Though grounded in history, the pattern of ascent and descent is analogous to that of romance, with its highs and lows, its voyages and reunions, things lost and found. It was originally staged under the title All Is True, a wittily ironic pointer to its romance-matter, such as Queen Katherine’s divine vision, which can hardly be literally true. Shakespeare and Fletcher may have chosen to infuse their play with the spirit of romance, so far from the tough world of the Richard and the other Henry plays, in order to create a safety zone that was necessary because Henry VIII dramatizes the still contentious issue over which England broke from the Church of Rome, the replacement of Queen Katherine with Anne Bullen. The crux of the action is the fall of Wolsey, mediator between the king and the Pope. It becomes the occasion not to pass judgment on the rights and wrongs of the Reformation, but for a generalized reflection on the fickleness of fortune and the fruitlessness of hanging “on princes’ favours.” Henry VIII was a great favorite on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stage. That was partly because of the opportunity for spectacle provided by the coronation and the play’s other scenes of procession and court business. But it was also because of the opportunity given to actors by Wolsey’s great set piece:
Farewell? A long farewell to all my greatness.
This is the state of man: today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes: tomorrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him:
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do.
Shakespeare’s Elizabethan history plays were dominated by wars, either civil or on French soil, and battles for succession to the crown. They were written in times of war when the question of the succession to Elizabeth was deeply troubling to the nation. Henry VIII, by contrast, was written after several years of peace. Indeed, King James regarded himself as an international peacemaker. Furthermore, he was a married king, so there was no anxiety about the succession, despite the nation’s sorrow at the premature death of his eldest son, Prince Henry, in November 1612. The wedding of the king’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, to Frederick the Elector Palatine, the most prominent Protestant ruler in continental Europe, was postponed until February 1613 so as not to be overshadowed by the funeral. Henry VIII, a play with both a royal death and a royal wedding, was written in the next few months.
Despite the Protestant match for the princess, there were anxieties about a possible revival of Roman Catholicism: the religious allegiance of James’s queen was a matter of public interest about which rumors circulated. And there was considerable concern over court favorites, as different factions jostled for power. Ever since the spectacular entrance procession of King James into London at the beginning of his reign, the new court had displayed its power through pageantry. The theater played a key role here. The king, his family, and his courtiers participated actively in masques, and, in their new capacity as the King’s Men, Shakespeare and his fellows were frequently called upon to play at court. All these concerns are woven into the fabric of Henry VIII, making it a distinctively Jacobean drama.
Kingly authority is asserted by pageantry, but also by the ruthless axing of counselors who have served their purpose. Buckingham says of York that “No man’s pie is freed / From his ambitious finger,” a sentiment that could apply to any one of the play’s thrusting courtiers as they jostle for the top seat at the table of power. A stage direction in the third act is typical of both the world of the drama and the environment that Shakespeare would have experienced when he took his men to play at court: “Exit King, frowning upon the Cardinal, the nobles throng after him, smiling and whispering.”
The question inevitably raised is whether or not the personal authority of the monarch is absolute. In order to please the courtly audience it was necessary for Shakespeare and Fletcher to follow a broadly pro-Henry line, but there do seem to be moments when a critique of the conscience of the king is built into the action. Specifically, a series of puns on words such as “prick” and “rule” imply that his policy is being determined by his sex drive as much as his desire to serve and shape his nation. The king clearly suffers a failure of “temperance,” a key Protestant virtue, in relation to Anne. And at the most elementary structural level, there is a tension between the representation of the two queens and the state ideology of Protestantism. Katherine of Aragon is the Catholic queen who becomes a near-saint granted a divine vision, while Anne, the trigger for the Reformation, is given a very small part and serves primarily as an object of sexual desire. Equally, although the chancellorship of Sir Thomas More only figures briefly in the play, there is a clear allusion to his subsequent martyrdom for the Catholic cause:
That’s somewhat sudden,
But he’s a learnèd man. May he continue
Long in his highness’ favour, and do justice
For truth’s sake and his conscience, that his bones,
When he has run his course and sleeps in blessings,
May have a tomb of orphans’ tears wept on him.
Shakespeare’s late plays share a fascination with the very different directions in which poetic language may lead. Elaborate rhetoric and honeyed words reveal how the verbal arts are tools for preferment and power. Words are both baits for advancement and means of getting off the hook: “may it like your grace / To let my tongue excuse all.” On other occasions, there is a plangent poetry of withdrawal, of retirement from the courtly fray. How is one to achieve inner peace in this world of political turmoil? The courtiers have varying degrees of success in their attempts to learn the Senecan art of patience, of using soliloquy and self-examination as a means of coming to terms with the buffets of political fortune. For Queen Katherine, uniquely, there is a moment of transcendence and divine vision. But it is only a moment, ending with a dissolution analogous to that of Prospero’s masque in The Tempest: “Spirits of peace, where are ye? Are ye all gone, / And leave me here in wretchedness behind ye?”
The voice that is absent from Henry VIII is the one that was so forceful in Henry IV and Henry V: the commoners, whose plain prose pricks the bubble of pretentious courtly language. As in The Winter’s Tale, gentlemen are brought on stage in the role of witnesses. But there are no equivalents to The Winter’s Tale’s lower-class characters of shepherd and clown. The only prose intervention belongs to a porter in the final act, who hears the hubbub of young gallants outside the closed door of the council chambers. “These are the youths that thunder at a playhouse, and fight for bitten apples,” he remarks, perhaps implying that of the three audiences for whom Shakespeare was writing—the court, the select company of the indoor Blackfriars theater, and the mass public who paid a penny to stand in the yard of the Globe—it is the first two who now interest him more. Insofar as the play does explore the consciousness of the low born, it is when a commoner such as Cromwell and above all Wolsey—son of a provincial butcher—becomes a “great” man, provoking the enmity of the dukes and earls born to ermine. At some level, Shakespeare—son of a provincial glover who had close links with butcher’s business—is reflecting upon his own extraordinary rise. Fletcher, by contrast, was born into a higher social echelon; he and Beaumont did write for the public stage, but always with a particular eye to the court audience.
There was, perhaps, a particular frisson when the play was performed at the Blackfriars, since this was the very location of the trial of Queen Katherine. But there is no doubt that Henry VIII was also played at the Globe soon after it was written. At a performance in June 1613, there was an accident when “chambers” (small cannon) were discharged in the fourth scene, resulting in the burning down of the theater. One of the several surviving accounts of the fire, by the diplomat Sir Henry Wotton, combines reportage with a perceptive reading of the play:
Now, to let matters of state sleep, I will entertain you at the present wit
h what has happened this week at the Bank’s side. 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. Now, King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain chambers being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.
Wotton’s account reveals how much care the King’s Men took in their efforts to represent “pomp and majesty” on stage: from the matting on the floor to the garters and crosses of St. George on the costumes, everything is contrived “to make greatness very familiar.” Intriguingly, though, the effect of transforming royal processions through Whitehall and Westminster into passages of a play on the matted stage of a thatched theater in the margins of Southwark is also to make greatness seem just a little ridiculous. The representation of the intrinsic theatricality of state power hints at its flimsiness, its reliance on the same mechanisms of show as those of the theater. Wotton’s insight serves as an epilogue not just on Henry VIII but on Shakespeare’s whole sequence of English history plays: on his stage, the people of England became intimately familiar for the first time with the story of their great ones, and at the same time they learned—through laughter and through debate—to respect the structures of greatness just a little less. Having witnessed the fall of lords and even monarchs on the boards of the Globe, they were ready some forty years later to erect a scaffold in Whitehall and witness the fall of an axe on the head of a real king.
ABOUT THE TEXT
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).
But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of a few plays there are hundreds of differences between the Quarto and Folio editions, some of them far from trivial.
If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rushlight and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.
But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a reasonably well-printed Quarto was available, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater-life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the RSC Shakespeare, in both Complete Works and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in the Textual Notes.
Both King John and Henry VIII were first printed in the Folio. An anonymous two-part play entitled The Troublesome Reign of King John, first printed in 1591, was attributed to Shakespeare in both its 1611 and 1622 reprints, though his authorship is extremely unlikely. The Folio text of King John is very clean, which argues against it being set from authorial papers, though its lack of theatrical notation seems to suggest otherwise. There are problems with inconsistency of speech headings, though, and the whole picture seems to add up to the printer’s copy being a pre-theatrical text copied by multiple scribes. The text of Henry VIII is clean and well printed, and is generally considered to have been set from a carefully prepared scribal copy. It features unusually full and detailed stage directions that make large demands on the available cast, although they seem to have been carefully copied from Holinshed, the play’s chief source. It does not follow, therefore, that they necessarily reflect performance or that the copy from which the Folio text was set was theatrical.
The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:
Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including King John or Henry VIII, so the lists here are editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “BLANCHE of Castile, John’s niece”).
Locations are provided by Folio for only two plays, but not for either King John or Henry VIII. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (“another part of the palace” or similar). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before.
Act and Scene Divisions were provided in Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. T
he Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.
King John & Henry VIII Page 2
