This context for Truth would seem to confirm readings of Henry VIII, or All is True as a firmly Protestant, apocalyptic play. Cranmer's prophetic emphasis on Time and Truth evokes an iconographie tradition central to the representation of Protestant hopes and it provides a resounding resolution to the political dilemmas dramatised in the course of the play. Yet several critics (e.g. [Lee Bliss, "The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix in Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth, " English Literary History 42; 1975]) have rejected readings of Henry VIII which begin with Cranmer's speech and then look back at previous events in light of that speech. For these critics, there is a strangeness, an uncertainty, about Henry VIII which is not resolved by locating the play within a tradition of unquestioning apocalypticism: Cranmer's prophecy may come as a final revelation in the play and it may seem to echo the language of apocalypse, but (pace Frances Yates) Henry VIII can hardly be called an apocalyptic play. As Clifford Leech pointed out nearly forty years ago [in "The Structure of the Last Plays," Shakespeare Survey 11, 1958],

Of all the last plays [Henry VIII] is the one that most clearly indicates the cyclic process. Nothing is finally decided here, the pattern of future events being foreshadowed as essentially a repetition of what is here presented.

Paul Dean similarly suggests [in "Dramatic mode and Historical Vision in Henry VIII, " Shakespeare Quarterly 37, 1986] that in Henry VIII there is no 'organic and cumulative movement toward a single concluding point' (178). And for Frank Cespedes ['"We Are One in Fortunes': The Sense of History in Henry VIII," in English Literary Renaissance 10, 1980], the play, despite its status as a 'history play,'

annuls eschatology and teleology. Against the optimistic principle of providential history invoked by Cranmer, the play emphasises the uncertainties of history in order to question the availability of an omniscient' perspective on historical events.

(416-7)

This suggests a tension (a defining tension, even) within Henry VIII between linear and cyclical forces. It is as if the play sets the Protestant teleological vision against a mythic sense of time as a cycle; and the key issue provoked by this linear / cyclical struggle becomes, perhaps oddly, not structure but tone. After all, while apocalyptieism is typically humourless, the cyclical and the ridiculous are rarely far apart: the inevitable repeat and return of serious events makes them more ironic, less serious.

Juxtaposing two examples of testimony—a description within the play of an event prior to the action of the play and a contemporary eyewitness description of a performance of Henry VIII—might help to underline the nature of the play's uncertainties. The testimony from the play proper is Norfolk's description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold (I. i. 13-38); the account of the performance is the letter of Henry Wotton which is the principal evidence for the date of first production. Critics seem to agree that the opening scene is in many ways representative of the play as a whole 'in its insistence on the second-hand nature of our acquaintance with historical events' (Dean 1986, 182). It is, as Gasper puts it, 'an artful piece of time-release poetry … which appears to be a panegyric of the court, but which reveals more and more scepticism, disgust and ridicule the more often we read it' (Gasper 1993, 208). Initially, though, we take Norfolk's glorious description at face value. He describes himself to Buckingham as 'ever since a fresh admirer' (I. i. 3) of the spectacle put on by the kings of England and France as they met to conclude peace at the Field of the Cloth of Gold:

                      To-day the French,
All clinquant all in gold, like heathen gods
Shone down the English; and to-morrow they
Made Britain India: every man that stood
Show'd like a mine. … Now this masque
Was cried incomparable; and th'ensuing night
Made it a fool and beggar. The two kings
Equal in lustre, were now best, now worst,
As presence did present them: him in eye
Still him in praise, and being present both,
'Twas said they saw but one, and no discerner
Durst wag his tongue in censure.
                           (I. i. 18-22, 26-33)

Yet within a few dozen lines we gather that the whole thing was a waste of time, a temporary peace which 'not values / The cost that did conclude it' (I. i. 88-9). And we recognise, looking back at the speech, that it expressed a kind of relativism. The English and French are each viewed in light of the other, with no firm ground for judgement: 'The two kings / Equal in lustre, were now best, now worst, / As presence did present them' (I. i. 28-30). And we are brought up sharp with recognition of the emptiness of the grand gesture. As Lee Bliss observes, in arguably the best reading of Henry VIII to date, '[i]n the beginning all had seemed true to Norfolk and, in his report, to us; only in retrospect can we see how false, how truly unstable … that appearance was' (Bliss 1975, 3). And we rapidly come to the conclusion that

'admire' did not signify wonder in the sense of approbation, but rather an ironic sense of amazement at the disparity between a dream of transcendent and transforming harmony and the disconcertingly mutable political realities of an impoverished nobility and a broken treaty. (Bliss 1975, 3)

In Norfolk's testimony, then, judgement and therefore truth are seen to be at best contingent. The accolade goes to the champion of the moment, but the decision is arbitrary, the moment fleeting, and the triumph glitteringly hollow.

Sir Henry Wotton's letter describing one of the first performances of the play implies in a different way that grandeur is by definition short-lived. Pomp cannot withstand scrutiny, since familiarity breeds contempt:

The King's players had a new play, called All is true, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII, 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 garters, the Guards with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous. ([The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 2 vols., 1907, edited by Logan Pearsall Smith], 32-3)

Wotton is clearly concerned that pomp without distance becomes revealing and therefore self-defeating. The truth (i.e. the irony) of the accuracy and care with which the play represents royal ceremony seems akin to Toby's efforts in Tristram Shandy to explain where he was wounded: the more precisely you show the details, the further from the truth you move and the more ridiculous you seem. In Henry VIII this movement is most clearly embodied in the conversations of the two choric Gentlemen, notably in Act IV, as they watch the Coronation procession pass by.

The detailed stage directions in the First Folio are echoed in the Gentlemen's comments:

2 Gent. A royal train, believe me: these I
  know;
Who's that that bears the sceptre?
1 Gent.                    Marquess Dorset,
And that the Earl of Surrey with the rod.
                                 (IV i. 37-39)

This detailing is apparently neutral: we simply absorb the display of power without question. Until, that is, the Gentlemen begin to move towards their more usual mode of irony. We have already seen the way in which conscience and lust have become intertwined in the king's manoeuvrings to gain Anne Bullen. The king repeatedly claims it is his conscience about his technically incestuous relationship with Katherine that is driving him to divorce. But the audience's suspicions of his motivations are compounded by his turn of phrase when he speaks of his regret at leaving 'so sweet a bedfellow,' crying 'But conscience, conscience; / O 'tis a tender place, and I must leave her' (II. ii. 142-3).⁶ Shortly afterwards, in mocking Anne for disguising ambition within her ostensible modesty, the Old Lady speaks with heavy innuendo of 'the capacity' of Anne's 'soft cheveril conscience' to receive gifts, if she 'might please to stretch it' (II. iii. 31-3). These moments of irony resurface at Anne's coronation. The Second Gentleman seems wholly caught up in the ceremony, but his rhapsody concludes with a suggestive, and politically dangerous, bathos:

Our king has all the Indies in his arms
And more, and richer, when he strains that
 lady;
I cannot blame his conscience
                                (IV. i. 45-7)

His friend ignores this aside, but returns to the topic himself a few lines later. 'These are stars indeed—' says the Second Gentleman, admiring the courtly women, to which the First Gentleman adds, 'And sometimes falling ones,' a remark risqué enough (laying bare, as it does, Anne's perceived route to power) to produce a 'No more of that' from his interlocutor. Detail, then, both of the king's motivations and of the practical staging of royal display, leads directly to ridicule, greatness made thoroughly overfamiliar.

The issue of testimony thus foregrounds the uncertainties of the play. There is no firm basis for the interpretation of events: witnessing and irony become blood-brothers. And it is not just interpretation but events themselves which seem ever more problematic as the play goes on. For Pierre Sahel [in "The Strangeness of a Dramatic Style: Rumour in Henry VIII" Shakespeare Survey 38, 1985],

[m]ost of the events of Henry VIII are echoed—more or less unfaithfully—within the play itself. They are not dramatized but reported after having passed through distorting filters. Characters present incidents and occurrences—or, often, their own versions of incidents and occurrences. (145)

The effect of this filtering of events is to sustain a sense of radical uncertainty throughout the play. For Sahel, it is rumour which sets the tone: rumour sometimes as a political tool, sometimes simply as the 'buzzing' (II. i. 148) which seems constantly to be going on in the background of each scene. Despite fears of suppression ['no discerner / Durst wag his tongue in censure' (I. i. 32-3)], rumour is never silenced. The absolute Truth upon which the Prologue seemed to stand and upon which Cranmer's prophecy will depend is rapidly submerged in report and opinion.

The relationship between rumour and truth is overtly questioned at the beginning of Act II in another of the Gentlemen's conversations. '[D]id you not,' asks the Second Gentleman, 'of late days hear / A buzzing of a separation / Between the king and Katherine?' 'Yes,' replies his friend,

                    but it held not
For when the king once heard it, out of anger
He sent command to the lord mayor straight
To stop the rumour, and allay those tongues
That durst disperse it.

To which the Second Gentleman immediately retorts:

             But that slander, sir,
Is found a truth now; for it grows again
Fresher than e'er it was, and held for certain
The king will venture at it.
                               (II. i. 147-156)

That clause 'held for certain' neatly captures the tone: certainty occupies the same space as opinion. Truth, in this context, is equated with slander: the two seem interchangeable, dependent simply upon the succession of events and the way things are viewed from moment to moment. Communication thus becomes a process which simultaneously transmits and degrades truth, an organic and inescapable infection: 'it grows again / Fresher than e'er it was.' The build-up to this exchange of rumour is both revealing and complex. The Second Gentleman drops a broad hint of occult knowledge: 'yet I can give you inkling / Of an ensuing evil, if it fall, / Greater than this' (II. i. 140-2). His friend's eager, staccato reply is a masterpiece of contradiction, desiring while denying the desire to know the truth (or, rather, the rumour). It also emphasises faith, not just as trustworthiness but as belief: 'Good angels keep it from us: / What may it be? you do not doubt my faith sir?' To which the Second Gentleman responds, teasingly, 'This secret is so weighty, 'twill require / A strong faith to conceal it.' 'Let me have it,' cries the First Gentleman, 'I do not talk much,' a comment generally guaranteed to raise a laugh in performance, since the only capacity in which we have seen the speaker is as a gossip and rumour-monger.

Faith and truth are thus contiguous, and they are equally abused in the process of communication. In fact, the play seems to move towards a proleptic acknowledgement of current definitions of testimony. For Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub [Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, 1992], testimony is

not simply (as we commonly perceive it) the observing, the recording, the remembering of an event, but an utterly unique and irreplaceable topographical position with respect to an occurrence.

(206)

Individual testimony becomes not one person's perspective on a single coherent truth of which the witness sees only one facet, but rather 'the uniqueness of the performance of a story which is constituted by the fact that, like the oath, it cannot be carried out by anybody else' (Felman and Laub 1992, 206). Certainly, Henry VIII seems to dwell on the radical and unbridgeable difference between the perspectives different witnesses have on the same event, to the extent that the event itself cannot clearly be said to have happened. Far from sustaining a sense of Truth as a Protestant absolute, the play makes truth an impossibility. Everyone, from Buckingham and his surveyor to Wolsey and Cranmer, claims a monopoly of truth. They cannot all be right. This is the fundamental problem for any attempt to locate the play's obsession with truth in relation to apocalyptic, militant Protestantism, and it puts intolerable pressure on the last scene. The key question is whether this equivocal mood can be fully transformed by Cranmer's prophecy, whether apocalyptic Truth can assert herself above the arbitrariness of the rumour-ridden political world, and even whether the prophecy is as resolutely apocalyptic as has been claimed.