SOURCE: Smidt, Kristian. “All Is True, or The Honest Chronicler—King Henry VIII.” In Unconformities in Shakespeare's History Plays, pp. 145-58. London: Macmillan, 1982.

[In the following essay, Smidt contends that unlike Shakespeare's other histories, Henry VIII is a play of character rather than of action and pageantry—a quality it shares with some of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies.]

Probably a majority of critics have seen Henry VIII as a play separated not only in time but in kind from the early histories. It is certainly different, but not because of the amount of pageantry it contains, as is often asserted, nor because of its use of mythic elements, Christian or pagan, nor because of its alleged looseness of plot.¹Henry VIII is unlike Shakespeare's English history plays of the 1590s because of its new approach to the treatment of character.

The pageantry is there, and the prologue apparently draws attention to it:

                                        Those that come to see
Only a show or two, and so agree
The play may pass, if they be still and willing,
I'll undertake may see away their shilling,
Richly in two short hours.

The citizens, we are told in the beginning of Act IV, ‘have shown at full their royal minds’ by celebrating the coronation of Anne ‘with shows, / Pageants and sights of honour’. There is contemporary testimony, too, as to the magnificence with which the play was presented, thanks paradoxically to the fire which destroyed the Globe on that fateful midsummer afternoon in 1613. Sir Henry Wotton, describing the fire in a letter to Sir Edmund Bacon, has this to say of the spectacle he saw before it broke out:

The Kings Players had a new Play called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the Reign of Henry 8. which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of Pomp and Majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garter, the Guards with their embroidered Coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous.

We must distinguish between dramatic and theatrical features, however. Sir Henry's sarcasm in that last sentence is levelled at the production of the play and does not implicate its essential nature. The ceremonial processions and arrangements that we witness have no structural importance and little thematic significance. They provide no action or information which does not sufficiently emerge from the dialogue, and are in fact spectacular additions to the basic dramatic scenes. Those who went to gape at shows could no doubt see away their shillings and feel richly rewarded without paying too much attention to more sophisticated matters. In an age when court masques had become popular it must have been tempting to transfer some of their attractions to the public theatre, and it was a simple matter to copy a few itemised descriptions of stately processions from Holinshed and use them for stage directions. There are perhaps more great ceremonies in Henry VIII than in the early plays, what with the trial of one queen, the coronation of another, and the christening of a princess, plus a formal meeting of the privy council. But there are funerals, coronations, and parliaments in the early plays as well, and Shakespeare, had he been so inclined, could as easily have inserted directions for additional pageantry in them as he did in Henry VIII. Indeed, for all we know, a number of dumb shows may have been included in the staging of the early history plays which do not appear in the printed texts, and we have no certain knowledge that Shakespeare himself included the directions for these spectacles in Henry VIII. The play is not dependent on them, and the characters are even occasionally impatient of ceremony. King Henry dispenses with the reading of the cardinals' commission from Rome at the beginning of Katherine's trial, and the queen refuses to submit to the impersonal forms of the tribunal. In the light of Katherine's personal dignity we might even be tempted to read a certain irony into Anne's submission to ceremony. It is hard to understand how Irving Ribner can characterise Henry VIII as ‘a patriotic pageant’.² If we pay any attention to Queen Katherine's complaints of being friendless among enemies, or indeed to the actual state of a country where such men as Buckingham, Norfolk, Suffolk, Surrey, and Sands represent the ruling class, we can hardly find much occasion for patriotic complacency.³ The patriotism is seriously qualified within the play and the pageantry is extraneous to its main concerns.

Nor are the mythic elements at all conspicuous. They are in fact concentrated in Cranmer's final prophecy of a golden age under Elizabeth and James I, which is briefly anticipated earlier in the play in Suffolk's praise of Anne Bullen (III.ii.50-2). Howard Felperin finds a double pattern of myth, ‘Tudor and Christian’, in Henry VIII. The Tudor, or historical, myth is ‘that of a Tudor golden age emerging under the watchful eye of God from a long ordeal of tyranny and dissension’.⁴ But that ordeal is not dramatised or even referred to in Henry VIII, which has very few links backward to the Plantagenet tetralogies. The ordeals it dramatises are those of individuals, except for Wolsey's rapacious taxation scheme, which is quickly quashed by Henry's intervention. Theological dissensions are kept strictly in the background, and when an individual, Cranmer, is accused of heresy, Henry again personally intervenes to vindicate him. Prophecies of an age of peace and prosperity, it should be remembered, occur at the end of Richard III and Henry V as well, albeit not as oracularly uttered as in Henry VIII. There is little sense of ‘an overriding philosophy of history, that God directs all’ in Shakespeare's last play, in spite of sympathetic interpretations which find it there.⁵ As for ‘the providentially governed pattern of worldly fall and Christian conversion’, this is not turned into a myth in the sense that it directs the movements of the play. It is true that Wolsey and to some extent Buckingham suffer a ‘fortunate fall’,⁶ but Katherine is in no need of conversion, and Henry needs only to have his eyes opened. Nor does the conversion of the most villainous character of the play, Wolsey, have any consequences for the subsequent action or for any of the other characters except perhaps Cromwell, since Wolsey's pernicious manipulations are continued by Gardiner. As Frederick O. Waage has remarked, ‘In Henry VIII those personal qualities in the principals which would allow them to insure the tranquil continuity of their state emerge only when death is denying them the power to insure that continuity.’ Waage thinks the play is characterised by ‘Shakespeare's inability to mythologize history’, an inability which was caused, as Waage sees it, by the disappointment of millennial expectations on the death of Prince Henry in 1612.⁷ Ronald Berman has suggested the presence of a pagan fertility myth enacted by Henry and Anne, with ‘Anne and her daughter […] envisaged as Ceres and Proserpina’.⁸ He might have extended his interpretation to include Katherine and Wolsey, for there is a death of nature as well as a rebirth if one is looking for mythic archetypes. But this is a typically modern explication which adds no significance to Shakespeare's treatment of historical persons and events. And in any case it would still have to be mainly based on the last act, with very little support from the central parts of this domestic and political drama.

The looseness of plot has been frequently alleged, and the New Penguin editor, A. R. Humphreys, takes an extreme position: ‘the play lacks integrated character … it is made up of notable episodes laid in sequence rather than generated dynamically one from another.’⁹ This question of structure used to be commonly seen as an aspect of the problem of authorship, and the more sentimental scenes, like those depicting the good ends of bad or worldly men, were attributed to Fletcher. But as in the case of 1 Henry VI, an influential body of opinion seems now to have swung in favour of Shakespeare's sole authorship, though it is generally conceded that Fletcher may have contributed a few lines and passages.¹⁰ I am content to leave the arbitrament to others and to take my stand, for the present purpose, with the upholders of Shakespeare's authorial integrity. Which means that if we find divided intentions it does not necessarily indicate divided responsibility. And should it ever be established that Henry VIII is the result of composite authorship it will at least not affect our analysis of the play itself.

With this in mind let us consider the complaints that have been made and can be made of the loose plot structure. Irving Ribner reviews the ‘poorly-connected series of episodes’ which, in his opinion, constitute the play:

It begins with the fall of Buckingham, who is promptly forgotten. Then follow the king's sudden infatuation with Anne Boleyn at a ball given by Wolsey, the trial of Queen Catherine, the sudden fall of Wolsey and the parallel rise of Cranmer. The coronation of Anne Boleyn is presented in great detail. There follows the plot of Gardiner against Cranmer and the Archbishop's absolution by the king, and the play ends with the report of Elizabeth's birth and an elaborate display of her christening, at which Archbishop Cranmer officiates as godfather and ends the play with an elaborate prediction of the great age of peace and prosperity which she is one day to bring to England.¹¹

R. A. Law gives his support to Ribner, makes a similar enumeration of scenes, and asks rhetorically, ‘Are not such incidents … presented to us primarily because Holinshed also records these events during his long account of King Henry's reign?’¹² It is particularly the last act, and within it the last scene, that of Cranmer's prophecy, which have been found inconsequential, or even incompatible with the rest of the play. In 1850 James Spedding declared that the play ‘falls away utterly, and leaves us in the last act among persons we scarcely know, and events for which we do not care’. Law contends that ‘This last act destroys all vestige of unity in the drama as a whole’, while Waage calls the last scene ‘an artificial appendage tacked on at the end to redeem the somber vision of the play as a whole’.¹³ Another main stricture is ‘that the characters are inconsistent, that Buckingham, Wolsey, and Katherine become weak at their falls’.¹⁴ This may also be seen as an aspect of plot structure, but we will leave it aside for the moment.

It may be easily agreed that the structure is episodic and that the play focuses in turn on such divergent concerns as the destruction of Buckingham, the royal divorce, the unmasking of Wolsey, the vindication of Cranmer, and the birth of Elizabeth. In all these actions different characters successively take the centre of the stage and it is hard to decide where to place the centre of interest. If Henry's divorce and remarriage are the main issue one has to wonder what Buckingham is doing in the first two acts, and there is a major unconformity in his disappearance. If, on the other hand, the machinations and disgrace of Wolsey are mainly in question this would make sense of Buckingham but not of Cranmer. In other words the beginning and ending seem not to belong to the same play. It is certainly true that the last act brings a whole new set of people into prominence.

King Henry, of course, is there all along, but what does he do in the play? We do not see him courting Anne except by the briefest of glimpses, or indeed rejecting Katherine except by his silence when she pleads. Nor do we see him facing up to Wolsey openly. In fact we never actually see him overcoming anyone by force or persuasion. He is acted upon but he acts through others, both in toppling Buckingham, securing his divorce, and exposing the cardinal. Only when he steps in to save Cranmer in the fifth act does he become an agent in terms of plot and staging. We do get some information as to his activities by means of narrative and by implication. But even so the impression of his role tends at times to be blurred. And the same is true of Wolsey. Thus in the trial of Katherine there comes a point at the end of Act II when the king exclaims against Wolsey and Campeius for trifling with him: ‘I abhor / This dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome.’ Up to that point the cardinals have obviously been more zealous than the king in pursuing the divorce and it is not made at all clear why the roles seem to be suddenly reversed. To add to the uncertainty they are not actually reversed in the sequel to the abortive trial until after the prelates' private interview with the queen, when we learn (in III.ii) that Wolsey has asked the pope to halt the divorce proceedings on account of the king's being ‘tangled in affection’ to Anne Bullen. Another blurring of roles takes place when the lords gather for their final onslaught on the cardinal and find that all they need to do is push home King Henry's attack. They are at once the king's instruments and his substitutes, and their ambiguous status is emphasised by their not having a written commission from the king. Not unnaturally Wolsey accuses them of envy and malice. The hunt is now theirs.

This blurring is an aspect of what is probably the major plot weakness of the play: the lack of adequately dramatic aims and motivation for the behaviour of the principals. It is shown in the ambiguity of the king's reasons for wanting a divorce, but it is mainly noticeable in the behaviour of Wolsey, the chief fomenter of trouble. At the beginning of the play Wolsey is already as powerful as he can ever hope to become in England. His plans to climb to the papacy do not really affect the plot, nor are they revealed till the moment of his disgrace (III.ii.210-13). His action against Buckingham lacks maturation and his action against Katherine is not in reality directed against her but against her nephew the emperor (II.i.162). Neither Buckingham's fall nor Katherine's serves to advance him. So apart from satisfying his spite it is hard to see what he is after.

The plot, then, is undoubtedly loose in many ways. But strangely enough, and whatever adverse critics may think, it has no remarkable faults or inconsistencies.¹⁵ When expectations are specifically raised and then disappointed they concern relatively unimportant matters, or there are fairly plausible explanations for their not being fulfilled. Thus Buckingham in I.i promises to denounce the cardinal to the king and expose his treason, but since Buckingham is arrested and himself accused of treason before he can reach the king's ear we must assume that he never has a chance to counter-attack. In IV.i the Third Gentleman expresses confidence that Cranmer ‘will find a friend will not shrink from him’ in Thomas Cromwell if matters come to a head between the archbishop and the Bishop of Winchester, and if we remember these words we are likely to be surprised at the feeble support that Cromwell ventures for his friend at the critical moment in the privy council, actually voting with the others for his arrest. But it has to be left to King Henry, of course, to come to Cranmer's aid. I have mentioned King Henry's impatience with the ‘dilatory sloth’ of the cardinals, whom we find immediately after his petulant outburst busily serving his cause with the queen. Other unfulfilled expectations I doubt if there are. It is worth observing that there is no open conflict between Katherine and Anne and we are nowhere led to expect one. Katherine does not even mention Anne at any time. Shakespeare could obviously have written a play in which such a conflict was featured, but he chose to keep the two women apart and the divorce distinct and separate from the marriage except for a very brief verbal hint (II.ii.17-18), and a vague suggestion through the ordering of scenes, that the king has a double motive for divorce. Katherine and Anne relate to the king and Wolsey, not to each other. Anne on the whole is kept in the background (unless we wish to stress her prominence in the coronation show), but by reasons of state she is closely woven into the causal fabric of the play and by her personal history she is firmly linked in the sequence of events.

Modern audiences no doubt have stock responses to Anne Bullen, and our sentimental romantic interest in her character could hardly have been foreseen by Shakespeare. He wrote a play principally about the fall of Katherine and Wolsey, into which the king's romance with Anne was woven more or less incidentally. Anne has speaking parts in two scenes, both of which represent Shakespeare's additions to the scanty material about her in Holinshed, and she appears as a mute in the coronation procession. But apart from these manifestations she is only the subject of talk and rumour, particularly in the long central scene in which King Henry's secret marriage to her is revealed. This is when Wolsey exclaims:

There was the weight that pull'd me down, O Cromwell,
The king has gone beyond me: all my glories
In that one woman I have lost forever.

Henry VIII is a play of a peculiar nature, and it is possible that the dramatist to some extent thought of Anne as a symbolic figure whose importance would be adequately demonstrated in the magnificence of the coronation scene and indirectly in that of the christening of her daughter Elizabeth (where she is absent). She still seems to have an importance in excess of her part in the play, however, and this impression is largely based on the one relatively long scene entirely of Shakespeare's invention where she is really allowed to speak her mind. In the course of a conversation with a fruity Old Lady she asserts that she would not be a queen ‘for all the riches under heaven’. Everything points to her sincerity, but we are never given an opportunity to see it practised or to share in her thoughts and emotions again.

The only difficulty caused by the divided treatment of the two queens is that the lords are made both to grieve at Katherine's misfortune and to rejoice at the happy prospects of her supplanter. There is a contradiction here if one brings their utterances together, but it is a functional contradiction in that it serves to keep our sympathies uncomplicated.

In architectural elevation there may not be anything very imposing in Henry VIII. It is no towering edifice, based and buttressed, one substructure resting upon another. But everything is meshed, consequential, and more subtly interrelated than one may suspect at first. The lords' attack on Wolsey merges inextricably, as we have seen, with that of the king. The trial of Buckingham is not merely a display of power on the part of Wolsey but provides a perspective for the king's fears as to what may happen should he die without legitimate issue,¹⁶ and also a point of reference for his warning to Cranmer near the end of the play that justice may be overborne by corruption.¹⁷ The vision of Katherine's heavenly coronation follows upon Anne's earthly coronation. And so one might go on.

The last example is one of those mentioned by Foakes in illustration of the pattern of contrasts and oppositions which governs the play.¹⁸ G. Wilson Knight, to whom Foakes is largely indebted, sees this pattern as a juxtaposition of sombre and light-hearted scenes with thematic overtones of far-reaching import:

We have accordingly a series of warmly conceived humanistic scenes countering our three falling movements. Those were moralistic, on the pattern of medieval stories of the falls of princes; these are eminently Elizabethan. Effects are deliberately got by juxtaposition, as when Buckingham's execution follows Wolsey's feast and the death of Katharine the coronation of Anne. We attend diversely two views of human existence; the tragic and religious as opposed by the warm, sex-impelled, blood; the eternities of death as against the glow and thrill of incarnate life, of creation. These two themes meet in the person of the King.¹⁹

Foakes particularly emphasises the trials of Buckingham, Katherine, and Cranmer as keystones in the structure of the play, and includes that of Wolsey to make four:

The character of these trials which form the groundwork of the plot is at once public, as they affect the state, and personal, as they affect the protagonists. The conflict they present between the public interest and private joy and suffering is indeed at the heart of the play, and all the contrasts already discussed between neighbouring scenes relate to it.²⁰

Both the pageantry and ‘the numerous scenes of walking lords or gentlemen, who discuss what has happened or is to happen … play a vital part in establishing this general conflict’, according to Foakes.

All this is no doubt close to the truth. There is a pattern, almost a rhythm, of reversals and contrasts, to some extent dependent on an alternation of sad and humorous scenes. There is an insistence on ceremony and some use of the language of ritual. And there is a general conflict between public and private interests. But Knight is carried away by his own poetic imagination and patriotic eloquence far beyond the facts and qualities of the play itself when he finds everything not only in Henry VIII but in all of Shakespeare's work coming to a great climax in Cranmer's prophecy.²¹ And Foakes, more sober, yet allows himself to be moved to praise of the wrong things when at the end of his structural analysis, turning from form to theme, he declares:

This careful organization goes to shape a play radically different from Shakespeare's earlier histories in dealing with peace, and in having for its general theme the promise of a golden future, after trials and sufferings terminating in the attainment of self-knowledge, forgiveness, and reconciliation.²²

One would like to think the prologue and epilogue as well as the rest of the play were written by Shakespeare. But even if they were by Fletcher or someone else, that someone could hardly have misunderstood the tenor and subject of the play so completely as to speak of woe and pity in the prologue and emphasise the role of Katherine in the epilogue if the general theme was ‘the promise of a golden future’. What Knight and Foakes see as the promise of a golden future are rather, as Lee Bliss has it in one of the most lucid and perceptive essays on Henry VIII I have come across, an attempt on Shakespeare's part to present an ideal contrast to the England of Henry VIII as Shakespeare actually described it.²³ The praise of Elizabeth and James I ‘fulfills the didactic function of panegyric in the Renaissance: idealized portraits which heighten the subject's exemplary traits in order to incite emulation’.²⁴

Knight and Foakes claim too much for this play and too little: too much for the patriotic ritual, too little for the psychology. This is probably because they misinterpret the significance of the pattern. Its interest is not in epic breadth but in moral insight. Where they come closest to recognising this fact is in what they have to say about the spiritual and political development of the king. Some critics seem to think that King Henry starts in almost abject dependence on Wolsey and grows in sense and authority till he is in complete command both of himself and his kingdom. This would make Henry VIII a play about the education of a monarch and King Hal another Prince Hal. Wilson Knight, however, whose portrait of Henry is a small masterpiece whatever one may think of his opinions, realises that even at first Henry ‘is not all under the influence of Wolsey’,²⁵ and Foakes sees him ‘as a strong, regal figure, the embodiment of authority’, though ‘initially this authority is subdued under the sway of Wolsey’.²⁶

Henry develops not from weakness to strength but from being deceived and deluded to becoming clearsighted, and this development is one of the main strands of the action. A good deal of suspense is made to hang on the question: how long will the king continue to be taken in by the cardinal and how will he react when he is undeceived? There is a parallel development on the external, political level from his having a papist counsellor, queen, and heir²⁷ to his having a quasi-protestant counsellor, queen, and heir. This movement in the play points naturally enough onward to Cranmer's vision of the reigns of Elizabeth and James. But to emphasise it too strongly would mean to see Katherine as an undesirable encumbrance at best and an evil influence at worst, one whom the king happily gets rid of along with Wolsey, whereas in fact she is depicted as a very saintly Catholic.

There is vision and perspective nevertheless, provided we are not put off by the strangeness of the good king and the good queen appearing on opposite sides of a conflict. The double standard that this division implies is actually the key to the central mystery of Henry VIII. For Shakespeare in his last play staked his all on the knowledge that he had fitfully acquired and taught throughout his career as a dramatist, that which had gone into the making of a Bolingbroke, a Shylock, a Macbeth, a Cleopatra, a Lear, a Leontes, even a Caliban: the knowledge that goodness and badness in most human beings are relative to the point of view and that it is humanity which rises and falls and rises again with its individual members.²⁸ So Henry is a good man when judged by his own standards and a good king when judged by his subjects but an ungrateful and cruel husband when judged by his wife and queen.²⁹ He is independent enough in exercising authority but not, at first, in knowing how and when to delegate it. In this respect he is the opposite of the Henry VI of the Contention plays, who is clearsighted enough but incapable of exerting his authority. His flirtation with Anne while still married to Katherine is not allowed to damage his character in the opinion of his subjects, but it adds a touch of ambivalence to his moral standing in the totality of the play.

Wolsey, the consummate hypocrite, the Tartuffe of Renaissance politics, has few redeeming qualities. But it is this most unlikely person who is selected for the explicit demonstration of Shakespeare's moral theme. In the conversation between Katherine, herself about to die, and her gentleman usher, Griffith, in IV.ii, Wolsey's epitaph is spoken in two contrary and juxtaposed character sketches first by Katherine, summing up all the bad qualities we have seen in evidence, then by Griffith, not denying his faults but reminding Katherine and us that

                              From his cradle
He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one,
Exceeding wise, fair-spoken and persuading:
Lofty and sour to them that lov'd him not,
But to those men that sought him, sweet as summer.
And though he were unsatisfied in getting
(Which was a sin) yet in bestowing, madam,
He was most princely:

(IV.ii.50-7)

Griffith calls to witness the colleges founded by Wolsey at Ipswich and Oxford and concludes by speaking of the cardinal's good end:

His overthrow heap'd happiness upon him,
For then, and not till then, he felt himself,
And found the blessedness of being little;
And to add greater honours to his age
Than man could give him, he died fearing God.

(ll.64-8)

This speech has the effect of making Katherine wish for an equally unbiased obituary for herself by ‘such an honest chronicler as Griffith’. The conversation is also designed to show that for all her loyalty and patience, Katherine is not free from baser feelings of bitterness and hatred. Even in death, we see shortly afterwards, she has human failings. Her pride, which has been so admirable, flares up in a last moment of anger with the messenger who hurries in unceremoniously to announce the presence of Capuchius.

Shakespeare's historical characters were not given to sudden conversions in the early plays. In the case of Wolsey there was Holinshed's authority for his conversion, and Shakespeare in his late maturity was obviously disposed to give prominence to openings for grace. But in the early histories, too, men and women at the point of death were often made to speak with an insight and sometimes with a charity they did not possess before. Thus both Hastings and Buckingham in Richard III blame only themselves for their misfortune and recognise the justice of God in the punishment which overtakes them, and the Yorkist butchers Edward and Clarence are both allowed to die in a spirit of religious humility. There is nothing quite so extraordinary, then, in the pious deaths of Buckingham and Wolsey as some critics maintain, nor are any of the characters inconsistently drawn merely because they are seen from different angles.

There is a case for inconsistency, as I have demonstrated in detail in my introductory chapter, in the portrayal of Buckingham during his last journey from Westminster to the Tower (II.i.55-136). He first declares to Sir Thomas Lovell that he forgives everybody, but immediately afterwards, speaking to Sir Nicholas Vaux, utters a curse against his ‘base accusers, / That never knew what truth meant’. Since it is hard to see what Shakespeare could have intended by making the duke so contradict himself, I am inclined to think, not that Shakespeare nodded but that one of the speeches was an afterthought and that the other should have been deleted if the author had been firm enough or his editors observant enough. It seems likely, too, that the first speech, that addressed to Lovell, was the original one, being closest to Holinshed, and that it should have been replaced by the second speech, the one addressed to Vaux. This would mean that Buckingham is less humble and forgiving in his last moments than some would like to think. What cannot be denied if nothing is omitted in the scene as we have it, is that Buckingham's last sentiments are bitterly misanthropical.³⁰ Perhaps Shakespeare, as he finished his play, came to feel that the pious deaths of his two main opponents, Wolsey and Katherine, were enough, and that three would be too many. He precisely did not want too much abstract patterning. So insight and fortitude Buckingham may have gained, but not reconcilement with his enemies. It is possible to say that he makes a good end, but in observing the good ends made by various characters in Henry VIII we must not blind ourselves to the weaknesses they all also display, Buckingham in particular.

Shakespeare's mature experience of life itself must have had a lot to do with the balanced and mellow vision of humanity which we find in his later plays. But his early immersion in the chronicles of England gathered by Holinshed and Hall and his return to them during the composition of Henry VIII must have played an important part in shaping the psychological relativism which went along with his charitable treatment of both repentant and unrepentant sinners (Gardiner is let off very lightly in Henry VIII), especially when he portrayed men and women who once had real life. Holinshed and Hall themselves drew on different sources for their information and judgments and frequently present divergent or contradictory views of individual characters. Or they disagree between them about people and events.³¹ Shakespeare may at times have been led into contradictory presentations more or less unwittingly by simply following his sources, and certainly his pictures of men like Richard II and Bolingbroke to some extent reflect the shifting attitudes of the chronicles. But he could hardly avoid being consciously struck by many of the contradictions and reflecting on their causes. He would have learnt to look all round a person before trusting any one account. As early as the two Richard plays he had begun to probe inside his characters and to debate the question of identity. Hamlet represents his supreme moment of relativism in this internal exploration of the psyche. It is a further step, philosophically, and perhaps psychologically, to the existential view that we are what we seem to be, and that we may seem different beings to ourselves and others at different times and in different circumstances. This is a typically modern view, but it is anticipated by Shakespeare, and it is this kind of realisation which is dramatised in Henry VIII, where contradiction and ambiguity in the character portrayal are turned into a creative principle, one is tempted to say a principle of structure, so that the characters appear now in one line of vision, now in another. That is why it seems likely enough that the subtitle, or alternative title, of the play was indeed All is True, the name by which Sir Henry Wotton referred to it in his letter to his nephew. I take this to mean not primarily that everything is ‘historically authentic’³² but that seemingly contradictory points of view are equally true. In fact the relativism extends beyond the interpretation of character to the understanding of manners, actions, and events. As Lee Bliss puts it:

Even before the appearance of the king, the first scene sets up a world in which establishing the ‘truth’ in any given situation is exceedingly complicated: prior certainty repeatedly dissolves in the face of later revelations. As the play progresses, its probable subtitle ‘All is True’ and the references to ‘truth’ in the Prologue become increasingly perplexing and ironic. If the facts of history remain constant, those treaties, taxes, deaths and births, rises and falls, become subject to many, even contradictory, interpretations. Any artistic work of course ‘interprets’ through necessary selectivity and compression, but Shakespeare has dramatized the essential limitations in our knowledge of ‘truth’ or human motivation through a proliferation of explanations within the play itself.³³

Henry VIII is remarkable not chiefly for the depth of its probing and its subtlety of penetration, those qualities which we find so strikingly manifested in the great tragedies, but for its wisdom of understanding. Shakespeare may have sensed some of this wisdom in Holinshed, but he brought it out and fleshed it. And to demonstrate his ultimate answer to the riddle of identity he had to use characters who were also true in the sense of being historical. He, too, is the honest chronicler.

We should not be misled, then, by the looseness of the action. Henry VIII is a play of character rather than of plot and intrigue. And the action is chiefly organised to give prominence to changing points of view with regard to characters, so much so that we are constantly assailed by conflicting impressions of them. It is by and by made perfectly clear that Buckingham is innocent of treason and the victim of injustice, but we cannot entirely doubt his surveyor's testimony against him. Wolsey is several times revealed as a machiavellian conspirator, but we cannot entirely doubt his professions of disinterested service. Henry's political sincerity seems unquestionable, but we cannot deny his concupiscence. Anne is both flirtatious and modest. Only Katherine and Cranmer are practically irreproachable, but Cranmer conducts the final divorce proceedings against the queen, and Katherine has the disadvantage of being a Spanish papist and perhaps an illegitimate wife. Not that papism is made a fault of character, and the religious issue is not brought into the open until the last act. But we must count a little on the bias of Shakespeare's audiences.

That bias is itself counteracted as it enters into the ambient vision of the play. Katherine appears in some of the best scenes: in three of them fighting Wolsey and in a fourth preparing for death. The play could well have been conceived as her tragedy, and one may fancy the prologue and epilogue reflecting a lingering-on of that conception. As it is, she becomes part of the human comedy, and her Catholicism one of the elements to be illuminated from opposite sides. There are obviously good and bad Catholics. Just as there are good and bad Englishmen. Just as England itself is viewed by the author's mature understanding—confirming what he knew since he wrote his first history play but never expressed so clearly as when he gave his sympathy to a foreign queen³⁴—as imperfect in fact but perfect in potential.

Notes

1. The pageantry has been emphasised by e.g. G. Wilson Knight in The Crown of Life (1947), Irving Ribner in The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (1957), and John D. Cox in ‘Henry VIII and the Masque’, ELH, 45 (1978) 390-409; the mythic elements by e.g. Howard Felperin in ‘Shakespeare's Henry VIII: History as Myth’, SEL [Studies in English Literature 1500-1900], 6 (1966) 225-46, and Ronald Berman in ‘King Henry the Eighth: History and Romance’, ES [English Studies], 48, 2 (1967) 112-21; the looseness of plot by e.g. Ribner, op. cit., and A. R. Humphreys in his Introduction to the New Penguin H8 (1971).

2. Op. cit., p. 290.

3. Cf. Lee Bliss: ‘This is a rather bleak picture of an England where double-dealing seems the norm rather than the exception, where the king's “pleasure” may be derived from appetite but is understood as law, and where men hardly dare discuss—much less act upon—matters of national concern’ (‘The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth’, ELH 42 (1975) 1-25. See p. 10).

4. Op. cit., pp. 245-6.

5. See R. A. Foakes, Introduction to the New Arden H8 (1957, UP 1968) p. xlix. Foakes particularly refers to Hardin Craig's An Interpretation of Shakespeare (1948).

6. Felperin, pp. 243-4.

7. Frederick O. Waage, ‘Henry VIII and the Crisis of the English History Play’, SSt [Shakespeare Studies], 8 (1975) 297-309; see p. 297 and cf. Lee Bliss, op. cit., esp. p. 19.

8. Berman, op. cit., p. 118.

9. New Penguin H8, p. 19. Humphreys (p. 18) allies himself with Aldis Wright and David Nichol Smith and quotes Wright's opinion of H8: ‘without plot, without development, without any character on which the interest can be concentrated throughout.’

10. A. R. Humphreys in the main defends the division of the play between Shakespeare and Fletcher suggested by James Spedding in 1850—see the New Penguin H8, pp. 21ff. He also provides a useful critical list of the main contenders for and against the collaboration theory pp. 50-4. To the supporters of collaboration may be added Cyrus Hoy and to the defenders of Shakespeare's sole authorship Irving Ribner, Howard Felperin, H. M. Richmond, and Lee Bliss.

11. Ribner, p. 291. See also Humphreys, New Penguin H8, pp. 35-9.

12. R. A. Law, ‘The Double Authorship of Henry VIII’, SP [Studies in Philology], 56 (1959) 471-88. See p. 488.

13. Spedding is quoted by Foakes, Arden H8, p. xlvii; Law, op. cit., p. 486; Waage, op. cit., p. 297.

14. Foakes, Arden H8, p. xlviii. Foakes does not endorse this view but refers it to a number of adverse critics of the play's structure whom he lists in a footnote: W. A. Wright, D. Nichol Smith, A. A. Parker, Eugene M. Waith, and R. Boyle.

15. Buckingham's valedictory speeches in II.i are inconsistent (see my introductory chapter and pp. 155-6 below) but not so as to create any major problems outside that scene.

16. See especially I.ii.132-5 and II.iv.168-79. It is interesting to notice that the question of legitimacy, so much at the centre of the early plays, is also present in H8. The links with KJ are especially strong in this respect.

17. See v.i.129-33. The king now admits that ‘such things have been done’.

18. Arden H8, p. lii.

19. G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life, p. 306.

20. Arden H8, pp. liii-liv.

21. Knight, pp. 334-6.

22. Arden H8, p. lviii.

23. See note 3 above.

24. Bliss, op. cit., p. 20.

25. Knight, pp. 306-15.

26. Arden H8, pp. lxi, lxiii. Cf. Bullough, Sources, IV, p. 448.

27. Henry's daughter Mary is mentioned by the king in II.iv.172-9 and by Katherine in IV.ii.131-8.

28. That human individuals could be both good and bad at the same time was always a part of Shakespeare's psychological and moral insight. That they could be greatly good and greatly bad at the same time was demonstrated in R2. A more penetrating character analysis is found in Julius Cæsar. To quote Geoffrey Bullough (Sources, V, p. 57):

    what Shakespeare learned from Plutarch was to represent more clearly than before the paradoxes of human motive, the mixture of good and evil in the same person. […] In Julius Cæsar the dramatist achieves a somewhat detached tolerance in his attitude towards historical figures, and at the same time a critical attitude towards politics and those who take part in it.

    At least one critic has also found a psychological relativism in Julius Cæsar similar to that which I find to be central in H8: see Rene E. Fortin, ‘Julius Cæsar: An Experiment in Point of View’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], XIX, 4 (Autumn 1968) 341-7.

29. For Katherine's judgment of Henry see also Bliss, op. cit., p. 11.

30. Buckingham's warning against false friends may even be seen to be directed against the king. Wolsey's famous last words (‘… he would not in mine age / Have left me naked to mine enemies’) are certainly a veiled accusation of the king for his ingratitude. And Katherine cannot entirely conceal her bitterness. Is there a little of Webster's political radicalism in Shakespeare's last play?

31. See also Bliss, op. cit., pp. 5-6: ‘Shakespeare capitalizes on the inconsistencies of the chronicles and with them enhances his use of multiple sympathetic perspectives.’

32. Humphreys, Penguin H8, p. 8: ‘The title as Wotton cites it—All is True—was perhaps an alternative to that using the King's name, and meant to draw attention, as the Prologue also does, to the play's unusual care to be historically authentic.’ Contrast Felperin's view, op. cit., p. 227: ‘Henry VIII departs from history, that is, from Holinshed, more radically than any of the earlier dramas—so much so, that the subtitle of the play, “All Is True”, makes one wonder whether Shakespeare is not ironically hinting that we revise our conventional notions of historical truth, even of mimetic truth itself.’

33. Bliss, op. cit., p. 3.

34. There remains an anti-foreign bias which finds an explicit outlet in the proclamation against French manners in I.iii. It must be supposed that the proclamation is issued by the king and is designed to set him in a favourable light. It has no other dramatic significance.