By Ace G. Pilkington
From Midsummer Magazine, 1995

Since 1850, when J. Spedding first suggested John Fletcher as Shakespeare’s co-author for Henry VIII, there has been disagreement about who wrote the play. Shakespeare’s fellow actors printed it as entirely his in the First Folio, but modern opinions have varied widely. Recent critics have been inclined to agree with the Folio and ascribe the whole work to Shakespeare, but meanwhile the play has been underperformed and underrated because it was supposed to be less than Shakespearean and, therefore, much less than perfect.

The play presented another problem for critics because of its mixture of genres. Here, to judge from the placement in the Folio and the cast of characters, was a history, but if one were to judge from the time of composition (1613), the themes, and even the organization, it was a romance, complete with masques, divine visitations, and other spectacles. In addition, the play’s central character, King Henry VIII, has had image problems of his own, and contemporary Americans are less likely to see him as the fons et origo of a divinely ordained Protestantism than Shakespeare’s audience was.

As a romance, Henry VIII presents the education of a king and the triumph of virtue within his country, coupled with the usual description of an even greater future. However, Shakespeare uses the same material simultaneously as history. Cranmer's prediction of the Elizabethan golden age to come is deliberately anachronistic; the audience had no need to believe in the archbishop's prescience since they had their own memories to assure them that what he said was largely true. More importantly, they were looking back from a future distant enough to let them ignore Henry’s short-term tyrannies and see instead his permanent (and positive) legacies. Elizabeth's success had been so complete and so completely unexpected that in the nostalgia for that golden time which swept the court of James I, the Tudor success seemed to make history shimmer with wonders.

Some modern commentary misses the complex vision of this doubled genre. Peter Saccio says, for example, that “Henry VIII is not about Henry VIII" (Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama [New York: Oxford University Press, 1977], 209) because “Shakespeare’s Henry is a character out of romance, at times more like Prospero or Mozart’s Sarastro or Tolkien's Elrond Halfelven than he is like any man who ever ruled England” (210). But in his prologue to the play, Shakespeare twice tells his audience to expect “truth,” and even if the second reference is to “our chosen truth,” the claim is emphatic.

The play’s ironies, as Dennis Kay points out, “Argue against a hierarchy of truth, and for the notion that Wolsey, for instance, can be both unjust and tragic” (Shakespeare: His Life, Work, and Era [New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1992], 387). The very location of some performances of the play at Blackfriars added another layer of complexity, offered another invitation to the audience to view the work from many perspectives because the King's Men were acting in the same chamber where Katherine had been put on trial. “Shakespeare exploits the potential of such a staging for creating a frisson as the present is suddenly joined to the past; by stressing the theatricality of the queen’s show trial he inverts our categories, so that Henry's charade becomes the theatrical fiction, Shakespeare's presentation of the evidence the judgment of history on the trial” (Kay 387).

But Shakespeare's judgment is many layered as are his characters. To simplify the play into a romance only, to remove the historical Henry from Shakespeare's picture, or to paint the king in dark colors only is to miss a portion of the truth which the playwright promised us. Part of the problem for modern audiences is the blackening of Henry's reputation by supporters of Thomas More, most notably Robert Bolt in his play and screenplay A Man for All Seasons. It is sometimes hard to remember that Henry was a vital, intellectually formidable, and beloved king as well as a bloated tyrant. It is equally difficult to visualize Thomas More as a scatological pamphleteer and vicious persecutor of heretics who “prayed that the day would never come when they would be happy to see Catholics and Lutherans living side by side and tolerating each other” (Jasper Ridley, Statesman and Saint: Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, and the Politics of Henry VIII [New York: The Viking Press, 1982], 261). Even in Utopia, his wittiest and least fanatical work, More describes atheists as subhuman and advocates the extermination of an entire people, called the Venalians but clearly recognizable as the Swiss.

Henry’s own contradictory nature has invited oversimplification. Henry VIII was a compound of contraries: a devout yet devious churchman, a passionate though perilous husband, and a brilliant but bloody king. As Francis Hackett says in his speculative but superbly written Henry the Eighth, “Even those who felt he was a fox, secretive, dexterous, canny, false and mischievous, a fox alert and twisting, never to be understood by mere intelligence but only by getting inside his red temper and his verminous soul—even they, plumbing his nature, sure of his inconstancy, could at any moment, just by listening to his own account of his large motives and simple attachments and genuine impulses, begin to feel shaken in their judgment and see in him an easy, great-natured and miscomprehended man” ([New York: Horace Liveright, Inc., 1929], 320).

There is much truth in the favorable aspects of Henry's nature that Shakespeare chooses to show. For example, the play frequently saves Henry's reputation by blaming Cardinal Wolsey, and if Shakespeare sometimes seems to go too far, there were many at Henry’s court who would have gone farther. The Venetian envoy Giustiniani said, “This cardinal is king . . . nor does his majesty depart in the least from the opinion and council of his lordship" (cited in Carolly Erickson, Great Harry: The Extravagant Life of Henry VIII [New York: Summit Books, 1980], 133). Before the disaster of the divorce, the athletic and pleasure loving young king had been only too glad to leave the tedium of government (though not all the long-term strategy) to the dauntingly intelligent and inhumanly industrious Wolsey, who sometimes worked for twelve hours straight without a break for food or any other human need (Erickson 132, 133).

Modern audiences are skeptical on several points that Shakespeare’s audience would, quite rightly, have accepted at face value. Henry was truly concerned to produce a male heir and secure the succession. Buckingham’s ambition was one indication of the instability in the kingdom that the lack of a son created, and Henry's belief that a daughter could not successfully inherit was entirely logical. Indeed, if Henry had not imposed his will so thoroughly on the country during his reign and then been succeeded by a male heir, the political climate might have become so unstable that the Wars of the Roses would have been fought again, and neither Mary nor Elizabeth could have been crowned.

Some modern audience members are inclined to see lust as Henry's main motive for changing wives (and Shakespeare glances at this in the play), but Henry did not divorce Katherine until she was past the age of childbearing. There is every indication that if Katherine (or Anne) had produced a male heir, Henry would have been happy to remain a loyal and loving (though thoroughly unfaithful) husband. After all, during his marriage to Katherine, he had had mistresses (including Anne Boleyn's sister) and even an illegitimate son. He could, in other words, gratify his lust without ever thinking of divorce.

In the same context, Henry's qualms over the legality of his marriage to Katherine are often taken to be no more than an excuse to rid himself of an unwanted wife. While it is true that Henry used the incest question as an excuse, it is probably also true that he believed he had offended God and that his marriage was wrong. This is another example of Henry's complexity (and some would no doubt add, his self-deception). He was the sort of man who could cut off a wife's head on one day and get engaged again on the next (Antonia Fraser, The Wives of Henry VIII [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992], 257), but when he received Katherine's last letter after her death, he wept (Fraser 230).

Finally, it is worth looking (as Shakespeare clearly expects his audiences to do) at Henry VIII’s effect on history and not merely on those individuals who met him, for better or worse, in the flesh. If he emerges from Shakespeare's play as a magnificent figure, it is partly because Shakespeare's audience saw him as the architect of their society and their success. Even modern historians who dislike him have come to similar conclusions. In the words of Will Durant, “Perhaps Elizabeth and Shakespeare could not have been had not England been set free by her worst and strongest king” (The Reformation: A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300 1564 [New York: MJF Books, 1957], 578). Perhaps the Protestant cause could not have sustained itself without him (as the Englishmen who first watched Henry VIII tended to believe). Perhaps without the religious factionalism and resulting skepticism that the warring Protestants and Catholics created, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, and the scientific method would never have been, or at least would never have survived to change history. There is an irony worthy of Shakespeare and a wonder worthy of a romance in the thought that the modern world could not have been born without this heroic ogre, Henry VIII, as inadvertent midwife.