician England. A vision of the Tudor-Stuart millenium is intoned on a stage crowded with aldermen, the Lord Mayor, the garter king-at-arms, Archbishop Cranmer, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, “two Noblemen bearing great standing bowls for the christening gifts; then four Noblemen bearing a canopy” (5.5.1.s.d.), the King and the Queen, and others—probably “as many as may be.” Did the audience leave the Globe assured that they had seen a faithful representation of the habits and costumes of the great men of the realm? Or would they instead be impressed by the wealth and prosperity of the company of players who could mount so dazzling a spectacle?

A DE CASIBUS TRAGEDY

While King Henry VIII relies on a rhetoric of spectacle, its dominant action consists of an anthology of variations on the medieval de casibus theme—that the sudden fall from greatness and power enforces the traditional moral that all sublunary power is fleeting and subject to the whim of fortune. First Buckingham, then Katherine of Aragon, and finally Cardinal Wolsey must exhibit fortitude and patience while surrendering worldly place. Shakespeare avoids the opportunity to dramatize the divorce and death of Anne Bullen, and he generates the play's only modicum of tension by allowing Archbishop Cranmer to fend off exactly the kind of attacks that had overcome Wolsey. At the end of the play, Shakespeare reverses the tragic momentum and, rather than enact still another collapse, celebrates a notable birth. The phoenix who arises out of the sacrificial deaths of the great ones is Queen Elizabeth herself.

The pattern of interlocking falls from power and authority is a fairly simple one; so too is the emotional response that is supposed to be generated. Again the Prologue gives the spectators their cue. This play will dramatize neither war nor battle and it will not amuse. The audience should not expect “a merry bawdy play, / A noise of targets, or to see a fellow / In a long motley coat guarded with yellow” (Prologue, 14-16). Instead, Henry VIII will represent “things now / That bear a weighty and a serious brow, / Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe” (1-3). Events in the play will stress “pity” and will appeal to those who can “let fall a tear” (6) or “draw the eye to flow” (4). Shakespeare (if it is Shakespeare) unapologetically offers a series of tableaux designed to incite honest and loyal citizens to weep copious and sympathetic tears.

First to fall is the Duke of Buckingham, about whom the audience knows little more than that he is a throroughly conventional aristocrat. Buckingham is intemperate and must be rebuked by Norfolk for his display of “choler” (1.1.131). He is also vain of his ancestry and outraged that he must take second place to low-born Wolsey, whom he dismisses as an “Ipswich fellow” (138) and a “butcher's cur” (120). He is particularly incensed by the notion that the times are so degenerate that “A beggar's book [i.e., learning] outworths a noble's blood” (122-23). Buckingham's only distinguishing mark is his sovereign's testimony that “The gentleman is learn'd, and a most rare speaker, / To nature none more bound” (1.2.111-12). It is part of the play's shorthand that such an endorsement must stand in place of a more extensive development of Buckingham's character.

When Buckingham addresses a crowd of supporters, he uses his eloquence to enforce weeping. He first addresses the commoners: “All good people, / You that thus far have come to pity me, / Hear what I say and then go home and lose me” (1.1.55-57). To this group Buckingham protests his fidelity to the King. Even though he concedes that there are some among his accusers whom he “could wish more Christian” (64), he forgives them in the hope that they will “glory not in mischief.” He wishes his social equals to be “good angels” who will pray when “the long divorce of steel falls on me” (76). Buckingham's words to the King are most clearly designed to bring a sob to the breast of all who revere monarchy. He absolves Henry of responsibility, and putting patriotism above private wrong, offers these “vows and prayers”:

                    May [Henry] live
Longer than I have time to tell his years;
And ever beloved and loving may his rule be;
And when old time shall lead him to his end,
Goodness and he fill up one monument!

(90-94)

Buckingham clings to the de casibus formula in his peroration: “And when you would say something that is sad, / Speak how I fell. I have done, and God forgive me” 1.2.136-37).

To avoid excessive repetition, Shakespeare offers a different kind of sympathy for Katherine by casting her (without historical warrant) as an active advocate of the rights of the common people. Katherine interrupts the trial of Buckingham to inform King Henry that his “subjects / Are in great grievance” because Cardinal Wolsey has contrived that each one must be taxed to “the sixth part of his substance, to be levied / Without delay” (58-59). (Malevolent Wolsey is also held responsible for Katherine's fall. The audience learns that “the cardinal / Or some about him near, have, out of malice / To the good queen, possess'd [Henry] with a scruple / That will undo her” [156-59]).

Katherine does not hesitate to attack Wolsey at her trial (2.4). In contrast to Henry's anxious and insecure courtiers, who are only willing to counter the Cardinal with backbiting and dark conspiracies, Katherine is both courageous and direct: “I do believe / … that / You are mine enemy” (2.4.73-75). Although eventually Katherine succumbs to cliché and becomes a passive sufferer, at this point in the play she is a forthright partisan. She confronts Wolsey directly. “It is you,” she says, who has

          blown this coal betwixt my lord and me—
Which God's dew quench! Therefore I say again
I utterly abhor, yea, from my soul
Refuse you for my judge, whom yet once more
I hold my most malicious foe.

(76-81)

Katherine treads the almost impossible path between self-assertion and shrewishness. She cannot wholly shirk traditional female roles even while fighting for her life and position. “My lord, my lord,” she says to Wolsey,

I am a simple woman, much too weak
T'oppose your cunning. Y'are meek and humble-mouthed,
You sign your place and calling, in full seeming,
With meekness and humility; but your heart
Is crammed with arrogancy, spleen and pride.

(104-8)

Katherine then withdraws from the court. She becomes less regal and more human:

They vex me past my patience. Pray you pass on.
I will not tarry; no, nor ever more
Upon this business my appearance make
In any of their courts.

(128-31)

By disallowing the authority of the King's ministers, the historical Queen maintained her dignity and her prerogative; by leaving the stage the Katherine of drama took the only path that could prevent her from falling into stereotype. Weeping and passivity would transform her into patient Griselda; retaliation would turn her into someone like Queen Margaret (in 3 Henry VI) who divorces herself (1. 254) from her husband's table and bed and is herself a type of the shrew. Katherine temporarily maintains her dignity in the small space between these opposed and rival stereotypes.

Katherine eventually loses the poise she demonstrates at the trial. When Wolsey and his fellow cardinal Campeius advise her to put her fate in the hands of the King, she becomes impatient: “holy men I thought ye, / Upon my soul two reverend cardinal virtues; / But cardinal sins and hollow hearts I fear ye” (3.1.102-4). Shortly afterward, she slides into passivity: “Do what you will, my lords” (175). Her death follows inevitably, but Shakespeare postpones it until after the fall of Wolsey. He even allows Katherine the small triumph of delivering the Cardinal's epitaph. The Queen is uncompromising:

          He was a man
Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
Himself with princes; one that by suggestion
Tied all the kingdom. Simony was fair play;
His own opinion was his law.
His promises were, as he then was, mighty;
But his performance, as he is now, nothing.

(33-37, 41-42)

But vindication is rapidly superseded by tears. Shakespeare plucks a sentimental string. “When I am dead,” Katherine concludes,

Let me 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.

(167-72)

Katherine has fought off stereotypes only to succumb at last.

The overthrow of Cardinal Wolsey is still a third variation on the theme. It comprises almost the entirety of one of Shakespeare's longest (455 lines) and most leisurely scenes (3.2). In an expository introduction, self-interested courtiers bring the audience up to date. Among other items of gossip, they reveal that it has come to light that one of Wolsey's conspiratorial letters to the Pope has come into Henry's hands and that the Cardinal's “witchcraft / over the King” (3.2.18-19) has consequently ended. When Wolsey enters, he is described as “moody” and “discontented.” He is provided with some melodramatically villainous lines in which he opposes the reformation not for philosophical but for personal reasons. In his conception, Anne Bullen is a “spleeny Lutheran”:

Anne Bullen? no! I'll no Anne Bullens for him;
There's more in't than fair visage. Bullen?
No, we'll no Bullens! Speedily I wish
To hear from Rome.

(87-90)

Wolsey mounts a brief resistance, but his collapse is sudden and entire, and the rest of the scene explores in unextraordinary fashion the psychological effects of his decline. Wolsey seems almost to welcome his own overthrow:

          Nay then, farewell!
I have touched 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.

(222-27)

He moralizes as if he were presenting a mirror for all magistrates. Except in the fluency of the verse, Wolsey's rejection of this world for a better is deeply Tudor:

                                        I have ventured
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. …
Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye!

(3.1.358-62, 365)

Wolsey enacts an abbreviated and truncated version of the tragic fall. Out of his suffering and isolation comes an incompletely felt spiritual renewal: “I feel my heart new opened” (366). Wolsey announces that he is changed by suffering and the audience is expected to take him at his word: “I know myself now, and I feel within me / A peace above all earthly dignities, / A still and quiet conscience” (380-82). Now that Wolsey has been transformed from an ambitious prelate to a repentant and suffering fellow being, Shakespeare feels free to fulfill his pledge to make the audience pipe their eyes. Wolsey and his successor Cromwell weep together. The sight of two grown men in tears is a sure way to enforce audience compliance:

Cromwell, I did not think to shed a tear
In all my miseries; but thou hast forced me
(Out of thy honest truth) to play the woman.
Let's dry our eyes.

(3.2.428-31)

Like Buckingham, Wolsey dies professing loyalty to the king and to the institutions of England:

                                        O Cromwell, Cromwell,
Had I but served my God with half the zeal
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.

(454-57)

All political and religious complexities are elided and merged in this deeply conservative moral.

CRANMER'S PROPHECY

All the lines in the plot have pointed to the prophetic speech of Archbishop Cranmer, which now brings the play to conclusion. It would be a hard-hearted Englishman indeed who would not be affected by this last emotional speech. The largest part of the prophecy concerns the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who had died eight or so years before the first performance of this play. Shakespeare reprises garden imagery one more time, but now combines his favorite metaphor with an assortment of biblical references to produce the most truly apocalyptic and millenial moment in the histories. The drama almost disappears as Cranmer steps outside of the make-believe of the theater and into real time:

This royal infant—heaven still move about her!—
Though in her cradle, yet now promises
Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings,
Which time shall bring to ripeness. She shall be
(But few now living can behold that goodness)
A pattern to all princes living with her
And all that shall succeed. Saba was never
More covetous of wisdom and fair virtue
Than this pure soul shall be. 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 loved and feared; her own shall bless her;
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 neighbors.
God shall be truly known, and those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honor,
And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.

(5.5.17-38)

The prophecy continues on to praise James I in equally robust terms (and at almost equal length). It is odd that a play that teaches that the greatness of princes is subject to mutability should end on a note so sempiternal.

No more gorgeous lines could serve as an epilogue to Shakespeare's arduous voyage through English history. Yet audiences and readers who are inspired by patriotic exaltations such as these would do well to cast their thoughts backward to such events as the wicked pillorying of Joan and the brutal victimizing of Jack Cade, to the cursed murders and fear-plagued dreams of Richard of Gloucester, to John of Gaunt's eloquent lament for the decay of England, to Falstaff's recruits become food for powder, to John of Lancaster's treachery at Gaultree Forest, and to argumentative King Harry's unsuccessful attempt to justify war to a common soldier. In these and many other episodes can be found a view of the fragility, danger, and corruption of human institutions that may serve as an alternative to Cranmer's uncritical celebration of the perfection of monarchy.

Primary Works

All the history plays appear in the First Folio of 1623. In addition, seven of the ten had already appeared in separate quarto editions (of varying quality). The following list follows the order of the plays as they appeared in the folio. (Plays published in 1623 are from the folio; other dates designate quarto editions.)

The life and death of King John. 1623.

The life and death of King Richard the Second. 1623.

The Tragedie of King Richard the Second. As it hath beene publikely acted by the right Honourable the Lorde Chamberlaine his Servants. 1597. (This lacks the “deposition scene” [4. 1. 154-318], which was not added until the publication of Q4 [1608].)

The First Part of Henry the Fourth, with the Life and Death of Henry Sirnamed Hot-spurre. 1623.

The History of Henrie the Fourth; With the battell at Shrewsburie, betweene the King and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henrie Hotspur of the north. With the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstalffe. 1598.

The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Containing his Death: and the Coronation of King Henry the Fift. 1623.

The Second part of Henrie the fourth, continuing to his death, and coronation of Henrie the fift. With the humours of sir John Falstaffe, and swaggering Pistoll. As it hath been sundrie times publikely acted by the right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his servants. Written by William Shakespeare. 1600.

The Life of Henry the Fift. 1623.

The Cronicle History of Henry the fift, With his battell fought at Agin Court in France. Togither with Auntient Pistoll. As it hath bene sundry times playd by the Right honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his servants. 1600.

The first Part of Henry the Sixt. 1623.

The second Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Good Duke Humfrey. 1623.

The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Iacke Cade: and the Duke of Yorkes first claime unto the Crowne. 1594.

The third Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Duke of Yorke. 1623.

The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke, as it was sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruants. 1595.

The Tragedy of Richard the Third: with the Landing of Earle Richmond, and the Battell at Bosworth Field. 1623.

The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittieful murther of his innocent nephewes: his tyrannicall usurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserved death. As it hath beene lately Acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his servants. 1597.

The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight. 1623.