INTRODUCTION Literary THE Famous History of the Life of Henry VIII. Early was first published in the Folio of 1623. The text History is unusually accurate, and was printed from a MS. prepared with equally unusual care for the press. As became a drama in which ceremony plays so large a part, the stage directions are full and accurate. In two of them (the coronation-scene, iv. I., and the baptism, v. 5.) the elaborate and precise historical realism of the modern stage seems to be more nearly anticipated than in any other play of Shakespeare's time. The costly and magnificent masques of Whitehall had stimulated kindred tendencies in the regular drama; and the Globe Company now controlled stage-resources very different from the 'four or five most vile and ragged foils' that had done duty for Agincourt in its early days. The spectacular elaboration of Henry VIII. was, however, evidently extraordinary and unprecedented. It involved, incidentally, the destruction of the first Globe Theatre. On June 29, 1613, the Globe was burnt down Date of Com during the performance of a play which a series of position. contemporary descriptions enable us with practical certainty to identify as Henry VIII. The most salient of these are as follows: (i) A MS. letter from Thomas Lorkin, dated 'this last of June' 1613, relates: 'No longer since than yesterday, while Bourbege his companie were acting at the Globe the play of Hen. 8, and there shooting of certain chambers in way of triumph; the fire catch'd and fasten'd upon the thatch of the house and there burn'd so furiously as it consumed the whole house and all in less than two hours (the people having enough to do to save themselves).' (ii) Sir Henry Wotton, writing to his nephew on July 2, gives a more detailed account of the fire and adds important particulars of the play. 'The king's players had a new play, called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry the Eighth, which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garter, the guards with their embroidered coats, and the like; sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar if not ridiculous. Now King Henry, making a mask at the Cardinal Wolsey's House, and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch,' etc. (iii) A third allusion, in a letter from John Chamberlain to Ralph Winwood, July 12, 1613, simply confirms these reports. But the mention of the event by Howes, the continuator of Stowe's Chronicle (1615), adds an important detail. 'The house,' he writes, 'being filled with people to behold the play, viz. Henry the 8.' In June 1613, then, a play variously known as Henry VIII. and All is True, and corresponding in every particular, so far as described, to the Henry VIII. afterwards published by Shakespeare's Company, was acted, as a new piece, by that company, on their own stage. The inclusion of the play in the Folio must be held to prove that Shakespeare had at least some connexion with it; its qualities of metre and style forbid us to place that connexion earlier than 1610. To hold that Shakespeare's Company, having a Shakespearean Henry VIII. in their repertory, were acting, some two years later, a totally distinct Henry VIII. by some other writer, is an unwarrantable violation of economy. The grounds hitherto adduced for rejecting the identification are extremely slight. A contemporary ballad on the fire declares that 'the riprobates prayed for the Foole and Henrie Condye,' whereas there is no Fool in Henry VIII. But the Fool may have been in the playhouse (and thus in need of the riprobates' prayers) without being in the play. Mr. Fleay relies on the absence of the title All is True. But the Prologue, with its reiterated references to 'truth' (cf. vv. 9, 18, 21), reads like an expanded commentary on a vanished text.1 The date 1610-12 is now therefore generally accepted.2 of the Plot. The Prologue seems, however, to have had a more The Sources specific and militant purpose than that of enforcing the title. It conveys a thinly veiled allusion to some less authentic version on the same noble story; and warns the audience that any who took Henry VIII. to be 'a merry bawdy play,' or 'a noise of targets,' or 'such a show as fool and fight is,' 'will be deceived.' 3 The Epilogue similarly 1 Boyle's theory that our Henry VIII. was written as late as 1617 depends upon the hypothesis which he has not made plausible, that it was the joint work of Massinger and Fletcher. 2 The apparent allusion in V. 5. 52 to the colonisation of 3 The Prologue has been Sources. warns off those who came merely to hear the Whether written or not with a deliberate design of vindicating history from these dramatic traducers, there is no question that the Shakespearean Henry VIII. is far more true to the letter of history than any of his earlier Histories. No other preserves so much of the recorded detail of history. Its speeches are often little more than Holinshed transcribed in blank verse; its pageantries punctiliously reproduce his detailed and picturesque narrative. Holinshed was indeed for this reign unusually full and unusually authentic. It lay but a generation behind him, and its motive undoubtedly recalls 1 Edited by K. Elze (1874). Elze held that the Shakespearean play was written during Elizabeth's reign-with subsequent interpolation of the allusions to James. This is absolutely negatived by the style. he was able to weave into his own work the first-hand reports of contemporaries like Hall and Cavendish. It is true that his sources were steeped in animus of very different shades, and that their parti-coloured hues give a composite and somewhat indecisive effect to his presentment of men. Holinshed's Wolsey is painted for the most part with the angry Protestant brush of Hall, whose Chronicle was suppressed under Mary; but we detect readily enough the passages transcribed from Wolsey's faithful usher1 (the valet to whom he was a hero), or from the Jesuit Campion's eulogy upon this great pre-Loyolan member of his Order. Nor have these dissonances been by any means effaced in the drama; indeed, they are even heightened by the addition of a highly-coloured Protestant patch from Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1576) -the Cranmer scenes in Act V. As it stands, the drama presents a strange mingling of reticence and partisanship. We are invited to bestow our sympathies, alternately, on different sides, and are yet denied the definite information needed for judging, or even knowing how the dramatist judged, between them. Critics, according to their bent, have found it equally easy to exhibit the play as a manifesto of the new faith or of the old- a celebration of Elizabeth or a vindication of Katharine. Gervinus explained it to be a pæan to the House of Tudor; it may quite as readily be represented as a satire on them. Henry is tenderly, even obsequiously, handled; we see him as the magnanimous father of his people, intervening to remit Wolsey's oppressive taxation (i. 2.), or to rescue the pious 1 G. Cavendish's Life of Wolsey was still in MS.; but Stow had transferred its substance to his Annales (1580), whence the material passed into Holinshed's second edition (1587) used by Shakespeare. |