SOURCE: Richmond, Hugh M. “The Resurrection of an Expired Form: Henry VIII as Sequel to Richard III.” In Shakespeare's English Histories: A Quest for Form and Genre, edited by John W. Velz, pp. 205-27. Binghampton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996.

[In the following essay, Richmond focuses on parallels between Henry VIII and Richard III, theorizing that Shakespeare drew upon Richard III to create the plot elements and structural patterns of Henry VIII.]

Negative critical comment on what is now often considered to be Shakespeare's last complete play¹ usually argues that it relapses rather clumsily into what seems an archaic form: the chronicle or history play with which he began his career in Henry VI. The almost medieval complexity of this typically Tudor form draws heavily on diverse historical narratives to the point of risking the sacrifice of elegance in both style and structure to the exigencies of representing a plausible stage facsimile of the historians' consensus (or lack of it) about past events and personalities. After Richard III Shakespeare seems to move steadily away from the genre's characteristically discontinuous structure, which confounds Sir Philip Sidney's Aristotelian approach to the medieval tapestry of plots interwoven throughout such scripts as Henry VI. However, Shakespeare never wholly abandoned the multifaceted chronicle genre, though he strayed away from English history under the influence of Plutarch, in his Roman plays. Moreover, though the other major tragedies show far less sustained concern to re-enact recorded history than the English history plays and the Roman ones, the tragedies are not wholly without historical allusions. King Lear and Macbeth are both diversified by much local detail from contemporary Elizabethan sources for what then passed as British history, such as the references to Edward the Confessor in Macbeth, or the anachronistic constellation of Saxon names in Lear derived from the prominent reign of King Edgar (Oswald, Edmund). And even later, the more historical elements of Cymbeline explicitly bridge the cultural gap between the Rome of Octavius Caesar and the native British tradition, despite the play's numerous anachronisms and fanciful elements. There is therefore a detectable continuity in Shakespeare's use of formal historical references throughout his career.²

Nevertheless, after the largely fanciful modes of Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, the abrupt return to a primarily political chronicle play in Henry VIII comes as a shock to many sophisticated critics. The unexpected documentary quality of this careful recension of Holinshed may partly explain the play's unfashionableness and even the modern attempt to repudiate it as not entirely Shakespeare's work, so that any supposed unworthiness or eccentricity can be blamed on Fletcher's divergence from the master. As Reginald Foakes notes: “It is significant that support for Fletcher has always been associated with condemnation of Henry VIII as bad, or lacking in unity.”³ However, the text may perhaps be made even less liable to censure through the discrediting of the charge of joint authorship if it displays a detailed, sustained, and conscious continuity of form, content and style with Shakespeare's earlier works, rather than deviation and decline from them. For Henry VIII illustrates in remarkable detail a conscious and overtly asserted reversion to the form of history play associated with Shakespeare's youth, specifically to the episodic structure, massing of documentary data, ambivalent characterization, religious themes, and ritual style of Richard III. However, it is my contention here that each reuse of historical material from the chroniclers by Shakespeare involves a fresh aesthetic permutation of effects from earlier models to provide a unique fusion. This synthesis can be made precisely evident only by juxtaposition with its closest earlier analogues in Shakespeare's oeuvre. The conclusions drawn from use of the comparative techniques of such a “syncretic” criticism⁴ will demonstrate exactly by what means the tone of the last play associates the more gracious mood of the romances with the harsh facts of English political history which Richard III had presented so brutally. The uniqueness of Shakespeare's last play will thus paradoxically appear precisely at its point of maximum resemblance to his earlier work.

It is nevertheless clear that in several ways Henry VIII remains a nostalgic exercise in generic revisionism of a kind which many critics have seen to be highly characteristic of the aging Shakespeare. For there has been a strong tendency recently to perceive that even the most marginal of Shakespeare's last plays are not as different generically from the earlier ones as was suggested by the modern scholarly commitment to a distinct category for what recent editions regularly identify as “romances.”⁵ In terms of the English histories, John Velz has already seen parallels between Richard III and Sir Thomas More, which are roughly contemporary, and he points out the necessary resemblances between the historical subject of the latter play and Henry VIII, in which Sir Thomas More reappears.⁶ The Levantine vagaries of Pericles are prefigured in The Comedy of Errors, and they have been perceived to be no less consistently Shakespearean by modern scholars as different as G. Wilson Knight, Philip Edwards, and, most recently, Karen Csengeri.⁷ Glynne Wickham recently observed that The Two Noble Kinsmen is in many ways a continuation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.⁸ In a relevant essay about “The Integrity of Shakespeare” J. M. Nosworthy has asserted that “the glorious conglomeration of styles” in Cymbeline is not derived from participation by another inferior talent or even based on Shakespeare's own deft imitation of lately fashionable contemporaries, but is a synthesis of detailed effects characteristic of earlier plays of his own.⁹ Moreover, in terms of that play's content, I have myself demonstrated that in a strictly chronological sense Cymbeline proves to be the unexpected climax of a historical Roman trilogy, covering the rise and decline of Octavius Caesar, which includes Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.¹⁰

With a range of accepted continuities between most of Shakespeare's last plays and their antecedents in his works, it seems plausible to develop further one of these two precedents for what many scholars now consider to be Shakespeare's last play, not least because the text of Henry VIII consciously invites recall of both historical material and a generic formula developed by that predecessor. I hope to confirm the plausibility of J. M. Nosworthy's assertion that to understand Shakespeare's late plays we do not need to find new genres or sources but to perceive that “simply he returned to his own earlier practices.”¹¹ Far from failing to achieve his goals in Henry VIII, that play confirms Nosworthy's assertion that such questionable Shakespearean plays prove that “when he is least himself, or at least what we might expect him to be, he is most himself.”¹² In these terms, the alternative title of Henry VIII, which Wotton and Bluett first identified as All Is True,¹³ suggests that by reverting to the form of the chronicle play Shakespeare was self-consciously vindicating the plausibility of such an earlier romance as The Winter's Tale by showing that the story line of the unfairly repudiated wife and the providential arrival of a daughter could be matched by Tudor history. Certainly Henry VIII is a case where “there may be more profit in seeking for Shakespeare in what purports to be his.”¹⁴ In relating Henry VI and Richard III to Henry VIII I may even come close to outbidding Nosworthy's claim (with the antecedents to Cymbeline which he finds in Titus Andronicus) of “illustrating Shakespearean continuity over what is practically the longest possible period.”¹⁵ The dramatic formula with which Shakespeare closes his career seems likely to be the one which he had evolved in creating his first English tetralogy.

The sense of political continuity is an essential element in the character of most of Shakespeare's history plays, not least in Richard III. This sustained allusion to context is no less marked in Henry VIII when Shakespeare recalls the reign of Richard III as deliberately as he had done the reign of Henry VI in the ominous Epilogue to Henry V. One may not want to make too much of the mere recurrence of the historical names of Norfolk, Surrey, and Lovell in the latest history play. However, structurally both plays surround the monarch with minor cycles illustrating the vicissitudes of lesser lives. Thus the fall of the Duke of Buckingham in Henry VIII is systematically matched with that of his father in Richard III when the son recalls ruefully, on his way to execution, how:

My noble father, Henry of Buckingham,
Who first rais'd head against usurping Richard,
Flying for succor to his servant Banister,
Being distress'd, was by that wretch betray'd,
And without trial fell; God's peace be with him!
Henry the Seventh succeeding, truly pitying
My father's loss, like a most royal prince
Restor'd me to my honors, and, out of ruins,
Made my name once more noble. Now his son,
Henry the Eighth, life, honor, name, and all
That made me happy, at one stroke has taken
For ever from the world. I had my trial,
And needs must say, a noble one; which makes me
A little happier than my wretched father.
Yet thus far are we one in fortunes: both
Fell by our servants, by those men we lov'd most—
A most unnatural and faithless service!
Heaven has an end in all.

(II.i.107-24)

Curiously enough, this scene with its many elaborate and conscious references to events in the last two acts of Richard III is sometimes assigned to Fletcher, but Shakespeare obviously intends us to create the characteristic perspective of receding parallels with which all his history plays are filled. He makes a close correlation between the three kings' behavior, in which Henry VIII is not paralleled with his benevolent father, Henry VII, but with the sinister Richard III, because of Henry VIII's ruthless execution of a duke for challenging the state's established authority. Indeed, the similar ground for the execution of the two dukes encourages us to note the tyrannical nature of these rulers, whom both dukes seemingly seek to assassinate according to the testimony of the Surveyor. He reports that, after Buckingham received a royal reproof:

“If,” quoth he, “I for this had been committed,
As, to the Tower, I thought, I would have played
The part my father meant to act upon
Th'usurper Richard, who, being at Salisbury,
Made suit to come in's presence, which, if granted,
As he made semblance of his duty, would
Have put his knife into him.” …
After “the duke his father,” with the “knife,” …
He did discharge a horrible oath, whose tenor
Was, were he as evil us'd, he would outgo
His father by as much as a performance
Does an irresolute purpose.

(I.ii.193-99, 203, 206-9)

This situation reconvenes the homicidal society of Richard III with its bizarre and fatal relationships which often provoke hasty furies and ruthless executions. By hindsight we know that the Tudor dynasty will survive Henry VIII's vicissitudes, but the situation in the first act of the play is as fraught with political uncertainty as the opening of Henry VI or Richard II. Typically, Shakespeare's version of the history play is not a simply affirmative one, particularly in the opening scenes. In Henry VIII we have an initial movement precipitated by an erratic, inexpert ruler, influenced by self-serving advisors, and threatened by instability abroad in Europe as well as subversion at home in England. The play reveals potentialities for diplomatic and political collapse from which the Tudors had already rescued England once under the guidance of Henry VII, as anticipated at the end of Richard III. But this classic opening for a chronicle play shows us a political state under serious threat of destabilization, whether we talk of Henry VI, Henry IV, or even Julius Caesar and Coriolanus.

Nor are domestic relations between the sexes exempt from equally sinister overtones in either play, or in the genre as a whole, in which women tend to play only ominous, frustrated, or miserable roles. For we can hardly avoid noting that there are many other sinister resemblances between the eponymous kings than the political ones: not least that each most inappropriately courts and marries a Lady Anne for whose death (indeed, murder) he is personally responsible—historically in Henry VIII's case, though this is not shown, while in Richard's it is merely implied (without historical validity) by Shakespeare through Richard's orders:

Come hither, Catesby. Rumor it abroad
That Anne, my wife, is very grievous sick;
I will take order for her keeping close.

(IV.ii.50-52)

Anne has already clearly detected that Richard “will, no doubt, shortly be rid of me” (IV.i.86) as Richard soon casually confirms: “Anne my wife hath bid this world good night.” (IV.iii.39) If the later play avoids recognition of the execution of Henry's Anne by its breaking-off point, still no audience of Shakespeare's time (nor surely of our own) can ignore the fatal aura surrounding his Anne Bullen even before that conclusion. I have seen modern audiences shiver at the dramatic irony of Anne's unwitting anticipation of her own execution, when she is made to exclaim over Henry's ominous attentions:

                                                                                                    Would I had no being
If this salute my blood a jot! It faints me
To think what follows.

(II.iii.102-4)

The imagery of “no being,” “blood,” and being “faint” from fear, anticipates her doom, even if all she can consciously predict is adultery with Henry. At the end of the play, the absence of Anne from the christening does little to exorcise this awareness of her impending fate. Obviously, it is hard for us to accept Henry's final, seemingly confident standing in the script without serious reservations,¹⁶ even if they are powerfully offset by our sense that they will be transcended in the reign of his new daughter.

Moreover, sexuality in Shakespearean history plays usually reflects a perverse desire in male leaders to violate political decorum by inappropriate or inept sexual alliances.¹⁷ In Richard III this ineptitude appears in Richard's courtship of the dowager Queen Elizabeth to further his incestuous marriage to his niece, Princess Elizabeth. This issue may remind us that, in the Blackfriars divorce proceedings, Henry VIII also appears guilty of an incestuous first marriage to his brother's bride.¹⁸ The political consequences of these genealogical complications match the issues of succession raised in Richard III by its stress on the sexual vagaries of Edward IV, which led to his supposedly bigamous marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. Richard of Gloucester exploits these aberrations to advance his claims to the succession by inferring “the bastardy of Edward's children” via Buckingham's advocacy:

You say that Edward is your brother's son.
So say we too, but not by Edward's wife;
For first he was contract to Lady Lucy—
Your mother lives a witness to his vow—
And afterward by substitute betroth'd
To Bona, sister to the King of France.
These both put off, a poor petitioner,
A care-craz'd mother to a many sons
A beauty-waning and distressed widow,
Even in the afternoon of her best days,
Made prize and purchase of his wanton eye,
Seduc'd the pitch and height of his degree
To base declension and loath'd bigamy.
By her, in his unlawful bed, he got
This Edward, whom our manners call the Prince.

(III.vii.177-91)

Henry VI's marriage to Margaret of Anjou may not violate sexual taboos so grossly, but marriage to an enemy alien hardly suggests sexual decorum either. Predictably, in view of the adulterous purpose of Suffolk's manipulations of the partners in this marriage, the outcomes are disastrous. A classic interest in Shakespeare's history plays derives from such tensions between private sexual drives and public policy.

Such questionable male marital choices also underlie many of the more public political and diplomatic issues and events in Henry VIII, for Henry VIII specifically identifies the issue of the legitimacy of his children as the origin of his own anxieties about his marriage:

My conscience first receiv'd a tenderness,
Scruple, and prick, on certain speeches utter'd
By th' Bishop of Bayonne, then French ambassador,
Who had been hither sent on the debating
A marriage 'twixt the Duke of Orleans and
Our daughter Mary. I'th' progress of this business,
Ere a determinate resolution, he,
I mean the Bishop, did require a respite,
Wherein he might the King his lord advertise
Whether our daughter were legitimate,
Respecting this our marriage with the dowager,
Sometime our brother's wife. This respite
Shook the bosom of my conscience.

(II.iv.168-80)

Male sexual vagaries lie at the heart of societal and even political tensions in many of Shakespeare's major plays. Moreover, not only does this issue touch directly on the status of Princess Mary, it remains a concern for the Princess Elizabeth whose birth is celebrated at the end of the play. Anne Boleyn was herself plagued by innumerable charges of sexual misconduct: of adultery with Sir Thomas Wyatt, of incestuously succeeding her sister Mary in the affections of Henry, of a bigamous marriage while Katharine was still alive, and by the final, fatal one of incest with her brother for which she was executed. As a result, a charge of illegitimacy similar to those made against Edward V and Mary Tudor also bedevilled the succession of Queen Elizabeth I. This gave credence and motive to the counterclaim to the English throne of Mary, Queen of Scots, which led to her execution while a prisoner of her rival, like that of the young Edward V in Richard III. Dynastic genealogy and family continuity are intrinsic issues in all of Shakespeare's histories.

Thus the royal name of Elizabeth rings through both plays. The precedent for later Tudor use of the name is found in the dowager Queen Elizabeth of Richard III, who is bereft of her two young Princes in the Tower, but whose surviving daughter, Princess Elizabeth of York, ultimately marries Henry VII, not Richard, and proves to be the grandmother of Queen Elizabeth I. Plans for the marriage of the earlier Princess Elizabeth end Richard III with the same expectation of a humane and fertile peace as that which ends Henry VIII in Cranmer's pacific prophecy at the christening of the later Princess Elizabeth. This matrilineal sequence provides another important thematic link between the two plays, for both lay great stress on maternal relationships. In this emphasis they are characteristic of the genre developed by the four plays of the first tetralogy, as sustained in both King John (with the omnipresent Constance) and Richard II (with the compulsive Duchess of York). The massed mothers of Richard III do much to neutralize and subdue Richard's virtuosity in the later parts of the play. For example, we must consider the formative effect of his own mother's progressive alienation, culminating in her curse of him, but marked by hostility from his birth:

Thou cam'st to earth to make the earth my hell.
A grievous burthen was thy birth to me,
Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;
Thy school-days frightful, desp'rate, wild, and furious,
Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous;
Thy age confirm'd, proud, subtle, sly, and bloody,
More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred.

(IV.iv.167-73)

Such a mother may be said to warp her child before she damns it. In his celebrated performance in Richard III at the RSC in 1984, Antony Sher detected the key to his whole temperament in this one of all Richard's relationships.¹⁹

Nor does the erratic hostility of the dowager Queen Elizabeth prove quite as harmless as Richard believes at her departing assent to his request for her daughter's hand: “Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!” (IV.iv.431) For most members of Shakespeare's audience would remember throughout this scene that, whatever she may say and despite her final seeming submission, Queen Elizabeth ultimately reneged on her consent, and gave her daughter to Henry Tudor in ratification of his succession as Henry VII, which is noted at the end of the play. Equally definitive of the play's outcome is the relentless and supernatural malevolence of Queen Margaret, which brings a metaphysical authority to the fate of Richard through her effective curses and convincing prophecies, validated by our hindsight of their fulfillment. Less obvious but by no means less significant is the climactic maternal triumph of the Countess of Derby, “who prays continually for Richmond's good” (V.iii.84), as well she might, for historically it was her influence which lay behind the successful challenge to Richard mounted by her son, Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond, as Richard himself perceives in the play: “Stanley, look to your wife. If she convey / Letters to Richmond, you shall answer it.” (IV.ii.92-93)

These impressive maternal figures provide early precedents for the role of Queen Katharine of Aragon, whose fight to preserve her own rights against the manipulations of Wolsey also, of course, involves those of her daughter, the Princess Mary, as she reminds us in seeking Henry's benevolence:

                    I have commended to his goodness
The model of our chaste loves, his young daughter—
The dews of heaven fall thick in blessings on her!—
Beseeching him to give her virtuous breeding—
She is young, and of a noble modest nature,
I hope she will deserve well.

(IV.ii.131-36).

Even Anne Bullen's tacitly maternal role in the play may be somewhat purged of impropriety by our awareness of the vicarious validation it receives from the magnificent career of her daughter, whose anticipation provides the play's coda. One of the most powerful dramatic ironies of this conclusion is that most audiences know the unsatisfactory final outcome of Henry's compulsive pursuit of a male heir, and that the two princesses whose existence frustrates it during the course of this play will be far more significant than his son Edward VI ever proved. Once again the authority of the female line ultimately outweighs that of the male choices, just as at the end of The Winter's Tale. While this issue is very prominent in the earliest chronicle plays about Henry VI, it is one of the concerns of such plays concealed by the less obvious female presence in Henry IV, Part 1, which makes that successful play less generically normative than the others.

Thus positive feminine influences are significant in both Richard III and Henry VIII, despite the perverse marriages which drive their plots and provide much of their sinister fascination. And it is primarily the volatility of male sexuality which precipitates these anomalies, for the male lovers' behavior is presented in a much more negative light than that of the women they love. The courtships that precede the marriages share a grotesque irony. We see monstrous parodies of Romeo's sentimentalities to Juliet in each play, with the cynical extravagance of Richard's seductions of Anne and Elizabeth, and with Henry's courtly flattery of Anne which scarcely masks his incipient adultery at Wolsey's ball. The latter closely matches Romeo's fickleness to Rosaline at the Capulets' analogous ball, but carries it to a more ominous level of willfulness than the mere challenging of a feud's loyalties, for Rosaline has no claims on her facile lover comparable to those of Queen Katharine on her husband of many years, and the alienation of Spain resulting from her divorce dominates English history for the rest of the century. In perversely courting his Lancastrian enemy, widow of the murdered Prince of Wales, the Yorkist Richard of Gloucester also systematically and cynically exploits most of the sentimental extravagances of a Romeo (both, for example, affect to welcome death if their beloveds should wish it). Similarly absolute, on first meeting his Anne, Henry says: “The fairest hand I ever touch'd! O beauty, / Till now I never knew thee!” (I.iv.75-76) Here he echoes Romeo's first reaction to Juliet: “I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.” (I.v.54) And if Juliet censures Romeo because “You kiss by th' book.” (I.v.111), Henry is equally artful in his osculations: “Sweet-heart, / I were unmannerly, to take you out / And not to kiss you.” (I.iv.95-97) But what appears naive innocence in Romeo appears here as culpable dishonor, particularly for a king who has just censured the Frenchified fashions and sexual decadence in his own court (I.ii.18-41), merely for following his own precedent at the Field of the Cloth of Gold (with accounts of which the play opened)—and who soon proceeds to censure Wolsey for his ostentation and frivolity (I.iv.87-89). Anticipating this affected puritanism in his opening soliloquy, Richard of Gloucester begins his ominous career in Richard III with the same hostility to courtly self-indulgence, only to outdo his brother Edward's virtuosity in courtship no less abruptly than does Henry VIII.

These formulaic resemblances in content and style between the early history plays and the latest history are framed by a shared structural pattern typical of the Shakespearean mode: the illumination of a tyrant's career through a series of subcycles about the vicissitudes of various lesser lives dependent on the major character who provides the nominal unity for the whole work. Thus Richard's character is illustrated and commented on from the start by circumstances in the fall of Clarence. Clarence is no more virtuous than Richard, perhaps even more treacherous in that he traitorously turned from Yorkist to Lancastrian whenever it suited his profit, and he led the way for Richard's own paradoxical marriage to the Lancastrian Anne by marrying her sister, also the daughter of the Earl of Warwick (who turned against the Yorkists after Edward's own injudicious marriage with Elizabeth Woodstock, the widow of another of his own opponents). However, if none of the three Yorkist brothers is better than greedy, ambitious, and self-indulgent, first Clarence and then Edward do come to understand their own failures and express repentance for them. The laborious scrutiny of conscience, which Clarence and his murderers all three undergo (I.iv), provides the context for our ultimate evaluation of Richard's own limitations. These are heightened by the further parallel fates of Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, Hastings, and Buckingham—all of whom come to appreciate their own guilt and express convincing repentance. While Anne Bullen may only nervously anticipate her future troubles, Richard's Anne finally achieves an extraordinary sense of her own self-inculpation when she recalls having cursed Richard's future wife before she herself fell prey to his seductions, “And prov'd the subject of mine own soul's curse.” (IV.i.80). We are thus thoroughly conditioned to turn our moral judgment against Richard as he himself does in his climactic nightmare before the Battle of Bosworth Field.

This classic, cyclical, morality-play structure of the early histories is repeated in Henry VIII, with one major difference, that in the earlier play the progression is relentlessly violent until after the last, total reversal of Richmond's triumph and the founding of the Tudor dynasty. In the later play we see the earlier one's pattern closely recapitulated only in the first cycle, the fall of Buckingham, as confirmed by the frequent retrospective references noted earlier. Buckingham shares the hubris of the earlier play's Hastings, and learns similarly how dangerous friends and intimates can be. Yet the subsequent falls of both Katharine and Wolsey do not so closely follow the brutal model of Richard III but progress to more affirmative views of human character and fate. In one way, of course, Queen Katharine's fall is worse than Lady Anne's in that it is wholly undeserved, as everyone admits. However, unlike her Shakespearean predecessor, Lady Anne, and her successor, Katharine will not be murdered or executed. While she may be treated condescendingly by the cardinals, her excellence is universally affirmed and her death is preceded by a kind of apotheosis in the masque (IV.ii.82ff.) which sanctifies her virtues with a heavenly vindication visible to the audience. We are made to feel that whatever she may have suffered on earth, she transcends her circumstances and may fairly hope to be compensated for them by heavenly rewards.

A very similar apotheosis also unexpectedly transfigures Wolsey, above all in Griffith's final vindication to Katharine of her enemy's virtues, which we see truly expressed in Wolsey's final reconciliation with his own defeat:

Never so truly happy, my good Cromwell.
I know my self now, and feel within me
A peace above all earthly dignities.

(III.ii.377-79)

All that has been manifestly shown to be wrong with Wolsey is now balanced by the final favorable verdict of Griffith to which even his most legitimate enemies, such as Katharine (and hence, presumably, the audience also), must assent:

Whom I most hated living, thou hast made me,
With thy religious truth and modesty,
Now in his ashes honor.

(IV.ii.73-75)

Thus the later history play moves much sooner to a positive reading of the same kind of events than the early one did and this is where their obvious generic similarities serve to highlight certain basic differences which modify the pessimistic terminal effects so characteristic of the early versions of the genre. The transcendence of Tudor politics colors the whole second half of Henry VIII rather than just the last lines of the final scene, as in Richard III. As a result of Henry VIII's final mastery of the sinister intrigues with which his court has been rife, the triumph of Cranmer establishes a positive model for the kind of effective rule which can only be anticipated after the victory of Richmond at the end of Richard III, and is not fully demonstrated by the new King Henry VII (who, anyway, himself later murdered a rival prince incarcerated in the Tower. Audrey Wilson argues that Henry VII had the most to gain by the earlier murders of the Princes in the Tower usually ascribed to Richard III).²⁰ Thus it is only in Henry VIII that the virtues of Henry VII are factually established, by Buckingham's recapitulation of his generosity. But, as we know only too well, Henry VIII liked to kill young women as well as young men, and this leaves the end of the play about him with an ominous aura equivalent to that of Henry V's Epilogue anticipating the tragic reign of Henry VI. The still living Queen Anne may not be present at the final christening in Henry VIII, but she inevitably exerts a ghostly (not to say ghastly) presence nevertheless, reminiscent of the other Queen Anne who haunts the last act of Richard III.

Both tyrants thus have exploitative relationships with women, masked by an outer affectation of puritanism and piety with which their actions grossly conflict. This compulsive trait had already appeared in the historical Richard, who was just as deeply preoccupied with the sexual vagaries of Mistress Shore as he is shown to be in the play (I.i.90-102, III.i.185, III.iv.70-76).²¹ As staged in Legge's Richardus Tertius, the historical Richard forced her to do public penance for her promiscuity by being paraded through the streets of London dressed only in a penitential sheet (which apparently served to win her pity and further admiration for her charms). Richard's contempt for his brother's sensuality, as shown in the affair with the widowed Lady Elizabeth Woodville, provides the basis for his radical alienation from his family in the famous speech where his wickedness is first fully formulated (3 Henry VI, III.ii.124-95), and his contempt for men dominated by women provides the later launching point for his trajectory which begins in the opening speech of Richard III. Yet much of Richard's energy in the play is devoted to seducing women to his own purposes, one way or another.

There is scarcely any necessity to document further the same pattern of sexual excesses in the historical Henry VIII, but it may need a more careful demonstration to confirm the complex recurring patterns in Shakespeare's ironic display of the discrepancy between Henry's affected reform of the extravagances in his own court, including Wolsey's, and his own indecorous behavior. “The new proclamation / That's clapp'd upon the court-gate” (I.iii.17-18) reminds us of the new order Angelo seeks to impose on the corrupt Vienna of Measure for Measure.²² The effects of Henry's naive attempt at “reformation of our travel'd gallants” (I.ii.19) are seen to be as repressive as Angelo's, giving great satisfaction to the conservative court faction:

                                                                                          They must either,
For so run the conditions, leave those remnants
Of fool and feather that they got in France,
With all their honorable points of ignorance
Pertaining thereunto, as fights and fireworks,
Abusing better men than they can be
Out of a foreign wisdom, renouncing clean
The faith they have in tennis and tall stockings,
Short blist'red breeches, and those types of travel,
And understand again like honest men,
Or pack to their old playfellows. There, I take it,
They may, “cum privilegio,” “oui” away
The lag end of their lewdness and be laugh'd at.
'Tis time to give 'em physic, their diseases
Are grown so catching. What a loss our ladies
Will have of these trim vanities!

(I.iii.23-38)

The questionable political outcome of formal puritanism is another compulsively recurrent theme of Shakespeare's histories—of which Henry V's repudiation of Falstaff is only the most obvious example. Similar puritanism underlies the political failures of Henry VI, not to mention the misfortunes of Marcus Brutus. In such episodes Shakespeare surely remains as concerned to show the inadequacies of puritan reformers as he was with the equally erratic and equally historical court of the King of Navarre in Love's Labor's Lost, in which a sophisticated bevy of ladies totally overthrows male asceticism. The masquing of Shakespeare's King of Navarre is as morally questionable as the masquing of his King of England, Henry VIII, and it leads as directly to the emotional subservience of a king to a skeptical mistress. Indeed, there is some evidence to show that the Frenchified sophistication (Wyatt's “newfangledness”), which Anne Boleyn learned at the French court, is directly derived from the same proto-feminist origins as that of the historical models for the French princess and her ladies in Love's Labor's Lost.²³ For the court of Francis I provided the glittering model for the account of the Field of the Cloth of Gold at the start of Henry VIII, and the values and manners of this court were defined and dominated by the personality of his sister, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre. Marguerite advanced female status and autonomy at the court of King Francis, whose petite bande of dashing young women provided role models for the later escadron volant of Catherine de'Medici (herself trained by Marguerite), several of whom appear under their own names in Love's Labor's Lost. Moreover, that original Marguerite is precisely “the Duchess of Alençon, / The French King's sister” whom Shakespeare shows Wolsey to be determined that Henry shall marry rather than her likely pupil, Anne (III.ii.85-89). For Anne's father was ambassador to France, and both she and her sister acquired their sophistication, which Henry found irresistible, during their adolescent years at the French court. Historians have even conjectured that Henry first saw Anne in the seductive train of Francis and Marguerite at the Field of the Cloth of Gold (see the reference in Henry VIII, I.i.23-26). Thus Shakespeare's portrait of Anne Bullen as yet another witty and seductive young woman in the French fashion can plausibly be seen as a further reversion to historical models provided by one of his earliest comedies, probably first written about the time of Richard III. Rather surprisingly this recurrence of the pert manners of witty Frenchwomen proves to be another persistent motif in the genre of the Shakespeare histories, for it also appears in the behavior of the youthful Marguerite of Anjou and the Countess of Auvergne (not to mention Joan of Arc) in Henry VI, as well as in that of her mother-in-law, the intensely amorous French Princess Katharine in Henry V who so attracts the hitherto sexually neuter Prince Hal/Henry V—he who had sneered so relentlessly at the uxoriousness of Hotspur and the fornications of Falstaff.²⁴

This recurrent Shakespearean pattern of princely severity which is then itself proved grossly guilty of what it would reprehend provides the climax to Act 1 of Henry VIII, when Henry disports himself at Wolsey's ball, in the very next scene (I.iv) following the announcement of his “reformation” of his court. Though himself fantastically garbed for the masque, he soon reverts to indirect censure of Wolsey for extravagance and frivolity:

You hold a fair assembly; you do well, lord.
You are a churchman, or, I'll tell you, Cardinal,
I should judge you unhappily.

(I.iv.87-90)

Yet, as we have seen, in the very next breath Henry asks eagerly: “What fair lady's that?” (I.iv.92) and then without hesitation he proceeds enthusiastically to her seduction, seemingly by way of intoxication:

By heaven, she is a dainty one.—Sweetheart,
I were unmannerly to take you out,
And not to kiss you. …
Lead in your ladies, ev'ry one.—Sweet partner,
I must not yet forsake you.—Let's be merry,
Good my Lord Cardinal. I have a dozen healths
To drink to these fair ladies, and a measure
To lead 'em once again, and then let's dream
Whose best in favor. Let the music knock it.

(I.iv.95-97, 104-9)

Having censured other males' self-indulgence and extravagance, the initially disguised king immediately himself begins a course of action leading to adultery, divorce, and the near ruin of that very Christendom of which he had once been hailed by the Pope as the defender against Luther. This is a betrayal of ecclesiastical commitment and theological values far worse than the merely private insincerity of the royal ascetic in Love's Labor's Lost, and therefore one much nearer to the metaphysical corruption of Shakespeare's Richard III. Thus, in plays as varied, yet historically derived, as Love's Labor's Lost, Richard III, Measure for Measure, Henry IV and Henry VIII, Shakespeare takes up the theme of all his histories: the affected moralism of various historical monarchs—seemingly in order to show their own inevitable subsequent lapses into sensuality. Yet though these may lead to public disasters in the short run, out of these dislocations may evolve a state of affairs which is possibly wiser, certainly more tolerant.

This is also the pattern in the earlier versions of the genre which we can more certainly perceive by the hindsight generated through a knowledge of Henry VIII. For the serene tone of Henry VIII proves far more reconciled to human vicissitudes even while tracing the same tragic cycles as Richard III. After all, Richard III's hypocrisy was hardly an anticipation of the Reformation, and the ending of Shakespeare's earlier history play shows us a world still governed by the full rigor of medieval theology, which almost every victim in the play is required to concede that his fate properly displays. Henry VIII, by contrast, openly establishes its time as the dawn of a new Christian era, the Reformation, which stressed a theology based on reconciliation with universal human fallibility—just as we can see the anticipations of the dawn of Christianity itself in the revision of judgments made in that other late play, set in the pivotal reign of Cymbeline, with its repudiation of archaic and over-rigid Roman legalism and class-consciousness. This late Shakespearean concern with cultural shifts from a more rigorous to a more tolerant world view certainly reflect a more relaxed personal ethos on the part of the aging dramatist, as Kevin Billington, director of the BBC production, has observed: “For a protestant playwright in the early seventeenth century to write about a Catholic Spaniard as if she was a saint is astonishing. And absolutely fundamental to an understanding of the play is the belief that there is some reconciliation, you can actually face your maker. And through the suffering, through the deaths, through the complications the nation comes through to our new religion and our new queen.”²⁵

The profound significance of this religious transformation can be confirmed by a look at the appended list of word-frequencies, which show both the strong affinities between Richard III and Henry VIII, and also their crucial divergence at this point of maximum resemblance, the central procedure for valid comparison as defined earlier in this essay by my comparative method of Syncretic Criticism. The words range over the field of the more obvious religious vocabulary which both plays exploit to a degree unshared by any other Shakespeare play. They share exceptionally heavy use of two classes of words: first, words overtly concerned with the individual's interest in religion: Christian, self, conscience, prayer; second, highly affirmative words about moral attitudes or conditions: charity, grace, blessed, amen. What Henry VIII conspicuously does not share with Richard III is the latter's sinister preoccupation with the negative side of religion in the form of such words as: curse, despair, death, Hell. Even seemingly positive words like day in Richard III suggest more specifically threatening aspects such as Doomsday, or the day on which a penalty falls due for breaking a contract, as admitted by Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, and Buckingham on their way to execution.

By contrast, in Henry VIII the falls of both Katharine and Wolsey are given positive conformations. Wolsey transforms his fall into a gain, corroborated by even his enemy Katharine at Griffith's instigation, while Katharine herself is given an apotheosis just short of a bodily assumption into heaven, for which there is no precedent in the earlier histories. This is precisely the kind of added motif in a genre which my comparative method is designed to detect. For such a mystical (or at least ceremonial) transcendence of mundane reality is a recurrent motif in all the later plays or so-called “romances,” as with the magical recognition scenes which present transfigured mothers, and daughters preserved, at the end of Pericles and The Winter's Tale, or the celestial intrusions that prefigure Posthumus' recovery of both Imogen and his own self-confidence in Cymbeline. Divine manifestations affirm their magical powers far more positively in these last plays than the earlier Shakespeare ventured to display. Only Buckingham's execution in Henry VIII looks back to the numerous fatalities of Richard III, which the later play avoids, though history provides enough examples if the dramatist wished for them.²⁶

It is chiefly in these terms of a more affirmative interpretation of events, expressed in high rituals, that Shakespeare's Henry VIII diverges from his earlier experiments in the genre of historical drama. This gives the play crucial significance as the last which his colleagues specifically assigned to Shakespeare. By cutting short the ominous cycle of Henry VIII's reign at the exact point which ends the play's action and by leapfrogging over Henry's deplorable later years through Cranmer's prophecy of the happier reign of Elizabeth, Shakespeare implies we are free to read history providentially by hindsight. For the true outcome of so much confusion and evil is not the all-too-momentary graciousness of Henry,²⁷ but the inauguration of a new era, of which Elizabeth I later becomes the symbol for us as for Shakespeare. By asserting that All Is True, Shakespeare invites us to accept this hopeful reading of what he insists are historical facts, as stressed by the production history of this play, which is one of the few consistently performed in historically accurate costume—a characteristic which, again, it shares chiefly with Richard III. Over the centuries, actors and directors have correctly perceived the shared need for visual affinities to these scripts' historicism, another continuity between them. As some recent performances of Richard III have diverged from the melodramatic model of Cibber's adaptation of the play in favor of more thoughtful interpretations,²⁸ we may confidently expect that appreciation for the integrity of Henry VIII will similarly encourage such vindications of its artistic distinctiveness as appear in the introduction to the BBC edition of the video script. Thus Henry VIII should reappear in all its former glory as an example of how Shakespeare revived a seemingly decayed genre as his last dramatic exercise, freshly illuminated by a providential response to English history which matches the mystical mood of his other late plays. Such a distinctive, complex synchronization of Henry VIII with characteristics of both Shakespeare's early and late plays strengthens the likelihood that the script is entirely his handiwork. With such a conscious sense of this serener play's definitive completion of the troubled cycle that began with the chronicle histories of Shakespeare's early career, the dramatist seems to have discovered that: “in my beginning is my end.”

Notes

1. For a representative survey of recent scholarly opinion on the authorship question, see John Margeson's introduction to his edition of William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII (New Cambridge Shakespeare Series [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990], 4-14). There is an unmistakable tendency for supporters of divided authorship to take a negative view of the script's value, so that the marked increase recently in positive criticism of the play favors either full Shakespearean authorship, or at least treatment of the text as a wholly integrated artifact. See also Stanley Wells, ed., Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide, new edition, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 381-87. Wells' personal preference for divided authorship now seems distinctly old-fashioned, despite the last effort to validate Victorian disintegrationist speculation by Cyrus Hoy, “The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (VII).” Studies in Bibliography, 15 (1962): 71-90. The argument seemingly no longer greatly interests most of the play's expositors. Like other admirers of it, I accept the argument for unity well stated in the introduction to R. A. Foakes's edition of Henry VIII (New Arden Series [London: Methuen, 1964], xv-lxvii). See the fuller review of these issues through survey of the script's stage history in Hugh M. Richmond, Shakespeare in Performance: King Henry VIII (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester Univ. Press, 1994).

2. The Middle Comedies may seem the least likely place to find any historical motifs, but see Leslie Hotson, The First Night of “Twelfth Night,” (New York: Macmillan, 1954), and Hugh M. Richmond “Much Ado About Notables,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 49-63, as well as Footnotes 22 and 23 below.

3. Foakes, xxii.

4. The exact procedures and validation for this method, under the title of “Syncretic Criticism,” are described in Hugh M. Richmond, “The Evolution of Sensibility,” Chapter 1 in The School of Love: The Evolution of the Stuart Love Lyric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), 3-23. In chronicle plays generally, as with Henry VIII, any fresh synthesis usually involves a blending of historical data with existing literary motifs. See, for example, the history-play genre's assimilation of the rhetorical formula of the death lament as traced in Velma Bourgeois Richmond, “Dramatic Elements in Laments for the Dead,” in the fifth chapter of Laments for the Dead in Medieval Literature (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1966), 127ff., a study which provides a precedent for my method here not only by its demonstration of the relevance of the genre of “romance” to the great lament for Henry V which begins Henry VI but also to those numerous laments with which Richard III and Henry VIII are almost equally bedecked, though expressing such contrasting moods.

5. See Alfred Harbage, ed., The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 1256; G. Blakemore Evans, ed., Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 976; David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Third Edition, (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1980), 1379. All subsequent Shakespeare citations are from this last edition.

6. John Velz, “Sir Thomas More and the Shakespeare canon: two approaches,” in Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More, T. H. Howard-Hill, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 182-90. Velz also notes such parallels between Richard III and Henry VIII as the scenes in both plays covering the execution of the two Dukes of Buckingham, father and son. Velz (184) considers Henry VIII, II.i. “simply a revision” of Richard III, V.i.

7. G. Wilson Knight, “The Writing of Pericles,” in The Crown of Life, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), 32-75; Philip Edwards, “An Approach to the Problem of Pericles,” Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952): 25-49; Karen Csengeri, “William Shakespeare, Sole Author of Pericles,” English Studies 71 (June, 1990): 230-43.

8. Glynne Wickham, “The Two Noble Kinsmen or A Midsummer Night's Dream Part II?” in G. R. Hibbard, ed. The Elizabethan Theatre VIII (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980).

9. J. M. Nosworthy, “The Integrity of Shakespeare: Illustrated from Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955): 55.

10. Hugh M. Richmond, “Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy: the Climax in Cymbeline,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 5 (April 1972): 129-39.

11. Nosworthy, 56.

12. Nosworthy, 56.

13. Margeson, 1.

14. Nosworthy, 56.

15. Nosworthy, 56.

16. For example, modern directors find it hard to resist an unscripted allusion to the ominous future, as in Trevor Nunn's production at the RSC in 1969, which ended with a grim Henry alone on stage, anticipating his later troubles.

17. One recalls Antony's renewed adultery after his unwise marriage to Octavia, which is a factor in his ruin in Antony and Cleopatra. How deep an issue Shakespeare finds the specific question of incest in marriage with a deceased brother's wife had already appeared in his use of it as a central issue in Hamlet's charges against Claudius.

18. One may also note Henry's later violation of canon law in marrying Anne Boleyn after debauching her sister Mary, for which he had to secure a further dispensation from Cranmer in addition to the annulment of his first marriage.

19. Antony Sher, The Year of the King: an Actor's Diary and Sketchbook, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1985), 129.

20. Audrey Wilson, The Mystery of the Princes (Gloucester, U.K.: Alan Sutton, 1981), 61, 128.

21. Hugh M. Richmond, “Richard III and the Reformation,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology] 83 (1984): 509-21.

22. Measure for Measure itself probably partly derives from the historical attitudes of King James I: see John Wilders, “The Problem Plays,” in Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide, New Edition, Stanley Wells, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 152. However, such scholars should also have noted the failed efforts at municipal reform set specifically in sixteenth-century Vienna of yet another historical monarch, the Emperor Maximilian II, who shared an ambivalent taste for Reformation views with Henry VIII and James I, not to mention Henri IV. See Hugh M. Richmond, Puritans and Libertines: Anglo-French Literary Relations in the Reformation (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 65.

23. See Hugh M. Richmond, “Shakespeare's Navarre,” Huntington Library Quarterly 43 (Summer 1979): 193-215; also Hugh M. Richmond, Chapter II: “Anne Boleyn and the French Fashion,” and Chapter IX: “Shakespeare's France,” in Puritans and Libertines.

24. Historians assert it was Katharine's charm and passion for Henry V which ensured the inclusion of her marriage to the English king in the Treaty of Troyes. See Ralph A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 16, 60-61. See also the analysis of her attitudes in Shakespeare's Henry V in Hugh M. Richmond, Shakespeare's Political Plays (New York: Random House, 1967), 176-77.

25. John Wilders, ed. The Shakespeare Plays: Henry VIII (New York: Mayflower, 1979), 27.

26. I need hardly say that the word-frequency list confirms my resistance to the view that Henry VIII is ambivalent, ironic, and skeptical in its treatment of such characters, as argued by Judith H. Anderson, “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: the Changing Relation of Truth to Fiction,” in Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984) and earlier by Lee Bliss, “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry VIII,” ELH 42 (1975): 1-25.

27. I thus cannot accept the entirely positive reading of Henry's evolution in the play by Paul Bertram, “Henry VIII: The Conscience of the King,” in Reuben Brower and Richard Poirier, eds., In Defence of Reading: A Reader's Approach to Literary Criticism (New York: Dutton, 1962), 153-73.

28. See Hugh M. Richmond, Shakespeare in Performance: King Richard III (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester Univ. Press, 1989).

Primary Sources

Shakespeare, William. Complete Works. Ed. David Bevington. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1980. (the authority for all quotations and citations to Shakespeare in this book unless otherwise noted).

———. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

———. The Comedy of Errors. Ed. R. A. Foakes. New Arden edition. London: Methuen, 1962.

———. King Henry VIII. Ed. John Margeson. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990.

———. Henry VIII. Ed. Hugh Richmond. Dubuque: Wm. C. Brown, 1971.

———. Henry VIII. Ed. John Wilders. B.B.C. Series. New York: Mayflower, 1979.

Secondary Sources

Anderson, Judith H. “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: The Changing Relation of Truth to Fiction.” In Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984.

Bliss, Lee. “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry VIII. ELH 42 (1975): 1-25.

Csengeri, Karen. “William Shakespeare, Sole Author of Pericles.” English Studies 71 (June, 1990): 230-43.

Foakes, R. A. See Primary Sources s.v. Shakespeare.

Hoy, Cyrus. “The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (VII).” Studies in Bibliography 15 (1962): 71-90.

Margeson, John. See Primary Sources s.v. Shakespeare.

Nosworthy, J. M. “The Integrity of Shakespeare: Illustrated from Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955): 52-56.

Richmond, Hugh M. Puritans and Libertines: Anglo-French Literary Relations in the Reformation. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981.

———. “Richard III and the Reformation.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 80 (1984): 509-21.

———. The School of Love: The Evolution of the Stuart Love Lyric. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964.

———. Shakespeare In Performance: King Richard III. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1990.

———. “Shakespeare's Navarre.” Huntington Library Quarterly 43 (1979): 193-215.

———. Shakespeare's Political Plays. New York: Random House, 1967.

———. “Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy: the Climax in Cymbeline.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 5 (April, 1972): 129-139.

Sher, Antony. The Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook. London: Chatto and Windus, 1985.

Velz, John W. “Sir Thomas More and the Shakespeare Canon: Two Approaches.” In “Sir Thomas More”: Essays on the Play and Its Shakespearian Interest, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill, 171-95. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989.

Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor, eds. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

Wickham, Glynne, “The Two Noble Kinsmen or A Midsummer Night's Dream Part II?” In The Elizabethan Theatre VII, ed. G. R. Hibbard. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980.

Wilders, John. See Primary Sources s.v. Shakespeare.