King John & Henry VIII (2 page)

The Bastard announces himself as a gentleman born in Northamptonshire; he is “A good blunt fellow,” that is to say a plain-speaking English countryman; later, he appeals to St. George, the patron saint of England. His, then, is the voice of Shakespeare’s own place of origin, the Midlands, deep England. He is given a choice: to inherit the Falconbridge estates or take his “chance” and assume the name, though not the patrimony, of the royal father who sired him out of wedlock.

The norm in the English gentry was for the older son to inherit the land and the younger to become mobile, to go to London and find a career in the law, the clergy, the army, the diplomatic corps, or possibly even the entertainment business. Settled legitimacy was pitched against the life of the adventurer. By accepting his illegitimacy and renouncing the land he is actually entitled to (because it was the mother’s adultery, not the father’s, he is not forcibly disinherited in the manner of Edmund in
King Lear
), the Bastard takes the route that was usually that of the younger brother. Shakespeare did the same when he left Stratford-upon-Avon.

The Bastard’s origin in middle England is further stressed by the arrival of Lady Falconbridge and James Gurney, wearing riding-robes that signify the journey from country to court. The Bastard then describes his half-brother as “Colbrand the Giant, that same mighty man.” Colbrand was a Danish invader who was defeated in single combat by Guy of Warwick—a legendary figure who was immensely popular in chapbook, ballad, and drama. If Robert Falconbridge is symbolically Colbrand, then Philip the Bastard is symbolically Guy, a Warwickshire folk hero. Perhaps he is even a version of Robin Hood, with the Sheriff of Northampton standing in for his colleague from Nottingham. Robin Hood himself, the most famous folk hero from the reign of John, cannot be mentioned because his name would immediately turn the king into a villain, which Shakespeare did not want to do at the beginning of the play, both because he wanted to keep open the question of the relative legitimacy of the claims of John and Arthur and because he was working in that tradition of chronicle and drama in which King John was a proto-Protestant hero because of his refusal to allow the Pope’s nominee, Stephen Langton, to become Archbishop of Canterbury.

When the Pope excommunicates the English king and gives permission—indeed promise of canonization—to anyone who conspires to kill him, the parallels with contemporary England, where the Pope had delivered the same sentence upon Queen Elizabeth, are impossible to ignore. So too with the way in which the fickle French swing one way and then the other (“O, foul revolt of French inconstancy!” exclaims Queen Elinor): in the sixteenth century, France was racked by religiously motivated civil wars and it was well nigh impossible to guess whether the state would end up with a Catholic or a Protestant on the throne. “The grappling vigour and rough frown of war” dominates the action of this play, just as wars of religion and dominion in the Netherlands, Ireland and elsewhere impinged upon the lives of Shakespeare’s audience. Like Thersites in
Troilus and Cressida
, though without the vicious streak, the Bastard anatomizes the resulting chaos of alliances and divisions: “Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!”

The Bastard stands in for Guy of Warwick, who stands in for Robin Hood of old England. It was Robin who maintained the values of good King Richard at home, while the latter was fighting his crusade in the Middle East (“Richard that robbed the lion of his heart / And fought the holy wars in Palestine”). As the play progresses, the Bastard’s role shifts to that of stand-in for the dead Coeur-de-lion himself. He ends up fighting the war on John’s behalf and at one point comes within a whisker of ascending the throne. He speaks for England in the closing lines:

The world-weary voice is that of a dramatist who in his
Henry VI
plays has shown the bloody consequences of England turning against itself.

Tragedies and history plays had a convention that the final lines were spoken by the person left in charge of the nation, so we may assume that the Bastard effectively takes on the role of regent during Prince Henry’s minority. Historically, Henry III was ten years old when he came to the throne; in the play, he calls himself a cygnet and is clearly a boy actor (the part could neatly be doubled with that of the dead Arthur).

The Bastard is the conscience of the nation, the symbolic heir of Lionheart, the voice of the shires. But he is also an adventurer, the embodiment of illegitimacy, a new man, an individualist who foreshadows the more sinister figure of Edmund in
Lear:
“I am I, howe’er I was begot.” Improviser, player, speaker of soliloquies, both inside and outside history, could he be the voice not only of Guy but also of William of Warwickshire? Who speaks for deep England? A bastard. An entrepreneur. A player. A man who idealizes the shires even as he leaves them to enter the theater, the market, the emergent empire. Who speaks? A Shakespeare.

Henry VIII
, coauthored with John Fletcher, is the only English history play of the second half of Shakespeare’s career, when his men were under the patronage of King James I. Written at a time of nostalgia for the age of Queen Elizabeth, the action comes to a climax when a doll representing the newborn future queen is brought on stage, her reign as a “maiden phoenix” is predicted, and her chosen successor, King James, is praised:

“A pattern to all princes,” she is later described as one who “shall make it holiday”: such language suggests how the English Protestant cult of the Virgin Queen derived some of its power from the way in which it reworked the Roman Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary.

The speech is spoken by the princess’s godfather, Thomas Cranmer, famous as the architect of the English Reformation and a martyr burnt to death in the reign of bloody Queen Mary: the linking of the infant Elizabeth to Protestant ideology could not be more strongly expressed. Though the final scene was written by Fletcher, Cranmer’s subsequent image of a “cedar” tree as a representation of the royal genealogical line replicates a prophecy spoken by the god Jupiter in Shakespeare’s
Cymbeline
. Events in
Henry VIII
do not, however, seem to have been driven by that sense of destiny, of a providential design leading to the establishment of a new dynasty, which shaped Shakespeare’s earlier chronicle plays. The emphasis is rather on the vicissitudes of court life. The play’s structure is built on an apparently arbitrary pattern of rises and falls: Buckingham falls, Anne Bullen rises, Wolsey rises, Katherine falls, Wolsey falls, Cranmer rises. Again, as Wolsey goes down, Thomas Cromwell comes up: Anne Bullen is “the weight” on this pulley of fortune. There is some skilled compression of history for the sake of dramatic effect: in the play, the fall of Cardinal Wolsey and the triple elevation of Thomas More, Thomas Cranmer, and Anne Bullen effectively work as a single event, whereas in reality these three came to eminence in, respectively, 1529, 1532, and 1533. Wolsey actually died in 1530, three years before the coronation of Anne as Henry’s second queen.

Though grounded in history, the pattern of ascent and descent is analogous to that of romance, with its highs and lows, its voyages and reunions, things lost and found. It was originally staged under the title
All Is True
, a wittily ironic pointer to its romance-matter, such as Queen Katherine’s divine vision, which can hardly be literally true. Shakespeare and Fletcher may have chosen to infuse their play with the spirit of romance, so far from the tough world of the Richard and the other Henry plays, in order to create a safety zone that was necessary because
Henry VIII
dramatizes the still contentious issue over which England broke from the Church of Rome, the replacement of Queen Katherine with Anne Bullen. The crux of the action is the fall of Wolsey, mediator between the king and the Pope. It becomes the occasion not to pass judgment on the rights and wrongs of the Reformation, but for a generalized reflection on the fickleness of fortune and the fruitlessness of hanging “on princes’ favours.”
Henry VIII
was a great favorite on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stage. That was partly because of the opportunity for spectacle provided by the coronation and the play’s other scenes of procession and court business. But it was also because of the opportunity given to actors by Wolsey’s great set piece:

Shakespeare’s Elizabethan history plays were dominated by wars, either civil or on French soil, and battles for succession to the crown. They were written in times of war when the question of the succession to Elizabeth was deeply troubling to the nation.
Henry VIII
, by contrast, was written after several years of peace. Indeed, King James regarded himself as an international peacemaker. Furthermore, he was a married king, so there was no anxiety about the succession, despite the nation’s sorrow at the premature death of his eldest son, Prince Henry, in November 1612. The wedding of the king’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, to Frederick the Elector Palatine, the most prominent Protestant ruler in continental Europe, was postponed until February 1613 so as not to be overshadowed by the funeral.
Henry VIII
, a play with both a royal death and a royal wedding, was written in the next few months.

Despite the Protestant match for the princess, there were anxieties about a possible revival of Roman Catholicism: the religious allegiance of James’s queen was a matter of public interest about which rumors circulated. And there was considerable concern over court favorites, as different factions jostled for power. Ever since the spectacular entrance procession of King James into London at the beginning of his reign, the new court had displayed its power through pageantry. The theater played a key role here. The king, his family, and his courtiers participated actively in masques, and, in their new capacity as the King’s Men, Shakespeare and his fellows were frequently called upon to play at court. All these concerns are woven into the fabric of
Henry VIII
, making it a distinctively Jacobean drama.

Kingly authority is asserted by pageantry, but also by the ruthless axing of counselors who have served their purpose. Buckingham says of York that “No man’s pie is freed / From his ambitious finger,” a sentiment that could apply to any one of the play’s thrusting courtiers as they jostle for the top seat at the table of power. A stage direction in the third act is typical of both the world of the drama and the environment that Shakespeare would have experienced when he took his men to play at court: “
Exit King, frowning upon the Cardinal, the nobles throng after him, smiling and whispering
.”

The question inevitably raised is whether or not the personal authority of the monarch is absolute. In order to please the courtly audience it was necessary for Shakespeare and Fletcher to follow a broadly pro-Henry line, but there do seem to be moments when a critique of the conscience of the king is built into the action. Specifically, a series of puns on words such as “prick” and “rule” imply that his policy is being determined by his sex drive as much as his desire to serve and shape his nation. The king clearly suffers a failure of “temperance,” a key Protestant virtue, in relation to Anne. And at the most elementary structural level, there is a tension between the representation of the two queens and the state ideology of Protestantism. Katherine of Aragon is the Catholic queen who becomes a near-saint granted a divine vision, while Anne, the trigger for the Reformation, is given a very small part and serves primarily as an object of sexual desire. Equally, although the chancellorship of Sir Thomas More only figures briefly in the play, there is a clear allusion to his subsequent martyrdom for the Catholic cause:

Shakespeare’s late plays share a fascination with the very different directions in which poetic language may lead. Elaborate rhetoric and honeyed words reveal how the verbal arts are tools for preferment and power. Words are both baits for advancement and means of getting off the hook: “may it like your grace / To let my tongue excuse all.” On other occasions, there is a plangent poetry of withdrawal, of retirement from the courtly fray. How is one to achieve inner peace in this world of political turmoil? The courtiers have varying degrees of success in their attempts to learn the Senecan art of patience, of using soliloquy and self-examination as a means of coming to terms with the buffets of political fortune. For Queen Katherine, uniquely, there is a moment of transcendence and divine vision. But it is only a moment, ending with a dissolution analogous to that of Prospero’s masque in
The Tempest:
“Spirits of peace, where are ye? Are ye all gone, / And leave me here in wretchedness behind ye?”