Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.

The Bard Takes a Stand Against Absolutism.

A Morality/Amorality Play for our Trumpian Times.

Burton Weltman

 

Setting the Stage for Henry VIII: History Repeating.

Prologue:  A darkened stage.  An offstage voice reads the Prologue. The Prologue warns the audience that this is a sad play in which the mighty fall and the righteous don’t necessarily triumph.  The last lines are ironic and darkly humorous given Henry VIII’s many disastrous marriages, two of which ended with him decapitating his wives: “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 Prologue, lines 30-32.

As the reading of the Prologue proceeds, the lights gradually go up, slowly revealing a very fat man sitting with his back to the audience.  The man is eating noisily and occasionally shouting out “Off with their heads!  Off with their heads!”

When the stage is fully lighted, the man turns toward the audience and he turns out to be a Donald Trump look-alike, with a Trump facemask and an orange wig.  The man stands and faces the audience. He takes off the wig and the mask, dons a regal cape and a crown, and he becomes Henry VIII.  Lights down.  On with the play.

The Relevance of Henry VIII: A warning about James I and Donald Trump. 

Henry VIII is a tragic-comic take-down of King Henry VIII.  The play deprecates both the personal life and the political actions of King Henry, focusing especially on his lust for absolute power.  Henry is portrayed as a combination of childish buffoon and amoral evil genius, habitually manipulating others and making public policy to satisfy his own personal desires, and aiming always at expanding and exerting his personal power.  His reign is portrayed as a perpetual round of persecutions, prosecutions, and executions.  The play has a superficially happy ending, but it is an ending that Shakespeare’s audience would have known was historically the beginning of another round of turmoil and terror.

The thesis of this essay is that Henry VIII is a political statement by Shakespeare in opposition to absolutism and, as such, it is implicitly critical of King James I, the English monarch when the play first appeared in 1613, who claimed absolute power by divine right.  The play can also function as a criticism of President Donald Trump, whose personality and behavior are essentially similar to those of King Henry, and whose claims to absolute power are similar to those of Kings Henry and James.  Mimicking the claims of James, Trump is frequently proclaimed a divinely appointed President by his supporters, an anointment he has not denied.  The implicit comparison of Henry’s political pretensions to those of James made for the relevance of the play to Shakespeare’s audience.  The parallels between Henry and Trump make for the relevance of the play to us today.

As a corollary to his political statement, Shakespeare also makes a historical statement in Henry VIII that all is not necessarily well that seemingly ends well, and that an apparently happy ending is not justified by despicable means.  The play contains, in this regard, an implicit warning to Shakespeare’s contemporaries about the potential for political turmoil in seventeenth century England of the sort that prevailed during and after King Henry’s reign in the sixteenth.  Absolute power means absolute enmity which makes for perpetual conflict.  It is a warning that is also all-too-relevant to us today living through the reign of would-be-king Donald Trump.

The thesis I am proposing is an unconventional interpretation of the play.  It is based on an assumption that the play is best understood the way Shakespeare’s audience would have understood it, which is within the context of sixteenth and early seventeenth century history.  I think that understanding the play in this way makes it a better play and makes it relevant to our Trumpian world today.  That is what I will try to show in this essay.

Henry VIII in the Shakespearean Canon: Deserves better than it gets.

Henry VIII is a dramatization of the year 1533 in the life of the English King Henry VIII.  It was a significant year for Henry and for the future of England.  In the course of the play, Henry splits the English Church from the Catholic Church and makes himself the head of it, divorces his long-time wife Katherine, and marries his mistress Anne.  Anne then gives birth to the future Queen Elizabeth.  Henry also has several of his closest friends and advisors beheaded, including the Duke of Buckingham and Cardinal Wolsey.  It was a seminal year in English history.  A year befitting a play.

Henry VIII is made up of elements that one would think should make it a popular play. It contains the pathos of high-born people being brought low, some justly, others unjustly.  It features eloquent and moving speeches, particularly those by the doomed Buckingham and Wolsey and the deposed Katherine.  It includes biting and insightful personal and political commentary by observant characters, especially the Duke of Norfolk and his friends.  It is also full of pageantry that can make for an engaging spectacle.

The play has not, however, been highly regarded or widely performed.  It has been almost invariably disparaged by critics, including the likes of Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, Tennyson in the nineteenth, and Mark Van Doren and Harold Goddard in the twentieth.  Part of the problem critics have had with the play is that it was a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher.  Fletcher was a young writer in Shakespeare’s theater company with whom Shakespeare collaborated on several of his later plays.

Scholars have disputed for many years as to which sections of the play were written by Shakespeare and which by Fletcher.  Much of their disagreement has centered on the different poetic styles of the two writers and, particularly, the different meters they characteristically used.  The question of which of them wrote what is not important to this essay.  This essay focuses on the message of the play and not its meter.  The point is that irrespective of who wrote which lines, the overall meaning and message of the play would certainly have been set by the senior and widely celebrated writer, Shakespeare.

Harold Goddard summed up the opinion of most critics when he deprecated the play as “more pomp and pageantry than drama,” and complained that “Henry VIII is such an anti-climax” after The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and the other great late Shakespeare plays.[1]  I think, however, that there is more drama and meaning in the play than is usually recognized, and that the biggest problem with the play has been the failure of critics to see it within its historical contexts, and to see it as Shakespeare’s audience would have.  Seeing it that way could make the play more interesting and illuminate its relevance for Shakespeare’s audience in 1613 and us today.

The Plot: All that glitters is not gold.

The plot of Henry VIII is fairly simple and quite compact.  While the play consists of five acts with a prologue and an epilogue, its action falls into three main parts.  The first part details the downfall and decapitation of the Duke of Buckingham. His demise is engineered by the power-hungry Cardinal Wolsey who is jealous of anyone close to the King.  Act I. Scene.2. Lines 170-200.

The second part describes the downfall and decapitation of Cardinal Wolsey, engineered in large part as revenge by some of Buckingham’s allies. Act III. Scene 2. Lines.1-13.  And the third part portrays the downfall of Queen Katherine, engineered by the King, and the rise of Queen Anne Boleyn, ending with the birth of the future Queen Elizabeth. The play closes with a boisterous celebration of the birth of Elizabeth and a prediction that hers will be a glorious reign.  As he leaves the stage at the end, Henry VIII is ecstatic.

In the conventional interpretation of the play, Henry VIII is portrayed as a brute but all is well that ends well.  In this view, Shakespeare was supposedly saying that Henry was a nasty specimen of a ruler but that since the glorious reign of Queen Elizabeth was the long-term result, Henry’s misdeeds were worth it.  A typical interpretation concludes that “The play ends with this great event [Elizabeth’s birth] and sees in it a justification and necessity of all that has preceded.  Thus history yields its providential meaning…”[2]

In this view, the celebration at the end of the play and the prediction that England’s future was secure are taken at face value. Shakespeare was supposedly saying that bad means can produce good ends.  I don’t agree.  And I think if that was all there is to the play, then the hostile critics may be right.  But I think there can be more to the play.  It’s a question of seeing the play within its contexts, that is, within the contexts of Shakespeare’s other history plays, the course of English history after 1533, and the state of English society in 1613 when Shakespeare wrote the play.

Henry VIII in the context of Shakespeare’s other history plays.

Henry VIII is one of Shakespeare’s last plays, and it is the last and the most contemporaneous of his history plays.  The reign of King Henry VIII was not ancient history to Shakespeare and his audience.  Shakespeare’s audience would have considered the reign of Henry VIII to be the beginning of the modern era, that is, their era.  They would have traced their present circumstances back to Henry’s regime.  This is significant because the play doesn’t just treat Henry VIII’s personal life with disdain, it treats his political decisions and pretensions to absolutism with contempt.  A pretension to absolutism that could be viewed as very similar to that of King James I.

Throughout the play, the Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Suffolk and the Earl of Surrey comment on the action in the play as it occurs, almost like a Greek chorus. The play opens with Norfolk facetiously recounting a meeting of Henry with the King of France.  He mockingly describes two very obese figures, covered in gold, silver and silk finery, awkwardly dismounting from overburdened horses and embracing.  Norfolk laughingly says he “beheld them when they lighted, how they clung in their embracement, as they grew together; which had they, what four throned ones could have weighed such a compounded one?”  Act I, Scene 1, Lines 8-10.

Norfolk goes on from there to denigrate Henry’s policies as well as his person, policies that tend toward personal political absolutism, not unlike the pretensions of James I to monarchial absolutism.  Throughout the play, Norfolk and his companions complain that Henry is emasculating the nobility, taking their power, taking away their ability to check his actions, and making them into dandified courtiers.  Their powerless also leaves the nobles’ livelihoods and even their lives subject to the whim of the King.  Absolute power for the King, absolute insecurity for his subjects.

The result that we see in the play is a kingdom full of people conniving against each other for the King’s favor, even to the point of having competitors killed, and a King who can destroy anyone with the snap of a finger, whether or not the person is guilty of any wrongdoing.  Henry’s pretensions to absolute power leads to the turmoil that we see during Henry’s reign in the play.  Absolute power for the monarch, complete chaos for the country.

Henry VIII was the culmination of Shakespeare’s consideration of English history, his tenth play on the subject, and it seems to contain a verdict on that history.  I think that verdict is “Enough already.”  Enough of the power trips and power struggles, the persecutions and executions, the demagoguery and deceit, that permeated the English history that Shakespeare dramatized in his plays.  Shakespeare is known for his ability to portray both sides of most issues, leaving it to his interpreters to decide which, if any, side is in the right.[3]  Creative ambivalence was his forte.  Not so, I contend, in this play.

Taking a side does not make Shakespeare into some kind of radical.  To the contrary.  A tension between traditionalism and modernism, old ways and new, between what we might today call conservatism and liberalism, runs through Shakespeare’s plays, with Shakespeare generally seeming to tilt toward traditionalism.  That is the case here.

Monarchial absolutism was a recently developing phenomenon in Europe.  With the rise of a wealthy capitalist class from which kings could finance their governments and the development of guns with which they could raise armies of plebian soldiers, kings were gaining independence from the nobles upon whom they had previously been dependent for money and soldiers.  Kings began to assert control over unified nation-states as distinguished from the conglomerations of disparate fiefdoms over which they previously had presided.  In Henry VIII, Shakespeare came down against this radical innovation.

In a history play such as Henry VIII, the historical events that it does not portray can be as important to the meaning of the play as those that it does portray. This is especially the case if the author can assume the audience knows about those omitted events and that the audience will consider them part of the context of the play.  I think this is the case with Henry VIII.  It is a play in which the events that are portrayed point to events with which Shakespeare’s audience would have been familiar but that come after the play’s ending.

Henry VIII, Henry VIII and Sixteenth Century English History.

Henry VIII is a history play but it deals with events that members of Shakespeare’s audience would have considered the recent past or even part of the extended present, in the way that many people in America today consider the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1940’s and 1950’s.  Written during the years 1612-1613, it portrays events of the year 1533 that significantly changed the course of English history.  And it intimates the havoc that one man with too much power can wreak on a society.

During the year 1533, King Henry VIII undertook a series of selfish, self-centered actions for personal gain that effectively revolutionized English society.  Apoplectic that the Pope would not approve a divorce for him from his wife Katherine, Henry divorced England from the Catholic Church and made himself the head of a Protestant Anglican Church.  This set off battles within England between Protestants and Catholics, and between Anglican Protestants and so-called Nonconformist Protestants, that still resonate today and that were vehemently fought for some two hundred years after Henry’s death.

Having made himself head of the Church, Henry then made Church offices a matter of personal royal patronage, with bishops and archbishops coming and going at his whim. Over the long term, this patronage system made Church policy and practices depend on which political party or faction was in power, significantly diminishing the stature of the Church.  Henry also confiscated massive amounts of Catholic Church property, kept some for himself and gave the rest to his allies.  This had the effect of furthering the development of a capitalist economy in England, albeit a corrupt, crony capitalism in which monopolies for lucrative businesses were given to friends and allies of the King.

Henry centralized political and economic power in himself, developed a cult of personality in himself, and made everyone pay court to him.  He arbitrarily and summarily turned against allies, even prosecuting and executing many, so that everyone nervously and obsequiously hovered around him, seeking to stay in his favor.  Finally, Henry fathered a series of children who had conflicting claims to the throne.  This made for political turbulence and violence as each asserted his or her claims, and for political uncertainty and instability from Henry’s death down to Shakespeare’s present day.

Although we can see all these things developing in the play, and Shakespeare’s audience knew the unhappy denouement, the play ends on a boisterously happy note.  It is seemingly a moment of equipoise.  Henry has apparently established his dominance over church and state in England, has papered over the differences between those in his realm who remained loyal to the Catholic Church and those who were pushing England toward a Protestant Church, and has an heir in the person of the baby Elizabeth.  It’s a happy ending.  Or so it may have seemed in 1533.

The felicity at the play’s end is enhanced by an apocryphal prediction made by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer.  Shakespeare invents for Cranmer a long speech in which Cranmer predicts that baby Elizabeth will grow up to become a sensational queen.  At this prediction, King Henry gushes “Archbishop, Thou hast made me now a man; never before this happy child did I get anything” and so forth for a dozen more gushing lines to end the play.  Act V. Scene 5. Lines 62-75.

But an ending is also a beginning, and a moment of equipoise is not forever.  We know today, and Shakespeare’s audience knew then, that Henry already had a daughter Mary, who was born of Katherine and who could have been his heir. But with the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Katherine, Mary had become an illegitimate child and not a potential heir to the throne.  Or so it was thought in 1533.  But Shakespeare’s audience knew better, and worse.  Mary was one day to become the Queen known as Bloody Mary.

From the vantage point of 1533, the play has a happily-ever-after ending.  But not so fast.  Shakespeare’s audience in 1613 would have known that in 1536, only three years after this happy ending, Henry would annul his marriage to Anne for failing to produce a male heir, and have her beheaded.  So, Henry really wasn’t as happy with the birth of Elizabeth as he may have appeared at the time or that Shakespeare made him appear at the end of the play.  And upon the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Anne, Elizabeth became an illegitimate child and was no longer a potential heir to the throne.  Or so it seemed in 1536.  Shakespeare’s audience knew better.

Shakespeare’s audience would also have known that Henry became paranoid in the years following 1533, afraid of both Protestant and Catholic opponents of his halfway religious reforms, and harried by a host of pretenders to the throne that his father had violently seized before him.  Henry proceeded after 1533 to kill off most of the most important people who were at one time close to him.  Of the characters in the play who were close to him in real life, Henry executed five during his lifetime: the Duke of Buckingham, Cardinal Wolsey, the Earl of Surrey, Thomas Cromwell, and Queen Anne Boleyn (spelled Bullen in the play).  Shakespeare’s audience would have known all of this.

Henry also ordered the execution of a sixth character in the play, the Duke of Norfolk, who was a main ally of Henry in reality and in the play.  Fortunately for Norfolk, Henry died before the decapitation could be carried out and Norfolk was saved.  A seventh character who is named in the play, Thomas More, another of Henry’s close confidents, was also subsequently executed by Henry.  An eighth character, Archbishop Cranmer, was under Henry’s suspicion for many years but survived his reign only to be executed later by Henry’s daughter Queen Mary.  As with the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, “Off with their heads” was the order of the day during King Henry’s reign and thereafter.

Finally, Shakespeare’s audience would have known that the death of Henry VIII unleashed a civil war between Protestants and Catholics in England, a bloodbath that continued for over twenty years and was still simmering in Shakespeare’s time.  Having veered back and forth between Catholic loyalists and Protestant reformers, Henry left them at each other’s throats when he died.

Upon Henry’s death in 1547, he was succeeded by his ten-year old son Edward, the product of his third wife, Queen Jane, the one after he had disposed of Anne.  Reigning as a mere child, Edward VI was guided by Archbishop Cranmer, an arch-Protestant who duly persecuted Catholics.  Edward died after only six years in office, having likely been poisoned by opponents of his religious policies.

Edward was succeeded in 1553 by his sixteen-year old cousin Lady Jane Grey.  She ruled as queen for nine days until she was overthrown and later executed by Edward’s sister, Bloody Mary. Like her mother Katherine, Queen Mary was a staunch Catholic.  She restored Catholicism as the religion of England, had Archbishop Cranmer killed, and had some three hundred other Protestants burned at the stake during her reign.

When Mary died in 1558, she was succeeded by Queen Elizabeth who ruled until her own death in 1603.  It’s at this point that the prediction that Shakespeare put into the mouth of Archbishop Cranmer in the play seemingly came true.  Elizabeth reigned long and well for England.  She began her reign with the enactment in the early 1660’s of a fairly generous Poor Relief Act.  Then she signed a peace treaty with France that finally ended some five hundred years of sporadic war over English claims to parts of France, which had been the subject or the background of several of Shakespeare’s plays.  And she oversaw the beginning of a very lucrative trade in African slaves that over the years became a foundation of English prosperity, albeit a disaster for Africa and Africans.

Elizabeth’s reign was not without conflicts and violence.  She outlawed Catholicism and restored Protestantism as the religion of the land.  There were ongoing persecutions during her time of Catholics in England and attacks by Catholic countries against England, including the famous Spanish Armada of 1588.  But these troubles were tame compared to the reign of Bloody Mary.  There were also prosecutions and executions of alleged plotters against Elizabeth, including Mary Queen of Scotts in 1587 and the Earl of Essex in 1601.  But, again, these were few and far between compared to the murderous reigns of Henry VIII and his immediate successors.

Forty-five years of stable government must have seemed a blessing to Elizabethan English people.  But at what price Shakespeare seemed to be asking?  Does Elizabeth’s reign justify the horrors of the reigns of Henry VIII and his successors before Elizabeth?  In making the last scene in Henry VIII a celebration her birth, I think Shakespeare was highlighting the horrors that had occurred during the play and that were yet to come after.

In this context, I think that the celebration at the end of the play, along with the pageantry elsewhere in the play, should be seen as ironic.  Shakespeare’s directions call for several scenes in which crowds of noblemen and noblewomen parade across the stage.  These scenes are usually staged as extravaganzas, with gorgeous costumes and sets, and seemingly accounts for complaints like that of Harold Goddard that the play is more pomp than drama.  The celebration at the end of the play is generally staged as though Shakespeare intended the audience to think this really is a happy ending.  But it isn’t, not if you know what happened next.  So, I would do things differently.

As a means of underling the shallowness of the King and his nobles, I would attire them in gaudy, garish, foolish-looking clothes and have them surrounded by a common people who are poorly dressed.  I would have the nobles parading around in ridiculously foppish and buffoonish fawning ways.  In this way, the ostentation can be seen as Henry’s, not Shakespeare’s, and the pomp can become part of the drama rather than a substitute for it.

This staging would be consistent with the complaint at the very beginning of the play by the Duke of Norfolk, a spokesperson for reason in the play, that Henry has dandified the nobility.  Although historically, as nobles became decreasingly needed as warriors, they increasingly became mere courtiers, Norfolk blames this dandification on the baleful influence on Henry of the French, which is something Shakespeare’s anti-French audience would have reacted viscerally against.  Act I. Scene 1. Lines 13-30.

Historical Message of Henry VIII: Power Corrupts the Powerful and the Powerless.

Shakespeare’s history plays are not historically precise and were not meant to be factually literal.  In these plays, Shakespeare took some historical figures plus some historical events and constructed a story out of them.  He took poetic liberty in delineating the main characters in the plays and in reconstructing the events.  The history plays were seemingly intended to convey messages about both history and current events, and to contain a moral to their stories.  Henry VIII is, I think, is no exception.

Commentators have frequently said that in his last plays, Shakespeare was trying to resolve and reconcile things that had perplexed him during his life.  In The Winter’s Tale, for example, which was written between 1609 and 1611, he deals with divisions and reconciliations among friends and family members.  In The Tempest, which is attributed to the years 1610-1611, he deals with the relation between life and art.  Prospero’s magic in The Tempest is generally seen as a metaphor for Shakespeare’s art, and Prospero’s abandoning his book of magic at the end of the play is widely regarded as a metaphor for Shakespeare’s abandoning the theater and moving toward retirement.[4]

Henry VIII is one of Shakespeare’s last plays.  If it falls into this category of bucket-list plays, what was he trying to say in it?  Michael Wood has opined that Shakespeare was trying to reconcile Catholics and Protestants.  In support of this contention, Wood notes that the two most sympathetic characters in the play are the Catholic Katherine and the Protestant Cranmer.[5]  I think that there is something to this suggestion but that there is also more to the play.

I think Shakespeare was trying to reconcile himself to the brutality and false promises of English history as he had portrayed it in his nine previous plays about English Kings.  In historical chronology, the plays started with King John, the regime in which the Magna Carta codified the rights of John’s subjects, and especially the nobles, against the King.  The plays dramatized an alternation of good and bad kings, with the hopes raised by the one being dashed by the next.  In Henry VIII, I think Shakespeare intended to show that the vicious cycle was still going around, even in his present-day.

Toward this end, Shakespeare invented an ostensibly happy ending to his play in which all the previous power struggles, persecutions, prosecutions, and executions had somehow been set aside and forgotten in the end.  A social equipoise had seemingly been achieved and a new beginning was ostensibly at hand.  Shakespeare, thereby, implicitly raised the question of what if Henry VIII had actually been satisfied with the situation he had engineered?  What if he had been content to be married to Anne and to have Elizabeth as his heir?  But he wasn’t.  And maybe he couldn’t be.

In Shakespeare’s plays, power generally corrupts and the desire for absolute power corrupts absolutely.  A power-hungry person can never have enough power.  There is always someone who has power he doesn’t have and must have to be satisfied.  But he can never be satisfied.  Because there is always someone threatening his power, and more power to be had.  That is what seems to drive characters such as Richard III and Macbeth in Shakespeare’s plays, as well as Henry VIII.  And Donald Trump today?

Shakespeare’s plays are full of examples of power turning people bad.  This was especially the case with royal children who were raised to be powerful.  In Henry VIII, the King’s personal satisfaction was his first and seemingly only priority.  A Trump-like, selfish, self-centered, self-willed person, Henry was so corrupted by power that he could not see past his own desires.  Having been born to royalty and raised to be king, Henry VIII was completely corrupted by the ability to have what he wanted when he wanted it, no questions asked.  He was the most powerful man in the kingdom, but with the mentality, desires and emotional control of an adolescent.  Sound familiar?

Portrayed in the play as a cunning capo, Henry ran his government like a mafia boss in charge of a mobster gang.  Loyalty to him and to whatever he wanted was all that counted.  That is why Archbishop Cranmer is saved at the end, despite facing charges similar to those that had brought others down:  Not for any religious, humanitarian, or other matters of principle.  He was saved because he was crucial in getting Henry his so-called divorce from Katherine.

While Henry is corrupted by possessing power, the nobles and others who hang around him in the play are corrupted by their proximity to power.  Many of them are high-born and powerful in their own right but they are like moths hovering around the more powerful King.  They woo Henry, giving him whatever he wants, and getting what they can out of the relationship.  But their well-being and even their lives depend on satisfying the whims of a capricious man-child.  Most of them eventually fail at this, and die for their efforts.  Anne Boleyn, for example, adamantly insists in the beginning of the play that she would not want to be queen and wouldn’t accept an offer of marriage from Henry. But, she does.  And she dies as a consequence.  Act II. Scene 3. Lines 22-40.

The nobles are corrupted by their proximity to power.  The masses of people are corrupted by their remoteness from power and their vicarious enjoyment of the King’s power.  Act IV, Scene 60, Lines 60-95.  Shakespeare portrays the common people as devoted to the King no matter how awful his behavior and how much damage he does to the country.  This is not unlike many supporters of President Trump in the United States today. Like Trump supporters, Shakespeare’s common people share a suspicion, envy, and hatred of those above them in the social and intellectual hierarchy of the day, and they love their leader for his attacks on those people.  They love him because he humiliates the people who humiliate them, even though they are also humiliated by him in the process.

Henry VIII, James I and Seventeenth Century English History.

In condemning Henry VIII’s power-tripping, I think Shakespeare was pointing to the pretensions to absolutism of King James I, and in highlighting the horrors that followed Henry’s reign, I think Shakespeare was raising doubts about the happy ending of his own time.  James I was not the philanderer and libertine that Henry VIII had been.  In fact, James was a narrow-minded, self-righteous pedant.  But he shared with Henry a lust for power.  Like Henry, James had been born and raised to be a king.  He became King of Scotland in 1567 at the age of eleven before becoming also King of England in 1603.  He had lived a life of power, with people bowing and scraping before him since he was a child, and he believed he was God’s special agent on earth.

When James became King of England, he commissioned a translation of the Bible that is called The King James Bible, the most popular English-language version of the Bible to this day.  A man with his own version of the Bible is likely to think well of himself.  And he did.  When James was still just King of Scotland, he had written a book entitled The True Law of Free Monarchies, published in 1598, in which he claimed that “The state of monarchy is the supremist thing upon earth; for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself are called gods.”  Questioning a king who considered himself a god could be a risky business.  But Shakespeare did it, even if he could dare to do so only by implication.

When Shakespeare wrote Henry VIII, things were generally considered to have gone well in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and she had been widely idolized.  Overcoming the social and political turmoil that had been bequeathed to her by her father Henry VIII and her siblings Edward and Mary, and the complication of being a woman in a traditionally male role, she turned obstacles into opportunities and became the “Loved Ruler” and the “Loving Ruler.”[6]  Becoming beloved more than feared, she fared well.

King James sought reverence rather than love.  Although his reign up to the time of the writing of Henry VIII was tame compared to the reigns of Henry VIII and Henry’s immediate successors, but it was full of potentially ominous religious, class, and political conflicts.  I think Shakespeare was concerned about these signs of social problems and he took what I think can be seen as a series of sideswipes at James.

Religious differences reemerged as a major problem under James.  Unlike the tolerant look-the-other-way Elizabeth, James was a vehemently anti-Catholic Protestant who looked for reasons to persecute religious dissenters and found them.  In 1605, the Gunpowder Plot by a group of Catholics to blow up Parliament revived religious violence in England.  It was already illegal in England to be Catholic or Jewish, but now new penalties were enforced against Catholics and several people found to be Jewish were exiled from the country.  James also had a phobia about witches being agents of the devil, and during his early reign at least fourteen people were hanged as witches.  Even a pacifistic Anabaptist was burned at the stake for heresy in1612.

Shakespeare was no fan of religious extremism.  Measure for Measure, first performed in 1604, is a sendup of religious fanaticism.  If, as Michael Wood has suggested, Shakespeare was hoping to help reconcile Catholics and Protestants in Henry VIII, in particular by portraying the Catholic Katherine in sympathetic terms, that would have been an implicit criticism of the religious extremism of James.

Shakespeare’s implied criticisms of James extended to social policy, in particular the enclosure movement which had gained new impetus during James’ reign.  Enclosure was a legal process whereby landlords closed off land from peasant farmers who had previously cultivated it so as to raise sheep instead.  It had been ebbing and flowing for two centuries.  Peasants dispossessed of their farmlands ended up as vagabonds or worked as day laborers, much to everyone’s distress.

In 1607, the peasantry’s simmering discontent against enclosures came to a boil.  A group of some five thousand peasants known as the Diggers of Warwickshire addressed a petition to King James asking for help against the landlords.  Frequently citing the Bible to the publisher of The King James Bible, they claimed the enclosures were an offense against the King since they “deprive his most true harted (sic) communaty (sic)” of the right to live.  James responded by calling their petition “a wicked instrument” and sending out troops that slaughtered hundreds of the peasants.[7]

Shakespeare not only was aware of the events in Warwickshire but incorporated the arguments and the language of the Diggers’ petition into the opening scene of his play Coriolanus, first performed in 1608.[8]  In this scene, the requests by a group of peasants for justice are summarily rejected.  I think the scene is an implied criticism of James’ response to the peasants of his day.

Coriolanus can also be taken as an implied criticism of James’ political pretensions.  The play is a deprecatory portrayal of a demagogue who hoped to overthrow the newly founded Roman Republic in the fifth century BCE and make himself a dictatorial king.  The play can be seen as a backhanded rebuke of James’ dictatorial ambitions.  Similarly, in The Tempest, first performed in 1611, when Prospero at the end of the play abandons the magic which had given him absolute power over his island and returns to Milan as a seemingly constitutional duke, this can be seen as a rebuke to James’ insistence on absolute authority. 

In this context, Henry VIII can be seen as a critique of James’ politics in several ways.  James was in perpetual conflict with Parliament over the levying of taxes, which the King attempted to do unilaterally but which Parliament claimed as its prerogative.  Members of Parliament considered James’ spending to be extravagant and refused to grant him the taxes he wanted, so he took to refusing to call Parliament into session and began imposing taxes unilaterally.  This is something that Henry is portrayed as attempting to do in Henry VIII.   In the play, the Queen Katherine, a Catholic no less, convinced Henry to rescind his new taxes.  I.2.55-70.  II.2.20-40.  This scene can be seen as directed against James’ actions.

James was also at loggerheads with the Common Law Courts.  The Common Law was judge-made law that derived from judges’ decisions on disputed legal cases.  One judge’s decision on a type of case became a precedent for the next judge’s consideration in the next case of that type.  English common law dates from the eleventh century ACE.  James claimed that his decisions could override common law decisions.  Common law lawyers, citing the Magna Carta among other precedents, rejected the King’s claim.  In Henry VIII, Shakespeare implicitly criticizes James’ claims to absolute authority and to being above the law by having Henry go to great lengths to ensure that his divorce from Katherine was legally recognized.  Even he felt the need to pay homage to the law.

Finally, Shakespeare rejected in his plays a key assumption that is generally made by members of the comfortable classes in society.  That assumption is that what’s good for me is good for all, and for all time.  To those who are doing well, the present moment will seem to be in perfect equipoise, with all the forces of good and evil in balance.  To the well-to-do, all of history has seemingly tended toward this moment – both the good and the bad of the past – and this moment justifies it all and does so forever.  Shakespeare never bought that comfortable line of thinking and Henry VIII is a quintessential example of his rejection of it.  A joyously happy ending turns out to be a horrible beginning.  Could he have been warning that something similar might be happening in 1613?

If Henry VIII reflects Shakespeare’s discomfort with the way things were tending in England in 1613, as I think it does, he may have been prescient.  The next half century was to witness violent religious and political conflicts, as England suffered through more power struggles, persecutions, prosecutions, and executions.

James I, after struggling through his own battles with Parliament, the courts and religious dissenters, bequeathed his pretensions to absolutism to his son Charles I.  It was a legacy that led to vehement political battles between Parliament and the King, and religious battles between Puritans and Anglicans. These conflicts eventuated in a civil war during the 1640’s that resulted in the temporary overthrow of the English monarchy, and cost Charles his head in 1649.

Order was not truly restored in English politics until the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the new ruling monarchs, King William and Queen Mary, accepted the primacy of Parliament. This accord began a period of relatively calm coequal rule that was characterized as “the King in Parliament.”  Pragmatism of the sort that Shakespeare generally championed – particularly in Henry VIII – finally prevailed.  For a time.

Staging Henry VIII: Portraying the Historical Context.

If I am right in my surmise that understanding Shakespeare’s intentions in Henry VIII requires the audience to be aware of sixteenth and early seventeenth century English history, how can one stage the play for people today who don’t know that history?  I have two suggestions.

The first is to fill the Playbill for the play with helpful historical information.

The second is to take advantage of technology that enables a director to project images and words onto the back wall of a stage.  Many productions use this technology for various purposes.  The purpose here would be to fill in some historical gaps for the audience during the play, and possibly make the performance more dramatic.  To make the play even more clearly relevant to the political situation in the United States today, images of President Trump could be projected on the back wall during appropriate scenes.

In particular, during the last scene, while Henry and his court are celebrating the birth of Elizabeth, some highlights of the subsequent regimes of Anne, Edward, Mary, Elizabeth, and James could be projected in words and images on the stage wall.  While this is going on, characters in the play could gradually leave the stage until Henry is the last one left.

Epilogue: King Henry VIII is the last one to leave the stage, lingering as an offstage voice reads the play’s epilogue, which emphasizes that this is a play in which women are the virtuous characters.  The epilogue seems to point back to the virtues of the cruelly divorced Queen Katherine but also forward to the successful reign of Queen Elizabeth.

A Trump look-alike comes onto the stage, passing the King as Henry leaves.  Each scrutinizes the other and gives the other a small smile and a nod of recognition.  The Trump look-alike looks out at the audience and smirks.  The lights go out.

B.W.  5/3/19

Postscript:  Performance of Henry VIII at the Stratford Theatre Festival

I recently saw a performance of Henry VIII at the Stratford Theatre Festival in Canada.  The director cut from Shakespeare’s script the opening lines of the play in which Henry VIII is described as an overweight, overdressed, vainglorious fool and then proceeded to portray Henry as some kind of heroic figure.  The play did not make sense, and it was a very disappointing performance.  Oh well, you can’t win them all.

B.W. 6/18/19

Footnotes:

[1] Harold Goddard. The Meaning of Shakespeare.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. P.269.

[2] Shakespeare’s Poems and Plays.  Encyclopedia Britannica. britannica.com Accessed 4/22/19.

[3] Jonathan Bate.  The Genius of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.  P.218.

[4] Harold Goddard. The Meaning of Shakespeare.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. P.278.

[5] Michael Wood.  Shakespeare.  New York: Basic Books, 2003. Pp.331-333.

[6] Garry Wills. Making Make-Believe Real.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

[7] Steve Hindle. “Imagining Insurrection in Seventeenth Century England: Representations of the Midland Uprising of 1607.” University of Warwick, 2018.

[8] Michael Wood. Shakespeare. New York: Basic Books, 2003. P.298.