Perhaps the real story is in the departures of Buckingham, Wolsey, and Katherine, and the disappearance of Anne Bullen?
We made a great deal of the exits: using the architecture of the church to give Buckingham, Wolsey, and Katherine long walks down the nave to a glorious exit beyond the audience and the crossing to the altar. A countertenor sang an ethereal tune and the lighting was suitably dramatic. A ghostly nightgowned Anne watched the christening of Elizabeth from the altar.
The story of the play might be that the only way out of the Tudor court is by death.
Another way of answering the “what’s the story?” question is to look at the journey of the main character. What happens to Henry VIII? Henry shifts from trusting the ambitious Wolsey who sowed division to trusting the pious Cranmer and ordering the factions to unite behind him. Henry leaves the barren Katherine and ends, by way of the fecund Anne Bullen, holding the new hope Elizabeth. So the kingdom moves from barren corruption to fertile prosperity. Our sympathies, though, are with Wolsey and Katherine.
There is a contemporary political parallel too. Wolsey was a ruthless and powerful political servant who operated as the power of the throne. He is shown in the play to serve his own interests as well as those of the state. The feared Robert Cecil, who had straddled the reigns of both Elizabeth and James, had been seen in some quarters as another Wolsey. Cecil had died in 1612 and Henry VIII was first performed in 1613. After Wolsey’s fall a new man arrives: Cranmer. Cranmer serves both God and the king and is incorruptible. It’s as if Shakespeare is asking, what kind of man do you want in government? Interestingly, James I’s solution to the problem of having so much power in one position was to leave the office of Secretary of State vacant until 1614.
The divisions rift by Henry’s madness were still causing tensions in James’s reign and so the choice of which parts of the story Shakespeare would tell was politically sensitive. The Jacobean audience would have been acutely aware of one absent character. There is just one reference in the play to Mary Tudor. Just before her death, Katherine reveals that she has commended her daughter to Henry and asked for her protection. Henry had only one real job: to provide an heir. Three of his children ruled: Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth. Edward was born after the play ends. Elizabeth is celebrated. Where is Mary? Her absence is part of the story too.
The 1762 Drury Lane production boasted 130 figures in the coronation procession in Act 4, including “The Queen’s herbwoman, strewing flowers” and “six Beef-Eaters”; does that sort of lavish spectacle attract you and how did you create your own coronation procession?
Doran: I tried to set up the glory of the spectacle, which has a theatrical impact, at the same time as saying that the narrative is going to end as everybody knew: in Anne Bullen’s head being chopped off. We tried to place those pieces of spectacle not just as excuses for a lot of nice costumes and some music, but as something that you could see had a political agenda.
Thompson: Spectacle is an important part of theater and I, like many people attracted to theater, love the lavish and we indulged in spectacle where mentioned in the text: fireworks were visible through the west window for the entry of the goat men for example. However, if we had the resources to create the sort of extravaganzas seen in Drury Lane in the eighteenth century I suspect I would have preferred to double the actors’ wages before spending anything on herbwomen strewing flowers or Beef-Eaters for the coronation.
Our coronation procession was about raising Anne as Henry had done. She was pushed down the nave above head height on a wheeled platform. Her eyes were focused on the horizon and her arms outstretched. She was a kind of sacrifice and is not seen again in the play.
The questions I was asking in rehearsal were: what does the spectacle do? What is the coronation scene about in terms of the play as a whole? What does it add to our understanding? Why are the gentlemen discussing who is who and where they are in the procession? Why does one gentleman recognize some people but not all?
I think that with the passage of time we have lost some of the significance. Shakespeare is showing us—or reminding the Jacobean audience—who had influence in the Tudor court after the removal of Katherine of Aragon. The contemporary audience will also have a sense of who was missing from the coronation. The marriage to Anne Bullen split the country. Thomas More’s friends bought him a gown to wear at the coronation. He kept the gown but did not attend. It is akin to the much-commented absence of past Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton. Or the position of the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, tucked away in the third row, when President Obama addressed Parliament recently. The absences and positions are lost on many but significant for those in the know. I am not sure whether we successfully communicated this or not but I do think that the scene is about more than spectacle and makes a dramatic comment on the rise and fall of members of the court. Again the play hints that the Tudor court was a dangerous place to be.
11. 2006, Gregory Thompson production. Aoife McMahon as Anne Bullen. “Our coronation procession was about raising Anne as Henry had done. She was pushed down the nave above head height on a wheeled platform. Her eyes were focused on the horizon and her arms outstretched. She was a kind of sacrifice and is not seen again in the play.”
Although the play is called Henry VIII, there’s a stage history of Wolsey and Katherine being seen as the leading roles; how did you manage the balance between these three characters in dramatic terms?
Doran: Adrian Noble gave me very good advice in making sure that the casting was the best I could possibly get, and in securing Jane Lapotaire (Katherine), Ian Hogg (Wolsey), and Paul Jesson (Henry) to play those three roles I didn’t have to do that balancing; it sorted itself out. Wolsey is a great starring role. It was one of Irving’s roles and is an amazingly good part even though he disappears halfway through. I think maybe if you put all your eggs into that basket and have a star actor playing Wolsey to the detriment of the other characters, then once he has left the stage the audience is left wondering when he’s going to come back on.
Katherine of Aragon is a wonderful part but I remember Jane Lapotaire describing it, after many performances, as a lonely part. There are four of what we described as “seasonal” scenes. She has her spring, her summer, her great moment in her autumn and then her decline into winter, but she doesn’t spend a lot of the time interacting and that was difficult. But it’s a spectacular role for an older actress.
Thompson: The play does the balancing act. I didn’t want to interfere with the dynamics of the play as written but to bring them out. I thought the best way was to be as physically close to the characters as possible.
Our Henry was as powerful and capricious as we could make him. We wanted to show the man and the monarch and consciously imitated the known portraits and popular images of Henry. Antony Byrne is a powerful, intelligent, and leonine actor with an RSC pedigree and I knew would give us a look of Henry in his prime. The play does not cover Henry’s decline into illness and obesity and so I wanted a younger stronger Henry than has been cast in the past.
Similarly, Anthony O’Donnell is an award-winning actor with a history with the RSC and enjoys the same physical stature as Wolsey. He is a rich comic actor and is more usually considered for lighter roles. I had a hunch that he would capture the tragedy of Wolsey’s loss.
For Katherine, the common choice is for a British actress to play Spanish. I was attracted to the authenticity of hearing a foreigner trying to speak English beautifully. I remembered Corinne Jaber from Peter Brook’s Mahabharata. The sense of the queen as both an insider and outsider in the court, both at home and far from home, was a given as soon as she spoke.
Having made the casting decisions the next step is to set up a framework so that all three characters are as powerful as can be. Actors gain power in the theater by going on a journey so we needed to play the forcefulness of Wolsey where his look could silence even the aristocrats of
court and he’s second only to the king; the potency of Katherine as she marches into Henry’s court to fight her case; the vitality of Henry as he never tires but runs from hunting to court to party and dance and then show how Wolsey, the man who has lost all he has strived for, seeks to preserve some dignity; how Katherine’s fierce energy even at her last breath affords her a spiritual awakening; and how Henry despairs of providing an heir and is desperate to find a courtier he can trust and rely on. I believe the balance in dramatic terms is achieved by playing the twists and turns of fortune to the maximum so that the joy is joyous and the tragedy terrible.
Shakespeare is kinder to Henry than history has been—he doesn’t blame or criticize his actions; did you play up the image of him as “bluff King Hal,” Bluebeard in a fatsuit, or did you see him as growing in stature as king in your production?
Doran: Henry is at this stage in his vigorous youth; not the fat old man of the later Holbein image. He has vigor and he grows throughout the role. There are some potentially subversive moments within the play. I learnt a very important lesson: it is possible to over-produce these plays. It tends to be done either by changing scenery between scenes or by putting musical cues between scenes. It’s very common practice but you can miss extra elements of the writing by doing it. You can do the same if you put an interval in the wrong place. At the end of Act 2 Scene 2, just before the first entrance of Anne Bullen, Henry is debating what he’s going to do about Queen Katherine. Finally he says that he must leave her: “O, my lord, / Would it not grieve an able man to leave / So sweet a bedfellow? But, conscience, conscience: / O, ’tis a tender place, and I must leave her.” The end of that scene seems to suggest that Henry VIII is basing his decision to divorce Katherine entirely upon his conscience. The next scene begins with Anne Bullen talking to the Old Lady character: her first line is “Not for that neither: here’s the pang that pinches.” It’s in the middle of a conversation they are already having. If you run the two scenes together, it’s as if Anne is answering the last line of the previous scene, saying it’s nothing to do with conscience—which of course is what many of the people in the audience are thinking. That is a rather subversive thing to do, but it allowed us to keep questioning the “All Is True” nature of the piece, and try to see what the perspective of the writers to the material was: what their attitude was in suggesting to the audience to keep questioning the historical “facts.”
Thompson: I think that it may not be Shakespeare who was being kind to Henry but that our perception of “bluff King Hal” came from the Victorian era and their view of history as the history of great men. No doubt this image was redoubled in the popular imagination of the last century by the gargantuan Henry of Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) stalking the corridors to get to Anne Bullen and even Sid James in Carry on Henry (1971) as “a great guy with his chopper.” We can thank David Starkey and his ilk for our subtler understanding of Henry’s tyranny.
Even in the reign of James I, it would have been dangerous for Shakespeare to portray the tyranny of the late Queen’s father. It was a balancing act for Shakespeare: how to bring true praise to the king and censure the tyranny. It is significant that the play ends before Henry begins the madness of beheading his wives. In the second half of the play Henry is “rescued” by the arrival of Cranmer and Elizabeth. I prefer to think that Shakespeare is being as critical as he could be in the circumstances. The play is saying that the court of Henry VIII is a very dangerous place to be and even now it would be dangerous to present much beyond the birth of Elizabeth.
The part of Katherine is powerfully drawn and immensely sympathetic—Shakespeare strengthens her character notably in relation to the accounts in the chronicle sources he used; how did you capitalize on this?
Doran: The other element that my research threw up was that, in 1613, with a potential Catholic marriage for King James’s son, Prince Henry, on the cards, there was a political agenda to putting on the play in the first place. In the rather Augustan policy that James had of trying to reconcile England with Spain post-Armada, one of the things that a play might do was to tackle the issue of the Spanish Queen, Katherine of Aragon, and what had happened to her. The play virtually canonizes Katherine of Aragon and that seemed to me to be an intensely political gesture.
I read a piece of research by Professor Glynne Wickham that it was possible that the play had been staged at Blackfriars theater (we know the play was also staged at the Globe because it was during a production of it that the Globe burnt down), in which case the scene of Katherine’s trial would have played in the very room in which the trial had actually happened (before it was converted into a theater). That must have been an intensely political act in itself.
Thompson: I’m afraid I didn’t refer to the historical sources in relation to Katherine but directed from the play. The sources are useful when they give you something not in the play rather than when they give you less. You can only play what’s written, of course.
Interestingly, Shakespeare weakens the drama of the masque. In George Cavendish’s Thomas Wolsey, Late Cardinall, His Lyffe And Deathe, when asked to identify which of the disguised masquers is the king, Wolsey chooses the wrong man: Sir Edward Neville. Neville was a great sportsman, the David Beckham of his day, and Henry’s jousting champion. Like the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, inviting superstars from the world of football to play against a Chechen team including himself as center-forward, Henry would joust with Sir Edward Neville on his team.
Henry was delighted that Wolsey was deceived into choosing the disguised Neville and burst into laughter. Why did Shakespeare dilute the drama of the scene so that Wolsey found out the king straightway? Perhaps many in his audience would have known this mistaking and it would have added to the idea that “All Is True.” Perhaps some even remembered that Edward Neville, like Buckingham before him, was beheaded by Henry VIII on the testimony of another. There was danger even in friendship with Henry.
Shakespeare’s other late plays (Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest) rely on magic for their resolution but Henry VIII is resolutely earthbound apart from Katherine’s vision in Act 4 Scene 2. Many modern productions cut this scene; how and why did you stage it?
Doran: We tried various things. I referred earlier to the canonization of Katherine because it seems to me that she learns within that scene some of the lessons that will allow her into heaven. At Kimbolton, where she is in her declining years, her steward Griffith has given her an account of Wolsey’s death and she becomes vicious about Wolsey, whom she counts her enemy. Griffith, rather astonishingly, points out what a good man Wolsey was, the institutions that he patronized and funded, and says one of the wonderful lines in the play: “Men’s evil manners live in brass, their virtues / We write in water.” Having counted Cardinal Wolsey’s good points, Katherine responds, “After my death I wish no other herald, / No other speaker of my living actions, / To keep mine honour from corruption, / But such an honest chronicler as Griffith.” It’s as if she has learned both patience and tolerance, and those two lessons allow her out of purgatory and into heaven. Her waiting maid is even called Patience.
In the staging of that scene we decided ultimately that, in a stage the size of the Swan space, Jane Lapotaire’s expression alone could create a greater vision than I could summon up. We put a shaft of light onto her as she opened her eyes, saw her vision and then woke up and told us what she had seen. In the context of the production we were doing that seemed sufficient.
Thompson: I staged it as Katherine’s vision. She is near death and she sees angels. Our angels gained height from the reverse of the platform used in Anne’s coronation: as Anne was raised up to be queen so Katherine could ascend to heaven.
Why would it be cut? Making a Catholic Queen the emotional center of a play is a political act on Shakespeare’s part. Her vision reinforces both her religion and her special nature. It is the Catholic that is welcomed to eternal happiness by spirits of peace.
Katherine is the spiritual heart of the play. She refuses to do anything that is not the truth. This makes her a powerful figure. Like Hermione, like Innogen, she holds fast to the truth; and, like Hermione and Thaisa, she dies. For Katherine there is no resurrection, of course, only loss. That a Spanish Queen and the mother of Mary Tudor was being honored in this way on the Jacobean stage is remarkable.
The spiritual nature of the scene is not normally found in a history play but it does connect Henry VIII to Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Pericles. There is a criticism of Henry VIII that on the one hand it’s not enough like Henry V to be a proper history, and on the other that it is a pity that it is not more of a romance like The Winter’s Tale. It is what it is and the romance elements are fascinating.
Like the later plays there is a lost mother, sinned against but pure; a ruler, blind to sin, who learns to trust truth; and a new daughter who provides hope for a glorious future.
There is a curious amalgam of Leontes and Camillo, the reformed man and the wise counselor, in Wolsey and Cranmer. I toyed with the idea of doubling the roles and casting one actor in both parts. At the end of the third act Wolsey bids farewell to the hopes of court and vows to rely upon his integrity to heaven. In the fifth act a new man arrives, Cranmer. He is to be housed in the Tower on the testimony of others. Cranmer welcomes the trial and relies on his truth and honesty to see him through. Fortunately for Cranmer, of course, Henry favors him and gives him his token for protection. In terms of the late plays the Leontes journey from sin to humility is taken by Wolsey/Cranmer.
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