Henry VIII (play)
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- This article is about the play. For the opera, see Henry VIII (opera)
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth was one of the last plays written by the English playwright William Shakespeare, based on the life of Henry VIII of England. An alternative title, All is True, is recorded in contemporary documents, the title Henry VIII not appearing until the play's publication in the First Folio of 1623. Stylistic evidence indicates that the play was written by Shakespeare in collaboration with, or revised by, his successor, John Fletcher. It is also somewhat characteristic of the late romances in its structure. During a performance in 1613, a cannon shot employed for special effects ignited the thatched roof of the Globe Theatre in London, burning down the original building.
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[edit] Subject matter
The play depicts the relationship between Henry VIII of England, Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, and Cardinal Wolsey. One of the play's most famous lines is Anne Boleyn's reflection that "'Tis better to be lowly born [...] / Than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief, / And wear a golden sorrow" (II.iii).
[edit] Date and Performances
Most leading 18th and 19th century scholars, including Samuel Johnson, Lewis Theobald, George Steevens, Edmund Malone and James Halliwell-Philips, dated the play's composition to before 1603, claiming that the pro-Tudor nature of the play makes it highly unlikely it would appear during the reign of King James, whose mother was beheaded by the Tudors.[1] However, scholars such as E.K. Chambers disagree, citing "pro-Tudor" plays like When You See Me, You Know Me and If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (both 1605), that were performed, published, and re-published throughout the Stuart era.[2] These scholars date Henry VIII to 1612-13. [See: Chronology of Shakespeare's plays.] The 1613 reprinting of Samuel Rowley's play on Henry VIII, When You See Me, You Know Me, (second quarto) may have been a move to capitalize on the notoriety of the Shakespearean play that year.[3]
Henry VIII is one of the twenty or so Shakespearean plays for which an actual performance can be precisely dated.[4] In the case of Henry VIII, the performance is especially noteworthy because of the fire that destroyed the Globe Theatre during the performance, as described in several contemporary documents. These confirm that the fire took place on June 29, 1613. While some modern scholars believe the play was relatively new (one contemporary report states that it "had been acted not passing 2 or 3 times before"),[5] the value of this has been questioned, since London diarist Samuel Pepys also referred to Henry VIII as "new" in 1663, when the play was at least 50 years old.[6]
Fifteen years to the day after the fire, on June 29, 1628, The King's Men performed the play again at the Globe. The performance was witnessed by George Villiers, the contemporary Duke of Buckingham, who left halfway through, once the play's Duke of Buckingham was executed. (A month later, Villiers was assassinated.)[7]
John Downes, in his Roscius Anglicanus (1708),[8] reports that the role of Henry VIII in this play was originally peformed by John Lowin, who "had his instructions from Mr. Shakespeare himself."[9] During the Restoration era, Sir William Davenant staged a production, starring Thomas Betterton, that was seen by Pepys. Subsequent stagings of the play by David Garrick, Charles Kean, Henry Irving, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree grew ever more elaborate in their exploitation of the play's pageantry.[10]
Since the nineteenth century, however, the play has fallen from favor, and productions of it remain extremely rare. The positive critical response to a recent production (1996-1997) by the Royal Shakespeare Company, however, indicates that the play may be more stageworthy than its current reputation suggests.
[edit] Authorship
The play is generally believed to be a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher, the writer who replaced him as the principal playwright of the King's Men. There is no contemporary evidence for this; the evidence lies in the style of the verse, which in some scenes appears closer to Fletcher's typical style than Shakespeare's. It is also not known whether Fletcher's involvement can be characterized as collaboration or revision.
The possibility of collaboration was first raised by Baconian scholar James Spedding in 1850.[11] Spedding and other early commentators relied on a range of distinctive features in Fletcher's style and language preferences, which they saw in the Shakespearean play. For the next century the question of dual authorship was controversial, with more evidence accumulating in favor of the collaborative hypothesis. In 1966, Erdman and Fogel could write that "today a majority of scholars accept the theory of Fletcher's partial authorship, though a sturdy minority deny it."[12]
The most important stylistic or stylometric study is that of Cyrus Hoy, who in 1962 divided the play between Shakespeare and Fletcher based on their distinctive word choices, for example Fletcher's uses of ye for you and 'em for them.[13] Hoy's division is generally accepted, although subsequent studies have questioned some of its details.[14]
The most common delineation of the two poets' shares in the play is this:
- Shakespeare — Act I, scenes i and ii; II,ii and iv; III,ii, lines 1-203 (to exit of King); V,i.
- Fletcher — Prologue; I,iii; II,i and ii; III,i, and ii, 203-458 (after exit of King); IV,i and ii; V ii–v; Epilogue.[15]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Anderson, Shakespeare by Another Name. 2004, pgs 403-04
- ^ Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923; Vol. 3, pp. 342, 472.
- ^ Chambers, Vol. 3, p. 472.
- ^ The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, King Lear, etc.; see the Performance data on the individual plays.
- ^ Gordon McMullan, ed. Henry VIII (London: Thomson, 2000), pp. 57-60.
- ^ Samuel Pepys' entry of Dec. 26, 1663.
- ^ Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964; pp. 74-5.
- ^ Downes was the prompter of the Duke of York's Company from 1662 to 1706; his Roscius Anglicanus is an important source of information on the Restoration stage and the traditions it preserved from the early Stuart era. Halliday, p. 140.
- ^ Halliday, pp. 218-19.
- ^ Halliday, p. 219.
- ^ Spedding, James. "Who Wrote Henry VIII?" Gentleman's Magazine, 178 / new series 34, August 1850, pp. 115-23.
- ^ Erdman, David V., and Ephraim G. Fogel, eds. Evidence for Authorship: Essays on Problems of Attribution. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1966; p. 457. For a summary of scholarship to that date, see: pp. 457-78.
- ^ Hoy, Cyrus. "The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon." Studies in Bibliography 15 (1962); pp. 71-90.
- ^ Hope, Jonathan. The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays. (CUP, 1994) pp.67-83.
- ^ Erdman and Fogel, p. 457.
[edit] Further reading
- Gordon McMullan, ed. King Henry VIII. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson, 2000.
[edit] External links
- King Henry the Eighth - plain vanilla text from Project Gutenberg
