Abstract
As the Duke of Buckingham is about to be executed with Henry VIII’s consent, his sudden death wish is somewhat unsettling. The duke would like Time to create a ‘monument’ in honour of the monarch when he dies: ‘And when old Time shall lead him to his end, / Goodness and he fill up one monument’ (2.1.93–4).2 Was William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s King Henry VIII, or All Is True, written in homage to that ‘monumental’ sovereign, Henry VIII? This, as we shall argue, is merely a rhetorical question. Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play seems more to belie its title doubly: Henry VIII is certainly not a biographical work, nor is it simply a play about the religious truths brought about by the Reformation.
‘we are to iudge honourablie of our rulers, and to speake nothing but good of the princes of the people … ’1
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Notes
R. Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. (London, 1808 [1586]), vol. 3, p. 675.
All references are taken from the following edition: W. Shakespeare and J. Fletcher, King Henry VIII, ed. G. McMullan, Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson, 2000).
G. McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. xi.
‘Most scholars whether they agree or not with the link between Henry VIII and the wedding celebrations of February 1613, accept the long-held view that the play was written late in 1612 or early in 1613’ (W. Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, ed. J. Margeson, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 4).
I. Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1965 [1957]), p. 209.
Sir Thomas More, Essays on the Play and its Shakespearian Interest, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 125.
R. B. Sharpe, The Real War of the Theatres, Shakespeare’s Fellows in Rivalry with the Admiral’s Men, 1594–1603, Modern Language Association (Boston, MA: Heath; London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 194.
See D. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), pp. 210–11.
See G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge; New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), vol. 4, p. 494.
On Prince Henry and his possible influence on Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII see: F. O. Waage, Jr., ‘Henry VIII and the Crisis of the English History Play’, Shakespeare Studies, 8 (1975) 297–309.
For the dating of the play, see A. Munday and Others, Sir Thomas More, ed. V. Gabrieli and G. Melchiori, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 12.
W. Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. S. Wells and G. Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 785.
‘The author avoids raising the specific question of the conflict between the Roman and the English Church, replacing it with that of the freedom of the individual conscience from worldly authority’ (G. Melchiori, ‘The Book of Sir Thomas More: dramatic unity’, in Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More, p. 77). This was no doubt why such an ambiguous and apparently anti-Catholic figure as Anthony Munday could be among the authors of a play on the life of a Catholic martyr. Yet Munday may not have been so rabidly anti-Catholic after all. See D. B. Hamilton: ‘Anthony Munday and The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Survey, 54 (2001) esp. 90–1.
G. McMullan, ‘The Dialogics of Reformation in Henry VIII’, in Shakespeare and Carnival, After Bakhtin, ed. R. Knowles (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 219.
McMullan, ‘The Dialogics of Reformation’, p. 214. See also these other seminal studies: L. Bliss, ‘The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phenix of Shakespeare’s King Henry the Eighth’, English Literary History, 42 (1975) 1–25
J. H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 126
P. Rudnytsky, ‘shakespeare and the Deconstruction of History’, Shakespeare Survey, 43 (1991) 43–58.
G. McMullan, ‘shakespeare and the End of History’, Essays and Studies, 48 (1995) 16–37.
On rumour, see Pierre Sahel, ‘The Strangeness of a Dramatic Style: Rumour in Henry VIII’ Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985) 145–51.
G. Wickham, ‘The Dramatic Structure of Shakespeare’s King Henry the Eighth: An Essay in Rehabilitation’, in British Academy Shakespeare Lectures 1980–89, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 132.
For V. B. Richmond, ‘Katherine is thus a Catholic with a conscience, not a superstitious follower of the Church’. She adds: ‘one of the most compelling scenes stages a “vision” that resonates with medieval stories of saints and heroes of romance to whom God gives a foretelling of eternal life and their own nearing life’ (Shakespeare, Catholicism and Romance (New York and London: Continuum, 2000), pp. 203
R. Vanita, ‘Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 40.2 (2000) 329.
In this way, their work was the product ‘of an era of doubt, conflict and dilemma’ (J. Gasper, ‘The Reformation Plays on the Public Stage’, Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, ed. J. R. Mulryne and M. Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 213).
J. Harington, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown, A. D. 1602, ed. C. R. Markham (London: Roxburghe Club, 1880), p. 99.
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© 2006 Jean-Christophe Mayer
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Mayer, JC. (2006). Revisiting the Reformation: Shakespeare and Fletcher’s King Henry VIII. In: Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595897_7
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