Shakespeare Henry VIII Review
Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is the last of a series of Shakespearean plays about England’s violent and troubled monarchy. It may be that the birth of Queen Elizabeth is the culminating moment of the play and the series. Seen in one light, the playwright makes the case that Providence always leads to the will of God being done in the interests of “God’s people” (i.e. in Shakespeare’s case, England). If the reign of Elizabeth was good (and objectively, for England, it was pretty good and it was certainly a marked improvement over the seemingly endless violent coups that are represented in the previous plays about England’s kings) then the story behind how she came to her thrown can all be made sense of as an outworking of Divine Providence. And that is one angle that the author of this play takes.
And yet there is another angle that the play presents to us. That angle involves exposing just how ruthless and wicked all those “rich men (and women) north of Richmond” are in their cut-throat attempts to acquire and maintain power. The play tells that story as a conclusion to a 400-year narrative told in King John, Richard II, Henry IV part one, Henry IV part two, Henry V, Henry VI part one, Henry V part two, Henry VI part three, and Richard III. If God is at work bringing about the divine reign of the blessed Queen Elizabeth, the human depravity that supplies the gears is anything but pretty. The play is a continued reminder that playing for great power is a high-risk enterprise that offers high rewards at high stakes and almost inevitably, costs a person their conscience before it costs them their lives.
As I was reading the play, I was reminded of the song that the Biblical character Hannah composed and sang in the introduction to the story of the Israelite monarchy (Book of I Samuel).
“Do not keep talking so proudly
or let your mouth speak such arrogance,
for the Lord is a God who knows,
and by him deeds are weighed.
“The bows of the warriors are broken,
but those who stumbled are armed with strength.
Those who were full hire themselves out for food,
but those who were hungry are hungry no more.
She who was barren has borne seven children,
but she who has had many sons pines away.
“The Lord brings death and makes alive;
he brings down to the grave and raises up.
The Lord sends poverty and wealth;
he humbles and he exalts.
He raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
he seats them with princes
and has them inherit a throne of honor.
“For the foundations of the earth are the Lord’s;
on them he has set the world.
He will guard the feet of his faithful servants,
but the wicked will be silenced in the place of darkness.
“It is not by strength that one prevails;
those who oppose the Lord will be broken.
The Most High will thunder from heaven;
the Lord will judge the ends of the earth.
“He will give strength to his king
and exalt the horn of his anointed.”
Several powerful characters in the play are brought low from the lofty heights of power and each gives Shakespeare a chance to reflect on the meaning of Fate’s fickleness in the courts of power. “I have touched the highest point of all my greatness,” says the powerful Cardinal Wolsey as he is discovered as an ambitious fraud and sent packing, his material possessions and power confiscated by the king,
“And from that full meridian of my glory
I haste now to my setting. I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening
And no man see me more.”
Buckingham too was earlier brought down by the conniving of the powerful Cardinal. He goes to his execution reflecting on the fall that ends his life:
“The last hour
Of my long weary life is come upon me.
Farewell. And when you would say something that is sad,
Speak how I fell” (2.1.152–56).
And so also Queen Katherine bemoans her misfortune when Henry divorces her for Anne Bollen.
“Shipwracked upon a kingdom where no pity,
No friends, no hope, no kindred weep for me,
Almost no grave allowed me, like the lily
That once was mistress of the field and flourished,
I’ll hang my head and perish.”
[All of the above quotes were culled from Barbara Mowat’s excellent review of the play “A Modern Perspective: Henry VIII” in the Folger Shakespeare Library].
We should note that at the end of the play, Anne Bollen (Boleyn) and Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury are at the height of their powers, but the original audience would have been aware (as should we) of the fact that they too were about to descend that rollercoaster of Fate’s demise. Henry had a way of, Stalin-like, feeding his loyal minions (and wives) into the maw of executions.
Barbara Mowat also notes a third narrative filter that can be seen playing a role in the structure of the story. That third layer is (in my way of seeing it) an illustration of the Machiavellian corruption that exists at the highest levels of any power pyramid. Life at the top is dog-eat dog (and was for even Jesus’ disciples at the end of his ministry). There is bribery, treachery, exploitation, manipulation. There is bitter competition, incessant conniving, faction building, back-stabbing, flattery, and lies. Almost every one of substance in the play, has learned to obtain power by sucking up to the king in crucial moments. Those that are particularly good at it, know how to feign tears when they grovel.
Seen in a modern context, the play is full of Ukrainian bribes, impeachments, indictments of political enemies, leaks, influence peddling, FARA violations, secret email accounts, shell companies, lust, sex scandals, hush money, stonewalling, investigations, alimony payments, riots, intelligence agency intrigue, and even an “abandoned laptop from hell” story.
Barbara Mowat calls this “the political ladder scheme.” She notes the irony that the original title of the play was All is True.
The message to the original hearers may well be spoken through the mouth of the innocent young Anne Boleyn:
Verily,
I swear, ’tis better to be lowly born
And range with humble livers in content
Than to be perked up in a glist’ring grief
And wear a golden sorrow.
Or as Solomon, that ancient product of an illicit affair and political intrigue once put it in his book of Proverbs:
“Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.”
Though as we shall soon see, when Henry VIII makes his queen’s stunningly good-looking maid, Anne an “offer she can’t refuse,” she doesn’t. In Anne Boleyn, we see the great temptation that all of the play’s villains and victims succumb to: They begin in innocence but, Lucifer-like, are soon enamored of power, right up until it is taken from them, and they wish they could undue their original surrender to ambition. It would have been better if they had never gotten close enough to power to think it in their grasp.
“All is true” says Mowat,
“Anne is a traveler on Fortune’s wheel; Anne has been placed by Providence in Henry’s eye to bring joy to the English nation; Anne is a woman who betrays her mistress for money and power. The three readings of her story—as of the stories of Wolsey, Katherine, and others—are built into the very structure of the play. . . . In watching the play, as in watching events in the world around us, we see the story now from one angle, now from another. Again, as in observing events in our world, we never know for certain who is telling ‘the truth.’”
I find it interesting that in the prologue, the narrator of the play speaks directly to the audience and asserts that the play will not make everyone happy. Indeed, says the narrator, the audience is asked to imagine the characters this play is based on and their lives and to “see how soon this mightiness meets misery”:
“And if you can be merry then, Ill say
A man may weep upon his wedding day.”
“Tis ten to one this play can never please,” the narrator concludes at the end. Noting that pretty much every main character in the play was a scumbag though all are gifted at asserting their innocence, save the one (Queen Katherine) who was just about the only person with sustained integrity in the whole story. Katherine is a rarity in the History plays of Shakespeare. An honest soul who cares about justice and is suspicious of con men and connivers and their innuendo and intrigue. Ironic that she was not English (Katherine was the daughter of the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabela).
It is quite fascinating to compare what the powerful people in this play say about themselves and what those who know them well say about them. I have already noted that Cardinal Wolsey portrays himself as a humble patriotic and loyal man of God.
Here is what those who know Cardinal Wolsey says about him:
Norfolk describes Wolsey as vengeful.
“You know his nature,
That he’s revengeful, and I know his sword
Hath a sharp edge; it’s long, and ’t may be said
It reaches far, and where ’twill not extend,
Thither he darts it.”
Buckingham tells us that Wolsey is corrupt and treasonous:
“But this top-proud fellow—
Whom from the flow of gall I name not, but
From sincere motions—by intelligence,
And proofs as clear as founts in July when
We see each grain of gravel, I do know
To be corrupt and treasonous.”
Wolsey is a boot-licking suck-up with an insatiable appetite for power we discover. We are told that he is adept at bribery. We are told that he was the author of a program of confiscatory taxation but when the king orders the tax rates lowered, Wolsey quickly tells those announcing the policy to the people that the tax cut was his idea. “Let it be noised That through our intercession this revokement and pardon comes,” he says to the heralds of the new policy. One of Wolsey’s critics notes that as soon as someone gains some favor or power in the king’s court, Wolsey has that man appointed to some distant embassy. He does not tolerate competition for the power he seeks.
“And generally: whoever the King favors,
The Card’nal instantly will find employment,
And far enough from court too.”
Two aristocrats reflecting on Wolsey’s ambitious aims refer to him as an “imperious man” who will “work us all from princes into pages.”
Queen Katherine says of the oily Wolsey,
“You sign your place and calling, in full seeming,
With meekness and humility, but your heart
Is crammed with arrogancy, spleen, and pride.”
“All hoods make not monks,” Katherine astutely notes of all the powerful clergy she knows, including Wolsey. “Holy men I thought you,” she says of Wolsey and his fellow cleric, “Upon my soul, two reverend cardinal virtues; But cardinal sins and hollow hearts I fear you.”
“Would I had never trod this English earth
Or felt the flatteries that grow upon it!
You have angels’ faces, but heaven knows your hearts.”
Wolsey asserts that he has never been anything but a saint and that he had nothing to do with the King’s decision to divorce Katherine (Though he did put on a party for the king that he stocked with “hotties” – Anne Boleyn among them). He is a creep. Until the very moment when he realizes that his goose is cooked - at which point in time he has a “come to Jesus” moment (or feigns one).
This is the eulogy said over the demise of Cardinal Wolsey
“He was a man
Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
Himself with princes; one that by suggestion
Tied all the kingdom. Simony was fair play.
His own opinion was his law. I’ th’ presence
He would say untruths, and be ever double
Both in his words and meaning. He was never,
But where he meant to ruin, pitiful.
His promises were, as he then was, mighty,
But his performance, as he is now, nothing.”
As the play concludes, the avaricious Cardinal Wolsey has been utterly replaced by Cranmer, the Arch bishop of Canterbury, a man who we suspect knew to come down theologically on the side of Henry’s divorce (Wolsey had double-dealed in that regard, hoping to be Pope himself at some point). Cranmer is someone who knew just exactly how to plant evidence of Wolsey’s corruption directly into the kings hands without anyone knowing who did it (the audience is only led to suspect).
“Heaven will one day open the King’s eyes that so long have slept upon him,” says one of the ambitious onlookers who fear Wolsey, calling Wolsey, “This bold bad man.” And eventually, “heaven” answers that prayer and Wolsey falls. “A long farewell to all my greatness!” he sighs,
“This is the state of man: today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely”
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth.”
And thus does the next ambitious man in line step up to the top rung of the ladder as though somehow his unique skills will save him from the same fate.
Shakespeare can only hope that the reign of Elizabeth will prove somehow to be different. “Perhaps,” we can almost hear him saying in the concluding epitaph to the integrity of Katherine, “maybe things will be different when women rule for most certainly, the men have proven themselves incapable?”
Question for Comment: Do you think having a woman for President would allow our country to clean up its rather disappointing act of late? Why or why not?
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