In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham represents the view of many Elizabethans when he decrees it to be the task of "historical Poesie" to record the "famous acts of Princes and the vertuous and worthy lives of our forefathers" (54). Arthur B. Ferguson, in his influential study, Clio Unbound, expands on this notion and suggests that Tudor historians cared little about social customs, institutions, and beliefs, and perhaps even less about secondary and largely informal causes, or anything else that reached "beyond the history of states as told in terms of the acts, the ambitions, and the tragic dilemmas of the actors themselves" (4,5). Alvin Kernan unites these views when he observes that Tudor playwrights appropriate the typical historical pattern for their historical dramas: "a weak or saintly king makes political mistakes and is overthrown by rebellious and arrogant subjects; the kingdom becomes a wasteland and society a chaos in which every man's hand is set against his fellow; after a period of great suffering, reaction against the forces of evil occurs, and a strong and good king restores order" (264). Henry VIII, it has been claimed repeatedly, is an aesthetic failure because it lacks a strong king as well as cohesive philosophy of history (Ribner 191).

It must be conceded that Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII fails to meet expectations raised by both Tudor historiographical practice and historical drama. The king is neither Puttenham's "great man," nor Kernan's "strong and good king [who] restores order." Joseph Candido describes him as a "well-intentioned yet strangely inattentive king" who fails "to address himself to the deep religious and political differences that divide his ministers" (56, 57). He is "blithely superficial" in his approach to the "grave and divisive issues of his reign" and too out of touch "to inspire our confidence in quite the same way that Henry V or even Bolingbroke does" (Candido 57). The central question here is whether Shakespeare and Fletcher are trying to portray the traditional "weak ruler" or aiming at something altogether different.

A second question is whether the play's episodic structure is due to a lack of both a consistent dramatic design and "a coherent and meaningful philosophy of history" (Ribner 291), or is instead a deliberate effort to portray history differently. How we answer these questions hinges on how we view the play's final scene and how we read Archbishop Cranmer's speech at the christening of Princess Elizabeth. Ostensibly at heaven's bidding, the Archbishop of Canterbury foretells the Age of Elizabeth as a golden world. She shall shower on England "a thousand thousand blessings"; "every man shall eat in safety / Under his own vine what he plants, and sing / The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours"; and "God shall be truly known" (Henry VIII 5.4.19, 33-35, 35). The nature of this speech is important because after the turmoil portrayed in the play—the opportunistic removal of the loyal Queen Katherine, the equally expedient execution of the Duke of Buckingham, and the timely fall of the powerful and corrupt Cardinal Wolsey—Cranmer tries to restore social order in the Henrician state by proffering a prophetic history of the next seven or eight decades. He links the Elizabethan past (which flows from the Henrician past) to the Jacobean present: "Nor shall this peace sleep with her" because her successor, James I, shall be "as great in admiration as herself," inherit her "blessedness," and "He shall flourish, / And like a mountain cedar, reach his branches / To all the plains about him: our children's children [i.e., James's generation] / Shall see this and bless heaven" (42, 43, 52-55). In this decidedly teleological oration it is the promise of the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I which underwrites the appropriateness of Henry's rule. But what is a promise to Cranmer's audience in 1533 is of course history to his audience in 1613. In short, how we respond to the play as a whole depends greatly on how we respond to Cranmer's rendering of Tudor-Stuart history.

Commentators who view the play as an aesthetic success turn to this final scene (and its historiography) to unify its various elements into a meaningful whole. Paul Dean, for instance, contends that while the "falls" of Buckingham, Katherine, and Wolsey and the "rises" of Anne Bullen and Thomas Cranmer are not unrelated, they are best understood "as a translation into dramatic terms of the undulations of the Wheel of Fortune which controls the action" (Dean 177). Dean acknowledges and then unifies the play's episodic structure by invoking the medieval de casibus tradition, thus explaining a Jacobean history play in terms of an essentially medieval theory of history. Frank V. Cespedes argues "that the structure of Henry VIII is designed to force upon its audience an awareness of two things at once: the fortunate march of English history toward the reign of Elizabeth [and James], and the 'sad,' 'woeful' story . . . of individuals during Henry VIII's reign who unwittingly helped to shape, and perished in the unfolding of, this historical process" (Cespedes 415). Thus the play presents the Jacobean viewer with "a conflict between historical ends and means" (415) of an essentially "'good' historical process" (437). Matthew H. Wikander simply notes that the Buckingham, Katherine, and Wolsey episodes "befog" the "play's historiography," which really "celebrates the stability and continuity of the monarchy in a manner even more providential than that of the Tudor chronicles" (46, 47). If Cranmer constitutes the standard of historical judgment in the play, then Dean's and Cespedes's readings are compelling; but I think we ought to resist granting the Archbishop such special status. Indeed, I want to do what neither the play's detractors nor those who try to save its reputation do, which is consider the possibility that Shakespeare and Fletcher give us not a disunified play about history but a play about disunified history.¹ The latter alternative, rather than harking back to medieval notions of history, looks to the more "modern" world of Jacobean historiography to illuminate the play. Choosing it allows us to see that despite the christening scene's power and pathos, Cranmer's effort to produce dramatic and historical closure is an ideological move that is undercut by other historical "voices" of the play.

Although Frances A. Yates has eloquently argued that the play depicts a return to the John Foxean way of viewing "Tudor reform of the Church as an imperial reform" carried out here by Henry VIII (68, 67-82), we should not conclude that a nostalgia for things Elizabethan necessarily led a Jacobean audience to embrace uncritically the Archbishop's narrow, medieval, providential conception of history. Since Cranmer is without a doubt the King's mouthpiece (he is instrumental in providing the legal means for the divorce), we do well here to remember Jean Bodin's admonition voiced in the Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (translated into English by Thomas Heywood in 1608) against looking for "the truth of history . . . in the Commentaries of Kinges, for they are given to speake largely of their own praises, but to make no use of those Observations which are little or nothing interessed in their praise or disgrace" (12). If this edict applies to Henry, it must also apply to his agent Cranmer. Moreover, I will show there is reason to conclude that Cranmer's unifying historiography sounded archaic and unsophisticated not only to more learned Jacobeans but also to those who were raised on the popular histories of Holinshed, Hall, Grafton, and others. From their own reading of the histories, Shakespeare and Fletcher certainly understood that Cranmer's conception of history was dated, and, to make sure the viewer understood the same, they set Cranmer's ideologically driven "good" historical process in competition with other, more recent methods of historical representation. In the episodes detailing the fortunes of Queen Katherine, the Duke of Buckingham, and Cardinal Wolsey, Shakespeare and Fletcher draw on distinct and at times theoretically incompatible "schools" of Renaissance historical thought. The Buckingham episode confronts questions of eye-witness evidence and hearsay; Katherine's divorce and disgrace foreground questions of historical (and legal) precedent versus innovation; while Wolsey's plunge from power in the play is in part facilitated by an antiquarian appeal to evidence that speaks for itself.

One notable effect of dramatizing these historiographies is a highlighting of their acute differences as knowledge-producing practices—differences that produce not historical clarity or certainty but epistemological ambiguity. Such ambiguity was a relatively new phenomenon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As Phyllis Rackin observes, "Historiographic writing no longer had a direct, unequivocal relation with historical truth. Alternative accounts of historical events and opposed interpretations of their causes and significance now threatened each other's credibility, a process intensified by the development of the printing industry and the spread of literacy" (Rackin 13). What is more, the crown itself began to take an increasingly active role in historiographical argumentation. In the Tudor era, we can trace the alliance between royal legitimation and historiography back to Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia (1534), a work commissioned by Henry VIII's father for the construction not only of a history for England but also of a compelling foundation for the Tudor dynasty. Henry VIII was certainly no less aware than his father of history's political utility. For instance, in his 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals—a document produced primarily for the specific purpose of establishing England as an autonomous nation independent from Rome—Henry appeals to the authority of "histories and chronicles" to authenticate the position of the monarch. A passage from the 1533 Act reads: "Where, by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic . . . be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience . . ." (Stephenson and Marcham 304). Richard Halpern observes that James had already argued in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies that the kings of Scotland historically (and therefore legally) preceded "any estates or ranks of men . . . any Parliaments . . . or lawes." The kings and no one else, James maintained, erected states, devised and formed governments, and "were authors and makers of the Lawes" (Halpern 223). In the Trew Law, James admits "that in the first beginning of Kings rising among the Gentiles . . . men choosed out one among themselves . . . to maintaine the weakest in their right," virtually conceding that historically speaking the monarch owes his powers to the people. But he then goes on to explain that this scenario hardly applies to Scotland: "For as our Chronicles beare witnesse, this Ile, and especially our part of it, being scantly inhabited, but by very few, and they as barbarous and scant of ciuility, as number, there comes our first King Fergus, with a great number with him, out of Ireland, which was long inhabited before us, and making himself master of the countrey, by his owne friendship and force, as well of the Irelandmen that came with him, as of the countrey-men that willing fell to him, hee made himself King and Lord. . . . Thereafter he and his successors . . . made and established their lawes. . . . So the trewth is directly contrarie in our state to the false affirmation of such seditious writers, as would perswade vs, that the Lawes and state of our countrey were established before admitting of a king . . ." (James I 61-62).

As we witness in Henry VIII, such historiographical pluralism is flexible enough to serve the state as it disposes of a Duke with pretensions to the throne, a Queen who is too old to bear a male heir, and an increasingly powerful and autocratic Cardinal. Yet since James I himself increasingly turned to historical argumentation to assert himself unequivocally on such momentous issues as royal prerogative and the crown's relationship to the law of the land, and since, as J. G. A. Pocock observes, "historical criticism became one of the sharpest weapons of monarchy" (17), it is easy to see how any epistemological ambiguity stemming from historiographical eclecticism could also destabilize the monarch's authority on such matters. Hence, in Henry VIII the Henrician state first exploits historiographical diversity and then tries to provide historical closure and clarity by attempting to erase or, at the very least, suppress the ambiguities that sprout from that diversity. In the scene depicting Elizabeth's christening, Cranmer's providential account of royal genealogy appropriates and reorders the discontinuous elements of Tudor (and Stuart) royal history under the all-embracing rubric of God's plan for England. The problem of course is that the historiographical eclecticism of the play strongly resists such a totalizing move. Taken as a whole, therefore, the play focuses not on the inevitable outcome of a historical process, as Cranmer submits, but on the various historiographical strategies that can be employed to make the outcome appear inevitable. Henry VIII draws our attention to the operations by means of which historiography produces a past and the ways in which historiography and historians mystify those operations by sanctifying them.

When Henry VIII is viewed in light of its serious interest in the process of historiographical representation, we can begin to extricate the play from the "Elizabethan" context in which so many critics have deemed it aesthetically inferior, and to which others have tried to make it conform. Although, as several critics have observed, Henry VIII does sporadically seem active behind the scenes, he is a far cry from the protagonist of the Elizabethan history play who, in the words of Leonard Tennenhouse, is able to "seize hold of the symbols and signs legitimizing authority and wrest them from his rivals, thus making them serve his own interests" (121). This presentation of the King, however, is quite deliberate. One of the conclusions of this essay is that far from being a successful or failed Elizabethan heroic play (in which a strong protagonist like Henry V or Henry VII triumphs over historical conflict), Shakespeare and Fletcher's account of the reign of Henry VIII precisely emphasizes the impotence of "powerful" individuals in the face of a network of mostly "invisible" and inscrutable historical forces that beset them from all sides.