Abstract
Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII implicitly references the king’s (and queen’s) two bodies through its linguistic doubleness and the duality of its staging, particularly surrounding the figure of the infant Elizabeth. This chapter explores how the rhetoric of Cranmer and King Henry in the concluding scene reinforces how Queen Elizabeth I herself carefully formulated and performed her two ruling bodies: the body politic and the body natural. The playwrights’ application of Elizabeth’s rhetoric seems to call attention to her ability to fortify the English nation through Henry and Cranmer’s invigorating words alongside images of power, control, and wealth. I argue, however, that the authors’ language and the play’s staging of Elizabeth also contains and limits her rhetorically constructed identity, pointing to an erasure of the infant princess within the play as well as her subsequent inability as queen, because of her female body, to renew England with the grandeur that Cranmer prophesies.
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Notes
- 1.
Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977).
- 2.
Leah Marcus, “Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I, and the Political Uses of Androgyny,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986).
- 3.
Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
- 4.
Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony (New York: Routledge, 1996).
- 5.
Ilona Bell, Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). See also Mary K. Nelson, “Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: Stigmatizing the ‘Disabled’ Womb,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009), np and Mary Beth Rose, “The Gendering of Authority in the Public Speeches of Elizabeth I,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 115.5 (2000): 1077–82.
- 6.
Significantly, this play was part of the performances put on to celebrate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V of the Palatinate in 1613. The named connection between the Princess Elizabeth (James I’s daughter) and Princess Elizabeth (Henry VIII’s daughter in the play) emphasizes James’ place as “rightful” king.
- 7.
Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957), 42.
- 8.
Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 47.
- 9.
Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies, 12.
- 10.
Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies, 12.
- 11.
Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies, 14.
- 12.
Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 12.
- 13.
Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies, 12. Endowing Elizabeth with these two bodies in 1561 was critical because the Duchy of Lancaster Case was decided that year (although it was initiated during Mary Tudor’s reign). The case was first printed in Plowden’s Reports ten years later, in 1571. The case raised questions surrounding the king’s two bodies, and confirmed in 1561 that the sovereign in his or her private capacity shall inherit the duchy estate, as opposed to the head of state.
- 14.
Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies, 12.
- 15.
Marcus, “Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines,” 138.
- 16.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 2011), 60.
- 17.
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 171.
- 18.
Butler, Bodies That Matter, 60. Significantly, Judith Richards highlights in “Examples and Admonitions: What Mary Demonstrated for Elizabeth” that Elizabeth employed and continued to craft and develop the ritualized performance of queenship her sister Mary Tudor created during her short rule. See also Sarah Duncan’s Mary I.
- 19.
Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 150. See also Susan Frye, “The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury,” SCJ 23 (1992): 95–114, and Mary Beth Rose, “The Gendering of Authority in the Public Speeches of Elizabeth I,” among many others.
- 20.
Elizabeth I: Collected Works, eds. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 325.
- 21.
Bell, Voice of a Monarch, 5.
- 22.
Bell, Voice of a Monarch, 45.
- 23.
Bell emphasizes that William Camden “rewrote Elizabeth’s first parliamentary speech to make it seem as if she was committed from day one to living and dying a virgin … Elizabeth’s symbolic marriage to her country, with its implicit rejection of any other marriage, is conspicuously absent from Elizabethan versions of the speech, which explicitly declare that Elizabeth will consider the possibility of marriage ‘whensoever it may please God to incline my heart to another kind of life’” (quotation taken from Collected Works, 57). Voice, 62.
- 24.
Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies, 38.
- 25.
Bell, Voice of A Monarch, 20.
- 26.
Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies, 38. Having an heir meant marrying and losing her position as queen to an outsider. Similarly, Richard Schofield, in “Did the Mothers Really Die? Three Centuries of Maternal Mortality” in The World We Have Lost, estimates maternal mortality in early modern England to be 6–7% (taken from David Cressy’s Birth, Marriage, and Death, 30).
- 27.
Elizabeth’s own writing also highlighted her strategies to disrupt traditional gender categories. See chapter two of Ilona Bell’s Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch for an in-depth analysis of how Elizabeth appropriated “the politics and poetry of love, which were both traditional masculine preserves […] calling attention to the fact that she was not only the object of male desire or the subject of male discourse but also the agent or speaker” (23).
- 28.
William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, King Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullen, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 5.4.30–2.
- 29.
Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 326.
- 30.
“phoenix, n.1.” The Oxford English Dictionary.
- 31.
Gordon McMullen, “Introduction” in King Henry VIII, 72.
- 32.
McMullen, “Introduction,” 72.
- 33.
According to McMullen, Sir Herbert Beerbohn Tree omits this scene, along with all of Act 5 in the popular 1910–11 run of Henry VIII (427); Hodgdon asserts that “though later productions eliminated it, Charles Kean’s 1855 production was the first to restore Elizabeth’s christening” (293 n20), and it was not staged again until Ben Iden Payne’s 1938 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production, where Elizabeth’s christening scene was generally omitted until 1855, and not again until 1938, when Princess Elizabeth Windsor proved a valid reason to “mark […] the passage of the theatrical iconography from one sovereign to another” (219).
- 34.
Kim Noling, “Grubbing Up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39.3 (1988): 292.
- 35.
The world of the play deems Mary’s reign nonexistent (as it does Edward’s, because his reign, like Mary’s, does not lead to the “bright sun [son] of heaven,” James [5.4.51]). Noling also remarks that “Mary is totally effaced by Henry in the last moments of the play when he says of Elizabeth, ‘never before / This happy child, did I get any thing’ (ll. 64–5). Daughters are threatening to Henry not because they are sexual temptations, but because they are signs of heavenly displeasure and dynastic fragility” (“Grubbing Up the Stock,” 304).
- 36.
See especially Noling, “Grubbing Up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII” and Mary K. Nelson, “Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: Stigmatizing the ‘Disabled’ Womb.”
- 37.
Noling, “Grubbing Up the Stock,” 303.
- 38.
Noling, “Grubbing Up the Stock,” 303–4.
- 39.
Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991), 228.
- 40.
Hodgdon, The End Crowns All, 229.
- 41.
Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 20.
- 42.
Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth, 20.
- 43.
There is a significant parallel between this image of Elizabeth writing herself into the Tudor line and the staging that takes place in Act 5, scene 4. With only Cranmer and Henry present, the play makes it clear that Elizabeth is Henry’s child. While Cranmer’s speech emphasizes Elizabeth’s specifically female body, using female pronouns twenty-eight times within forty-eight lines, when Henry speaks after Cranmer’s prophecy he does not once refer to Elizabeth as female. She is referred to as “This happy child” (64), “this child” (67), or “this little one” (75). The staging, paired with Henry’s ambiguous pronoun usage does underscore Elizabeth as a part of the Tudor myth—but only insofar as her infant female body acts as a stepping stone to a male “Tudor” heir.
Bibliography
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Lamont, N.L. (2018). The Fortification and Containment of Elizabeth I’s Rhetoric and Performance in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII. In: Finn, K., Schutte, V. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's Queens. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74518-3_16
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