Globe Education Online

Henry VIII (2010)

Prof Gordon McMullan (King's College London) provides an introduction to Henry VIII, discussing collaboration, the concept of 'late plays', and how the play interrogates ideas of history.

Time: 18mins, 33secs

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Transcript of Podcast

Ryan Nelson:

Hello, I’m Ryan Nelson, and welcome to this Globe Education podcast which provides an introduction to Henry VIII and its colourful history. I’m here with Gordon McMullan, who is Professor of English at King's College London. He established and convenes the university’s MA in Shakespearean Studies: Text and Playhouse, which is run in conjunction with Globe Education here at the Globe. His book, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death, was published by Cambridge in 2007. Prior to that, he has written The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (1994) and edited Henry VIII for the Arden Shakespeare series (2000); he has also edited 1 Henry IV for Norton Critical Editions and four collections of essays, the most recent of which is Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, co-edited with David Matthews (Cambridge, 2007). He is a general editor of Arden Early Modern Drama and a general textual editor of the Norton Shakespeare.

So today, with that experience of Henry VIII and Fletcher, I want to ask you about some of the ways we might helpfully think about this play, and a logical place to start I guess is with the fact that it’s a collaboration, and we have to confess that here at Shakespeare’s Globe we haven’t given billing to Fletcher either, so I’d like to rectify that by giving Fletcher some equal time here. But I want you to unpack some of those issues around collaboration and whether there’s a certain anxiety about modern readers and audiences with acknowledging collaborators generally, or acknowledging Shakespeare’s collaborators.

Gordon McMullan:

Yes, I think when people look at Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, it doesn’t worry them if playwrights other than Shakespeare collaborate, but the history of Shakespeare criticism, the history of Shakespeare reception, has treated Shakespeare as the classic lone genius in the attic, writing away with inspiration from above – the image of Shakespeare that was made very clear for us in Shakespeare in Love. Shakespeare, like all of his contemporary playwrights wrote plays collaboratively; he wrote plays collaboratively early in his career, he wrote a couple of plays collaborative perhaps in the middle to later part in his career, and he certainly wrote three plays collaboratively right at the end of his career.

The three plays right at the end were Cardenio, a play which has had a lot of attention paid to it just recently because it appeared for the first time in the Arden series. I say “it”; what we don’t actually have is the Shakespeare/Fletcher original. All we have is a play created by an 18th century editor and playwright called Lewis Theobald, called Double Falsehood, which he claimed was based on a manuscript of the original, although unfortunately he didn’t have it to hand. So we don’t actually know whether it really was based on it, but we do have two other plays written collaboratively by Shakespeare and Fletcher, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The Two Noble Kinsmen was performed at the Globe in 2000, and now it’s the turn of Henry VIII.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Shakespeare wrote the play collaboratively. Something like two thirds of the plays written in Shakespeare’s day were written collaboratively; it was absolutely standard practice. And even when a play is technically a solo-authored play, it is in all sorts of ways a collaboration anyway, because the playwrights wrote plays for an acting company, they wrote it for a particular repertory, they were always closely collaborating with the acting company, with the individual actors. So there’s all sorts of different levels at which collaboration works in Shakespeare’s career.

What’s probably happened, what’s seemed to have happened around 1612 or so, is that the collaborative pairing of Beaumont and Fletcher had had two or three substantial hits with a rival company, had established themselves as the most fashionable playwrights in London at that point, and the King’s company were never slow to cotton on to success elsewhere. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the main playwright for the King’s Company chooses at that point to collaborate with one of the up-and-coming younger playwrights.

Probably half of Henry VIII is written by Fletcher, half is by Shakespeare, and what’s fairly entertaining when you look closely at it is that some of the speeches from Henry VIII that you will find in anthologies of Shakespearean quotations, incorporated as instances of Shakespeare’s unique poetic capabilities and unique poetic style, are in fact speeches from the Fletcher scenes. So the general assumption that the “good bits” in the play are written by Shakespeare and the bits that we don’t like so much are all Fletcher’s fault simply doesn’t follow through. Wolsey’s speech about his fall after Henry VIII has disposed of him is written by Fletcher, and even more shockingly sometimes to Shakespeareans is the fact that probably Cranmer’s big prophecy about the baby Elizabeth at the end is another Fletcher speech.

None of this matters. What matters is that it’s a wonderful play. What matters is also, I think, that collaborators of any kind do not set out to make it clear to anyone reading what they’ve produced which bit’s they wrote. I mean, when you watch EastEnders, are you sitting there trying to work out which scriptwriter has just written that speech? Of course you’re not! You’re absorbed, they hope, in the drama.

It’s a practice that emerges from the Romantic idea of the singularity of the genius – this tendency to want to know absolutely precisely who wrote which bit. I deliberately, when I did my edition of Henry VIII for the Arden series, did not begin as all other editions for decades or centuries had become, of a very long account of the authorship question, of who wrote which bit, I deliberately left that till the end of the introduction, because what matters to me is to get the message across that this is a wonderful play that does fascinating with English history. It’s a play which is full of human drama of all kinds for which you do not need historical knowledge. It’s a play which is enhanced for you to a certain extent if you do have a certain amount of historical knowledge: if you know that the English Reformation took place in Henry VIII’s reign; if you know the logic and the origins and the outcome of the Reformation; and if you have a sense of the situation in England after the death of Elizabeth I. In other words, if you have a sense that for people living through that period, England had, as it were, one week been Catholic, the next week been Protestant, the next week been Catholic again, then gone back to being Protestant again … any sense that we might have that the Reformation happened overnight then England was stably Protestant from then on is to completely misunderstand the much more fascinating, the unstable nature of the history at the time. One of the things that you do get from Henry VIII is a sense of that valuable instability.

RN:

I think one of the myths you mentioned there is the idea of the single lone genius; I think one of the other aspects often romanticised is the notion of a late flourishing of genius, or of output, or of productivity, and you’ve written extensively on the idea of late writing. What do you mean by it being a late play generally, and is it just an idea?

GM:

Well, on one very simple level it’s a late play because it comes right at the end of Shakespeare’s career. He stops writing within about a year of the first performance of Henry VIII. He didn’t, as legend would have it, stop writing and flounce off to Stratford and never reappear in London, in fact around the time he was writing the play he was also buying a flat in the Blackfriars area. And he kept coming back to London in the years that followed the writing of Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. So he certainly wasn’t retiring and going off with a grand gesture to Stratford, but he seems to have stopped writing plays for the King’s Company. So in that sense Henry VIII is a late play.

However, that question gets complicated almost immediately by the fact that it’s a collaboration. Well, it may be a late play for Shakespeare, but it’s a fairly early play for Fletcher; so how can you have a late-early play, or an early-late play? It’s difficult.

So the myth-making that goes with the idea of late style suggests that tiny handful of geniuses, Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Henry James, others, all share an attribute of genius which is that at the very end of the line, in considerable old age, instead of declining like the rest of us do, they have a sudden burst of remarkable late productivity, which has a tone of serenity and calm and is a indicator that they’re on their way to heaven. That seems to me to be an unnecessary merging of remarkable individual talents; it makes it sound like they were all doing exactly the same thing. It compresses chronology in a way that makes it sound as if what Titian was doing at the end of his career was much the same as what de Kooning was doing at the end of his career, which doesn’t strike me as fair to any of the individuals involved, shall we say. So if you look at Shakespeare, and you shave away that sense of imposed transcendent serenity, and you also shave away the idea that Shakespeare was old, because he wasn’t, he was 47 or so when he wrote Henry VIII, and critics have generally had to ignore what social historians tell them and make a story up about how being 47 was really actually very old in Shakespeare’s day, because average life expectancy was actually 35 or something. But average life expectancy is precisely average life expectancy; the figure of 35 or whatever it is comes about because an awful lot of people died when they were very young. If you made it to 30 you were probably going to make it to 60, 65. You weren’t considered to have reached old age officially in Shakespearean London until you were 60, that’s when you didn’t have to pay church taxes any more. So, Shakespeare wasn’t old at 47. He was coming to the end of his writing career, but that isn’t the same as being old.

So how then do we understand Henry VIII in relation to the rest of Shakespeare’s career? Well it’s certainly a play that harks back to much earlier in his career. The last time he’d written a play featuring an English king had been Henry V in 1599. So it is 13, 14 years after the preceding history play. So clearly Shakespeare, in company with Fletcher, is turning back to something he’d done earlier on. Equally clearly, Henry VIII does not look like Henry V, or like the Henry IV plays, or like Richard III; it looks a bit more, in its cyclical qualities, like the Henry VI plays, say, but it’s very different in tone to those. It’s clearly a Jacobean play and not an Elizabethan one.

And it’s a play that shares certain attributes, certain shapes and themes with some of the other plays at the end of Shakespeare’s career: Pericles; The Winter’s Tale; Cymbeline; The Tempest; obviously The Two Noble Kinsmen since it was written very close in time to that. It doesn’t share those things with all the plays that Shakespeare wrote towards the end of his career, so Coriolanus, for example, chronologically counts as a late play, but it doesn’t have the same romance tone and happy outcome as some of those other plays. But certainly Henry VIII feels in certain ways like one of those other late plays. After all, the end involves a kind of happy reconciliation scene involving a father and a daughter. Okay, the daughter is only a baby and can’t contribute anything to the proceedings, but it’s still a father and a daughter sequence. And it’s still a sequence that through Cranmer’s presence, the old man holding the baby and speaking in prophecy over her invokes the iconographic image of veritas felia temporis, “Truth the daughter of time” – an image of revelation, an image of a future that will bring things to an ideal conclusion, the prospect of heaven. It shares that with the kind of reconciliation you see between Pericles and Marina, for example, the kind of relationship that some critics (though not all) would argue is there between Prospero and Miranda at the end of The Tempest, for example.

At the same time there are other generic influences on Henry VIII, notably the court masque, a very Jacobean form, a form that had been effectively constructed by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s friend and rival in the early years of James’s reign. It’s very clear that at the party scene of Wolsey’s house, the dancing that happens there, the costumes that the King and his courtiers turn up in at the party, this clearly belongs to that masque genre, so it’s very obviously a Jacobean play, a play of its moment.

RN:

A lot of that blurring of genre I guess, or it not fitting comfortably into the category of history is also wrapped up in the fact that it’s not necessarily a ‘true’ history, and you started to talk about this idea of it being mythologised, or of it having a “carnivalesque” feel. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that and what effect that has on how we view it.

GM:

It’s certainly a play that will trip you up if you believe there is one kind of truth in history. It’s a play that resists any idea that a correct production can be created, that if we simply dress Henry VIII up in his Holbein outfit, if we make sure that the people in the processions are in exactly the right order and look like they will have done in the 1530s, that what you have is a “proper” version of the play.

The play originally, when first performed, was called All is True, not Henry VIII. We know this because we have several accounts of the catastrophic event that the play was responsible for: during the party scene at Wolsey’s house when the King arrives a cannon is fired off to announce his arrival. Unfortunately on the 26th of June 1613 the blank charge from the cannon landed in the thatch and burnt the Globe down, abruptly curtailing the performance of that particular day. We know from those reports the play was called All is True.

All is True is a wonderfully tricky title, because the play sets up contradictory testimonies: we don’t actually know whether Buckingham did plot against Henry VIII, or whether he has been falsely accused of plotting against Henry VIII. We know that Wolsey has paid his surveyor to spill the beans, but we don’t know if Wolsey’s paid the surveyor to tell the truth or to lie. The play gives us contradictory understandings of events. We hear Henry, apparently entirely sincerely, talking about how bad his conscience feels about realising that there’s the shadow of incest over his marriage to Katherine. We also hear the commentating gentlemen saying how beautiful Anne Boleyn is, commenting of the King’s desire to marry her, “I can’t blame his conscience”.

So we hear a very different understanding of the key word of the English Reformation, “conscience”, the thing that Protestants are supposed to obey over and above anything the church tells them. Conscience is that key word that was absolutely integral, absolutely central to the Reformation, and yet it’s a word that – to use the critical term – the play “carnivalises”, that is it throws into dialogue; it doesn’t allow that word to have one meaning. That word has the high spiritual meaning, and it has low sexual meaning. There’s one point when the old lady talking to Anne Boleyn about the prospect of her becoming queen, says all she has to do with her conscience is “stretch it a little”. It becomes a very physical image, shall we say.

In other words what happens in the play is that ideas of truth and conscience get put into play. You do not have a clear line to follow, and it makes the play both difficult to perform and fascinating, because Henry VIII is both completely sincere and completely insincere. Anne Boleyn is both innocent and sweet, and also a tart. Wolsey is grasping and greedy and murderous, but also entirely sympathetic. Buckingham is innocent and guilty. Of course that makes life absolutely impossible for a director, who has to make some decisions about these things. But a really good production of Henry VIII manages to leave that shadow of doubt in the mind of the audience: “This seems to be nice and clear but it’s not quite, is it?” is the feeling I think you need to get from the play when you’ve seen it.

RN:

I think that’s maybe a very good place to end then! Thank you very much!