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Henry VIII by William Shakespeare
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Henry VIII (1612)

by William Shakespeare

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1,3812113,397 (3.33)40
This is one of the later and less well known of the Bard's plays (am reading it in the aftermath of The Mirror and the Light), and was co-written with another dramatist, John Fletcher. It telescopes the events of over 10 years between the execution of Buckingham for alleged treason to the birth of Elizabeth, taking in the fall of Wolsey and the King's divorce from Katherine of Aragon. A decent play for anyone knowledgeable enough about the Tudors to spot the historical errors! The play is perhaps most famous for being performed at the time the original Globe theatre burned down in 1613 due to a cannon being set off. ( )
  john257hopper | Aug 22, 2020 |
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William Shakespeare's last English history play reads depressingly as if the magnificent Henriad had not existed. Thematically and stylistically it is a companion piece to Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays from the dawn of his career as a playwright. Like H VI 1-3 this is written in collaboration. If this is a sequel to RIII then it is a very mediocre one. The characters of Katherine and Wolsey are the main - in fact the only - highlights of the play. In sum the drama appears a weak pretext for depicting a Grand Pageant for the Tudor succession which backfired (literally when the Globe was set on fire by a stage cannon). ( )
  merlin1234 | Apr 11, 2023 |
Actually the version in the Norton Histories [b:The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition: Histories|3862365|The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition Histories (Norton Shakespeare)|Stephen Greenblatt|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1390062413s/3862365.jpg|21929509], not the Arden.

On the surface, All is True is a puff piece written to suck up to King James I. The ending certainly gives that impression, as Elizabeth is christened and the archbishop gives forth a prophecy of her future greatness and that of the male heirs that, childless, she will miraculously produce.

But an early patron, a descendant of Buckingham, walked out at the scene where his ancestor was lead to the Tower (and thence to execution). Cardinal Wolsey, a scheming villain if ever there was one, receives his due comeuppance early on -- and his Protestant successor is nearly run to the Tower himself, by the same (Catholic) nobles that had just so deservedly done in Wolsey.

Above this all is Henry, allowing injustice to thrive when it suits him, halting it at his pleasure. Being king, he can do no wrong, and his perfection is lauded by all (though they do, toward the end, start to address him as "My dread King") -- yet clearly he is the cause of the suffering and strife that runs throughout the play.

Are his pronouncements and doings mere whims? Is he, like Wolsey, hatching schemes which persistently go awry? Or does a deep-seated hatred of his fellow man cause him to wreak such havoc?

The play, alas, gives us no answer. This is much more "The Birth of Elizabeth" than it is any portrait of Henry VIII, and that is what makes it approach mediocrity. So much plotting and intrigue, all leading up to a lackluster finish. ( )
  mkfs | Aug 13, 2022 |
This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress, Blogspot & Librarything by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: Henry VIII
Author: William Shakespeare
Rating: 2.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Play
Pages: 261
Words: 75K

Synopsis:

From Wikipedia

The play opens with a Prologue (by a figure otherwise unidentified), who stresses that the audience will see a serious play, and appeals to the audience members: "The first and happiest hearers of the town," to "Be sad, as we would make ye."

Act I opens with a conversation between the Dukes of Norfolk and Buckingham and Lord Abergavenny. Their speeches express their mutual resentment over the ruthless power and overweening pride of Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey passes over the stage with his attendants, and expresses his own hostility toward Buckingham. Later Buckingham is arrested on treason charges—Wolsey's doing.

The play's second scene introduces King Henry VIII, and shows his reliance on Wolsey as his favourite. Queen Katherine enters to protest about Wolsey's abuse of the tax system for his own purposes; Wolsey defends himself, but when the King revokes the Cardinal's measures, Wolsey spreads a rumour that he himself is responsible for the King's action. Katherine also challenges the arrest of Buckingham, but Wolsey defends the arrest by producing the Duke's Surveyor, the primary accuser. After hearing the Surveyor, the King orders Buckingham's trial to occur.

At a banquet thrown by Wolsey, the King and his attendants enter in disguise as masquers. The King dances with Anne Bullen.

Two anonymous Gentlemen open Act II, one giving the other an account of Buckingham's treason trial. Buckingham himself enters in custody after his conviction, and makes his farewells to his followers and to the public. After his exit, the two Gentlemen talk about court gossip, especially Wolsey's hostility toward Katherine. The next scene shows Wolsey beginning to move against the Queen, while the nobles Norfolk and Suffolk look on critically. Wolsey introduces Cardinal Campeius and Gardiner to the King; Campeius has come to serve as a judge in the trial Wolsey is arranging for Katherine.

Anne Bullen is shown conversing with the Old Lady who is her attendant. Anne expresses her sympathy at the Queen's troubles; but then the Lord Chamberlain enters to inform her that the King has made her Marchioness of Pembroke. Once the Lord Chamberlain leaves, the Old Lady jokes about Anne's sudden advancement in the King's favour.

A lavishly-staged trial scene (Act II Scene 4) portrays Katherine's hearing before the King and his courtiers. Katherine reproaches Wolsey for his machinations against her, and refuses to stay for the proceedings. But the King defends Wolsey, and states that it was his own doubts about the legitimacy of their marriage that led to the trial. Campeius protests that the hearing cannot continue in the Queen's absence, and the King grudgingly adjourns the proceeding. (Act III) Wolsey and Campeius confront Katherine among her ladies-in-waiting; Katherine makes an emotional protest about her treatment.

Norfolk, Suffolk, Surrey, and the Lord Chamberlain are shown (Act III Scene 2) plotting against Wolsey. A packet of Wolsey's letters to the Pope have been re-directed to the King; the letters show that Wolsey is playing a double game, opposing Henry's planned divorce from Katherine to the Pope while supporting it to the King. The King shows Wolsey his displeasure, and Wolsey for the first time realises that he has lost Henry's favour. The noblemen mock Wolsey, and the Cardinal sends his follower Cromwell away so that Cromwell will not be brought down in Wolsey's fall from grace.

The two Gentlemen return in Act IV to observe and comment upon the lavish procession for Anne Bullen's coronation as Queen, which passes over the stage in their presence. Afterward they are joined by a third Gentleman, who updates them on more court gossip – the rise of Thomas Cromwell in royal favour, and plots against Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury. (Scene 2) Katherine is shown ill; is told of Wolsey's death; has a vision of dancing spirits. Caputius visits her. Katherine expresses her continuing loyalty to the King, despite the divorce, and wishes the new queen well.

Act V. The King summons a nervous Cranmer to his presence, and expresses his support; later, when Cranmer is shown disrespect by the King's Council, Henry reproves them and displays his favour of the churchman. Anne Bullen gives birth to a daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth. In the play's closing scenes, the Porter and his Man complain about trying to control the massive and enthusiastic crowds that attend the infant Elizabeth's christening; another lush procession is followed by a prediction of the glories of the new born princess's future reign and that of her successor. The Epilogue, acknowledging that the play is unlikely to please everyone, asks nonetheless for the audience's approval.

My Thoughts:

The edition of The Complete Shakespeare I am reading has these “History” plays in alphabetical order instead of chronological order, so we skipped right over Richard III. That'll probably be next.

I didn't actually care. I cared less about this than I did for the entire Henry VI trilogy, which I didn't think was possible.

★★✬☆☆ ( )
  BookstoogeLT | Jul 25, 2022 |
Not bad. Not excellent. Happy birthday to it this year. ( )
  et.carole | Jan 21, 2022 |
I feel like there's diminishing returns in these last few "Shakespeare and friends" works. This one was an awful lot of politics (the boring kind), a whole lotta telling, and almost everything important happening off-stage.

That said, the scene where Cardinal Wosley's scheming is revealed and he realizes he's lost the favour of King Henry, and ultimately sends Cromwell away? Brilliantly done.

Overall, however, not my favourite. Nope, not by a long shot. ( )
  TobinElliott | Sep 3, 2021 |
This is one of the later and less well known of the Bard's plays (am reading it in the aftermath of The Mirror and the Light), and was co-written with another dramatist, John Fletcher. It telescopes the events of over 10 years between the execution of Buckingham for alleged treason to the birth of Elizabeth, taking in the fall of Wolsey and the King's divorce from Katherine of Aragon. A decent play for anyone knowledgeable enough about the Tudors to spot the historical errors! The play is perhaps most famous for being performed at the time the original Globe theatre burned down in 1613 due to a cannon being set off. ( )
  john257hopper | Aug 22, 2020 |
Previously, things I've read covering the historically crucial events surrounding Henry VIII's divorce and subsequent break from the Catholic Church have focused on Wolsey, More, Cromwell and Henry himself, ignoring Katherine, whom Henry is dumping in favour of Anne Boleyn. This is different: Thomas More is conspicuous by his absence - he's not even name-dropped - and Katherine is very much front and centre of the middle part of the play.

Katherine and Wolsey are presented as Tragic figures: Katherine as undeserving victim, powerless but eloquent in her own, ultimately futile defence. Wolsey as worldly schemer for Rome and his own self-aggrandisement who ultimately repents, apparently sincerely and with great humility, when caught conspiring against the divorce and lining his own pockets from the national Treasury.

What of Henry? He reminds me of Julius Caesar; the instigator of the action but really not the dramatic lead. Intrigue, plots, chaos and death swirl around him but he remains mostly a cypher. He doesn't die half way through, like Caesar, of course. Instead he lives on to see Anne Boleyn betray his hopes by giving birth to a daughter.

That daughter is prophetically praised in the final scene; the baby that will become the legendary Virgin Queen of Shakespeare's day and save Britain from Spain, Rome, all and sundry...

How much of the Tudor idolatry was merely political expediency is open to question, given the extremely sympathetic treatment of Katherine, the fact that Shakespeare was brought up in a Catholic household and the lack of any unequivocal statement about Will's own religious leanings.

The play impresses more by way of the characterisation and eloquence of Wolsey and Katherine than it does as a coherent drama as a whole.

( )
  Arbieroo | Jul 17, 2020 |
I can't say that the writing is bad, per-se, more that the topic is unworthy except for being an obligatory propagandist piece to prop up the worthiness of the Anglican church versus the Catholics.

I'm sure no one is surprised on this count.

There's rather less of the real drama that surrounded the King the man and all his travails or misogyny surrounding his six wives or the interesting women surrounding this historic character, rather it's just the focus on the single quasi-divorce still under the Catholic eye and the fall of the Cardinal and the succession of our dear Elisabeth by her on-stage birth under the Anglican eye.

Does it read as a set piece? A vanity play? A yawn-worthy white-wash of the man the Queen's father? Um, yeah, yeah, it does. *sigh*

And here I'd hoped for a bit more drama more in line with the actual history. Alas. Not my favorite. By a long shot. ( )
  bradleyhorner | Jun 1, 2020 |
Henry VIII is the final play in the histories series. Although it’s frequently challenged as being written solely by Shakespeare, I'm accepting it as part of the canon. The histories begin, chronologically, with Richard II and take us all the way through the Wars of the Roses.

The plot covers the execution of Buckingham, the rise and fall of Cardinal Wolsey, the divorce of Henry VIII and Queen Katherine, his marriage to Anne Boleyn, the birth of Elizabeth, and more. The play itself is rarely produces and not well known, but pieces of it will be familiar to anyone who has read Wolf Hall or The Other Boleyn Girl.

There's a lot crammed into this one, but a few of the characters truly shine. Your heart breaks for the neglected Katherine. She’s tossed aside by her husband of 20 years when someone younger catches his eye. She has some fantastic moments when she challenges Cardinal Wolsey.

“Y’ are meek and humble-mouth’d,
You sign your place and calling, in full seeming, with meekness and humility;
but your heart is cramm’d with arrogance, spleen, and pride.”

Buckingham is also a sympathetic character with some great speeches. Overall the play doesn't flow as well as many of his others. It's too scattered, too many moving pieces, but it's still got some beautiful language.

“Yet I am richer than my base accusers,
That never knew what truth meant.”

“Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot
That it do singe yourself.”

“Love thyself last: cherish those hearts that hate thee;
Corruption wins not more than honesty.
Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace,
To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not:
Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's,
Thy God's, and truth's.” ( )
  bookworm12 | Jan 29, 2019 |
Henry has decided to divorce his first wife, Katherine, after twenty years of marriage, in order to marry Anne Bullen. At his side is the manipulative Cardinal Wolsey, common born yet with the King wrapped around his finger. Though Katherine pleads with her husband, Wolsey is instrumental in her downfall, and in the execution of the Duke of Buckingham, accused of treasonous gossip. The whole court holds its breath waiting for the day the King will realize he's been Wolsey's puppet.

Clearly written to be performed for Elizabeth I, Shakespeare is currying favor. Henry VIII is a man who was manipulated into treating Katherine badly, and who rejoiced that Anne had given birth to a daughter (ha!). Anne is a sweet maiden who worries about Katherine, and the play ends with a gushing speech about Elizabeth herself. This probably won't make anyone's list of the best of Shakespeare, but it is interesting and there are some good scenes, such as Katherine ripping into Wolsey. ( )
1 vote mstrust | Feb 7, 2018 |
34 William Shakespeare, John Fletcher Henry VIII

FORMAT OTHERS GENRE RATING
E-BOOK Lewis Theobald, editor Literature ***

I read this late collaboration because I knew it had great speeches and because I wanted to see how the Bard and his fellows would have treated England's Stalin. I liked the great speeches, i.e., Katherine of Aragon's defense of herself and Wolsey's farewell to his greatness, and would like to think that Shakespeare wrote them. But I had to shake my head sadly at how the playwrights had to treat the Anne Boleyn story with kid gloves and eulogize the baby Elizabeth. ( )
  Coach_of_Alva | Dec 20, 2014 |
Shakespeare's "Henry VIII" is best remembered as the play that was on stage when the Globe Theater burned down. There's a reason that's what it's known for.... the play itself really doesn't hold up well to the bard's more famous works.

Rife with historical inaccuracies, most of the action takes place off stage, so you just hear characters talking about it. (Yeah, I didn't like it when Hilary Mantel did this either.) It was the Elizabethan age, so of course Shakespeare makes the birth of Queen Elizabeth something like the second coming and is mostly laudatory about her mother Anne Boleyn.

There really isn't much that's great about this one. ( )
  amerynth | Jul 22, 2014 |
Well here we are in the ugly competition. "Worst plays by William Shakespeare". Wisely the first line is "I come no more to make you laugh:... And you won't. It seems to me, that a sort of historical pageant was required, perhaps to get some people to put their money down at the box-office, and this was cobbled up. It is a chore to read, and only the queen Catherine of Argon scenes have much fire. We have records that the theatre caught fire during one of the performances and the audience must have left the theatre early with some relief. The theatre burned down , this was WS's last history play, and he soon retired. the play was written or revised, in1613. ( )
  DinadansFriend | Nov 28, 2013 |
Read this as a companion piece after I finished Wolf Hall. I didn't even know he wrote a play about Henry VIII, and now I know why: it pretty much sucks. And a total whitewash, which makes sense in retrospect. Where's the fucking beheadings, Will? ( )
  AlCracka | Apr 2, 2013 |
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1223233.html

Here we are, practically at the end of Shakespeare's writing career, and he goes right back to the beginning with a play about an English King called Henry.

It's an odd one. To get the worst out of the way, the last three scenes are all about the birth of Elizabeth I and how she and her successor will obviously be wonderful. Total rubbish. But we've built up to this with the poisonous interactions of her father, Henry VIII, with a succession of key advisers: the Duke of Buckingham, his own wife Queen Catherine, Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop Cranmer. The separate falls of Wolsey and the Queen are both carefully and credibly sketched out, and both get good speeches as their farewells to the action.

The other two are a bit less integrated, however. Cranmer in particular seems to be brought in just for the sake of arguing with King Henry's counsellors; and then it turns out it was all a misunderstanding. Thus does Shakespeare portray the founding of the Church of England.

The scholarly consensus splits the authorship of the scenes a bit randomly between Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Myself, I felt the first three acts had a certain internal logic which is dissipated by the fourth and not really regained by the last. But what do I know?

The Arkangel version is rather good, and makes the best of the less than fabtastic source material. In particular, Timothy West as Wolsey and Jane Lapotaire as Catherine of Aragon carry all but the last parts of the play. I was less convinced by Paul Jessup in the title role, but it held together better than I expected from reading the script. ( )
2 vote nwhyte | May 22, 2009 |
When I was younger, I wanted to do nothing but read Shakespeare, but now I wish I could just see some plays, because I am unable to really make a good drama out of it from my own imagination. Reading it recently, I can see that Henry was under a lot of pressure. He was trying to keep up with the Jones'. In this case, the Jones' would be the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France, as well as the nation of Spain. I am sure that the English did not think that they were being arrogant by asserting that they were superior to those other nations on the mainland. They were just trying to survive in a free-for-all.
Recently I have also been reading Reformation Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 by Diarmaid MacCulloch, and that is colouring a lot of my reaction to Shakespeare. Part of me thinks that Shakespeare cannot possibly stand up to the erudition and complexity of MacCulloch, but thankfully that is not even the question. Complexity and erudition don't matter a jot when you are trying to write drama; it's a totally different genre entirely. So I should just be satisfied with each book on its own and not worry about meaningless comparisons.
It really sucks to be a queen who leaves her own country and goes to a foreign court as a complete stranger. If the king becomes estranged from you, you don't stand much of a chance of any happiness. Too bad.
Being a hanger-on or court attendant must have ranged from just galling because of how appallingly sycophantic you had to be, all the way to outright fear for one's life, when the tide of favour changed, and suddenly you were in a party about to be ousted from a position of power. Even the churches were not safe, and their lands were taken over. What a bloody business it all was. Could anybody be really happy in this awful mess?
  libraryhermit | Sep 15, 2010 |
Saw. ( )
  ErinHorakova | Apr 8, 2013 |
Saw. ( )
  ErinHorakova | Apr 8, 2013 |
King Henry VIII' has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. This edition offers a fresh perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play.rrBelieved to be Shakespeare's very last play, Henry VIII is probably best remembered as the play which, when performed in June 1613, led to the Globe Theatre burning down due to the fireworks and cannon fire listed in the stage directions. However, otherwise the play has puzzled critics, who can see little more in it than a nostalgic account of Henry's reign, and the prophetic birth and christening of Elizabeth, Shakespeare's Queen, which takes place at the end of the play.Henry VIII deals with the intrigue which surrounds Henry's court, and in particular the controversial figure of Cardinal Wolsey, and Henry's separation from his wife Katherine, and infatuation with Anne Bullen. However, there is little sense of the psychological complexity created by Shakespeare in earlier history plays like Henry V. Henry VIII himself is a grand but distant figure, and the virulent anti-Catholicism lacks complexity. Within an increasingly troubled political period, the final hopeful invocation of "Peace, plenty, love, truth" seems rather flat, as does the play as a whole. This has led many critics to argue that Shakespeare was just one of many collaborators in the writing of the play. --Jerry Brotton
  Roger_Scoppie | Apr 3, 2013 |
FFYAA
  JohnMeeks | Nov 20, 2008 |
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