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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2014
In Henry VIII, Shakespeare looks beyond religious conflict to express a larger moral—and Christian—vision. He offers a panorama of Christian virtues and characters who manifest them, indicating by their actions and sufferings the role their virtues might play in supporting nobility and justice. He also finds support in Christianity for deriving noble and base from the character of one's soul rather than from birth and for a reliance on fair judicial procedure rather than on the sword for the protection of justice. Finally, in the relation between Henry VIII and Archbishop Cranmer, Shakespeare illustrates a politics that protects religious belief from persecution. Henry VIII offers a vision of the virtues of Christianity that could contribute to a good political community, or at least to understanding what such a community entails.
1 The play might be the last Shakespeare wrote. The Tempest, often understood as Shakespeare's farewell to the theater, was performed in 1611. Inasmuch as Henry VIII does not manifest a single dramatic action, and offers a cast of characters who rise and fall from prominence rather than a focus on its title character, scholars have questioned whether Shakespeare was its sole author. R.A. Foakes makes the sound point that consideration of authorship does not affect the worth of the play, and recommends viewing the play “as a whole,” and appreciating it “for what it is” (introduction to the Arden edition of Shakespeare's King Henry VIII, ed. Foakes, R. A. [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957], xxviGoogle Scholar). Line numbers in parentheses refer to the Foakes edition of the play.
2 Slights, Camille Wells, “The Politics of Conscience in All is True (or Henry VIII),” Shakespeare Survey, no. 43 (1991)Google Scholar: 67 and 63; Richmond, H. M., “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: Romance Redeemed by History,” Shakespeare Survey, no. 4 (1968): 346–47Google Scholar; and Young, Alan R., “Shakespeare's Henry VIII and the Theme of Conscience,” English Studies in Canada 7, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 38–53Google Scholar, esp. 40–43. More broadly, but with a similar emphasis on the optimism of the play, some scholars connect Cranmer's predictions for the infant Elizabeth with the restorative pattern they find in Shakespeare's last plays, where the young in their innocence rejuvenate the old, and make restitution for the bitterness of the past. For example, Foakes, introduction to King Henry VIII, xli; Richmond, “Shakespeare's Henry VIII,” 334–49; and Felperin, Howard, “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: History as Myth,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 6, no. 2 (Spring 1966): 225–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Wegemer, Gerard B., “Henry VIII on Trial: Confronting Malice and Conscience in Shakespeare's All Is True,” in Shakespeare's Last Plays: Essays in Literature and Politics, ed. Smith, Stephen W. and Curtright, Travis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 73–86Google Scholar, esp. 74, 77, 84–86.
4 Bloom, Harold, The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 685–86Google Scholar. So too does Lee Bliss emphasize the play's darker side, for it “dramatize[s] the essential limitations in our knowledge of ‘truth’ or human motivation.” Alluding to the play's alternate title, “All Is True,” Bliss observes that if everything is equally true, it is also equally questionable. The ambiguities of the play undercut Cranmer's prophecy and turn it into “a dramatically appropriate discontinuity” (Bliss, Lee, “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's Henry VIII,” English Literary History 42, no. 1 [1975]CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 3, 10, and 14). See also Slights, “The Politics of Conscience,” 60, 64, and 68; Cespedes, Frank V., “‘We Are One in Fortunes’: The Sense of History in Henry VIII,” English Literary Renaissance 10, no. 3 (1980): 413–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rudnytsky, Peter L., “Henry VIII and the Deconstruction of History,” Shakespeare Survey, no. 43 (1991): 45–54Google Scholar.
5 Foakes, King Henry VIII, 8, note on lines 12–13.
6 The accusations of treason against Buckingham involve his ruling England, should the king and his heirs fail to prosper, and even planning to assassinate Henry to bring about this result (I.ii.132–209). Holinshed says that “the cardinal chiefly procured the death of this noble man,” without commenting on his guilt or innocence (Chronicles, in appendix to Foakes edition, 188–92). To assume that Buckingham is guilty of treason is to assume that Buckingham is like his predecessors, who plot to obtain the English crown, whether for themselves or their allies (see II.i.139). In Buckingham, I argue, Shakespeare is describing a new type of noble, who can forgive his enemies for wrongs done. (See II.i.65.)
7 When Bolingbroke and Mowbray prepare for a trial by combat in Richard II, and a herald calls upon God “to defend the right,” the combatants themselves seem to expect that their own prowess will determine the outcome (see, e.g., I.iii.101 and I.i.74–77). Shakespeare questions the justice of trials by combat in Henry VI, Part II. There an apprentice Peter Thump claims that his master Thomas Horner denied the legitimacy of Henry VI's title to rule and asserted that the king's cousin the duke of York is the rightful king. Gloucester determines that “the law” demands that the controversy between them be decided by single combat. On the day of the “trial,” one if not both of the combatants are intoxicated. When one kills the other, Henry VI declares that “by his death we do perceive his guilt” (I.iii.220; II.iii.101).
8 There are suggestions of trials in the two tetralogies, but law appears to have little force. In Richard II, Bolingbroke calls Richard II from prison to read a prepared list of charges against him, but Richard never reads them, leaving Bolingbroke's seizure of power all the more questionable (Richard II, IV.i.222–72). In Henry VI, Part I, a legal dispute occurs outside the Inns of Court, but we do not hear the argument. Noblemen choose sides in what turns into the War of the Roses (II.iv). In the two tetralogies, family quarrels lead to one murder after another, culminating in the horrors of civil war, and finally of Richard III's tyranny. Not until Henry VIII do legal trials become expected, even if one cannot assume a just outcome. As in Aeschylus's Oresteia, Shakespeare shows a movement from private revenge for crime within ruling families to the rule of law.
9 To be sure, Buckingham notes that “his guiltless blood” will one day make his base accusers groan for their deeds (II.i.106; see also II.i.68). His forgiving his enemies, curiously, does not remove their responsibility for their own wrongdoing. He is much gentler with Sir Thomas Lovell, a supporter of Wolsey, when Lovell asks his forgiveness (II.i.79–85).
10 Foakes, King Henry VIII, 24, note on scene ii. All this is more remarkable in that historically the tax and uproar from the people occur four years after Buckingham's trial. But then in contrast to Wolsey Shakespeare has made room for Katherine in his play. See Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles, 192–93.
11 My observation is confirmed in Macbeth, where the treasonous Thane of Cawdor dies after confessing his treason, and asking pardon “with deep repentance.” Malcolm observes, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.” “He died as one that had been studied in his death to throw away the dearest thing he owed as t'were a careless trifle” (I.iv.7–8). Malcolm's reflection on the traitor's death is hardly a commendation. Macbeth himself attempts in the end to redeem his life by a final act of courage in battle rather than by repentance (V.vii.33–34). Shakespeare's reservations about the thane's death presumably attach to Macbeth's as well.
12 In his first tetralogy of English history plays, written early in his career, Shakespeare presents a feisty and subtle foreign queen, Margaret of Anjou, who influences her husband Henry VI for her own power and pleasure. She survives her husband and son in the brutal War of the Roses, and hovers over the final play of the tetralogy, Richard III, in which she teaches the women whom Richard has wronged how to curse (IV.iv.116–17). Katherine, also a foreigner who marries a king of England, in contrast, serves as a model who gives lessons on how to bestow blessings rather than curses, even on those who wrong her. (See also II.ii.34–36.)
13 Wegemer argues that Chancellor Thomas More, who presides over the council, appears to proceed without bias, and with fairness to Cranmer (V.ii.42–45, 181–87; see also III.ii.393–99). Wegemer persuasively contrasts Gardiner's “aggressively hostile spirit” toward Cranmer with More's role as a peacemaker (“Henry VIII on Trial,” 84–85. More does, however, accept the charge against Cranmer's beliefs as a legitimate one (V.ii.42–53).
14 Holinshed, Chronicles, 210.
15 Foakes, Henry VIII, 172, note to lines 86–89, and Saunders, J. W., “Vaulting the Rails,” Shakespeare Survey, no. 7 (1954): 69–81Google Scholar.
16 Slights argues that in Henry VIII “the politicians' concern to court popular favor suggests that the people are a real force” (“Politics of Conscience,” 66). Of course, this is yet another reason for giving the people their due.