Moral concerns have persisted … for every audience of Henry VIII since 1613. They constitute the familiar context which attends the play with its sustained dramatic irony: unexpressed but omnipresent in every audience’s awareness.… Any successful production must communicate this final delicate balance of the sinister and the hopeful, without slipping into a naïve proclamation of one or the other in the last scene. The sustaining of this elusive tone constitutes the unique challenge which the play proposes in production.128
Directors have risen to this challenge in a variety of ways in the face of critical hostility. Historically productions had focused on the play’s pageantry and the leading roles of King Henry, Katherine of Aragon, and Cardinal Wolsey. Trevor Nunn was reacting against such a conventional approach in his 1969 production, which employed a modern set and production style while locating the play within the context of Shakespeare’s other late plays. In his program notes Nunn argued that “They do not idealise the human condition, the beast is there alright, so also is the angel. Man is in search of ripeness or grace or … self-knowledge. In the late plays grace is achieved through love.”129 According to John Barber such a context revealed that
Henry VIII … is held together and sustained by the same themes as in the other late works: pity for the unjustly used and hope that a new generation will right ancient wrongs. Thus the newborn Elizabeth is only another Perdita or Miranda.130
This reconciliatory conclusion though seemed at odds with a consciously political interpretation, set against the backdrop of 1960s political radicalism and a production style most often described as “Brechtian.” It was played within a black box with “a fine, heavy, Elizabethan castle hung against a black backdrop and lit ingeniously to give it varying degrees of depth.”131 Other critics were less complimentary. Irving Wardle referred to the set as “a permanent toytown backdrop of Tudor London.”132 He was one of many to be irritated by the self-conscious “series of newspaper headlines that flash up before every scene.”133 These were subsequently dropped in the London revival.
Wardle speculated that the captions were one of the techniques deployed, “meant to establish a link between modern spectators and the ordinary citizens who carry so much of the play’s narrative.” But, he concluded,
attitudes to Royalty have changed so much that the link is more ironic than direct. Apparently this is not intentional, as the production finishes with rapt invocations to peace and plenty which are meant in earnest even though they do transpose the finale from blazing ceremonial into the mood of a gentle masque.134
Various strategies were employed to engage audience participation. In Act 2 Scene 1 in the discussion between the two Gentlemen, on the line “We are too open here to argue this” the promptbook reads “They clock audience.” Direct address was used “in the manner of the music-hall”135 and there was a “splendid football match in which Emrys Jones’s Archbishop Cranmer takes a penalty kick after the ball has been neatly returned to the stage from the front stalls.”136 This scene did not, however, impress all the critics with its splendor:
in period productions (and this one is no exception) there is invariably a varlet whose breeches fall down, supported, for reasons seldom clear, by quantities of disagreeably self-conscious small children. It is nervous work watching Cranmer dribbling a woolly ball with these juveniles as he waits (“like a lousy footboy at chamber door”) before his trial; worse is to come when the peers in council, routed by the king, line up to pass the same ball embarrassedly from hand to hand, as in a number rather low down on the bill at the Palladium. Mr. Nunn has shown signs before of an alarming weakness for woolly balls, but never on such a scale as this.137
Ronald Bryden in The Observer described the end of the production: “a sonorous white hippie mass in which actors advance on audience, chanting Cranmer’s wishes for England’s prince’s ‘peace, plenty, love, truth.’ ” He regards this as a “triumphant close”138 to Trevor Nunn’s first season. D.A.N. Jones in The Listener was less convinced:
When Cranmer makes his final great speech, that Blake-like vision of a future England of “peace, plenty, love, truth,” Nunn uses a modern style for expressing rapture. You know those modish camp-meeting songs, “That’s the way God planned it” and “Oh happy day, when Jesus walked,” and the mantras of the Hare Krishna group. In this mood, Nunn sets his actors to surge toward the audience chanting the four pleasing words. I think this over-softens a tough play. They have left out the fifth word: “terror.”139
In retrospect, theater historian Hugh Richmond judged it “one of the most thought-provoking productions of this century.”140
Nunn’s production was seen as radical and modern. Howard Davies’s was if possible even more so and again the epithet “Brechtian” crops up repeatedly in discussions of his 1983 production. The play’s politics were again emphasized, with the program notes’ inclusion of an extract from R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. In Davies’s view the play “is very much a modern play, dealing with taxes, unemployment and social divisions.” His production was clearly glancing at the right-wing politics of Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. The theme of the bureaucratization of a centralizing Tudor state was literalized in the opening scene. Nunn had cut both prologue and epilogue (as well as engaging in considerable textual pruning). Davies’s production started with King Henry alone on stage scattering papers and speaking the prologue himself.
Irving Wardle describes the stage as “well and truly alienated. Hayden Griffin’s sets consist of enlarged reproductions of Elizabethan street scenes and architectural perspectives, trundled along traverse rails and suspended well above the stage floor.”141 Davies was keen to reveal the reality beneath the surface and like Nunn eschewed traditional pageantry, but “in passages like the masque of Katherine’s dream and the staging of the coronation ritual with a group of robed dummies, it supplies something no less visually exciting than conventional pageantry.”142 Katherine’s dream was a ghostly dance lit by ethereal blue light. For Anne’s coronation Davies incorporated the Folio’s detailed stage directions as a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Its pace and energy succeeded as Wardle suggested but it also underlined the insubstantiality of the royal pageant. The Epilogue was delivered by Queen Anne amid more paper being thrown into the air and a whistle blowing “time.”
Discussing Davies’s 1983 production James Fenton argued, “Truly to shock a modern audience, one would need to go back to that old tradition of pageantry and choristers, historicism and authentic sets.”143 Gregory Doran contrived to do this with his 1996 production explaining the theatrical context for doing so in the program notes:
Tyrone Guthrie directed a series of energetic productions of the play which re-emphasised the role of Henry.… Trevor Nunn’s 1969 production by contrast … reworked the play in an austere Brechtian frame which foregrounded the play’s bleak politics. The most controversial twentieth-century production has been that of Howard Davies at Stratford in 1983 which offered a postmodern resistance to pageantry emphasising the play’s profound ambivalence over the slippery concepts of “truth” and “conscience.” It is arguably only in the wake of Davies’s production and its deliberate resistance to the legacy of splendour that Henry VIII can be taken beyond these contrasting and controlling modes, recovered as a Jacobean play, and re-invented for the twenty-first century.144
Presumably the term “Jacobean play” implies one that combines spectacle and pageantry (as in the Jacobean masque) and yet is deeply political at the same time. Doran was largely successful. Michael Billington thought the production in the Swan made “good use of the space’s opportunity for intimate spectacle.”145 Shaun Usher was alert to both elements:
We begin with the splendid tableau of a gilded king out-dazzling even the Field of the Cloth of Gold—equal honours here to Robert Jones and Howard Harrison for set and lighting—but like the climactic set-piece of Elizabeth I’s christening, the picture lingers only lo
ng enough to impress. Then it’s on with the power struggles, Henry versus pious Catherine (sic), Cardinal Wolsey versus The Rest.146
Billington also describes the way in which politics and spectacle worked together in this production:
In its last outing in 1983 Howard Davies treated the play as a cynical Brechtian anatomy of power politics: a piece of mocked Tudor. Doran, presumably in a spirit of irony, blazons the play’s original title, All Is True, across the back-wall and the Stratford programme; the result is not so much to heighten the play’s documentary reality as to make you aware how everyone bends the idea of truth to his own purposes.… Truth, in short, is a malleable weapon rather than a fixed commodity.
Doran and his designer, Robert Jones, also seek to give the play visual unity by showing Henry periodically emerging from a recessed chamber in golden triumph while brutal realpolitik takes place on the forestage.147
Costumes and Music
In Shakespeare in Performance, Richmond argues that this is a play that, given its historical specificity, needs to be staged in “historically accurate costume.”148 The designers for all three productions have agreed with him and taken the well-known portraits of the chief protagonists as their inspiration, notably the Holbein portrait of Henry. Both Nunn’s and Doran’s productions were sumptuously costumed. Deirdre Clancy in Howard Davies’s production designed authentic period costumes but in subdued tones of gray and oatmeal suggesting “not Holbein’s oils but his drawings.”149
In his autobiography, Donald Sinden, who played Henry in 1969, recalls the assembled cast at the end singing a magnificent “Gloria.”150 In Doran’s production Henry had emerged in his first golden pageant to the magnificent choral singing of “Exultate, Jubilate.” The masque at the Cardinal’s took some by surprise: “Wolsey’s priapic house-party staggered some of the audience, but manifestly suggested the Cardinal’s vulgarity.”151 It took on demonic overtones as it emerged from and eventually exited via the trapdoor.
The most controversial and original music was by Ilona Sekacs for Davies’s 1983 production. Pastiche Kurt Weill, it acted as punctuation between scenes and suggested a parallel with the decadent court of the Weimar Republic: “the music, content sometimes to endorse the pathos, is often sharp and derisive, alerting us to ironies.”152 The dance in the masque at the Cardinal’s was a somewhat anachronistic tango in which the fate of women in the play could be read from Henry’s brutality in “Haling Anne Bullen to her feet,” a fate “not only symbolized but determined in that court dance which whirls women round and throws them away. The men rise and fall, the women are taken and discarded.”153
“Three Magnificent Acting Parts”154
In Sir Henry Wotton’s description of the burning down of Shakespeare’s Globe when the thatch caught light from a celebratory cannon during a performance of this play, he voiced the objection that its realist dramatic qualities were “sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous.”155 Many critics since have been disconcerted by its “low-key emotions and intimate verbal style”156 which creates a sense of the ordinariness and realism of the characters, but has subversive potential: “it images directly the contradiction between the sacred royal office and the fallible human individual who holds it, making historical actions intelligible as everyday transactions.”157
Historical productions of the play focused on pageantry and featured the roles of Katherine and Wolsey as star vehicles. The role of the king has tended to provoke controversy because Shakespeare’s Henry is not the monstrous Bluebeard of popular myth. Richmond argues that “At this pivotal point in his career Henry’s role must remain as unclear, even incoherent, as it probably seemed to its original audience—and just as bewildering as contemporary politicians often appear to us now, without the advantage of hindsight.”158
Despite describing the part of Henry as “a stinker,”159 Donald Sinden was able to utilize his natural charm and charisma in the part in Nunn’s production and win over most of the critics. He believed that the play showed “only a veneer of the truth” and found “all the speeches ambiguous.”160 Richmond thought that “This tension between surface characterisation and the latent reality known to the audience by hindsight is what lent memorable force to Sinden’s performance.”161 Many critics commented on the paleness of his makeup (and all commented on half his beard coming off during the trial scene on the opening night). K. E. B. of the Nottingham Evening Post found Sinden “a Henry of distinction and, praise be not over-padded. His gradual accession of authority from the time that Wolsey dominated and deceived him until he emerged as the ruler in fact as well as in name, bluff but not blustering, was a delight to watch.”162
Nunn had dispensed with Prologue and Epilogue. This is Sinden’s own description of the ending:
At the end of the play … the assembled characters sang a magnificent “Gloria” and then left the stage in stately procession. Only Henry remained in a spotlight, holding the infant Elizabeth who had just been christened. Here I tried to do a most difficult thing. The end of the play is a cry for peace in the time of the future Elizabeth I and in a few brief seconds I, as Henry with no lines, looked into the future, saw the horror that was to come, questioned why, realised the failure of the hope, crashed into the twentieth century and pleaded silently that where the sixteenth century had failed, those of the future may succeed. Many people told me it was a most moving moment.163
Richard Griffiths, who played the part in Davies’s 1983 production, is on record as calling Henry VIII “a belting good play,”164 and was proudly proclaimed as the only actor to play the part without padding. He played Henry in a deliberately naturalistic way, in keeping with the downplaying of the pageantry. Ned Chaillot thought he made him “a likeable rogue,”165 while J. C. Trewin suggested, “There will probably be argument about Henry, as Richard Griffiths presents him; but it is a pleasure to have a King who is not simply an angry boomer behind a Holbein mask.”166 Sheridan Morley, however, complained that he “never inspires the remotest terror or authority.”167
Paul Jesson in Doran’s production, which played up the pageantry, attempted more bluffness while at the same time making Henry human. As Benedict Nightingale saw it, Paul “Jesson’s splendidly bluff, blunt King learns to see through fake and value honesty,” and he goes on to blame Shakespeare for Henry’s lack of villainy, complaining that “The principals are all relentlessly good mouthed.”168 Shaun Usher found it an impressive performance:
Jesson has the presence to fulfil that wide-as-he-is-tall image from the school history books, and the skill to convey arrogant yet sentimental sensibility with deep veins of deviousness and humbug. Previously, Henrys have been upstaged by Catherine of Aragon, or dwarfed in surrounding pageantry; Jesson is never in danger of being deposed.169
Queen Katherine
Queen Katherine was played in the past by theatrical legends such as Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, Sybil Thorndike, and Edith Evans. The part requires intelligence, spirit, dignity, and pathos: a part “Dame Peggy Ashcroft seemed born to play.”170 She brought great personal commitment to the role and, according to Trevor Nunn, felt the play did less than justice to Katherine’s historical dilemma and hence attempted to incorporate extra material from the transcript of the trial, which he vetoed. Ashcroft, by common consent, triumphed. John Barber singled hers out as “the one outstanding performance of the night,” describing how,
When besotted with Anne Bullen, the King spurns his Queen; she reacts first with fire then with melancholy, at last with a pitiful pride. The actress finally came to resemble a Rembrandt portrait of a shrivelled old lady. She speaks always like a queen and even when dying and desolate can hang a word on the air like a jewel.171
Keith Brace was also struck by her final scene:
Dame Peggy more or less created her own play in the death of Katherine, where the emotions aroused were out of proportion to the actual emotional content of the words spoken. She carried the sce
ne at her own slow, but never wearying pace. It was, ironically, more Brechtian as a statement about death rather than a re-enactment of death than all those silly headlines.172
8. 1969, Trevor Nunn production. Peggy Ashcroft as Katherine who reacted “first with fire then with melancholy, at last with pitiful pride. The actress finally came to resemble a Rembrandt portrait of a shrivelled old lady.”
Gemma Jones, too, in Davies’s 1983 production made a fine Katherine, intelligent and dignified in standing up for the rights of the people in council, committed to her husband. Davies offered a fuller staging of her celestial vision and, maintaining her dignity, she became a figure of pathos in her death.
Jane Lapotaire played Katherine in 1996, emphasizing her status as an outsider by employing a soft Spanish accent and having her ladies sing and dance sevillanas to a flamenco guitar at the beginning of Act 3. Her Katherine was very human, vulnerable, and angry. Benedict Nightingale thought her “a fine Katherine of Aragon … who brings patience, dignity and, in her final encounter with Cardinal Wolsey, a moving mix of queenly outrage and simple pain.”173 The celestial vision was simply represented by a shining light playing across her, bathing her sleeping figure: “Hers is the pathos of the evening.”174
Cardinal Wolsey
The chosen part of Kemble, Irving, and Gielgud; it was played in Nunn’s production by Brewster Mason, a huge, intimidating figure and an RSC stalwart. Gordon Parsons thought he played the part “as a benign, scarlet slug of a man,”175 but Charles Landstone thought him “too coarse as Wolsey, bringing sarcasm in place of pathos to his famous dying speech.”176
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