The Strangeness of a Dramatic Style: Rumour in Henry VIII

Summary

Henry VIII is a strange play which has not given rise to especially abundant criticism. If the bibliography of studies on Hamlet is about twice the size of the telephone book of a large city, the complete list of writings on Henry VIII will hardly fill a volume as slender as the staff directory of a provincial university. This neglect can, in part at least, be traced back to James Spedding’s doubts about the authorship of the play. That question, for long a critical crux – and, in these days of newly acquired stylometric habits, soon to become a critical fashion – has presumably obliterated some of the play’s other specific issues which might well provide different clues to account for the reticence of critics: its moral confusion, for instance (though Spedding himself was by no means unaware of this), or its heterogeneous nature, for it is a history play written in the period of the romance plays, or its very strangeness, which has occasionally led its most serious readers plainly to wonder what Henry VIII is about. Some attention has been paid to its weird, and probably cynical, structure; but, with its series of sad downfalls punctuated by the tears that the characters shed even over those whose doom they have caused and concluded by Cranmer’s enthusiastically optimistic tirade, the play seems to take pains to nonplus the readers and spectators of later ages: judging by the limited numbers of the critical platoon, this strategy of bafflement has not proved ineffective.