Shakespeare's history of King Henry the Eighth

Front matter

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Preface

This play, which I edited in 187 1, and revised in 1883, with the addition of line numbers, is now reissued with further and fuller revision on the same plan as the sixteen plays that have preceded it in the series.

The notes credited to " Adee " were sent to me when I was at work on the play in 1883 by my good friend, Hon. Alvey A. Adee, of Washington, D.C., then, as now. First Assistant Secretary of State, and an accomplished Shakespeare scholar and critic.

The notes credited to "White " are from Mr. Richard Grant White's first and fully annotated edition of Shakespeare in twelve volumes, not from the later abridged " Riverside " edition, and were used with his permission and approval.

Appendix

The Time-Analysis of the Play Historic Dates, in the Order of the Play List of Characters in the Play i8

39 41 71

lOI

129 144 173

259 259 259 260

Index of Words and Phrases Explained.

The Tower of London

Introduction To King Henry The

EIGHTH

The History of the Play

Henry VIII, under the title of " The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight," was first pubHshed in the Folio of 1623, where it is printed with remarkable accuracy.

The date of the play has been the subject of much discussion. The earlier editors and comm.entators, with the single exception of Chalmers, beUeved that it was lo King Henry the Eighth

written before the death of Elizabeth (March, 1603), and that the allusion to her successor, "■ Nor shall this peace sleep with her," etc. (v. 5), did not form a part of Cranmer's speech as originally composed, but was interpolated by Ben Jonson after James had come to the throne. But, as White remarks, " the speech in question is homogeneous [though not, as he calls it, 'Shakespearian '] ; the subsequent allusion to Elizabeth as ' an aged princess ' would not have been ventured during her life ; and the exhibition of Henry's selfish passion for Anne Bullen, and of her lightness of character, would have been hardly less offensive to the Virgin Queen, her daughter."

In the Stationers' Registers, under date of February 12, 1604 [-5], we find the following memorandum: " Nath. Butter] Yf he get good allowance for the Enterlude of K. Henry 8th before he begyn to print it, and then procure the wardens hands to yt for the entrance of yt, he is to have the same for his copy ; " and some editors have thought that this refers to Shakespeare's drama. It is more probable, however, that the reference is to a play of Samuel Rowley's, " When you See me you Know me, or the Famous Chronicle History of King Henry the Eighth," which was pubhshed in 1605.^

1 This play is " a bluff, hearty, violently Protestant piece of work, the Protestant emphasis being indeed the most striking thing about it. The verse is formal, with one or two passages of somewhat heightened quality. The characters include a stage Harry, a very invertebrate Wolsey, a Will Sommers whose jokes are as thin as they are inveterate, a Queen Katherine of the doctrinal and magnanimous order, a modest

Introduction ii

Most of the recent editors believe that the play was written in 1612 or 1613, and that it was the poet's last work. The evidence drawn from the play itself tends to confirm this view of its date. In the prophecy of Cranmer, the lines, —

" Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine. His hopour, and the greatness of his name. Shall be, and make new nations," —

allude, we can hardly doubt, to the colonization of Virginia, and, if so, could not have been written earlier than 1607. The style and the versification of the play, moreover, indicate that it was one of the last productions of the poet. As White has remarked, " the excessively elliptical construction, and the incessant use of verbal contrac- ^ tions, are marks of Shakespeare's latest years — those which produced The Tempest and The Winter''s Tale^ It will be observed also that many of the lines end with unaccented monosyllables or particles ; and this peculiarity is very rare in those plays of Shakespeare which are known to be his earliest, while it is frequent in those which are known to be his latest.

The external evidence also favours this date. The Globe Theatre was burned down on the 29th of June, 1613, and we have several contemporary accounts of the catastrophe. A letter from John Chamberlain to Sir

Prince Edward ; with minor personages of the. usual sort, and, beyond the usual, a Dogberry and Verges set of watchmen, with whom, together with one Black Will, King Henry has a ruffling scene " (Symons) . The play was reprinted in 1613, 1621, and 1632.

Ralph Winwood, dated July 12, 16 13, describes the burning, and says that it " fell out by a peale of chambers " — that is, a discharge of small cannon. Howes, in his continuation of Stowe's Annales, written some time after the fire (since he speaks of the theatre as rebuilt "the next spring"), says that the house was "filled with people to behold the play, viz., of Henry the Eighth^ Sir Henry Wotton, writing to his nephew on the 6th of July, 1613, gives a minute account of the accident: " Now to let matters of state sleep, I will entertain you at the present with what happened this week at the Bankside. 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. . . . Now, King Henry making a mask at the Cardinal Wolsey's house, and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of ^lie paper, or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where, being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes being more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming, in less than an hour, the whole house to the very ground. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks ; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him if he had not, by the benefit of a provident wit, put it out with bottle ale." There can be little doubt that the play in question was Shakespeare's Henry

F///, in which, according to the original stage direction (iv. i), we have " chambers discharged " at the entrance of the king to the " mask at the cardinal's house." It appears to have had at first a double title, but the ^' All is True " was soon dropped, leaving only the more distinctive title corresponding to those of Shakespeare's other historical plays. There seem to be several references to the lost title in the Prologue : " May here find truth too j " " To rank our chosen truth with such a show ; " and "To make that only true we now intend."

The critics are now generally agreed that portions of Henry VIII were written by John Fletcher. Mr. Roderick, in notes appended to Edwards's Canons of Criticism (edition of 1765), was the first to point out certain peculiarities in the versification of the play — the frequent occurrence of a redundant or eleventh syllable, of pauses nearer the end of the verse than usual, and of " emphasis clashing with the cadence of the metre." More recently two critics (Mr. James Spedding, in the Gentleman's Magazine, August, 1850, and Mr. Samuel Hickson, in Notes and Queries, vol. ii. p. 198 and vol. iii. p. 33), working independently, divided the play between Shakespeare and Fletcher in the same manner, assigning certain scenes to each author, on account of difi"erences in the versification and diction ; and a study of the dramatic treatment and characterization by these and other critics led to precisely the same results. Mr.. Spedding afterward stated that the resemblance to Fletcher's style in parts of the play was pointed out to him several years before by

14 ^i^g Henry the Eighth

Tennyson ; and it is a curious fact that Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his lecture on Shakespeare (pubhshed in 1850 before he could have seen the articles by Spedding and Hickson, and written several years before it was published), also noted the evidences of two hands in Henry VIII. He says, after referring to Malone's discussion of the double authorship oi Henry VI: "In Henry VIII I think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his [Shakespeare's] stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful man with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy and the following scene with Cromwell, where, instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose secret is that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best bring out the rhythm, here the Hnes are constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable traits of Shakespeare's hand, and some passages are like autographs. What is odd, the compHment to Queen Elizabeth [v. 5, 17 foL] is in the bad rhythm."

The passages which Emerson ascribes to the "man with a vicious ear" are all among those which Spedding and others decide to be Fletcher's. People with no ear for rhythm may sneer at verse tests as they please ; but when poets like Tennyson and Emerson come to the same conclusions as the " metre-mongers " and other critics, we may safely assume that these conclusions are probably correct.

Craik (^English of Shakespeare, Rolfe's ed. pp. 10, 38) believes that much of the play is " evidently by another hand," the character of the versification being " the most conclusive, or, at least, the clearest evidence that it cannot have been written throughout by Shakespeare." Abbott {Shakesperian Grammar, p. 331), after stating that in Shakespeare's verse " the extra syllable [at the end of a line] is very rarely a monosyllable," says : *'The fact that in Henry VIII, and in no other play of Shakespeare's, constant exceptio7is are found to this rule, seems to me a sufficient proof that Shakespeare did not write that play." Fleay, Furnivall, and Dowden agree with Spedding in assigning to Shakespeare act i. sc. i, 2 ; act ii. sc. 3, 4 ; act iii. sc. 2 (to exit of King, line 203) ; and act v. sc. 2 : the remainder they believe to be Fletcher's.

Various theories have been proposed to explain the double authorship of the play. Some critics think that it was an instance of collaboration ; but it is more probable, as the majority believe, that Fletcher completed an unfinished play of Shakespeare's. Three or four take . the ground that Shakespeare was the sole author; one (Mr. Robert Boyle, in the Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, for 1880-1885) argues that the play was written by Fletcher and Massinger, and that Shakespeare had nothing to do with it. Mr. Arthur Symons (introduction to the play in the *' Henry Irving " edition) doubts whether Shakespeare wrote the non-Fletcherian parts, but hesitates to attribute them to Massinger or any other dramatist of the time. He says : " There are lines and passages which, if I came across them in an anonymous play, I should assign without hesitation to Massinger; there are also lines and passages to which I can recollect no parallel in all his works." He " cannot hold with any assurance that the second author has yet been discovered."^

Mr. Aldis Wright (Clarendon Press edition of the play, 1 891) remarks: "In such a case it is easier to prove a negative than a positive, and while it may appear to some not sufificiently certain that Mr. Boyle has identified Massinger as the author of the parts he attributes to him, he must be allowed to have given excellent reasons for concluding that they were not written by Shakespeare." So far Mr. Wright fully agrees with Mr. Boyle ; but as to the question whose are the non-Fletcherian parts, he says : " I confess this is a question I am not careful to answer. If they are not by Shakespeare, it matters little to whom they are assigned." He gives some weight to the fact that there are many " un-Shakesperian words and phrases " in the play, of which he adds a partial hst ; and these, he says, " occur in all parts of the play, and not merely in those which Mr. Spedding assigns to Fletcher." But in Henry VIII, of which about three-fifths is Fletcher's, there are only 143 words (22 of which are compounds) found in no other work ascribed to Shakespeare, while

1 Mr. Boyle and Mr. Symons agree in adding act. iv. sc. i to Spedding's non-Fletcherian part of the play ; and Mr. Boyle also adds the following portions of other scenes : act i. sc. 4, lines 1-24, 64-108 ; act. ii. sc. I, lines 1-53, 137-169; and act v. sc. 3, lines 1-113.

in Hejiry V, another play taken at random, there are 138 such words (25 being compounds). Hamlet (a play about twice as long as Henry VIH) has more than four hundred such words. As the authorship of both Henry V and Hamlet is undisputed, it is evident that no argument concerning Shakespeare's share in Henry VIH can be based upon the supposed " un-Shakesperian words " in the play.

Mr. Fleay, in his Shakespeare Mamml {i^']6), accepts Spedding's theory of the authorship of the play ; but in his Life and Work of Shakespeare (1886) he says: " This play is chiefly by Fletcher and Massinger, Shakespeare's share in it being only i. 2, ii. 3, ii. 4. It was not, however, written by these authors in conjunction. Shakespeare appears to have left it unfinished ; his part is more like The Winter's Tale than any other play, and was probably written just before that comedy in 1609." The 16 13 play he believes to have been "Shakespeare's in its original form," but " probably finished by Fletcher, and destroyed in great part in the Globe fire." The "extant play," he thinks, "was produced, by Fletcher and Massinger in 161 7."

Mr. Sidney Lee {Life of Shakespeare) believes that the play was written by Shakespeare and Fletcher, who in his part of the work had " occasional aid from Massinger;" but he considers that the theory that "Massinger and Fletcher alone collaborated in Henry VILL (to the exclusion of Shakespeare altogether) does not deserve serious consideration." He is inclined to ascribe HENRY vni — 2

Wolsey's famous " Farewell " to Shakespeare ; but, as Dowden says : " It is certainly Fletcher's, and when one has perceived this, one perceives also that it was an error ever to suppose it written in Shakespeare's manner."

The Historical Sources of the Play

The historical authorities followed by the authors in the first four acts of the play were Edward Hall's Unioit of the Families of Lancaster and York, the first edition of which appeared in 1548, and Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, pubHshed in 1577. These writers had copied largely from George Cavendish's Life of Cardinal Wolsey, of which there were many manuscript copies in Shakespeare's day, though the work was not printed until 1641. For the fifth act they took their materials from John Fox's Acts and Monuments of the Church, published in 1563.

In these books the poets found many details which they put into dramatic form with very shght change of language, as will be seen from the illustrations given in the Notes. The action of the play includes events scattered through a period of about twenty-three years, or from 15 20 to 1543, and the events are not always given in their chronological order. Thus the reversal of the decree of taxing the commons (1525) and the examination of Buckingham's surveyor (152 1) are in one scene; the banquet scene (1526) precedes that of Buckingham's execution, and in the later scene we find mention of Henry's scruples concerning his marriage (1527) and of the arrival of Campeggio (1529) ; the scene in which Anne is made Marchioness of Pembroke (1532) precedes that of the trial of the queen (1529) ; the death of Wolsey (1530) is announced to Katherine in the scene in which she dies (1536) ; in the same scene in which the birth of Elizabeth (1533) is announced to the king, he converses with Cranmer about the charge of heresy (1543) ; and in the scene in which Cranmer is accused before the council (1543) Henry asks him to be godfather at the baptism of Elizabeth (1533). Even if we make no account of the introduction of the charges against Cranmer (1543), the action of the play will cover a period of some sixteen years, from the return of the Enghsh Court from the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, to the death of Katherine in 1536.

General Comments on the Play

The German critic Herzberg describes the play as " a chronicle-history with three and a half catastrophes, varied by a marriage and a coronation pageant, ending abruptly with the baptism of a child." It is, indeed, most incoherent in structure, " After all our sympathies have been engaged upon the side of the wronged Queen Katherine, we are called upon to rejoice in the marriage triumph of her rival, Anne Bullen." Its poor dramatic construction would of itself suffice to prove that it was not a complete work of Shakespeare's — or, indeed, of any single playwright of the better type — if we had not other good evidence to the same effect.

The views of the leading critics concerning the characters in the play have naturally been affected by their theories of its authorship. Charles Knight, who, though admitting that the verse has peculiarities " not found in any other of Shakespeare's works," nevertheless regards the theory that it is not wholly his own as " utterly untenable," says : " There is no pl^y of Shakespeare's which has a more decided character of unity — no one from which any passage could be less easily struck out. We believe that Shakespeare worked in this particular upon a principle of art which he had proposed to himself to adhere to, wherever the nature of the scene would allow. The elHptical construction, and the license of versification, brought the dialogue, whenever the speaker was not necessarily rhetorical, closer to the language of common life. I Of all his historical plays the Henry VIII is the nearest in its story to his own times. It professed to be a ' truth.' It belongs to his own country. It has no poetical indistinctness about it, either of time or place ; all is defined. If the diction and the versification had been more artificial, it would have been less a reality." The opening hues of the prologue, according to Knight, are " a perfect exposition of the principle upon which the poet worked in the construction of this drama. . . . There had been a considerable interval between its production and that of Henry V, the last in the order of representation of his previous Histories. During that interval several of the poet's most admirable comedies had been unquestionably produced ; and the audience of 16 13 was perhaps still reveUing in the recollections of the wit of Touchstone or the more recent whimsies of Autolycus.

But the poet, who was equally master of the tears and the smiles of his audience, prepares them for a serious view of the aspects of real life — ' I come no more to make you laugh.' . . . He had to offer weighty and serious things; sad and high things; noble scenes that commanded tears ; state and woe were to be exhibited together ; there was to be pageantry, but it was to be full of pity ; and the woe was to be the more intense from its truth. . . . From the first scene to the last, the dramatic action seems to point to the abiding presence of that power which works ' her cruel sports to many men's decay.' We see ' the ever-whirling wheel ' in a succession of contrasts of grandeur and debasement ; and, even when the action is closed, we are carried forward into the depths of the future, to have the same triumph of ' mutability ' suggested to our contemplation." The play not only opens " with singular art," but " the great principle " announced in the prologue is its key-note to the end, and the characters are developed and delineated in perfect keeping with it. Thus, as Knight tells us, the dramatist " closes his great series of ' Chronicle Histories.' This last of them was to be ' sad, high, and working.' It has laid bare the hollowness of worldly glory ; it has shown the heavy * load ' of ' too much honour ' ; it has given us a picture of the times which succeeded the feudal strifes of the other ' Histories.' "

On the other hand, if we regard the play as one which was originally planned by Shakespeare, who partially developed the leading characters and then for some reason laid it aside, and which afterwards was put into the hands of Fletcher, who finished it in his own way — which was not at all Shakespeare's way — we can understand the weakness of the patched-up plot, and the inconsistencies of the modified characterization. These are well set forth by Spedding, who says : —

" The effect of this play as a whole is weak and disappointing. The truth is that the interest, instead of rising towards the end, falls away utterly, and leaves us in the last act among persons whom we scarcely know, and events for which we do not care. The strongest sympathies which have been awakened in us run opposite to the course of the action. Our sympathy is for the grief and goodness of Queen Katherine, while the course of the action requires us to entertain as a theme of joy and compensatory satisfaction the coronation of Anne Bullen and the birth of her daughter, which are in fact a part of Katherine's injury, and amount to little less than the ultimate triumph of wrong. For throughout the king's cause is not only felt by us, but represented to us, as a bad one. We hear, indeed, of conscientious scruples as to the legality of his first marriage ; but we are not made, nor indeed asked to believe that they are sincere, or to recognize in his new marriage either the hand of Providence, or the consummation of any worthy object, or the victory of any of those more common frailties of humanity with which we can sympathize. The mere caprice of passion drives the king into the commission of what seems a great iniquity ; our compassion for the victim of it is elaborately excited ; no attempt is made to awaken any counter-sympathy for him ; yet his passion has its way, and is crowned with all fehcity, present and to come. The effect is much like that which would have been produced by The Winter's Tale if Hermione had died in the fourth act in consequence of the jealous tyranny of Leontes, and the play had ended with the coronation of a new queen and the christening of a new heir, no period of remorse intervening. It is as if Nathan's rebuke to David had ended, not with the doom of death to the child just born, but with a prophetic promise of the felicities of Solomon.

" This main defect is sufficient of itself to mar the effect of the play as a whole. But there is another, which, though less vital, is not less unaccountable. The greater part of the fifth act, in which the interest ought to be gathering to a head, is occupied with matters in which we have not been prepared to take any interest by what went before, and on which no interest is reflected by what comes after. The scenes in the gallery and council-chamber, though full of life and vigour, and, in point of execution, not unworthy of Shakespeare, are utterly irrelevant to the business of the play ; for what have we to do with the quarrel between Gardiner and Cranmer? Nothing in the play

24 ^i^g Henry the Eighth

is explained by it, nothing depends on it. It is used only (so far as the argument is concerned) as a preface for introducing Cranmer as godfather to Queen Elizabeth, which might have been done as a matter of course without any preface at all. The scenes themselves are indeed both picturesque and characteristic and historical, and might probably have been introduced with excellent effect into a dramatized life of Henry VIII. But historically they do not belong to the place where they are introduced here, and poetically they have in this place no value, but the reverse.

"With the fate of Wolsey, again, in whom our second interest centres, the business of this last act does not connect itself any more than with that of Queen Katherine. The fate of Wolsey would have made a noble subject for a tragedy in itself, and might very well have been combined with the tragedy of Katherine ; but, as an introduction to the festive solemnity with which the play concludes, the one seems to be as inappropriate as the other. . . .

" I know no other play in Shakespeare which is chargeable with a fault like this, none in which the moral sympathy of the spectator is not carried along with the main current of action to the end. In all the historical tragedies a Providence may be seen presiding over the development of events, as just and relentless as the fate in a Greek tragedy. Even in Henry IV, where the comic element predominates, we are never allowed to exult in the success of the wrong-doer, or to forget the penalties which are due to guilt. And if it be true that in the romantic comedies our moral sense does sometimes suffer a passing shock, it is never owing to an error in the general design, but always to some incongruous circumstance in the original story which has lain in the way and not been entirely got rid of, and which after all offends us rather as an incident improbable in itself than as one for which our sympathy is unjustly demanded. The singularity of Henry VIII is that, while four-fifths of the play are occupied in matters which are to make us incapable of mirth, —

' Be sad, as we would make you. Think ye see The very persons of our history As they were living ; think you see them great, And follow'd with the general throng and sweat Of thousand friends ; then in a moment see How soon this mightiness meets misery !

And if you can be merry then, I'll say A man may weep upon his wedding day,' —

the remaining fifth is devoted to joy and triumph, and ends with universal festivity : —

' This day let no man think He has business at his house, for all shall stay; This little one shall make it holiday.'

" Of this strange inconsistency, or at least of a certain poorness in the general effect which is amply accounted for by such inconsistency, I had for some time been vaguely conscious ; and I had also heard it casually remarked by a man of first-rate judgment on such a point [Tennyson] that many passages in Henry VIII were very much in the manner of Fletcher ; when I happened to take up a book of extracts, and opened by chance on the following beautiful lines : —

* Would I had never trod this English earth. Or felt the flatteries that grow upon it ! Ye have angels' faces, but heaven knows your hearts. "What will become of me now, wretched lady? I am the most unhappy woman living. — Alas ! poor wenches, where are now your fortunes? Shipwrack'd upon a kingdom, where no pity, No friends, no hope, no kindred weep for me, Almost no grave allow'd me. — Like the lily. That once was mistress of the field and flourish'd, I'll hang my head and perish.'

" Was it possible to believe that these lines were written by Shakespeare? I had often amused myself with attempting to trace the gradual change of his versification from the simple monotonous cadence of T/te Two Gentlemen of Verona to the careless felicities of The Winter's Tale and Cy?nbeline, of which it seemed as impossible to analyze the law as not to feel the melody ; but I could find no stage in that progress to which it seemed possible to refer these lines. I determined upon this to read the play through with an eye to this especial point, and see whether any solution of the mystery would present itself. The result of my examination was a clear conviction that at least two different hands had been employed in the composition of Henry VIII, if not three; and that they had . worked, not together, but alternately upon distinct portions of it.