Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth

Front matter

Ill m SS wSs&m

mm

[1-07!!.] HEEABY OT SHE

Introduction

History of the Play.

KING HENRY THE EIGHTH was undoubtedly among the latest of the Poet's writing : Mr. Grant White thinks it was the very last ; nor am I aware of any thing that can be soundly alleged against that opinion. The play was never printed till in the folio of 1623. It is first heard of in connection with the burning of the Globe theatre, on the 29th of June, 1613 : at least I am fully satisfied that this is the piece which was on the stage at that time. Howes the chronicler, recording the event some time after it occurred, speaks of " the house being filled with people to behold the play of Henry the Eighth." And we have a letter from Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas Puckering, dated " London, this last of June," with the following : " No longer since than yesterday, while Burbage's company were acting at the Globe the play of Henry the Eighth, and there shooting off certain chambers in way of triumph, the fire catched, and fastened upon the thatch of the house, and there burned so furiously, as it consumed the whole house." But the most particular account is in a letter from Sir Henry Wotton to his nephew, dated July 2, 16 13 : "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 in the reign of Henry the Eighth, which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp -and majesty. Now King Henry making a masque 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, 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 within 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."

Some of the circumstances here specified clearly point to the play which has come down to us as Shakespeare's. Sir Henry, to be sure, speaks of the piece by the title "All is True " ; but the other two authorities describe it as " the play of Henry the Eighth." And it is worth noting that Lorkin, in stating the cause of the fire, uses the very word, chambers, which is used in the original stage-direction of the play. So that the discrepancies in regard to the name infer no more than that the play then had a double title, as many other plays also had. And the name used by Sir Henry is unequivocally referred to in the Prologue, the whole argument of which turns upon the quality of the piece as being true. Then too the whole play, as regards the kind of interest sought to be awakened, is strictly correspondent with what the Prologue claims in that behalf: a scrupulous fidelity to Fact is manifestly the law of the piece ; as if the author had here undertaken to set forth a drama made up emphatically of " chosen truth," insomuch that it might justly bear the significant title All is True.

The piece in performance at the burning of the Globe theatre is described by Wotton as a new play ; and it will hardly be questioned that he knew well what he was saying. The internal evidence of the piece itself all draws to the same conclusion as to the time of writing. In that part of Cranmer's prophecy which refers to King James, we have

these lines :

Wherever the bright Sun of heaven shall shine, The honour and the greatness of his name Shall be, and make new nations : he shall flourish, And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches To all the plains about him.

On a portrait of King James once owned by Lord Bacon, the King is styled Imperii Atlantici Conditor. And all agree that the first allusion in the lines just quoted is to the founding of the colony in Virginia, the charter of which was renewed in 1612, the chief settlement named Jamestown, and a lottery opened in aid of the colonists. The last part of the quotation probably refers to the marriage of the King's daughter Elizabeth with the Elector Palatine, which took place in February, 16 13. The marriage was a theme of intense joy and high anticipations to the English people, as it seemed to knit them up with the Protestant interest of Germany ; anticipations destined indeed to a sad reverse in the calamities that fell upon the Elector's House. Concurrent with these notes of seeming allusion to passing events, are the style, language, and versification ; in which respects it is hardly distinguishable from Coriolanus and the other plays known to have been of the Poet's latest period.

All which considered, I am quite at a loss why so many editors and critics should have questioned whether Shakespeare's drama were the one in performance at the burning of the Globe theatre. They have done this partly under the assumption that Shakespeare's play could not have been new at that time. But I cannot find such assumption at all sustained by any arguments they have produced. It is true, a piece described as "The Interlude of King Henry the Eighth " was entered at the Stationers' in February, 1605. There is, however, no good reason for ascribing this piece to Shakespeare : on the contrary, there is ample reason for supposing it to have been a play by Samuel Rowley, entitled " When you see me you know me, or the famous chronicle history of King Henry the Eighth," and published in 1605.

Some, again, urge that Shakespeare's play must have been written before the death of Elizabeth, which was in March, 1603. This is done on the ground that the Poet would not have been likely to glorify her reign so largely after her death. And because it is still less likely that during her life he would have glorified so highly the reign of her successor, therefore resort is had to the theory, that in 16 13 the play was revived under a new title, which led Wotton to think it a new play, and that the Prologue was then written, and the passage referring to James interpolated. But all this is sheer conjecture, and is directly refuted by the Prologue itself, which clearly supposes the forthcoming play to be then in performance for the first time, and the nature and plan of it to be wholly unknown to the audience : to tell the people they were not about to hear

A noise of targets, or to see a fellow

In a long motley coat guarded with yellow,

had been flat impertinence in case of a play that had been on the stage several years before. As to the passage touching James, I can perceive no such signs as have been alleged of its being an after-insertion : the awkardness of connection, which has been affirmed as betraying a second hand or a second time, is altogether imaginary : the lines knit in as smoothly and as logically with the context, before and after, as any other lines in the speech.

Nor can I discover any indications of the play's having been written with any special thought of pleasing Elizabeth. The design, so far as she is concerned, seems much rather to have been to please the people, by whom she was all* beloved during her life, and, if possible, still more so when, after the lapse of a few years, her prudence, her courage, and her magnanimity save where her female jealousies were touched, had been set off by the blunders and infirmities of her successor. For it is well known that the popular feeling ran back so strongly to her government, that James had no way but to fall in with the current, notwithstanding the strong causes which he had, both public and personal, to execrate her memory. The play has an evident making in with this feeling, unsolicitous, generally, of what would have been likely to make in, and sometimes boldly adventurous of what would have been sure to make out, with the object of it. Such an appreciative delineation of the meek and honourable sorrows of Catharine, so nobly proud, yet in that pride so gentle and true-hearted • her dignified submission, wherein her rights as a woman and a wife are firmly and sweetly asserted, yet the sharpest eye cannot detect the least swerving from duty ; her brave and eloquent sympathy with the plundered people, pleading their cause in the face of royal and reverend rapacity, this too with an energetic simplicity which even the witchcraft of Wolsey's tongue cannot sophisticate : and all this set in open contrast with the worldly-minded levity, and the equivocal or at least qualified virtue, of her rival, and with the headstrong, high-handed, conscience-shamming selfishness of the King ; — surely the Poet must have known a great deal less, or a great deal more, than anybody else, of the haughty daughter of that rival and that King, to have thought of pleasing her by such a representation.

Historic Basis of the Action.

The historical matter of the play, so far as relates to the fall of Wolsey and the divorce of Catharine, was derived, originally, from George Cavendish, who was gentleman-usher to the great Cardinal, and himself an eye-witness of much that he describes. His Life of Master Wolsey is among the best specimens extant of the older English literature ; the narrative being set forth in a clear, simple, manly eloquence, which the Poet, in some of his finest passages, almost literally transcribed. Whether the book had been printed in Shakespeare's time, is uncertain ; but so much of it as fell within the plot of the drama had been embodied in the chronicles of Holinshed and Stowe. In the fifth Act, the incidents, and in many cases the very words, are taken from Fox the martyrologist, whose Acts and Monuments of the Church, first published in 1563, had grown to be a very popular book in the Poet's time.

The " fierce vanities " displayed in the Field of the Cloth of Gold, with an account of which the play opens, occurred in June, 1520, and the death of Buckingham in May, 152 1. The court assembled for the divorce began its work on the 1 8th of June, 1529, and was dissolved, without concluding any thing, on the 23d* of July. On the 17th of October following, Wolsey resigned the Great Seal, and died on the 29th of November, 1530. In July, 15 31, Catharine withdrew from the Court, and took up her abode at Ampthill. Long before this time, the King had been trying to persuade Anne Boleyn, one of the Queen's Maids of Honour, to be a sort of left-hand wife to him ; but an older sister of hers had already held that place, and had enough of it : so she was resolved to be his right-hand wife or none at all ; and, as the Queen would not recede from her appeal to the Pope, Anne still held off till she should have more assurance of the divorce being carried through. In September, 1532, she was made Marchioness of Pembroke, and was privately married to the King on the 25th of January, 1533. Cranmer became Archbishop of Canterbury the next March, and went directly about the business of the divorce, which was finished on the 24th of May. This was followed, in June, by the coronation of the new Queen, and in September by the birth and christening of the Princess Elizabeth. Soon after the divorce, Catharine removed to Kimbolton, where, in the course of the next year, 1534, she had to digest the slaughter of her steadfast friends, Fisher and More ; as the peculiar temper of the King, being then without the eloquence of the great Cardinal or the virtue of the good Queen to assuage it, could no longer be withheld from such repasts of blood. Catharine died on the 8th of January, 1536, which was some two years and four months after the birth of Elizabeth. The play, however, reverses the order of these two events. As for the matter of Cranmer and the Privy Council, in Act v., this did not take place till 1544, more than eleven years after the event with which the play closes.

Authorship of the Play.

Dr. Johnson gave it as his opinion that the Prologue and Epilogue of this play were not written by Shakespeare. And I believe all the critics who have since given any special heed

IO KING HENRY THE EIGHTH.

to the matter have joined in that opinion. I have not for many years had the slightest doubt on the subject. And I am equally clear in the same opinion touching the Epilogues to The Tempest and King Henry the Fourth, and the Chorus to the fourth Act of The Winter's Tale. Nor, indeed, does it seem possible that any one having a right taste for Shakespeare should judge otherwise, after comparing those pieces with the Induction to the Second Part of Henry the Fourth, and the Choruses in King Henry • the Fifth ; all which ring the true Shakespearian gold for workmanship in that kind. It was very common for the dramatic writers of the time to have such trimmings of their plays done by some friend. Who wrote the Prologue and Epilogue to Henry the Eighth has been somewhat in question. The well-known intimacy and friendship between Jonson and Shakespeare have naturally drawn men's thoughts to honest Ben as the author of them : but, as the style answers equally well to the motions of another hand ; and as we have unquestionable marks of another hand in the body of the play ; a conjectural ascription of the matter to Jonson is not properly in order.

It is now, I think, as good as settled that this play was the joint production of Shakespeare and John Fletcher ; somewhat more than half of it belonging to the latter. Dr. Johnson had the sagacity to observe that the genius of Shakespeare comes in and goes out with Catharine ; and that the rest of the play might be easily conceived and easily written. But this germ of criticism did not grow to any tangible results till our own day. As far back, however, as 1850, Mr. James Spedding, a critic of approved perspicacity and judgment, published an article in The Gentleman's Magazine, discoursing the theme with lucid statement and cogent argument ; and all the more satisfactory, that it lands in definite and well-braced conclusions. On the appearance of this article, Mr. Samuel Hickson, another discriminating and judicious critic, put forth a brief paper in Notes and Queries, expressing an entire concurrence with Mr. Spedding, and also saying that he had reached the same conclusion three or four years before ; this too without having any communication with him, or any knowledge of him, even of his name ; but that the want of a favourable opportunity had kept him from making his thoughts known. Nor was this a mere general concurrence : it was an entire agreement in the details, and extending even to the assignment of scenes and parts of scenes to their respective authors. Still more recently, Mr. F. G. Fleay has brought his metrical tests and his figures to bear upon the question ; and the result is a full confirmation both of the general and the particular conclusions reached by the two other gentlemen.

Of course the evidence on which this judgment proceeds is altogether internal, as the play has come clown to us without any outside tokens or suggestions of another hand than Shakespeare's in the making of it. And the most striking and available parts of that evidence, though not the strongest, have reference to the qualities of style and versification. But Fletcher's peculiarities in this point are so strongly marked ; rather say, he has an habitual mannerism of diction and metre so pronounced ; that no one thoroughly at home in his acknowledged workmanship can easily fail to taste his presence in whatever he wrote : and, as certain portions of the play in hand have the full measure of his idiom in those respects, so it is nowise strange that several critics, once started on the track, should all tie up in the same result.

For my own part, I have slowly and reluctantly grown, or been drawn, into the same upshot with the writers named.

and am now thoroughly satisfied that the conclusion they have reached is substantially right. The details of this conclusion are as follows: — That the first and second scenes of Act i. are Shakespeare's ; also the third and fourth scenes of Act ii. ; also about three sevenths of the second scene in Act hi., down to the King's parting from Wolsey with the words, " and then to breakfast with what appetite you have " ; also the first scene of Act v. : and that all the rest of the play is Fletcher's ; namely, the third and fourth scenes of Act i., the first and second of Act ii., the first, and about four sevenths of the second in Act hi., the whole of Act iv., the second, third, and fourth of Act v., also the Prologue and Epilogue. Mr. Fleay makes the whole number of blankverse lines in the play to be 2613, of which 1467 are Fletcher's, thus leaving only 1146 to Shakespeare. ,

From the forecited distribution I see no reason to dissent, except that, as Mr. Spedding admits, some of the portions assigned to Fletcher have traces of a superior workman. In particular, the latter part of the second scene in Act hi., all after the exit of the King, seems to me a mixture of Fletcher and Shakespeare : though the Fletcher element preponderates, still I feel some decided workings of the master-hand. The same, though in a somewhat less degree, of the coronation scene, the first in Act iv. Certainly, if Fletcher wrote the whole of these, he must have been, for the time, surprised out of himself, and lifted quite above his ordinary plane ; even the best that he does elsewhere giving no promise of such touches as we find here. On the other hand, I doubt whether the first scene of Act v. be pure Shakespeare : at all events, it seems by no means equal to his other portions of the play. And, as the two authors probably wrote in conjunction, it might well be that some whole scenes were done by each, while in others their hands worked together, or the one revised and finished what the other had first written ; thus giving us choice bits of Shakespearian gold mingled with the Fletcherian silver.

Mr. Spedding's essay is so fine a piece of criticism in itself, so calm and just in temper, and withal cuts so near the heart of the subject, that I cannot well resist the impulse to reproduce a considerable portion of it. After a clear statement of his conclusion, together with the grounds of it, he proceeds as follows :

The opening of the play — the conversation between Buckingham, Norfolk, and Abergavenny — seemed to have the full stamp of Shakespeare, in his latest manner : the same close-packed expression ; the same life, and reality, and freshness ; the same rapid and abrupt turnings of thought, so quick that language can hardly follow fast enough ; the same impatient activity of intellect and fancy, which, having once disclosed an idea, cannot wait to work it orderly out ; the same daring confidence in the resources of language, which plunges headlong into a sentence without knowing how it is to come forth ; the same careless metre which disdains to produce its harmonious effects by the ordinary devices, yet is evidently subject to a master of harmony ; the same entire freedom from book-language and commonplace ; all the qualities, in short, which distinguish the magical hand which has never yet been successfully imitated.

In the scene in the Council-chamber which follows, where the characters of Catharine and Wolsey are brought out, I found the same characteristics equally strong.

But the instant I entered upon the third scene, in which the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Sands, and Lovell converse, I was conscious of a total change. I felt as if I had passed suddenly out of the language of nature into the language of the stage, or of some conventional mode of conversation. The structure of the verse was quite different, and full of mannerism. The expression became suddenly diffuse and languid. The wit wanted mirth and character. And all this was equally true of the supper-scene which closes the first Act.

The second Act brought me back to the tragic vein, but it was not the tragic vein of Shakespeare. When I compared the eager, impetuous, and fiery language of Buckingham in the first Act with the languid and measured cadences of his farewell speech, I felt that the difference was too great to be accounted for by the mere change of situation, without supposing also a change of writers. The presence of death produces great changes in men, but no such change as we have here.

When, in like manner, I compared the Henry and Wolsey of the scene which follows with the Henry and Wolsey of the Council-chamber, I perceived a difference scarcely less striking. The dialogue, through the whole scene, sounded still slow and artificial.

The next scene brought another sudden change. And, as in passing from the second to the third scene of the first Act, I had seemed to be passing all at once out of the language of nature into that of convention ; so, in passing from the second to the third scene of the second Act, (in which Anne Boleyn appears, I may say for the first time, for in the supper-scene she was merely a conventional court lady without any character at all,) I seemed to pass not less suddenly from convention back again into nature. And, when I considered that this short and otherwise insignificant passage contains all that we ever see of Anne, and yet how clearly the character comes out, how very a woman she is, and yet how distinguishable from any other individual woman, I had no difficulty in acknowledging that the sketch came from the same hand which drew Perdita.

Next follows the famous trial-scene. And here I could as little doubt that I recognized the same hand to which we owe the trial of Hermione. When I compared the language of Henry and of Wolsey throughout this scene to the end of the Act, with their language in the Council-chamber, (Act i. scene 2,) I found that it corresponded in all essential features: when I compared it with their language in the second scene of the second Act, I perceived that it was altogether different. Catharine -also, as she appears in this scene, was exactly the same person as she was in the Council-chamber ; but, when I went on to the first scene of the third Act, which represents her interview with Wolsey and Campeius, I found her as much changed as Buckingham was after his sentence, though without any alteration of circumstances to account for an alteration of temper. Indeed the whole of this scene seemed to have all the peculiarities of Fletcher, both in conception, language, and versification, without a single feature that reminded me of Shakespeare ; and, since in both passages the true narrative of Cavendish is followed minutely and carefully, and both are therefore copies from the same original and in the same style of art, it was the more easy to compare them with each other.

In the next scene, (Act iii. scene 2,) I seemed again to get out of Fletcher into Shakespeare ; though probably not into Shakespeare pure ; a scene by another hand perhaps, which Shakespeare had only remodelled, or a scene by Shakespeare which another hand had worked upon to make it fit the place. The speeches interchanged between Henry and Wolsey seemed to be entirely Shakespeare's ; but, in the altercation between Wolsey and the lords which follows, I could recognize little or nothing of his peculiar manner, while many passages were strongly marked with the favourite Fletcherian cadence : and as for the famous "Farewell, a long farewell," &c, though associated by means of Enfield' *s Speaker with my earliest notions of Shakespeare, it appeared (now that my mind was opened to entertain the doubt) to belong entirely and unquestionably to Fletcher.

Of the fourth Act I did not so well know what to think. For the most part it seemed to bear evidence of a more vigorous hand than Fletchers, with less of mannerism, especially in the description of the coronation, and the character of Wolsey ; and yet it had not to my mind the freshness and originality of Shakespeare. It was pathetic and graceful, but one could see how it was done. Catharine's last speeches, however, smacked strongly again of Fletcher. And, all together, it seemed to me that, if this Act had occurred in one of the plays written by Beaumont and Fletcher in conjunction, it would probably have been thought that both of them had a hand in it.

The first scene of the fifth Act, and the opening of the second, I should again have confidently ascribed to Shakespeare, were it not that the whole passage seemed so strangely out of place. I could only suppose that the task of putting the whole together had been left to an inferior hand ; in which case I should consider this to be a genuine piece of Shakespeare's work, spoiled by being introduced where it has no business. In the execution of the christening-scene, on the other hand, (in spite again of the earliest and strongest associations,) I could see no evidence of Shakespeare's hand at all ; while in point of design it seemed inconceivable that a judgment like his could have been content with a conclusion so little in harmony with the prevailing spirit and purpose of the piece.

As regards the point of diction and metre, the argument turns very much upon the use of verses with a redundant syllable at the end, or what are commonly called lines with double endings, but what I sometimes designate as lines with amphibractic endings. This, at all events, is the handiest, and perhaps the most telling, item to be urged in illustration of the point. And here it will not be out of place to observe that Shakespeare's regular Verse is the iambic pentameter. This, however, he continually diversifies with metrical irregularities, introducing trochees, spondees, anapests, dibrachs, tribrachs, and sometimes dactyls, in various parts of his lines. But his most frequent irregularity is by ending his verses with amphibrachs ; and this occurs much oftener in his later plays than in his earlier ; and in some of his plays, as in the Shakespeare portions of the

INTRODUCTION. \J

one now in hand, we have about one third of the lines ending- with amphibrachs. The purpose of this is, to prevent or avoid monotony ; just as great composers enrich and deepen their harmonies by a skilful use of discords. Now Fletcher's use of this irregularity is far more frequent than Shakespeare's : commonly not less than two thirds of his lines, and often a larger proportion, having amphibractic endings. So excessive is this usage with him, that, besides rendering the movement of his verse comparatively feeble and languid, it becomes a very emphatic mannerism : in fact, it just works the irregularity itself into a new monotony, and a monotony of the most soporific kind. For nothing has so much the effect of a wearisome sameness as a continual or too frequent recurrence of the same variation : even the studied and uniform regularity, or what Cowper terms "the creamy smoothness," of Pope's versification is less monotonous to the ear, than such an over-use of one and the same mode of diversity. And this, together with certain other traits of style and diction not easy to describe, imparts to Fletcher's verse a very peculiar and rather heavy swing and cadence, often amounting to downright sing-song and humdrum. Many times, in reading him, I have, almost before I knew it, caught my thoughts drowsing off into a half-somnolent state, from this constant and uniform oscillation, so to speak, of his language and metre. Vastly different is all this in Shakespeare ; whose metrical irregularities are always so ordered as to have the effect of jogging the attention into alertness and keeping it freshly awake.

To make the point clear to the apprehension of average readers, I will next produce several of Fletcher's best and most characteristic passages ; enough to give a full and fair taste of his habitual manner. The first is from The Knight l8 KING HENRY THE EIGHTH.

of Malta, ii. 5, where Oriana, the heroine, being falsely accused of crime, and sentenced to die, unless a champion appear and vindicate her honour in single combat, makes the following speech as she goes up to the scaffold :