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KING HENRY VIII.

INTRODUCTION.

LITERARY HISTORY AND CRITICAL

REMARKS.1

Henry VIII. was first printed in the Folio of 1623, where it ends the series of "Histories." The main historical authorities, which it follows with extreme exactitude, were, in the first four acts, Holinshed's Chronicles; in the fifth, Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Church, commonly known as the Book of Martyrs. The play is a good deal indebted, directly or indirectly, to a narrative then in MS., George Cavendish's Life of Cardinal Wolsey, largely quoted from by both Holinshed and Hall, though the book itself was not published till 1641. Closely as the play follows its authorities, alike in the main course of incident and in the general choice of language, there are numerous deviations from the chronological order of events. These will be seen by referring to Mr. Daniel's table of "historic dates in the order of the play."

So far we have dealt with facts: what remains must be but conjecture. It is as well to say frankly, that we know with certainty neither who wrote Henry VIII., nor when it was written. I shall give, first, the scanty records, the few external facts relating to the play; then, the various theories which have been brought forward as to its date and authorship; not having much hope of being able, finally, to speak myself on all points with the enviable assurance of one whose mind is fully and confidently made up.

The first allusion to a play on the subject of Henry VIII. is found in an entry in the

1 I have found it necessary in this case to combine the Literary History and the Critical Remarks, instead of giving them, as usual, separately. An Introduction to Henry VIII. has to deal with disputed conclusions, and the "critical remarks" become so many arguments, and have to come forward when and where they are wanted.

Stationers' Registers under date February 12, 1604-5: "Nath. Butter] Yf he get good allowance for the Enterlude of K. Henry 8th before he begyn to print it, and then procure the wardens hands to yt for the entrance of yt, he is to have the same for his copy." This play, which Collier "feels no hesitation" in supposing to be the play which we find in the Folio, may more reasonably be identified with the rough and scrambling historical comedy of Samuel Rowley, When you see me, you know mee; or, the famous Chronicle Historie of King Henrie the Eight, with the berth and vertuous life of Edward Prince of Wales, which Nathaniel Butter published in 1605. It is a bluff, hearty, violently Protestant piece of work, the Protestant emphasis being indeed the most striking thing about it. The verse is formal, with one or two passages of somewhat heightened quality; the characters include a stage Harry, a very invertebrate Wolsey, a Will Sommers whose jokes are as thin as they are inveterate, a Queen Katharine of the doctrinal and magnanimous order, a modest Prince Edward; with minor personages of the usual sort, and, beyond the usual, a Dogberry and Verges set of watchmen, with whom, together with one Black Will, King Henry has a ruffling scene. The play was reprinted in 1613, in 1621, and again in 1632.

The next allusion which we find to a play on the subject of Henry VIII. is in connection with the burning of the Globe Theatre on June 29, 1613. In the Harleian MS. 7002, leaf 268, there is a letter from Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas Pickering, dated "this last of June, 1613," in which we read: "No longer since then yesterday, while Bourbege his companie were acting at ye Globe the play of Hen: 8, and there shooting of certayne chambers in way of triumph; the fire catch'd & fastened upon the thatch of ye house and

there burned so furiously as it consumed the whole house & all in lesse then two houres (the people having enough to doe to save themselves)." On July 6, 1613, Sir Henry Wotton writes to his nephew (Reliq. Wotton. p. 425, ed. 1685): "Now to let matters of state sleep; I will entertain you at the present with what hath happened this week at the Bank-side. The king's players had a new play, called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry the Eighth, which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garter, the guards with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in truth, within a while, to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous. Now King Henry, making a mask at the Cardinal Wolsey's house, and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff where with one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where, being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming, within an hour, the whole house to the very ground." In the 1615 edition of Stowe's Annales, "continued and augmented by Edmond Howes," we read (p. 926) under date 1613: "Also vpon S. Peters day last the play-house or Theater, called the Globe, vpon the Banck-side, neere London, by negligent discharging of a peale of ordnance close to the south side thereof tooke fier, & the wind sodainly disperst ye flame round about, & in a very short space ye whole building was quite consumed, & no man hurt: the house being filled with people, to behold the play, viz., of Henry the 8. And the next spring it was new builded in far fairer manner then before."

It will thus be seen that in 1613 a play on the subject of Henry VIII. was being acted at the Globe under the name of All is True. It is described by Sir Henry Wotton as "a new play." Further, it represented "King Henry making a mask at the Cardinal Wolsey's house," where chambers were discharged in his honour, as in the Folio Henry VIII. i. 4. (stage-direction, after line 49: "Drum and

trumpet, chambers discharged"). It also apparently contained a scene in which Katharine was brought to trial. The name, All is True, is perfectly appropriate to the play which we have in the Folio, and in the Prologue there are three expressions which may be taken as references to such a title: line 9: "May here find truth, too;" line 18: "To rank our chosen truth with such a show;" and line 21: "To make that only true we now intend." So far, we have a certain show of evidence, very slight indeed, which might lead us to suppose (in the absence of other evidence to the contrary) that the play All is True, acted as a new play at the Globe in 1613, was that which is printed as Henry VIII. in the First Folio of Shakespeare. There is nothing, however, to tell us that this play of 1613 was by Shakespeare.

Leaving for the present the question of date, we must now consider the more important question of authorship. And here we should premise that the fact of Henry VIII. having been printed in the First Folio is far from being a conclusive argument on behalf of its genuineness, whole or partial. The editors of the First Folio had an elastic sense of their editorial responsibilities. They admitted Titus Andronicus and the three parts of Henry VI., which it is practically certain that Shakespeare did no more than revise; as well as The Taming of the Shrew, which we know to be a recast of the earlier play The Taming of a Shrew. They did not admit Pericles, which was published in Quarto under Shakespeare's name, generally recognized at the time as his, and, in the greater part of it, so obviously Shakespearian that its authenticity could not have been seriously doubted.

The first to call attention to the metrical peculiarities of Henry VIII. was a certain Mr. Roderick, Fellow of Magdalen College, Cambridge, some of whose notes are given in the sixth and posthumous edition of Thomas Edwardes' Canons of Criticism, published in 1758. Roderick notes (1) that "there are in this Play many more verses than in any other, which end with a redundant syllable. this Play has very near two redundant verses to one in any other Play;" (2) that "the

Casura, or Pauses of the verse, are full as remarkable;" (3) "that the emphasis, arising from the sense of the verse, very often clashes with the cadence that would naturally result from the metre." "What Shakespear intended by all this," he adds, “I fairly own myself ignorant.”

Before this, Johnson had observed that the genius of Shakespeare comes in and goes out with Katharine, and that every other part might be easily conceived and easily written. Later, Coleridge, in 1819, distinguished Henry VIII. from Shakespeare's other historical plays as "a sort of historical masque or showplay." Even Knight was forced to acknowledge that the moral which he traces through the first four acts has to be clenched in the fifth by-referring to history for it! It was not, however, till 1850 that it occurred to anyone to follow out these clues by calling in question the entire authenticity of the play. In that year the suggestion was made by three independent investigators. Emerson, in his Representative Men, treating of Shakespeare, says passingly: "In Henry VIII. I think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell, where-instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best bring out the rhythm-here the lines are constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable traits of Shakespeare's hand, and some passages, as the account of the coronation, are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm." In taking it for granted that in Henry VIII. Shakespeare is to be seen altering an earlier piece of work, rather than working contemporaneously with another dramatist, or allowing his own work to be altered, Emerson simply follows in the line of Malone's investigations into the construction of the three parts of Henry VI. It

did not lie within his scope to investigate the matter further; the passage, indeed, in which he states his view, is a digression from his main argument. In August of the same year Mr. James Spedding published in the Gentleman's Magazine a paper entitled "Who wrote Shakespeare's Henry VIII.?" in which he dealt at considerable length with the question of authorship. "I had heard it casually remarked," he says, "by a man of first-rate judgment on such points [Tennyson] that many passages in Henry VIII. were very much in the manner of Fletcher. I determined upon this

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to read the play through with an eye to this especial point, and see whether any solution of the mystery would present itself. The result of my examination was a clear conviction that at least two different hands had been employed in the composition of Henry VIII.; if not three; and that they had worked, not together, but alternately upon distinct portions of it." On August 24, 1850, a letter appeared in Notes and Queries from Mr. Samuel Hickson (the writer of an investigation into the authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen, published in the Westminster Review of April, 1847), stating that he himself had made the same discovery as Mr. Spedding three or four years back, and desiring (he adds) "to strengthen the argument of the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, by recording the fact that I, having no communication with him, or knowledge of him, even of his name, should have arrived at exactly the same conclusion as his own." In 1874 the New Shakspere Society republished Mr. Spedding's essay and Mr. Hickson's letter, supporting the theory of double authorship by Mr. Fleay's and Mr. Furnivall's application of certain further metrical tests. In a paper read before the New Shakspere Society, November 13, 1874, Professor J. K. Ingram expressed himself as not so fully convinced that the non-Fletcherian portion of the play was by Shakespeare as that the non-Shakespearian part was by Fletcher. "In reading the (so-called) Shaksperian part of the play I do not often feel myself in contact with a 1 Mr. Spedding's article was published under the initials J. S.

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mind of the first order. Still, it is certain that there is much in it that is like Shakspere, and some things that are worthy of him at his best; that the manner, in general, is more that of Shakspere than of any other contemporary dramatist; and that the system of verse is one which we do not find in any other, whilst it is, in all essentials, that of Shakspere's last period. I cannot name anyone else who could have written this portion of the play" (New Sh. Soc.'s Transactions, 1874, p. 454). Finally, Mr. Robert Boyle, in an Investigation into the Origin and Authorship of Henry VIII., read before the New Shakspere Society, January 16, 1885, attempted to prove that Shakespeare had no share whatever in the play, but that the part formerly assigned to him was really written by Massinger, and that Massinger and Fletcher wrote the play in collaboration. Mr. Spedding had accepted the generally-received date of 1612 or 1613, and suggested that the play may have been put together in a hurry on the occasion of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage (February, 1612-13); Mr. Boyle contended that the play was not produced till 1616, probably not till 1617, and that it was written to supply the place of All is True (possibly Shakespeare's, possibly not), which was destroyed in the Globe fire of 1613.

Such, in brief, are the main theories with regard to the various problems raised by this puzzling play. I have purposely avoided saying much as to the question of date, both because I think there is little enough to be said, and because this little is rather an inference from, than a support to, whatever theory of authorship we may choose to follow.

That Shakespeare—or that any single writer -did not write the whole of Henry VIII., seems to me (to take a first step) practically beyond a doubt. So much we can hardly fail to accept; first, on account of the incoherence of the general action, the utter failure of the play to produce on us a single calculated effect; secondly, on the even stronger evidence of the versification. As Hertzberg remarks, Henry VIII. is "a chronicle-history with three and a half catastrophes, varied by a marriage and a coronation pageant, ending abruptly with

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the birth of a child." Spedding rightly notes that "the effect of this play as a whole is weak and disappointing. The truth is that the interest, instead of rising towards the end, falls away utterly, and leaves us in the last act among persons whom we scarcely know, and events for which we do not care. The greater part of the fifth act, in which the interest ought to be gathering to a head, is occupied with matters in which we have not been prepared to take any interest by what went before, and on which no interest is reflected by what comes after." It is not merely that there are certain defects in the construction-defects in construction are to be found in nearly every play of Shakespeare. The whole play is radically wanting in both dramatic and moral coherence. Our sympathy is arbitrarily demanded and arbitrarily countermanded. We are expected to weep for the undeserved sorrows of Katharine in one act, and to rejoice over the triumph of her rival, the cause of all those sorrows, in another. "The effect," as Spedding expressively puts it, "is much like that which would have been produced by the Winter's Tale if Hermione had died in the fourth act in consequence of the jealous tyranny of Leontes, and the play had ended with the coronation of a new queen and the christening of a new heir, no period of remorse intervening." That Shakespeare, not only in the supreme last period of his career, but at any point in that career at which it is possible that the play could have been written, should be supposed capable of a blunder so headlong, final, and self-annulling, is nothing less than an insult to his memory. It is difficult to fancy that any single writer, capable of so much episodical power, could have produced a play in which the point of view is so constantly and so unintelligibly shifted.

This we say is difficult, but it is impossible to believe that any single writer could have produced a play in which the versification obeys two perfectly distinct laws in perfectly distinct scenes and passages. The unanswerable question is: Did Shakespeare at any period of his life write verse in the metre of Wolsey's often-quoted soliloquy (iii. 2. 350

372)? If one may believe the evidence of
one's ears, never; nor is the metre so admir-
able that we can suppose he would take the
trouble to acquire it, lacking as it is in all that
finer magic, in all that subtler faculty of ex-
pression, which marked, and marked increas-
ingly, his own verse. The versification of
some portions of the play does undoubtedly
bear a considerable resemblance to the later
versification of Shakespeare. We have thus
in one play verse which is like Shakespeare's,
and verse which is unlike Shakespeare's. The
conclusion is inevitable: two writers must
have been engaged upon it. Messrs. Spedding
and Hickson agreed in dividing the play as
follows. To the writer whose versification is
like Shakespeare's (and whom they took to be
Shakespeare) they assigned i. 1. 2., ii. 3. 4., iii. 2.
(as far as line 203), and v. 1. The rest of the
play they assigned to the other author. Mr.
Boyle, in his examination of the play, while
substantially following this division, assigns
to the Shakespeare-like author iv. 1. (rightly,
as I think), and also adds to his share i. 4.
lines 1-24, 64-108, ii. 1. lines 1-53, 137-169,
and v. 3. lines 1-113. Reading the remaining
parts of the play, the parts written in the
metre of that soliloquy of Wolsey, so markedly
unlike, as I have said, the metre of Shake-
speare, we find that the metre is as markedly
similar to that of Fletcher. Compare with
this passage the following typical passage from
one of Fletcher's plays, The False One, ii. 1.:
I have heard too much;

And study not with smooth shows to invade
My noble mind as you have done my conquest.
Ye are poor and open; I must tell you roundly,
That man that could not recognise the benefits,
The great and bounteous services of Pompey,
Can never dote upon the name of Cæsar.
Though I had hated Pompey, and allowed his ruin,
I gave you no commission to perform it.
Hasty to please in blood are seldom trusty;
And but I stand environ'd with my victories,
My fortune never failing to befriend me,
My noble strengths and friends about my person,
I durst not trust you, nor expect a courtesy
Above the pious love you show'd to Pompey.
You have found me merciful in arguing with ye;
Swords, hangmen, fires, destructions of all natures,
Demolishments of kingdoms, and whole ruins,
Are wont to be my orators. Turn to tears,

VOL. VIII.

You wretched and poor seeds of sunburnt Egypt; And now you have found the nature of a conqueror, That you cannot decline with all your flatteries, That when the day gives light will be himself still, Know how to meet his worth with humane courtesies. Go and enbalm the bones of that great soldier; Howl round about his pile, fling on your spices, Make a Sabæan bed, and place this phoenix Where the hot sun may emulate his virtues, And draw another Pompey from his ashes, Divinely great, and fix him 'mongst the worthies. This gives, in an extreme form, those characteristics which peculiarly distinguish the verse of Fletcher, and which (it will be seen) distinguish equally the passage of Henry VIII. to which I have referred, and all those portions of the play already indicated: there is the same abundance of double and triple endings, the same fondness for an extra accented syllable at the end of a line (a characteristic which is inveterate in Fletcher and of which scarcely an example is to be found in the work of any of his contemporaries), the same monotony, the same clash of metrical and sense-emphasis. Emerson, in the passage already quoted, defines admirably the difference between this metre and that of Shakespeare a difference which is indeed so obvious as to make definition seem unnecessary. It may be doubted whether in the whole of Shakespeare there is such a line as this (iii. 2. 352): This is the state of man: to-day he puts forthwhere the double ending is composed of two equally accented syllables. Examples by the score could be cited at a moment's notice from any play of Fletcher's, and from Fletcher's plays alone. May we not therefore feel justified in assigning to Fletcher (in the absence, be it understood, of any distinguishing Shakespearian features in the characterization and the language) those portions of the play in which the versification is precisely like that of Fletcher and completely unlike that of Shakespeare or any other known dramatist?

We have now to consider the authorship of the remaining part of the play-the more important part, not only because it contains the famous trial-scene, but because the writer introduced, and doubtless sketched out, the various characters afterwards handled by himself

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