The Two Noble Kinsmen
Act Three
By Dennis Abrams Act Three: Separated from the royal party while out celebrating May Day, Arcite is suddenly confronted by Palamon. The two argue over Emilia once again, before agreeing to fight a duel over her. At the same time, the Jailer’s Daughter, is desperately searching the woods for Palamon when she comes upon a group of countrymen rehearsing an entertainment. Realizing that she has seemingly lost her mind, the performers include here in their masque, which they then present to Theseus and his companions. And in yet another part of the wood, Arcite brings his cousin armor but no sooner do the two begin go fight when they are interrupted by Theseus and his party. When the Duke condemns them to death, Emilia pleads for the sentence to be commuted to banishment, but the kinsmen turn down the offer (both preferring to die rather than never see her again). Theseus then demands that Emilia choose between the two, but when she is unable to do so, he agrees to supervise a final contest to win her hand.
Shakespeare and Fletcher took the story of the Jailer’s Daughter (for whatever reason they gave her no other name) from the tiniest of hints in the “Knight’s Tale” – there it is merely a mysterious “freend” who helps Palamon escape – but what they made out of it becomes utterly crucial to the play. (And as we read, the Jailer’s Daughter is Bloom’s favorite character in the entire play). Against the narrative of the two kinsmen, which becomes more and more contorted than ever – Arcite manages to work his way into Theseus’s court is disguise, while Palamon hides in the forest – the two playwrights (I’m guessing mostly Shakespeare) set four haunting scenes that trace her emotional collapse. “Let not my sense unsettle,” she begs when she is unable to find her beloved (3.2.2(, but a scene later her fears have been realized. As she addresses the audience in soliloquy (virtually the only character in the play to do so), it becomes clear that her sanity is gone. “I am very cold,” she shivers,
and all the stars are out too, The little stars and all, that look like aglets – The sun has seen my folly. Palamon! Alas, no; he’s in heaven. Where am I now? Yonder’s the sea and there’s a ship – how’t tumbles! And there’s a rock likes watching under water – Now, now, it beats upon it – now, now, now, There’s a leak sprung, a sound one – how they cry! Open her before the wind – you’ll lose all else. Up with a course or two, and tack about, boys. Good night, good night, you’re gone.
(3.4.1-11)
As we’ve seen, Shakespeare is usually credited with Act One of Kinsmen, the first two scenes of Act Three and three scenes in Act Five, including the play’s very last – but even if this soliloquy is Fletcher’s handiwork (and I really can’t see – or hear – that it is), it reads like a collection of Shakespearian motifs. Mumbling scraps of folk ballads, the Jailer’s Daughter reminds of Hamlet’s Ophelia, though her habit of repeating words resembles nothing less than that of King Lear. More tragically even than these, her rambling voice also resembles that of the equally nameless maiden in A Lover’s Complaint, a poem of Shakespeare’s also given over to the story of a grief-stricken and isolated young woman.
From Bloom:
“We then go off to prison with Palamon and Arcite, but since this is part of John Fletcher’s share in the play, we can evade it, except for noting that the cousins fall in love with Emilia at first sight, thus destroying their own friendship forever, as in Chaucer. Shakespeare began writing again by supplying a first scene to Act III, where Arcite, long since liberated by old acquaintance with Theseus’s friend Pirithous, is wandering lovelorn in the woods, while everyone else is off a-maying. On this fateful Mayday, the still-shackled Palamon, freshly escaped from prison, confronts Arcite, and the two agree on a fight to the death, the winner take Emilia. The scene has a mad, irrealistic charm, as Shakespeare juxtaposes their high rhetoric of chivalry with their mutually insane, regretful need to immolate one another. It is difficult to describe the comedy of their encounter, parallels being few, but some lines of Arcite’s catch the flavor:
Honour and honesty I cherish and depend on, howsoe’er You skip them in me, and with them, fair coz, I’ll maintain my proceedings. Pray be pleased To show in generous terms your griefs, since that Your question’s with your equal, who professes To clear his own way with the mind and sword Of a true gentleman.
(III.i.50-57)
This intricate mix of pomposity and courtesy disappears when Fletcher takes over for the duel, which is interrupted by Theseus and his entourage, Emilia included. After the furious Duke threatens the two erotic madmen with the prospects of death or banishment, a tournament is agreed upon, each dualist to be backed by three knights of his choice, the victor to receive Emilia, the loser (and his supporters) to suffer beheading, so that Theseus is bound to achieve his dubious satisfaction.”
And from Garber:
“There is, however, another love story in the making, one with a less ‘noble’ shape and – for a while at least – boding a far less happy ending. For the Jailer’s Daughter has fallen in love with Palamon, just as Palamon has fallen in love with Emilia. Smitten, the Jailer’s Daughter frees Palamon from prison. He encounters Arcite in the wood, where the two kinsmen determine to fight a duel for the right to claim Emilia as ‘my mistress’ (3.1.29) – a duel that takes place in act 3, scene 6, and constitutes the second of this play’s ‘broken,’ or interrupted, ceremonies.
As for the Daughter, she promptly goes mad, afflicted by melancholy or madness arising from passionate love. Her situation and her onstage response to it recall that of Ophelia, and she sings a similar song of unrequited passion and betrayal, with similar slips into sexual innuendo (‘O for a prick now, like a nightingale,/To put my breast against’ [3.4.25-26]). The Daughter will be recruited as a ‘dainty madwoman’ into an antic dance being staged by a pedantic schoolmaster and his countrymen and ‘wenches’ for the edification of the Duke (much in the spirit of the sheepshearing scene in The Winter’s Tale, or the pageant of the “Nine Worthies” staged by the pedant Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost). Madwomen – and madmen – were regarded in some quarters as figures of entertainment in this period. Webster’s Duchess of Malfi features a dance of eight madmen (4.2). The Schoolmaster’s long rhyming preface to his entertainment staged in act 3, scene 5, as a play-within-the-play with Theseus, Hippolyta, and Emilia in the onstage audience, features dubiously chiming couplets (‘The body of our sport, of no small study,/I first appear, though rude and raw and muddy’) and some fearsome alliteration (‘dainty Duke, whose doughty dismal fame/From Dis to Daedalus’), and gives way to a morris dance, constituting a rustic spectacle in the middle of the play, between the ‘high’ ‘comic,’ or romantic, movement, in which the noble kinsmen fall nobly in love with an unattainable woman, and the ‘tragic’ movement, in which they fight for her to the death, and one of them actually dies.
But as for the daughter, her plight is less hopeless than it may at first have appeared – the play is, after all, a tragicomedy, not a tragedy like Hamlet. In fact, she is recovered to her wits by a piece of extended role-playing undertaken by her faithful Wooer, who is advised by the Doctor,
[T]ake upon you…the name of Palamon; say you come to eat with her and to commune of love…Sing to her such green songs of love as she says Palamon hath sung in prison; come to her stuck in as sweet flowers…Learn what maids have been her companions and play-feres, and let them repair to her, with Palamon in their mouths, and appear with tokens as if they suggested for him. It is a falsehood she is in, which is with falsehoods to be combated.
(4.3.64-80)
Like the trope of entertaining a mad world with madmen, this strategy has a peculiarly ‘modern’ feel. (‘It is a falsehood she is in, which is with falsehoods to be combated’) The ‘cure’ is effected in act 5, with the Doctor, the Jailer, the Wooer, and the Daughter all onstage, and the Doctor’s down-home sexual advise to the Wooer (‘Lie with her if she ask you./…in the way of cure’ [5.4.27]). The ‘low’ plot of the Jailer’s Daughter and the faux Palamon offers a nice counterbalance to the ‘high’ plot of Emilia and her two suitors, since Emilia has a little real cognizance of the individual qualities and natures of the courtly kinsmen Palamon and Arcite as the mad Daughter does of the difference between ‘Palamon’ and Palamon.
As for the duel scene (3.6), it is structured, as we have already noted, as a second broken ceremony, paralleling the interrupted wedding in act I, scene I. Again the women will kneel and plead with Theseus, and again he will ultimately yield to their request. The scene has some strong elements of comedy, a little reminiscent of the threatened duel in Twelfth Night between Viola/Cesario and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, in which each for different reasons is terrified to fight the other. Palamon and Arcite have no such fear; they are defined, and they consistently define themselves, as soldiers (as Arcite says, ‘We were not bred to talk, man. When we are armed/And both upon our guards, then let our fury,/…fly strongly from us’ [3.6.28-30]). But they find themselves caught in a courtly dilemma and rather wish there were an honorable way out. ‘Your person I am friends with,’ Arcite tells Palamon, as he gives him a choice of swords and armors. ‘And I could wish I had not said I loved her,/Though I had died; but loving such a lady,/And justifying my love, I must not fly from’t’ (3.6.39-42). And Palamon replies, ‘Arcite, thou art so brave an enemy/That no man but thy cousin’s fit to kill thee’ (43-44). As they outfit themselves and each other – putting on armor is not a task that is easy for a man to do for himself – they chat in a homely and intimate way that is the opposite of martial confrontation:
Palamon: Pray thee tell me, cousin, Where gott’st thou this good armour?
Arcite: ‘Tis the Duke’s, And to say true, I stole it. Do I pinch you?
(3.6.53-55)
And:
Arcite: …use your gauntlets, though – those are o’th’ least. Prithee take mine, good cousin.
Palamon: Thank you, Arcite. How do I look? Am I fall’n much away?
Arcite: Faith, very little – love has used you kindly.
(3.6.64-67)
Such affectionate and even comical exchanges, born of long familiarity, give way to an awkward ceremonial: as the stage direction says, ‘They bow several ways, then advance and stand’ before they commence their flight. ‘Once more farewell, my cousin,’ says Arcite, and Palamon replies in kind: ‘Farwell, Arcite.’ But no sooner have they begun to trade blows in earnest than they are interrupted – yet another interrupted ceremony – by the hunting horns of Theseus and the arrival of Theseus, Hippolyta, Emilia, Pirithous, and their train.
The scene here will resemble both the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Theseus enforces the restrictive law of Athens, and the late scene in that same play when he and Hippolyta encounter the sleeping lovers in the woods. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, Theseus demands:
What ignorant and mad malicious traitors Are you, that ‘gainst the tenor of my laws Are making battle, thus like knights appointed, Without my leave and officers of arms? By Castor, both shall die.
(3.6.132-136)
Theseus has forbidden the kind of individual armed combat in which they were about to engage if it were not under his control. Palamon’s reply is eloquent – as, indeed, is Arcite’s – as both undertake to explain the code of love that has inspired their ritual enmity. ‘We are certainly both traitors,’ acknowledges Palamon,
both despisers Of thee and of they goodness, I am Palamon, That cannot love thee, he that broke thy prison – Think well what that deserves. And this is Arcite; A bolder traitor never trod they ground, A falser ne’er seemed friend. This is the man Was begged and banished; this is he contemns thee, And what thou dar’st do; and in this disguise, Against thine own edict, follows thy sister, That fortunate bright star, the fair Emilia, Whose servant – if there be a right in seeing And first bequeathing of the soul to – justly I am; and, which is more, dares think her his.
(3.6.137-149)
This is the ‘treachery’ that Palamon would combat. As for Arcite, he embraces the title of traitor:
Let me say thus much – if in love be treason, In service of so excellent a beauty, As I love most, and in that faith will perish, As I have brought my life here to confirm it, As I have served here truest, worthiest, As I dare kill this cousin that denies it, So let me be most traitor and ye please me. For scorning of thy edict, Duke, ask that lady Why she is fair, and why her eyes command me Stay here to love her, and if she say, ‘Traitor,’ I am a villain fit to lie unburied.
(3.6.161-171)
‘Let’s die together, at one instant, Duke,’ proposed Palamon (his line here echoes, probably unconsciously, another famous Shakespearean ‘twinning ‘passage, Celia’s ‘WE still have slept together,/Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together’ [As You Like It 1.3.67-68]). ‘Only a little let him fall before me,/That I may tell my soul, he shall not have her.’ (3.6.178-179)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Athenians – all but Theseus – are swept away by this idealistic rhetoric. ‘O heaven,/What more than man is this!’ exclaims Pirithous when he hears Palamon. In a visual echo of the play’s opening scene, the two women, Emilia and Hippolyta, fall to their knees in supplication, and they are joined by Pirithous. ‘These are strange conjurings,’ observes the disconcerted Theseus, but he is persuaded – as is the way with Shakespeare’s over-strict law-enforcing Dukes – to seek a better solution. Asked how she would solve this problem, Emilia, the object of the noble kinsmen’s adoration, modestly suggests that they should both be banished and have nothing further to do with her, a suggestion that enrages both smitten men (‘forget I love her?/O all ye gods, despise me then’ [3.6.257-258]) and makes the rest of the company admire them. (‘These are men!’ exclaims Pirithous [3.6.264] Coming shortly after his ‘What more than man is this!’ this delirious approbation may suggest to a director a moment risibly over-the-top.)
In any case, Theseus, forced to rethink his harsh edict and avoid Emilia’s kindly meant but harsher one (as in Romeo and Juliet, the lover’s choices would have been death or banishment), ordains a new contest, under his own aegis, to replace the outlaw duel between the rival friends. In three months’ time they are to reappear before him, each accompanied by three knights, and participate in a challenge, a kind of jousting contest. Whichever of the men can force the other ‘[b]y fair and knightly strength’ to touch a pyramid installed by Theseus will win Emilia; the other will lose his head, as will his knightly friends.”
Our next reading: The Two Noble Kinsmen, Act Four
My next post: Thursday evening/Friday morning.
Enjoy
Act Two: In jail in Athens, Palamon and Arcite are busy consoling themselves with the closeness of their friendship when Palamon suddenly sees the beautiful Emilia (Hippolyta’s sister) gathering flowers outside. Both men fall instantly in love with her, but Palamon claims that since he saw her first, he gets precedence, and the two begin to argue. Their quarrel stops only when Arcite is suddenly released. Though banished from Athens, Arcite takes the opportunity to appear in disguise at Theseus’s games, where he impresses everyone with his wrestling skills (not to mention his noble bearing). His reward, fittingly, is to be bestowed on Emilia as a servant. Meanwhile, the Jailer’s Daughter has arranged Palamon’s escape in the vain hope of winning his love.
But even though the play is properly Chaucerian, it is also convincingly a Shakespearean one as well. As well as taking its cue from Chaucer, the story of cousins Palamon and Arcite gestures back to early comedies such as The Two Gentleman of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost, in which close (even intimate) male friendships occupy a central position in the drama. In Kinsmen, nowhere is this clearer than after the battle between Theseus and Creon that occurs in the middle of Act One. Despite the fact that the kinsmen have been captured by Theseus following the Theban defeat and thrown into prison, their Athenian jailer and his daughter are amazed by the prisoners’ jovial spirits. “They eat well, look merrily, discourse of many things, but nothing of their own restraint and disasters,’ the Jailer’s Daughter wonderingly observes (2.1.38-40), and it soon becomes clear that what sustains the two men, “dearer in love than blood,” is their own friendship (1.2.1). Arcite describes it extravagantly. “Even from the bottom of these miseries,/From all that fortune can inflict upon us,” he declares,
I see two comforts rising – two mere blessings, If the gods please, to hold here a brave patience, And the enjoying of our griefs together. Whilst Palamon is with me, let me perish If I think this is our prison.
(2.2.56-62)
Their intimacy is such that it overcomes physical hardship, and Palamon echoes not only his friend’s thoughts but his high-flown way of expressing it. “Let’s think this prison holy sanctuary,” he agrees,
To keep us from corruption of worse men. We are young, and yet desire the ways of honour, That liberty and common conversation, The poison of pure spirits, might, like women, Woo us to wander from. What worthy blessing Can be but our imaginations May make it ours? And here bring thus together, We are in an endless mine to one another: We are one another’s wife, ever begetting New births of love; we are father, friends, acquaintance; We are in one another, families…
(2.2.71-82)
This doctrine of mutual self-sufficiency is incredible in every sense of the word. Rewriting their imprisonment as something they have chosen voluntarily, like life in a monastery, Palamon suggests that they provide the substance of each other’s lifes – friends, family, even spouse. Though it’s undeniably more grandiose (or overblown), this pact does seem to each the “deep oaths” signed at the start of Love’s Labour’s Lost by the King of Navarre and his three lords, and like those ivory-tower fantasies it will prove, not surprisingly, totally unsustainable. Palamon and Arcite, though they persuade themselves otherwise, are only this close because circumstance has brought them together, and now circumstance will tear them apart.
The transformation comes more immediately than anyone – even perhaps the audience – expects. Just a few minutes later Palamon and Arcite are joined onstage by Emilia, Queen Hippolyta’s sister, who appears outside the prison picking flowers. “She is wondrous fair,” says Arcite, and Palamon echoes him, sighing, “She is all the beauty extant.” (2.2.148). So closely attuned to each other that they boast of being each other’s “wife,” the cousins, with the most ironic inevitability, fall for exactly the same woman. But it isn’t long (naturally) before the pair find themselves exchanging terms of high sentiment and refinement for something less noble: “What do you think of this beauty?” Palamon asks, suddenly suspicious.
Arcite: ‘Tis a rare one
Palamon: Is’t but a rare one?
Arcite: Yes, a matchless beauty.
Palamon: Might not a man well lose himself and love her?
Arcite: I cannot tell what you have done; I have, Beshrew mine eyes for’t! Now I feel my shackles.
Palamon: You love her, then?
Arcite: Who would not?
Palamon: And desire her?
Arcite: Before my liberty.
Palamon: I saw her first.
(2.2.154-63)
Palamon’s childish interject here is genuinely funny, but it also indicates just how easy it has been for these two young men to renounce the vows they swore so passionately just a few minutes earlier.
Palamon and Arcite are not alone in feeling the violent tremors created by love. When Arcite is suddenly banished from Greece, Palamon is left alone in prison – an arrangement that suits the Jailer’s Daughter, who is earnestly trying to catch the stranger’s eye. Acknowledging the social gulf between them, she admits that “to marry him is hopeless,/To be his whore is witless’ (2.4.4-5) but can see no other way out. Then an idea strikes. “Say I ventured/To set him free?” she wonders,
What says the law then? Thus much For law or kindred? I will do it, And this night or tomorrow he shall love me.
(2.4.30-3)
The play does not make things that easy, however, her lover remains indifferent and aloof, seeming not to realize even when she helps him escape that her motivation is the hope of marrying him.
—————-
To continue with Bloom:
“Shakespeare, more grimly than ever before, declines to glorify war, and gives us a truly shocking speech by the Amazon Hippolyta, as she and her sister Emilia bid farewell to Pirithous, cousin and closest friend of Theseus, as he goes off to join the Duke in battle:
We have been soldiers, and we cannot weep When our friends down their helms, or put to sea, Or tell of babes broached on the lance, or women That have sod their infants in – and after ate them – The brine they wept at killing ‘em.
(I.iii.18-22)
If once cannot weep at mother’s boiling, in their own salt tears, their own infants for dinner, one can perhaps laugh, in psychological self-defense. Since this grotesque vision is cause for neither woe nor wonder on Hippolyta’s part, we can surmise that Shakespeare again achieves an alienation effect, in the mode of his own Titus Andronicus of two decades before. But that play was an outrageous send-up of Marlowe and Kyd. What is this sentiment doing in The Two Noble Kinsmen? Neither Hippolyta herself nor Emilia seems to take this hideous image as other than merely factual, which is another mark of Shakespearean distancing in this uncanny play. It would be at least as difficult to gauge Hippolyta’s lack of jealousy when she considers the depth of the Pirithous-Theseus relationship:
They two have cabined In many as dangerous as poor a corner, Peril and want contending; they have skiffed Torrents whose roaring tyranny and power I’th’ least of these was dreadful; and they have Fought out together where death’s self was lodged; Yet fate hath brought them off. Their knot of love, Tied, weaved, entangled, with so true, so long, And with a finger of so deep a cunning, May be outworn, never undone. I think Theseus cannot be umpire to himself, Cleaving his conscience into twain and doing Each side like justice, which he loves best.
(I.iii.35-47)
To say that your marriage may outwear but never outdo your husband’s relation to his closest male companion is again to manifest an uncanny dispassionateness, particularly since Hippolyta evidently does not care which one Theseus loves best. Emilia’s reply is both polite and even more dispassionate: ‘Doubtless/There is a best, and reason has no manners/To say it is not you.’ Unless Shakespeare means to parody his major excursions into jealousy, including Othello and The Winter’s Tale, he is giving us an entrance into an Amazonian consciousness very different from anything he has portrayed in his women. All this is prelude to the most moving account that Shakespeare ever rendered of love between young girls. Rosalind and Celia, as their respective lusts for Orlando and Liver evidence, were early inseparables of a very different order than were the older Emilia and the departed Flavina, lost when each lady was just eleven:
Emilia: You talk of Prithous’ and Theseus’ love: Theirs has more ground, is more maturely seasoned, More buckled with strong judgement, and their needs The one of th’other may be said to water Their intertangled roots of love;But I And she I sigh and spoke of were things innocent, Loved for we did, and like the elements, That know not what, nor why, yet do effect Rare issues by their operance, our souls Did so to one another. What she liked Was then of me approved; what not, condemned – No more arraignment. The flower that I would pluck And put between my breasts – O then but beginning To swell about the blossom – she would long ‘Till she had an other, and commit it To the like innocent cradle, where, phoenix-like, They died in perfume. On my head no toy But was her pattern. Her affections – pretty, Though happily her careless wear – I followed For my most serious decking. Had mine ear Stol’n some new air, or at adventure hummed one, From musical coinage, why, it was a note Whereon her spirits would sojourn – rather, dwell on – And sing it in her slumbers. This rehearsal – Which every innocent wots well comes in Like old emportment’s bastard – has this end, That the true love ‘tween maid and maid may be More than in sex dividual.
(I.iii.55-82)
We see why Emilia, more even than Chaucer’s Emily, will be so despairingly passive as to whether she will be awarded to Arcite or to Palamon. The length, weightedness, and complexity of this declaration is unique in Shakespeare, and deserves to be better known as the locus classicus in the defense of such love in the language. Emilia’s speech is much Shakespeare’s most passionate in the play, as Hippolyta dryly observes. Hippolyta’s courtly irony cannot lessen the poignance of Emilia’s paean to the dead Flavina, or more precisely to the perfect love of the two pre-adolescent girls, each finding her entire identity in the other. The contrast between this union of serenities and the murderous violence of the Palamon-Arcite strife for Emilia could not be more persuasive. With a mordant wit, Shakespeare concludes the scene with a sisterly debate as gravely courteous as it is disquieting:
Hippolyta: You’re out of breath, And this high-speeded pace is but to say That you shall never – like the maid Flavina – Love any that’s called man.
Emilia: I am sure I shall not.
Hippolyta: Now alack, weak sister, I must no more believe thee in this point – Though in’t I know thou doest believe thyself – Than I will trust a sickly appetite That loathes even as it longs. But sure, my sister, If I were ripe for your persuasion, you Have said enough to shake me from the arm Of the all-noble Theseus, for whose fortunes I will now in and kneel, with great assurance That we more than his Pirithous possess, The high throne in his heart.
Emilia: I am not Against your faith, yet I continue mine.
(I.iii.82-98)
The key phrasing is ‘a sickly appetite/That loathes even as it longs,’ a superb expression of acute ambivalence. It is difficult not to conclude that the ambivalence is very much that of the forty-nine-year-old Shakespeare, who seems to intimate his own newfound freedom – if not from desire, then from its tyranny – and seems also to manifest a nostalgia for other modes of love. Shakespeare’s sexual complexity, which may have chastised itself in the elegy for Will Peter, breaks bounds in The Two Noble Kinsmen, if only in some ironic grace notes, since he avoids celebrating anything like the Emilia-Flavina ecstasy of oneness in his accounts of the Pirithous-Theseus and Palamon-Arcite relationships.
The victorious Theseus, having captured the wounded Palamon and Arcite vows to heal them and then to hold them prisoner,, for reasons that Shakespeare keeps implicit but that have about them a touch of sadistic and homoerotic possessiveness, a pride at having in one’s power two such superb defeated warriors. Shakespeare’s first act comes full circle, with the reappearance of the three Queens, now burying the remnants of their husbands, and keening a memorably enigmatic couplet:
This world’s a city full of straying streets, And death’s the market-place, where each one meets.
(I.v.15-16)
This may be Shakespeare’s most direct response to The Knight’s Tale’s warning that we are always keeping appointments we have never made. We then go off to prison with Palamon and Arcite, but since this is part of John Fletcher’s share in the play, we can evade it, except for noting that the cousins fall in love with Emilia at first sight, thus destroying their own friendship forever, as in Chaucer.”
—————-
And from Garber:
“Part of the importance of [the scene between Emilia and Hippolyta] is the way it skillfully sets up a similar conversation between the imprisoned Palamon and Arcite in act 2, in which the noble kinsmen articulate the pattern of their friendship and the implications of their captivity. Palamon starts with the twin theme: ‘O never/Shall we two exercise, like twins of honour,/Our arms again.’ (2.2.17-19). Arcite sees the end of their hopes for a future, and for progeny:
Here we are, And here the graces of our youths must wither, Like a too-timely spring. Here age must find us And, which is heaviest, Palamon, unmarried – The sweet embraces of a loving wife Loaden with kisses, armed with thousand Cupids, Shall never clasp our necks; no issue know us; No figures of ourselves shall we e’er see To glad our age… …………………… This is all our world, We shall know nothing here but one another, Hear nothing but the clock that tells our woes.
(2.2.26-42)
Still, there is some comfort in the fact that they are together. ‘Whilst Palamon is with me, let me perish/If I think this our prison,’ Arcite says, and Palamon replied in the same spirit: ‘’Tis a main goodness, cousin, that our fortunes/Were twined together’ (2.2.61-62, 63-64). This leads Arcite to a further set of speculations and escapist fantasies (in the same vein as John of Gaunt’s counsel to his exiled son Bolingbroke, to suppose ‘the singing birds musicians’ in Richard II):
Let’s think this prison holy sanctuary, To keep us from corruption of worse men. We are young, and yet desire the ways of honour That liberty and common conversation, The poison of pure spirits, might, like women, Woo us to wander from. What worthy blessing Can be, but our imaginations May make it ours? And here being thus together, We are an endless mine to one another: We are one another’s wife, ever begetting New births of love; we are father, friends, acquaintance; We are in one another, families – I am your heir, and you are mine… ………………………………. Were we at liberty A wife might part us lawfully, or business; Quarrels consumes us; envy of ill men Crave our acquaintance. I might sicken, cousin, Where you should never know it, and so perish Without your noble hand to close mine eyes, Or prayers to the gods…
(2.2.71-94)
Palamon is overwhelmed with this vision: ‘You have made me –/I think you, cousin Arcite – almost wanton/With my captivity’ (2.2.96-97). The conversation ends on a note of certainty:
Palamon: Is there record of any two that loved Better than we do, Arcite?
Arcite: Sure there cannot.
Palamon: I do not think it possible our friendship Should ever leave us.
Arcite: Till our deaths it cannot.
(2.2.112-115)
Like Emilia’s ‘never,’ Palamon’s ‘not…ever’ invites a dramatic reversal, and that is exactly, and immediately, what it gets. Having rhetorically claimed that their captivity protects them from women who might seduce them away from the path of honor, that ‘[W]e are one another’s wife,’ and that ‘[a] wife might part us,’ Palamon and Arcite are about to become rivals for the love of a woman they behold from afar, as Emilia and her waiting-woman enter the garden below their prison window to admire the flowers that grow there, especially the one called ‘narcissus.’ (By this time Emilia has changed her views at least enough to critique the ‘fair boy’ who was ‘a fool/To love himself,’ for [W]ere there not maids enough? [2.2.120-121]).
‘Never till now was I in prison, Arcite,’ says Palamon (2.2.132), and shortly – having nothing better to do – these two noble kinsmen have both fallen in love:
Palamon: Might not a man well lose himself and love her?
Arcite: I cannot tell what you have done; I have, Beshrew mine eyes for’t. Now I feel my shackles.
Palamon: You love her then?
Arcite: Who would not?
Palamon: And desire her?
Arcite: Before my liberty.
Palamon: I saw her first.
Arcite: That’s nothing.
Palamon: But it shall be.
Arcite: I saw her too.
Palamon: Yes, but you must not love her.
(2.2.156-164)
And so on and on, putting their friendship, and their kinship in jeopardy. ‘Why then would you deal so cunningly,/So strangely, so unlike a noble kinsman,/To love alone? asks Arcite. ‘Speak truly. Do you think me/Unworthy of her sight? (2.2.193-195). Like another eponymous duo, the two gentlemen of Verona in Shakespeare’s play of that name, likewise sundered by their love for Silvia, Palamon and Arcite split apart over their ‘love’ for Emilia, to whom neither has ever spoken. When, shortly, Theseus sends for Arcite, gives him his liberty, but banishes him from Athens, Arcite’s first thought is that Palamon is far more fortunate, since he can look at Emilia every day from his prison window. ‘I will not leave the kingdom,’ Arcite resolves. ‘If I go he has her’ (2.3.19, 21). Learning from some rustic countrymen that ‘games’ are going forward and that Duke Theseus himself will be present, Arcite determines to put on a ‘poor disguise’ and enter the competition, hoping, he says, that ‘happiness prefer me to a place/Where I may ever dwell in sight of her’ (2.3.84-85). At the country sports, Arcite – like Pericles disguised in his play as ‘the mean knight’ – distinguishes himself as the fastest runner and best wrestler, identifies himself as a ‘youngest’ son (in the time honored spirit of fairy tales), and is presented to Emilia – whose birthday has, it turns out, inspired these celebrations, as her courtly servant. Theseus admires both the man and his prowess, and urges Emilia to supply Arcite with horses and to look upon him with favor, perhaps as a ‘master,’ or husband.”
Our next reading: The Two Noble Kinsmen, Act Three
My next post: Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning.
Enjoy
Prologue and Epilogue Palamon and Arcite, cousins (the two “noble kinsmen”), both nephews of King Creon. Theseus, Duke of Athens Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, later Theseus’s wife Emilia, Hippolyta’s sister A Woman, Emilia’s attendant Pirthous, Theseus’s close friend Artesius, an Athenian soldier Three Queens, widows to kings killed at the siege of Thebes Hymen, god of marriage. Valerius, a Theban Six Knights, attending Arcite and Palamon A Jailer of Theseus’s prison The Jailer’s Daughter and her Wooer
A Doctor Six Countrymen led by the schoolmaster Gerald
Act One: In Athens, preparations for the marriage of King Theseus and Hippolyta are disrupted by the sudden appearance of three queens, whose husbands have died fighting the evil King Creon of Thebes. Denied the right to bury their husbands – whose bodies still lie on the battlefield – the women demand that Theseus take up their cause and attack Thebes. At that moment, Palamon and Arcite (Creon’s nephews) are debating whether to escape the corruption of Thebes when a messenger arrives with news that Theseus is threatening the city. Despite their disgust with their uncle, the two kinsmen decide to remain and fight. Theseus triumphs, however, and the wounded Palamon and Arcite are captured and imprisoned.
As I mentioned in my introduction, it’s been suggested that The Two Noble Kinsmen is a kind of Midsummer Night’s Dream part two: both plays draw heavily on Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” the graceful and courtly story told by the worthy, wise and “parfit gentil” Knight to the assembled gaggle of pilgrims as the first of The Canterbury Tales. But where the Dream merely takes up the Athenian setting of Chaucer’s narrative and the wedding between the duke Theseus and his bride Hippolyta, discarding the rest, Kinsmen is a full dramatization of the tale itself, that of two cousins, “yonge knyghtes” captured by Theseus as prisoners of war, who tragically fall for the same woman. That Shakespeare returned once more to a medieval author who had served him well before (most obviously in Troilus and Cressida as well as the Dream) attests not only to Chaucer’s continued popularity – an expanded edition of his works appeared a decade or so before Kinsmen reached the stage – but also to a Jacobean taste for medieval romance. The small, indoor Blackfriars became the King’s Men’s winter house from around 1609, and the refined audiences who attended that theatre a few years later would surely have been flattered to hear that “Chaucer, of all admired” was providing the night’s entertainment, as the Prologue announces. “If we let fall the nobleness of this,” he goes on,
And the first sound this child hear be a hiss,
How it will shake the bones of that good man,
And make him cry from under ground, ‘O fan
From me the witless chaff of such a writer,
That blasts my bays and my famed works makes lighter
Than Robin Hood?’ This is the fear we bring,
For to say truth, it were an endless thing
And too ambitious to aspire to him,
Weak as we are, and almost breathless swim
In this deep water.
(Prologue 13-25)
Begging its audience not to ‘hiss’ – if only to preserve Chaucer’s ‘sweet sleep’ and keep him from spinning in his grave – the ‘child’ play attempts a similar trick to the earlier Pericles, apologizing for, yet also showing off, its prestigious paternity. The authors keep their promise, too: while in previous scripts based on Chaucer Shakespeare reworks his material intensively (Troilus and Cressida is the most obvious example), in Kinsmen he and Fletcher are more restrained. This is to be a properly Chaucerian play.
From Garber:
“The Two Noble Kinsmen begins with a Prologue and ends with an Epilogue, thus bracketing its ceremonial, romantic, and tragic events from a faraway past with gestures towards the present-day audience. The Prologue is jaunty, bawdy, with gestures toward the present-day audience. The Prologue is jaunty, bawdy, and colloquial – a nice, and deliberate, contrast with the more formal, even hieratic scene that is to follow. The ‘breeder’ to which the Prologue alludes is the author of the play’s source:
New plays and maidenheads are near akin: Much followed both, for both much money giv’n If they stand sound and well. And a good play, Whose modest scenes blush on his marriage day And shake to lose his honour, is like her That after holy tie and first night’s stir Yet still is modesty, and still remains More of the maid to sight than husband’s pains. We pray our play may be so, for I am sure It has a noble breeder and a pure, A learned, and a poet never went More famous yet ‘twist Po and silver Trent. Chaucer, of all admired, the story gives: There constant to eternity it lives. If we let fall the nobleness of this And the first sound this child hear be a hiss, How will it shake the bones of that good man…?
(Prologue 1-17)
Instead of the ‘hiss’ of a dissatisfied audience, the Prologue sues for applause (in a figure recognizable from Prospero’s Epilogue in The Tempest): ‘Do but you hold you/Your helping hands and we shall back about/And something do to save us’ (Prologue 25-27). The play, he assures the audience, ‘is ‘[w]orth two hours’ travel,’ whyere ‘travel’ is the same as ‘travail’ (effort or labor). The phrase recalls the ‘two hours’ traffic of our stage’ from the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet. The result, at least for a modern audience, is to suture this play to the framing techniques of other, more familiar ‘Shakespeare’ plays, and also to replace the narrator figure of Gower (in Shakespeare’s earlier medieval romance, Pericles) with a free-standing actor, the Prologue, who will then disappear into the action.
The Epilogue, spoken by a different actor and coming almost immediately after the onstage death of Arcite, one of the play’s attractive eponymous ‘kinsmen,’ will be even more colloquial and flirtatious (Lois Potter in the Arden edition writes that ‘the most likely speaker is a boy actor dressed as a woman’), more closely resembling Rosalind than Prospero:
I would now ask ye how ye like the play, But, as it is with schoolboys, cannot say. I am cruel fearful. Pray yet stay awhile, And let me look upon ye. No man smile? Then it goes hard, I see. He that has Loved a young handsome wench, then, show his face – ‘Tis strange if none be here – and if he will, Against his conscience let him hiss and kill Our market… …… If the tale we have told – For ‘tis no other – any way content ye, For to that honest purpose it was meant ye, We have our end…
(Epilogue 1-15)
Prologues and epilogues of this kind are, of course, present in numerous early modern stage plays, and the evocation of the modes of address of Prospero, Rosalind, and the Romeo and Juliet Prologue here is meant to be indicative rather than exhaustive.
The play contained between these two audience-engaging parentheses begins with a broken ceremony. The stage direction to act 1, scene 1, like those in Henry VIII is highly detailed, and both descriptive and prescriptive:
Music. Enter Hymen with a torch burning, a BOY in a white robe before, singing and strewing flowers After Hyman, a nymph encompassed in her tresses, bearing a wheaten garland. Then THESEUS between two other nymphs with wheaten chaplets on their heads. Then HIPPOLYTA, the bride, led by [PIRITHOUS] and another holding a garland over her head, her tresses likewise hanging. After her, EMILIA holding up her train.
The occasion is the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. Emilia (Chaucer’s ‘Emily,’ a character deriving from his source, a tale by Boccaccio) is Hippolyta’s sister, and Pirithous a friend of Theseus. Hymen – also present in the wedding finale of As You Like It – is the classical god of marriage. But before the ceremony can take place, it is interrupted by the arrival of three queens, dressed in black, seeking Theseus’s assistance in the war against ‘cruel Creon’ of Thebes, who has slain their husbands and refuses to yield up the bodies for burial. Theseus at first declines to interrupt his marriage ceremony, and its erotic aftermath, for this mission of mercy, but he is importuned by Hippolyta and Emilia, and by the eloquent widowed queens. ‘O when/Her twinning cherries shall their sweetness fall/Upon thy tasteful lips, what wilt thou think/Of rotten kings or blubbered queens?’ (1.1.176-179), one of the queens demands of him with pathos and pertinence. Hippolyta lends the force of her own persuasion, sounding, as she does so, rather like Portia sending Bassanio off to rescue Antonio before he comes to her wedding bed – or like Othello postponing his own wedded pleasure in order to quell the Turks in Cyprus. Here is Hippolyta:
Though much unlike You should be so transported, as much sorry I should be such a suitor – yet I think Did I not by th’abstaining of my joy, Which breeds a deeper longing, cure their surfeit That craves a present medicine, I should pluck All ladies’ scandal on me [Kneels] Therefore sir, As I shall here make trial of my prayers, Either presuming them to have some force, Or sentencing for aye their vigour dumb, Prorogue this business we are going about, and hang Your shield afore your heart – about that neck Which is my fee, and which I freely lend To do these poor queens service.
(I.i.185-198)
Theseus charges Pirithous to ‘[k]eep the feast full,’ to go on with the festivities, and prepares to assist the queens: ‘As we are men,/thus should we do; being sensually subdued/We lose our human title’ (1.1.230-232). This, too, echoes the Othello theme of the subjugation of private sensuality to public service.
The scene then shifts to Thebes, and the two ‘kindsmen,’ Palamon and Arcite, cousins and best friends, are introduced. They lament the ‘decays’ of Thebes and the fallenness of the city, ‘where very evil/Hath a good colour; where every seeming good’s/A certain evil’ (1.2.38-40), Affectations of style, speech, and dress have overtaken the court of Creon, and the two young men are determined to ‘leave his court that we may nothing share/Of his loud infamy’ (1.2.75-76). No sooner have they made this declaration, however, than the situation changes. The announcement of Theseus’s approach turns the two men into patriots, who will fight for their city’s honor rather than for its dishonorable tyrant: ‘Our services now stand for Thebes, not Creon’ (1.2.99). Palamon and Arcite go to battle to defend Thebes against Athens, are injured, and are treated kindly by Theseus, who orders that they be tended back to health, and imprisoned. Described by a herald as ‘[m]en of great quality…/sisters’ children, nephews to the King’ (1.4.15-17), ,they are taken to an Athenian jail and cared for by a jailer and his daughter. ‘[T]he prison itself is proud of ‘em, and they have all the world in their chamger,’ rhapsodizes the Daughter, echoing a common theme of Renaissance lyric from Raleigh to Donne to Lovelace. ‘It is a holiday to look on them. Lord, the difference of men!’ (2.1.22-24, 50-51). The stage is set for a move from pageantry to love comedy, and then, via the Daughter’s unrequited love for Palamon, to madness.
In Athens, meanwhile, those left behind discuss male and female friendship, and articulate strong models of same-sex allegiance, akin to those articulated in other Shakespeare plays (Antonio and Bassanio; Hermia and Helena; Leontes and Polixenes; and so on). In our discussion of The Merchant of Venice,A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Winter’s Tale, we touched upon the Renaissance ideal of friendship and its Platonic and erotic associations. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, as in most – though not all – Shakespearean instances, these discussions locate the ideal model of friendship in the past, as something to be accommodated to the changed circumstances of marriage (in the case of Theseus and Pirithous) or as something lost and perhaps irreplaceable (in the case of Emilia and her friend Flavina, who died when she was eleven years old). It is worth examining the ways in which these two paradigmatic friendships are described, early in the play, since these models will have a bearing on the relationship between Palamon and Arcite, and the manner in which that ‘ideal friendship’ will be breached, first by competitive love for the same woman, Emilia (a version of Rene Girard’s concept of ‘mimetic desire’), and then by death. Shakespeare’s plays use the pattern of mimetic desire over and over, as we have seen in the early comedies. In The Two Noble Kinsmen this triangular desire underwrites much of the action, coloring eroticism with rivalry – and rivalry with eroticism.
‘How his longing/Follows his friend!’ exclaims Emilia about Pirithous, whose mind seems divided between thinking of the absent Theseus and fulfilling his injunction to keep the festivities alight (1.3.26-27). Hippolyta is happy to agree: ‘Their knot of love,/Tied, weaved, entangled with so true, so long,/And with a finger of so deep a cunning,/May be outworn, never outdone’ (41-44) This reflection reminds Emilia of her own loss, which she describes in one of those passages of exposition that are plainly for the audience’s enlightenment. Hippolyta, though she listens with every evidence of close attention, makes it clear that she has heard this tale before:
Emilia: I was acquainted Once with a time when I enjoyed a playfellow; You were at wars when she the grave enriched, Who made too proud the bed; took leave o’th’ moon – Which then looked pale at parting – when our count Was each eleven.
Hippolyta: Twas Flavina.
Emilia: Yes. You talk of Prithous’ and Theseus’ love: Theirs has more ground, is more maturely seasoned, More buckled with strong judgement, and their needs The one of th’other may be said to water Their intertangled roots of love; but I And she I sigh and spoke of were things innocent, Loved for we did, and like the elements, That know not what, nor why, yet do effect Rare issues by their operance, our souls Did so to one another. What she liked Was then of me approved; what not, condemned – No more arraignment. The flower that I would pluck And put between my breasts – O then but beginning To swell about the blossom – she would long ‘Till she had an other, and commit it To the like innocent cradle, where, phoenix-like, They died in perfume. On my head no toy But was her pattern. Her affections – pretty, Though happily her careless wear – I followed For my most serious decking. Had mine ear Stol’n some new air, or at adventure hummed one, From musical coinage, why, it was a note Whereon her spirits would sojourn – rather, dwell on – And sing it in her slumbers…
(1.3.49-78)
In short, Emilia speculates, ‘true love ‘tween maid and made may be/More than in sex dividual’ (1.3.81-2). Hippolyta intercedes to interpret, translating Emilia’s thoughts: ‘[T]his high-speeded pace is but to say/that you shall never, like the maid Flavina,/Love any that’s called man’ (1.3.83-85). To which Emilia replies promptly and roundly, ‘I am sure I shall not’ (86).
We might pause here to note the oddity of this conversation, in which Hippolyta, the Amazon Queen, maintains the view of heterosexual love and marriage, while her sister insists upon her ‘faith’ in the fact that she will never love a man as she loved the dead Flavina. Hippolyta’s peroration, in which she gently advises her sister that she will change her mind one day, may seem contrary in spirit to the idea of a Shakespeare imagined as limning powerful patterns of same-sex love – and, indeed, from that of a Fletcher memorably described as sharing a bed and a wench with his best friend and frequent collaborator Francis Beaumont – but it is nevertheless quite in line with the usual plots and practices of Shakespeare’s plays. Hermia and Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Celia and Rosalind in As You Like It, are first twinned, then divided. Each chooses a husband, although that choice does not invalidate either the passion, or the eloquence, or their romantic friendship. In Twelfth Night Olivia’s love for the cross-dressed Viola – whom she knows as the boy ‘Cesario’ – is transmuted, by the machinations of the plot, into a marriage with Viola’s twin, Sebastian, and the embrace of Viola herself as a ‘sister.’ The Two Noble Kinsmen revisits this classic Shakespearean scenario in which passionate childhood loves between persons of the same sex, while they may be rhetorically reconfirmed at the play’s end, are also formally augmented or superseded by heterosexual marriage.
Hippolyta: Now alack, weak sister, I must no more believe thee in this point – Though in’t I know thou doest believe thyself – Than I will trust a sickly appetite That loathes even as it longs. But sure, my sister, If I were ripe for your persuasion, you Have said enough to shake me from the arm Of the all-noble Theseus, for whose fortunes I will now in and kneel, with great assurance That we more than his Pirithous possess, The high throne in his heart.
(1.3.87-97)
Hippolyta’s ‘we’ is the personal plural, what is sometimes called the ‘royal we.’ She is confident that she, and not his childhood friend Pirithous, is Theseus’s chosen partner.
Perhaps it is enough that Shakespeare does allow the alternative view to stand, at least for the moment – ‘I am not/Against your faith, yet I continue mine,’ says Emilia – and the form that these philosophical conversations always takes is dialogic, so that there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer to such a debate. But ‘never’ in such conversations serves almost always, especially in the comedies, as a kind of dare, waiting to be proved wrong. (‘That you shall never, like the maid Flavina,/Love any that’s called man’).
The ‘dead twin’ theme is a familiar one in the plays (compare Juliet and the dead Susan in Romeo and Juliet – ‘Susan is with God’ [Romeo and Juliet 1.3.21]; Viola Cesario and her imaginary sister who pined away ‘like patience on a monument’ in Twelfth Night; and the dead sister of the merry Catherine in Love’s Labour’s Lost). Empirical social history tells us that child mortality in this period was high, but we do not need recourse to the ‘real’ to see that dramatically and poetically the dead twin emblematizes a road not taken. Flavina dies at eleven, the partner and soul mate of her loving and beloved Emilia. But Emilia lives, and her life changes. Her definitive ‘I am sure I shall not’ dangles as a tantalizing piece of plot bait, waiting for its reversal – and this would be true no matter what she averred to be unalterably true. The reversal, in other words, is theatrical, not merely narrative and psychological.”
———————-
And from Harold Bloom:
“Chaucer’s heroes, Palamon and Arcite, are sworn brothers and chivalric idealists, until they gaze upon the superb Emily, the sister of Hippolyta, now married to Theseus of Athens. From that fatal falling-in-love onward, they are sworn rivals, determined to cut each other down, so that the survivor can possess Emily. Theseus sets up a grand tournament to settle the matter, but Arcite’s victory proves ironic, since he falls off his horse during a victory canter and is mortally injured. Palamon therefore gets the girl, and Theseus delivers an oration that insists all this was divinely ordained.
But Theseus does not speak for the narrating Knight, nor does the Knight speak for the poet Chaucer, though the differences between the three are subtle. For the Knight, love is an accident, and all life is accidental, including the ruin of the friendship of Palamon and Arcite. Talbot Donaldson interprets Chaucer as implying that pure chance governs everything, including love and death, which does not leave much of Theseus’s theodicy but bears out the Knight’s stoic acceptance of keeping appointments one has never made. Since Palamon and Arcite are virtually indistinguishable, while pure Emily is passive, the reader might not much care if it were not for Chaucer’s own subtle negations. Palamon, Arcite, and Emily pray respectively in the temples of Venus, Mars, and Diana, all of which are chapels of pain, replete with representations of victims and victimization. The Knight describes these with bland cheerfulness, but we shudder, and Chaucer clearly intends that we are to be appalled.
Talbot Donaldson wryly notes that ‘whereas the horrors in Chaucer seem mostly charged to the gods above, Shakespeare puts them back where they started, in the hearts of people.’ For The Two Noble Kinsmen, that is an understatement: eros is the authentic horror, the never-ending and ultimate illness, universal and afflicting all ages of men and women, once they have left childhood for the sorrows of sexual life. In fact, Shakespeare’s part of The Two Noble Kinsmen might make us doubt that life is anything except sorrows. Act I opens with three mourning Queens throwing themselves down at the feet, respectively, of Theseus, Hippolyta, and Emilia. These women in black are the widows of three kings among the Seven Against Thebes, whose rotting corpses surround the walls of Creon’s city, for the tyrant refuses them burial. The Queen’s supplicating laments are ritualistic, essentially baroque in their elaborations:
We are three queens, whose sovereigns fell before The wrath of cruel Creon; who endured The beaks of ravens, talons of the kites, And pecks of crows in the foul fields of Thebes. He will not suffer us to burn their bones, To urn their ashes, nor take th’ offence Of mortal loathsomeness from the blest eye Of holy Phoebus, but infects the winds With stench of our slain lords. O, pity, Duke! Thou purger of the erath, draw thy feared sword That does good turns to th’ world; give us the bones Of our dead kings, that we may chapel them, And of thy boundless goodness take some note That for our crowned heads we have no roof, Save this which is the lion’s and the bear’s, And vault to everything.
(I.i.39-54)
One could fit the matter of their plea into ten fewer lines, but the mannerism of their speech is more important. The luxuriance, not so much of grief, but of outrage, dominates. Outrageousness is the rhetorical tonality of Shakespeare’s final mode, where most voices carry the burden of being outraged: by injustice, by time, by eros, by death. Thomas de Quincy, the Romantic critic most attuned to rhetoric, found in Acts I and V of The Two Noble Kinsmen ‘the most superb work in the language,’ and commended Shakespeare’s more ‘elaborate style of excellence.’ What are the poetic motives of such extraordinary elaboration? Theodore Spencer, puzzling out these ‘slow rhythms’ and this ‘formal grace,’ suggested a choral effect, distanced from action:
‘There are, in the Shakespearean parts of The Two Noble Kinsmen, an unmistakable incantation, tone, and order: the incantation which accepts illusion, the tone which has forgotten tragedy, and an order melted at the edges into a larger unity of acceptance and wonder.’
Spencer, shoe lyrics closely imitated Yeats’s, seems to me to be describing late Yeats, not late Shakespeare. Illusion, acceptance, and wonder are neither the matter nor the manner of The Two Noble Kinsmen. The style of old age suits the Yeats of Last Poems and Plays or the Hardy of Winter Words, or the Stevens of The Rock, but not Shakespeare in this final play. If this greatest of poets is weary of passion, he is also estranged from the enormous panoply of styles he has previously created. Ellipsis becomes a favorite rhetorical figure, which is bewildering in so baroque a style; to elaborate while leaving out is a strange mode, yet it is perfectly appropriate for this play of destructive desire and obliterated friendship. Theseus reacts to the first queen’s litany by remembering the long-ago day of her wedding to the slain Capaneus:
you were that time fair; Not Juno’s mantle fairer than your tresses, Nor in more bounty spread her, your wheaten wreath Was then nor threshed nor blasted; Fortune at you Dimpled her cheek with smiles. (I.i.62-66)
Himself about to be married, Theseus abruptly laments (rather unflatteringly to her face) the loss of the first Queen’s beauty:
O grief and time, Fearful consumers, you will all devour!
(I.i.69-70)
It is that sense of loss, more than the entreaties of the Queens, and even of Hippolyta and Emilia, that makes Theseus decide to postpone his marriage, in order to march against Creon and Thebes. This first scene of heraldic intensity yields to an equally deliberate second, the introduction of Palamon and Arcite. Shakespeare wastes no art in rendering them at all distinct from each other; they seem, indeed, as inseparable cousins, to share the same high, somewhat priggish moral character, and to exhibit no personality whatsoever. Their interest for Shakespeare, and for us, is as a polemical thrust against the London of 1613, the city the playwright had abandoned for Stratford, and yet rather uneasily, since he kept a foot in the capital. In 1612, heretics and witches were still being executed, while in the next year Sir Thomas Overbury was poisoned in the Tower of London, at the behest of the Countess of Essex, whose marriage to James I’s catamite, Robert Carr, Overbury had protested. As always, the circumspect Shakespeare kept his comments both recondite and indefinite, though Creon’s Thebes rather clearly is the rancid London of James I:
Arcite: This is virtue, Of no respect in Thebes. I spake of Thebes, How dangerous, if we will keep our honours, It is for our residing, where every evil Hath a good colour; where every seeming good’s A certain evil; where not to be even jump As they are, here were to be strangers, and Such things to be, mere monsters.
(I.ii.35-42)
To be ‘even jump,’ or ‘exactly,’ with the way things are in Thebes-London is to descend rapidly from the state of innocence that Palamon and Arcite continue to celebrate. Moral warriors, estranged nephews of Creon, they rejoice mutually in their ‘gloss of youth,’ and in being ‘yet unhardened in/The crimes of nature.’ Yet they are patriotic young men, and rally to Thebes when informed that Theseus marches against it; however noble his cause.”
More on this in my next post.
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Our next reading: Act Two of The Two Noble Kinsmen
My next post: Sunday evening/Monday morning
Enjoy. And enjoy your weekend.
The Two Noble Kinsmen
An Introduction
By Dennis Abrams
After the political intrigue of Henry VIII, it would be difficult to imagine a play more different than the one which followed it onto the stage. The Two Noble Kinsmen concluded Shakespeare’s professional theatrical career, and although it was also co-written with John Fletcher, their collaboration seems to have been much less intimate than before. And despite being elegant and courtly – its source is Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” its dramatic language heavily influenced by the elaborate Jacobean masques of the time – the tone of Kinsmen is mixed, and often difficult to gauge. While the story of two men who fall in love with the same women stirs memories of Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, most obviously The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in this play resolution proves strikingly difficult to achieve. The “kinsmen,” Palamon and Arcite, claim to be closer to each other than anyone alive, but their conversion from extravagant devotion to bitter hatred undermines the chivalric ideals both claim to serve – and in the handful of professional performances the play has received, they have often been completely overshadowed by another character, the nameless Jailer’s Daughter, who falls hopelessly and tragically (of course) in love with Palamon. Dominated by loss and compromise – never more so than its gruesome, troubling conclusion – Kinsmen feels a world away not just from Henry VIII, but from the renunciations and reconciliations offered by Shakespeare’s ‘last plays,” especially The Tempest, often thought of as Shakespeare’s cordial farewell to his art.
DATE
Featuring Shakespeare’s last writing for the professional stage, The Two Noble Kinsmen was first performed in 1613-14, possibly at the indoor Blackfriars theatre.
SOURCES
Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” is the play’s key source, as for A Midsummer Night’s Dream – another influence. The masque in Act Three is “lifted” from Francis Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple (1613).
TEXTS
One of several Shakespeare plays not to make it into the First Folio (1623), Kinsmen was printed in a 1634 quarto edition proclaiming that it was co-written with John Fletcher – a plausible excuse for its earlier exclusion. Though regularly published in editions of Fletcher, it was not generally believed to be Shakespeare’s work until the nineteenth century.
From Harold Bloom:
“Ultimately the supremacy of Shakespeare consists in his unmatched power of thinking. Since this is poetic thinking, and usually dramatic in its nature, we tend to consider it as imaging rather than arguing. But here too Shakespeare-as-inventor encloses us. His is the largest form of representing thought, as well as action, that we have known. Can we truly distinguish his thinking from his representations of thinking? Is it Shakespeare or Hamlet who thinks not too much but much too well? Hamlet is his own Iago just as he is his own Falstaff, because Shakespeare has made Hamlet the freest of all his ‘free artists of themselves,’ to use Hegel’s phrase. Shakespeare’s eminence among all strong poet is that, compared even to Dante or Chaucer, he enjoys and manifests the greatest degree of freedom in fashioning his free artists of self. Nietzsche implied that the Dionysian Hamlet perished of the truth, presumably after abandoning art. The Hamlet of Act V is certainly not the poet-playwright-director of Acts II and III, and Shakespeare allows the dying prince to hint that he possesses a new kind of knowledge not yet available to us. Such knowledge would have come from a different thinking that began with Hamlet’s sea change, on the abortive voyage to England. Our only evidence for differences in Shakespeare’s own thinking ensues from intimations that his greatest plays induced sea changes in their own author. The experience of composing Hamlet and King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest left traces available to us in his final work, The Two Noble Kinsmen, of a new Shakespeare, who chose to abandon writing after touching, and transgressing, the limits of art, and perhaps also of thought.
As far as we can know, the Shakespearean portions of The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) constitute the final writing of any sort by the author of Hamlet and King Lear. I have never seen a performance of The Two Noble Kinsmen, and don’t particular want to, since Shakespeare’s contributions to the play are scarcely dramatic. Critics of The Two Noble Kinsmen generally disagree, but I find Shakespeare’s style, in this final work, to be subtler and defter than ever, though very difficult to absorb. His purposes here are very enigmatic, he abandons his career-long concern with character and personality and presents a darker, more remote or estranged vision of human life than ever before. Pageant, ritual, ceremony, whatever one chooses to call it, Shakespeare’s share in The Two Noble Kinsmen is poetry astonishing even for him, but every difficult poetry, hardly suitable for the theater. It contrasts oddly with the rest of the play, written by John Fletcher, in perhaps the third collaboration between the two. Since we do not have their Cardenio, and since Fletcher may have written relatively little or even none of Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen is their only certain joint enterprise. Shakespeare’s colleagues, editing the First Folio, included Henry VIII but not the final play, thus conceding it to Fletcher (then their resident playwright, as Shakespeare’s successor). Scholars now mostly agree that Shakespeare wrote Act I, the first scene of Act III, and Act V (excluding the second scene). Three-fifths of the play is evidently Fletcher’s, and is both lively and rather silly. Shakespeare’s two-fifths is somber and profound, and perhaps gives us a better entrance into Shakespeare’s inner life, in his final phase, than is provided by Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.
More lyrical than dramatic, The Two Noble Kinsmen’s Shakespearean portions manifest little action and minimal character portrayal. Instead we hear a voice, hardly, as in Henry VIII, in ‘the style of old age’ (Shakespeare being forty-nine) and yet more than a little weary of great passions, and of the sufferings of what Chesterton was to call ‘great spirits in chains.’ Prospero, Shakespeare’s anti-Faust, was his last great spirit. Theseus, who by the close of The Two Noble Kinsmen is almost Shakespeare’s surrogate, is in himself only a voice, one remarkably unlike that of the Theseus of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The earlier Theseus was Hippolyta’s inferior, this final Theseus is at least her equal. He is Shakespeare’s last poet, possibly reflecting what I suppose must be called the playwright’s staggered and uneasy retirement. Shakespeare seems to have gone home again, to Stratford, in late 1610 or early 1711, but then to have returned intermittently to London until sometime in 1713. After that, in the nearly three years before his death, he was in Stratford, writing nothing. The rest was silence, but why?
Only conjecture is available to us, and I suspect our best clues are in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Shakespeare’s abandonment of his art is virtually unique in the annals of Western literature, nor can I think of a major composer or painter who made a similar retreat. Tolstoy gave up his true work for a time, and wrote religious tracts instead, but returned magnificently at the end with his short novel Hadji Murad. There are poets who should have stopped and didn’t; Wordsworth after 1807 and Whitman after 1865 wrote very badly indeed. Moliere died at fifty just after writing, directing, and acting the lead part in The Imaginary Invalid. Shakespeare possibly gave up acting as early as 1604, in his later thirties, and presumably directed all his plays through Henry VIII, though he may have stopped earlier, perhaps in 1611, since by then he lived mostly in Stratford. We can only guess whether he supervised The Tempest in 1611, or whether he was on hand to see the Globe Theater burn down during a performance of Henry VIII on June 29, 1613. Biographers surmise some of Shakespeare’s familial and financial activities during the last three years of his life, but they cannot help us to speculate as to why he chose to end after a dramatist’s career of a quarter century. Russell Fraser, my favorite Shakespeare biographer, wryly repeats Theodore Spencer’s fantasy that a deputation of the King’s Men called upon their old friend and urged him to leave the writing to John Fletcher, who by 1613 had begun to be much more in the mode than the old-fashioned Shakespeare. Indeed, I can imagine the players reacting with great puzzlement and frustration to the speeches provided them by Shakespeare in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Yet they would have known that Fletcher was an inkblot in comparison to Shakespeare, whose enormous success had been their fortune also.
In his final effort, the endlessly fecund experimenter goes beyond romance or tragicomedy into a strange new mode, which he founds upon Chaucer, his truest precursor, and still his only authentic rival in the language. Shakespeare returns to The Knight’s Tale, which had helped inform A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and this time he engages it much more directly. Chesterton, who had a shrewd sense of the relationship between Chaucer and Shakespeare, remarked of The Knight’s Tale that
‘Chaucer does not himself to go prison with Palamon and Arcite, as Shakespeare does in some sense go to prison with Richard the Second. Nay, to some extent, and in some subtle fashion, Shakespeare seems to identify himself with Hamlet who finds Denmark a prison or the whole world a prison. We do not have this sense of things closing in upon the soul in Chaucer, with his simple tragedies; one might also say, his sunny tragedies. In his world misfortunes are misfortunes, like clouds in the sky, but there is a sky.’
But by The Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare has no interest in going to prison (or anywhere else) with Palamon and Arcite, and the play (or Shakespeare’s part in it) is all clouds and no sky. Where Shakespeare based his own Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream more on Chaucer’s Knight than on Chaucer’s Theseus, the Theseus of The Two Noble Kinsmen is a harsh figure throughout, until at the close he seems to modulate into someone rather like Shakespeare himself. Chaucer’s Knight and Shakespeare’s earlier Theseus are chivalric skeptics; the final Theseus might be called a brutal nihilist, who nevertheless plays at maintaining the outer forms of chivalry. The ethos of Chaucer’s poem is condensed by one of the Knight’s couplets:
It is ful fair a man to bare him evene,
For alday meeteth men at unset stevene.
My old friend, the great Chaucerian Talbot Donaldson, superbly paraphrased this as:
It is a good thing for a man to bear himself with equanimity, for one
is constantly keeping appointments one never made.
That is not quite the stance of Theseus in the final lies of The Two Noble Kinsmen, as far as we know the last lines of serious poetry that Shakespeare ever wrote:
O you heavenly charmers,
What thing you make of us! For what we lack
We laugh, for what we have are sorry; still
Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
That are above our question. Let’s go off,
And bear us like the same.
(V.iv.131-37)
I will return to this passage when I conclude this chapter, but for now note that to ‘bear us like the time’ alludes to ‘bare him evene,’ while swerving away from the Chaucerian equanimity. Chaucer, a genial satirist, is also a very good-humored ironist; the ironies of The Two Noble Kinsmen, as we will see, are savage. One might have thought that Shakespeare had reached the limits of bitterness in Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, but he extends those limits in his final play. Mars and Venus govern The Two Noble Kinsmen, and it would be difficult to decide which deity is more reprehensible, or whether indeed it is pragmatically responsible to distinguish between the two. ‘Make love, not war!,’ a popular chant of the sixties becomes sublimely insane in The Two Noble Kinsmen, since Shakespeare at forty-nine scatters organized violence and eros into a confusion not to be resolved.
In temperament and visions of reality, Shakespeare’s work from about 1588 through Twelfth Night in 1601 was profoundly Chaucerian. The dramatist of the problem plays, the high tragedies, and the late romances still rendered a kind of homage to Chaucer, but the final resort to this greatest of precursors hints at a third Shakespeare, from whom the genial spirit, even in irony, has departed. Had there been a theater to write for, perhaps Shakespeare would have left us another three or four plays, but he evidently sensed that no theater would or could have played them, and one can doubt that even his prestige would find a theater now for a nihilism surpassing The Two Noble Kinsmen’s, even if a darkness were possible. The Knight’s Tale evades the abyss of nihilism, though its implications are dark enough: pure caprice governs all of live.”
And from Garber:
“A late play, first published in 1634, The Two Noble Kinsmen is attributed, on its title page, to ‘the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. William Shakespeare, Gent.’ Both Fletcher and Shakespeare were dead (Shakespeare died in 1616, Fletcher in 1625) by the time the published version appeared, but the title page cites its first performance, ‘presented at the Blackfriars by the King’s Majesty’s servants,’ Shakespeare’s company. Only gradually, however, has the play entered the popular Shakespeare canon, regularly taught and staged. Shakespeare had collaborated with Fletcher before, in Henry VIII, and also, apparently, on a lost play called Cardenio. Neither Cardenio nor The Two Noble Kinsmen, however, is in the 1623 First Folio; the presence there of Henry VIII seems to indicate that the collaboration was no bar to a claim of authorship, and in fact many stage plays of this period were to some extent collaborative works, with additions offered by other playwrights, and by players, and sometimes with improvised bits that became regular parts of the acting script.
The chief course of the play is Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale,’ and the personae therefore have a certain commonality with Shakespeare’s earlier comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which likewise opens with the expectation of the wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and his Amazonian bride, Hippolyta. Unlike Dream, a true comedy in which all dangers are averted or contraverted and everything ends (relatively) happily, The Two Noble Kinsmen, is a tragicomedy, so described by the publisher in the Stationers’ Register. One of its noble heroes dies, tragically and somewhat unexpectedly (at least to those unfamiliar with the plot of Chaucer’s tale). While the virtues and pleasures this play offers are very considerable – it is full of magnificent poetry, and also of the kind of theatrical spectacle that distinguishes Henry VIII – it will probably be more useful here to discuss patterns in The Two Noble Kinsmen that are both like and unlike better-known plays in the Shakespeare canon, not in order to assimilate and tame this play by suppressing all its interesting singularities, but rather to make it legible, so that its differences and special qualities are easier to discern and to appreciate.”
This is going to be interesting.
Our next reading: The Two Noble Kinsmen, Act One
My next post: Thursday evening/Friday morning
Enjoy.
And for those of you were going to join in the next reading adventure, the site for our reading of the best of Murakami is now up: The Wild Murakami Chase. Check it out here and subscribe here – we’ll kick it off in the beginning of May.
My love is as a fever, longing still For that which longer nurseth the disease, Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, The uncertain sickly appetite to please. My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me, and I desperate now approve Desire is death, which physic did except. Past cure I am, now reason is past care, And frantic-mad with evermore unrest; My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are, At random from the truth vainly express’d; For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
SONNET 147
PARAPHRASE
My love is as a fever, longing still
My love is like a fever, still longing
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
For that which feeds the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Feeding on that which prolongs the illness,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
All to please the unhealthy desires of the body.
My reason, the physician to my love,
My reason, love’s doctor,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Angry that I do not follow his directions,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Has left me, and desperate I find that
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Desire leads to death, which physic (reason) will not allow.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
Now reason is past caring, now I am past cure,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
And I am frantic with continual unrest.
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
My thoughts and my words are like a madman’s,
At random from the truth vainly express’d;
Lies foolishly uttered;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
For I thought you were moral and bright (shining as a star),
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
But you really are black as hell and dark as night.
Notes
sickly (4) ] Love as a sickness is the primary motif of the sonnet. Notice Shakespeare’s word choices: fever (1), disease (2), ill (3), physician (5), prescription (6), physic (8), death (8), and cure (9). Also note the more subtle word play with physician and physic. The focus on illness might be connected to venereal disease. Note Sonnet 144, “Till my bad angel fire my good one out” (14). Many critics believe this is a direct reference to a sexually transmitted disease.
the physician to my love (5) ] The poet’s reason acts as his doctor, advising him on the proper course of action. In the next line we see that death is not a remedy which the physician will allow the poet.
approve (7) ] Find by experience.
black (14) ] A play on the dark complexion of the poet’s mistress.
Shakespeare’s scathing attack upon the morality of his mistress exemplifies their tumultuous and perplexing relationship. The three quatrains outline the poet’s inner struggle to cope with both his lover’s infidelity and the embarrassing self-admission that he still desires her to gratify him sexually, even though she has been with other men. The poet yearns to understand why, in spite of the judgment of reason (5), he still is enslaved by her charms. Confused by his own inexplicable urges, the poet’s whole being is at odds with his insatiable “sickly appetite” (4) for the dark lady. He deduces in the final quatrain that he surely must be insane, for he calls his mistress just and moral when she obviously is neither. Not until later sonnets (150-1) do we see a change of tone and a cool-headed acknowledgment of the recklessness of the whole affair.
In Sonnet 151, the poet admits that he cannot continue the relationship because it betrays his “nobler part” (6) i.e. his soul, and in Sonnet 152 we are witness to the end of the affair. Is Sonnet 147 autobiographical? Did Shakespeare really have an affair with a raven-haired seducer? Critics are divided on this matter, and, until some new documents are uncovered, we shall never know the truth. Attempts have been made to solicit possible historical candidates for the role of the dark lady, based on their likely association with Shakespeare. The most famous contenders are Mary Fitton, lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth; Lucy Morgan, a brothel owner; and Emilia Lanier, the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, patron of the arts. I’ll leave you with a skeptic’s view of the autobiographical nature of the sonnets:
Every sonneteer of the 16th century, at some point in his career, devoted his energies to vituperation of a cruel siren….In Shakespeare’s early life the convention was wittily parodied by Gabriel Harvey in “An Amorous Odious sonnet entitled The Student’s Loove or Hatrid, or both or neither, or what shall please the looving or hating reader, either in sport or in earnest, to make of such contrary passions as are here discoursed”. The Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets may therefore be relegated to the ranks of the creatures of his fancy. It is quite possible that he may have met in real life a dark-complexioned siren, and it is possible that he may have fared ill at her disdainful hands. But it was the exacting conventions of the sonneteering contagion, and not his personal experiences or emotions, that impelled Shakespeare to give the dark lady of his sonnets a poetic being” (Sidney Lee, quoted in the Alden edition, p. 359).
Or:
My love is as a fever longing still, For that which longer nurseth the disease; Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, The uncertain sickly appetite to please. My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me, and I desperate now approve Desire is death, which physic did except. Past cure I am, now Reason is past care, And frantic-mad with evermore unrest; My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are, At random from the truth vainly expressed; For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
Perhaps as a natural continuation of the renunciation of the previous sonnet, or perhaps independently of it, the poet here reflects on his woeful state. He is like a patient in a fever who has been declared by the physician to be past cure. All his thoughts and words are like those of madmen, and everything is uttered at random, without any coherence. His fever lends him words, and although he cannot explain his infatuation, he feels it to be wrong, and yet he is compelled to continue drinking and eating the same noxious food which brought on his disease in the first place. Hence there is no escape for him, and he sees himself trapped in the black vortex of hell in which his mistress resides, and there is no release from the darkness.
The 1609 Quarto Version
MY loue is as a feauer longing ſtill, For that which longer nurſeth the diſeaſe, Feeding on that which doth preſerue the ill, Th’vncertaine ſicklie appetite to pleaſe: My reaſon the Phiſition to my loue, Angry that his preſcriptions are not kept Hath left me,and I deſperate now approoue, Deſire is death,which Phiſick did except . Paſt cure I am,now Reaſon is paſt care, And frantick madde with euer-more vnreſt, My thoughts and my diſcourſe as mad mens are, At randon from the truth vainely expreſt. For I haue ſworne thee faire,and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell,as darke as night.
Commentary
1. My love is as a fever longing still,
My love = my passion for you, my infatuation. longing still = constantly desiring, incessantly eager. fever – A term often associated with love which Shakespeare has already used in connection with his aberrant behaviour when he appeared to have deserted the youth and distracted himself with other loves: How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted In the distraction of this madding fever! 119. Medically a fever was ‘an vnnaturall heate grounded in the hearte and lyuer’. (OED cites this from 1547). Given the uncertain knowledge of the time, it could be applied to almost any illness. The usual treatment would be blood letting, which was supposed to reduce the inner pressures and temperature: DUM. I would forget her; but a fever she Reigns in my blood and will remembered be. BIR. A fever in your blood! why, then incision Would let her out in saucers: sweet misprision! LLL.IV.3.91-4. Since fever brought on ravings, there was a widespread belief that the sick persons always irrationally desired the thing which was no good for them. They might wish for fruit or drinks for example, which the physician would consider to be unsuitable and damaging to the health. Hence the prescription (line 6) could be, as well as medicine, a prohibition against the consumption of these supposedly undesirable foods. Compare : ……………….and your affections are A sick man’s appetite, who desires most that Which would increase his evil. COR.I.1.173-5.
2. For that which longer nurseth the disease;
longer = for a longer time. The proximity of longing and longer makes it seem as if the patient longs to prolong his illness. that which etc. = the unsuitable food or drink which caused the disease initially. nurseth = nurses. The word is ambiguous, for it suggests two opposites, ‘brings back to health’, and ‘tends carefully, so that it (the illness) stays’.
3. Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Feeding on – i.e. his love is feeding on the forbidden fruit. which doth preserve the ill = which causes the illness to remain.
4. The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
(In order to) satisfy my wavering, distempered desires. appetite = desire for food. But, in the context of a diseased love, it signifies lust, carnal desire. OED.3 gives: ‘one of those instinctive cravings which secure the preservation of the individual and the race’. Shakespeare’s use of the word is often rather stronger and more specific than OED indicates, as the following three extracts show:
Behold yond simpering dame, Whose face between her forks presages snow; That minces virtue, and does shake the head To hear of pleasure’s name; The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to ‘t With a more riotous appetite. KL.IV.6.118-23.
Moreover, urge his hateful luxury And bestial appetite in change of lust; R3.III.5.80-1.
There is no woman’s sides Can bide the beating of so strong a passion As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart So big, to hold so much; they lack retention Alas, their love may be called appetite, No motion of the liver, but the palate, That suffer surfeit, cloyment and revolt; TN.II.4.92-8.
The subject of the line is ‘my love, which is like a fever’ (line 1). Note that the word order is inverted – ‘in order to please the sickly appetite’.
5. My reason, the physician to my love,
My reason – one of the faculties of the soul. Its presence here, as also the feeding metaphors, help to tie this poem in with the previous one. the physician = the doctor. The two words were used by Shakespeare without distinction. Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna married the physician John Hall in 1607.
6. Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
prescriptions = rules of good health, the regimen given as a means of curing a disease, proscriptions (i.e. orders to avoid certain things). In more recent use the word came to mean ‘the medicine (which had been written down by the doctor)’. kept = observed, obeyed. As in ‘to keep one’s promise’.
7. Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Hath left me – i.e. my reason has left me. I desperate = I, having become desperate; in desperation, I etc. approve = demonstrate, show by my experience, give proof that.
8. Desire is death, which physic did except.
A line of uncertain meaning which is variously glossed. ‘Desire, such as I experience it, will bring my death, although the appropriate medicine would have averted it’. ‘Any desire which militates against good medical practice brings death to the patient’. ‘Sexual desire shortens life, but medicine can allay the effects of it’. ‘Sexual desire under certain conditions which would cause physicians to forbid it, will prove fatal’. The difficulty is partly in the word ‘except’, but also in the compression of ‘desire is death’. except probably means here ‘took exception to’. (See SB.p.518-9). There was a belief that every orgasm shortened one’s life by a day. There may also be a reference to venereal disease in ‘desire is death’. It was widespread and often fatal. See the note below to line 13.
9. Past cure I am, now Reason is past care,
An echo of the proverb ‘Past cure past care’, meaning that when curative remedies have been exhausted to no effect, there is no point in worrying any further, but also equivalent to the more humdrum ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk’. Shakespeare has inverted it by saying ‘Reason is past care i.e. beyond hope, therefore I am past cure’.
10. And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
And frantic mad = and I am frantically mad; I have become frantic. Note that Q’s spelling of ‘mad’ as ‘madde’ allows a confusion with made. Thus ‘I have been made frantic by my love for you’. The spelling of ‘mad’ in the following line is conventional. evermore unrest = unrest which is incessant and endless. Evermore seems here to have an adverbial force, but if taken as two words, ‘ever more’, it could mean unrest, disquiet, which is continually increasing.
11. My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
There is a feverish quality to these two lines, in keeping with the theme of fever introduced at the start. He no longer knows what he is saying or if his thoughts have any meaning. my discourse = my speech; my reasoning, my faculty of reasoned speech. As in: O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason, Would have mourned longer Ham.I.2.150-1. where wants = lacks. as madmen’s are – i.e. my speech is like madmen’s speech.
12. At random from the truth vainly expressed;
random – Q’s randon was a variant of the time, based on the French word meaning ‘headlong, in a violent rush’. at random from the truth = wide of the truth, straying erratically and irrationally from the truth, furiously rushing from the truth. vainly expressed = spoken to no purpose, spoken with foolhardiness.
13. For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
The couplet explains how he has strayed at random from the truth, for he has sworn that his beloved is something which she is not, that she is fair and beautiful, when she in fact is dark and benighted. The most disturbing aspect of these concluding lines is that they are so brutal and unforgiving. The epithets have both physical and moral significance, for he seems determined to prove that she was not beautiful either in soul or body. There was indeed a tradition within the sonneteering world at the time that the beloved was not always as fair as Petrarch’s fairest Laura. But it was essentially a playful tradition, in that there was a determination to find something different to look at. Robert Tofte, for example, in 1597, declares “My mistress seems but brown“, say you to me. ‘Tis very true, and I confess the same. ……………… This is the cause: for brown and pitiful I left a fair, but yet a faithless Trull. Laura III.31. But Shakespeare’s sonnet breaks off from that tradition, for it heaps vilification on the beloved as if she were a tart. For Tofte the faithless Trull was the one he had left, not the one he was busy praising at the moment. Whereas here the poet loves, or pretends to love, what he finds dark, black, bestial, and morally unfathomable. It is tempting to ask whether or not this is his madness speaking, whether or not he is as guiltless as we might assume, whether or not the man who left to his wife the second best bed night not have been a swine with women. For it is not impossible that the writer who gave the world some of the finest women ever created in fiction should be unable to form a satisfactory relationship with them in his life. The harsh judgement which here he levies upon his mistress, as he does also, but less vitriolically, in 131,137 and 152, does not seem to have caused too much disturbance, even among female critics, who, one would expect, might be more sensitive to these possibilities. (KDJ and HV for example both comment on this sonnet unecstatically and with little sense of discomfort at its content, except perhaps by excusing it as mad ravings). Yet it is surely appropriate to ask for whom the sonnet was intended. Was it one of the sugared sonnets among his private friends, was it intended for his mistress, or was it for the wider world, the public who might read eventually the full sequence? All these possibilities fill one with a sense of unease, and however much one might wish to praise the poem for its unfailing honesty, one wonders whether that is really a sufficient justification for its cruelty. Alternatively we could perhaps look for a mundane explanation, and see this as the meanderings of someone who is suffering from a bad dose of the pox. The closing line, with its suggestions of hell and darkness, is, as always, suggestive of the female hell, the vagina, which burns with the flame of venereal disease, as in Timon of Athen’s outburst: ………………………………………..be whores still; And he whose pious breath seeks to convert you, Be strong in whore, allure him, burn him up; Let your close fire predominate his smoke, And be no turncoats: Tim.IV.3.139-43. The essential condition for cure of the illness was obviously abstention from intercourse, which the poet does not seem to be able to manage, and the physician despairs of him. Apart from that, treatment was possible by ‘suffumigation with cinnabar in a meat-pickling vat’, an experience not likely to be very pleasant. The patient was at the same time kept on a low diet. After such a cure anyone might well feel dejected and low and be capable of writing a sour sonnet or two about his mistress.
14. Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
See note above. The blackness of hell and the darkness of night, and vice versa, were proverbial attributes.
Or:
Context
Sonnet 147 falls in the realm of the Dark Lady sonnets (Sonnets 127-154). It falls towards the end of the Dark Lady sequence. These sonnets, unlike the sonnets which refer to the young man, are typically more aggressive and are usually referring to either the Dark Lady specifically, her relationship with the speaker, or the love triangle between the speaker, the Dark Lady, and her additional lovers. In the second grouping of sonnets in which sonnet 147 falls, the speaker’s feelings toward to dark lady change several times. Sonnet 147 is another turning point in which the speaker reverts to anger towards the Dark Lady. There are several theories as to who the Dark Lady actually is, if not a fictional character, however there is no substantial “proof” to allow these theories to be considered truth.[1]
Towards the end of the sonnets, beginning at Sonnet 147, the speaker returns to his previously disturbed state. The image of feeding within sonnet 147 is a continuation of imagery begun in sonnet 146. In Sonnet 147, the image of feeding changes from feeding death to feeding illness. In fact, as to the image of “Feeding”, Fred Blick has demonstrated that Sonnets 146 and 147 are influenced by the correspondingly numbered Psalms 146 and 147 and that they are designed as a pair. In the case of Sonnet 146 this influence is found in the vocative address to the “soul”, in the synchronous correspondence of argument of Psalm and Sonnet relating to “Feeding” and in the remedying of ills. In the case of Sonnet 147 unhealthy “Feeding” and the healing of love “as a fever” brought on by fatal “Desire” which “Phisick did except”, is seen in Psalm 147’s “feeding the young ravens” (carrion feeding ravens, symbolic of Death) and in “medicine” for the “broken in heart” (see Psalm 147 verses 3 and 9).
Sexuality
Like many of the sonnets written by Shakespeare, sonnet 147 was written to or about the Dark Lady. There’s an obvious sexual tone to the sonnet. A jolted lover is describing their inability to stop loving their mistress, who has not seemed to remain faithful. The sonnet itself seems to be sexually ambiguous, there is no reference to gender, so one could argue that this sonnet is homoerotic or heterosexual, but due to the couplet describing someone “…black as hell, as dark as night”, the general consensus is that this sonnet was written to or about the Dark Lady.
Analysis and Criticism of Lines 1-8
Robert Appelbaum is a critic who wrote an article on Sonnet 147 in The Greenwood Companion to Shakespeare. The following is his prose paraphrase of the first two quatrains in order to better understand Shakespeare’s language:
“My love is like a fever; it keeps longing for the thing that strokes it and only makes it worse; it feeds on what makes it sick in order to gratify a volatile, pathological appetite. My rational mind, which would act as a physician and cure me of this morbid love, is angry because its prescriptions have not been followed, and so it has abandoned me. In a desperate condition, I now find by experience that desire, which rejected medicine (or which medicine proscribed), is death”
Appelbaum begins by discussing that the first quatrains are entirely subjective in outlook and the poem develops metaphysical ideas, similar to the poems of John Donne. “It dramatizes a condition of the inner life, at once physical and mental, through which an individual has failed to prevent himself from falling in to the extreme, unhealthy madness of love” . He argues there are statements that each dominate the quatrain in which it appears. The statement he talks about in the first quatrain is:
“My love is like a fever.” Appelbaum suggest that like a fever, this is a love that burns. More importantly, this statement addresses the pre-modern medicine belief that fevers didn’t happen because of an infectious pathogen, but because of something that was eaten. The feverous subject continues to desire this food that made it sick, even though to consume more of this product makes the disease worse.
The statement that dominates the second quatrain is, “My reason has left me.” Appelbaum explains this as because the speaker’s reason has left him, he cannot keep himself from continuing to feed on the cause of his illness- and the idea of death approaches.
Therefore, Appelbaum concludes that these quatrains “develop the idea of a man who, having contracted a pathological condition, has spun out of control, in the course of which a truth that is not truth at all begins to form in his mind: “desire is death”
Next, he examines the idea of the divided self. He says that one of the most interesting aspects of the sonnet is what if offers to the psychology of inward experience that was taken for granted in Shakespeare’s time. There are two instances of the divided self. First, the poet is divided from his own passion. “This is a division of the self where love and desire are experienced like an illness, and the illness itself experienced like a gluttonous fever”. Then he spent time discussing the idea of eating something “cold.” He writes, “In medicine of Shakespeare’s time, a fever could be triggered by eating something too “cold,” though not necessarily something cold in a literal sense; it may be a question of something “cold” in a medical, analogical sense. The body would heat up (literally) in order to compensate for this “coldness.” But as the body was heated up, the individual might then crave to eat more of the “cold” substance to cool himself, though the effect would only be to trigger more eat. So a deprived or “sickly appetite” would be avaricious for a substance that would seem to make the individual better but could only make the individual worse”. The speaker asserts that this is what love is like. The speaker desires more and more of the person that makes him sick with love, and “feeding” on this love-object ends up making him sicker.
However, as the speaker gets sicker with passion for a love that is harmful, his reason is still able to tell him to stop. The second instance of the divided self is a division between one’s rational mind and one’s passionate behavior. The rational mind can prescribe a treatment for the passion, for instance, tell it to stop eating, but the passion is too strong and continues. The speaker believes that his reason can actually get angry and abandon him, making him desperate. However, he’s still conscious enough to recognize the most stunning idea of the poem that “desire is death.”
Appelbaum says Shakespeare’s thoughts of the rational mind vs. passion foreshadow Freud’s later idea of the conflict between Eros and Thanatos (or the life drive vs. the death drive) and the Ego surrendering to the Id, while disregarding the wisdom of the Superego.
Helen Vendler also looked at Sonnet 147 in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In her criticism, she focused mostly on the language and word choice of the sonnet. Her ideas are that certain parallels in rhythm “foreground” conceptual resemblances. For example, the subject phrase “my reason” matches rhythmically and positionally its verb phrase “hath left me.” At the same time, “Desire is death” matches its parallel which is “past cure I am.” She argues that the alliterating chain of words disease, desperate, desire, death, discourse, dark tells the story of the poem.
She discusses that the paradox of the sonnet is that the “madman” is in actuality perfectly clear about what the truth is. Because of this, we cannot believe him when he tells us that Reason has left him.
Carl Atkins provided his criticism of Sonnet 147 in Shakespeare’s Sonnets with Three Hundred Years of Commentary.” He notes that the first quatrain is an extended simile of a patient with a fever, keeping himself ill with things he doesn’t really like. This does not follow according to Atikins, because any cure “based on the theory of the four humors would forbid a feverish patient food”.This is based on the modern proverb, “feed a cold and starve a fever.” The simile continues with Reason acting as a physician and the patient ignoring his own damage.
Atkins describes that lines 7 and 8 have caused some difficulty of interpretation because the phrase “I desperate now approve” is unclear. He and other scholars such as Dowden interpret “I desperate” as “I, who am desperate.” Some critics such as Schmidt defines “approve” as “experience,” but other critics argue against this because there is little basis for that in Shakespeare.
The line “Desire is Death” (line 8) is central to the poem. It should be noted that there is a biblical reference here, as Romans 8:6 reads: “For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” This simply means that if one follows the appetites and passions of the body, death will come, but if one is spiritual they will live peacefully. The speaker in Sonnet 147 is preoccupied and “mad” with passion, which according to the bible, will lead to death. As to Sonnets 146 and 147 considered as a pair, Fred Blick (see above) has pointed out that “Desire” in Sonnet 147 is on one side of a metaphorical equarion. On the other side stand the “rebel powers” of 146. The speaker’s “soul” of 146 and “mind” of 147 are afflicted by “rebel powers” and “Desire” respectively. These afflictions are equivalent to “Death” which “Phisick” and “terms devine” could forestall.
Analysis and Criticism of Lines 9-14
Continuing Applebaum’s Modern English prose paraphrase,
I am past being cured; my rational mind that should cure me is past caring for me. I am frantically mad, ever unable to seep. My thoughts and words are like a madman’s, at odds with the truth and poorly articulated. For I have sworn that you are fair, and have regarded you as beautiful physically and morally, although you are “as black as hell, as dark as night”
Vendler has an interesting way to look at this sonnet which most all critics see as a descent into madness. She notices the etymology of the words used in the quatrains vs. the couplet, seeing a distinctly “elaborate Latininity of diagnosis and explanation” in the quatrains, and a “predominantly Anglo-Saxon lexicon” in the couplet. This descent can be seen as a devolution
Latin is the language of science, and the narrator begins as very diagnostic. However, in his lashing out in the couplet, he puts the more base words, the words of true emotion that were not overrun by the Latin language influence, into play.
Vendler also sees the dichotomy of the first person self-referential tone of the quatrains and the second person exclamations in the second quatrain the couplet “departs from the self-referential tone.” This tone is very important as Vendler makes the assertion that the narrator is not mad. The narrator abandons his hope and reason, not the other way around.
“He says he knows what Reason says, but he no longer cares to observe its mandates.” He also describes his actions as like those of a madman. This Narrator has given up on civilized life, instead agreeing to rule himself by his emotions, after he forced his Reason out.
Vendler further backs up her claim by noting the rhyme structure in the couplet, “perfect symbolic balance—6, 4, 6, 4” Vendler sees this as a perfect example of “madness’ of thought and protection.”
Stephen Booth, who writes with a language-based approach, has one very interesting note. He says three lines reflect popular proverbs. Two Shakespeare uses include “Frantic mad with unrest” and proverb states, “Desire has no rest.” Along with “Black as hell” being a common descriptor in Shakespeare’s time.
But the most interesting was Shakespeare’s use of “Past cure, past care.” Meaning a sickness that could not be cured should not be thought about. However, “Shakespeare is here not merely reproducing the proverb, but playing with it, for he has here inverted it. The case is past cure because the physician has ceased to care.”
And finally, from David West:
My love is a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please. 4
My reason, the Physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I, desp’rate now, approve
Desire is death, which Physic did except. 8
Past cure I am, now Reason is past care,
And frantic mad with evermore unrest.
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed, 12
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
My love is like a fever, craving what finds it.
I disobeyed my physician, reason, and he has abandoned me,
and I am now proving that desire is death.
I am delirious, thinking and speaking like a madman,
for I thought you beautiful, and you are black as hell.
1-4 In the second ode of his second book Horace compares greed to dropsy, as an affliction which makes the sufferer crave water, and water feeds the dropsy, ‘crescit indulgens sibi dirus hydrops’, ‘the dreaded dropsy grows by indulging itself.’ Cravings of this sort occur also with fevers, and Shakespeare selects the telling detail, the seeming eternity of suffering. In this author ‘longing still/For that which longer nurseth the disease’ is not idle wordplay, but suggests the patient’s sense that this condition is never going to end. The absurdity of the craving is conveyed twice, first in the paradox of nursing a disease, then in feeding on something that preserves an ill(ness) in order to gratify the appetite of a sick and uncertain mind.
5-8 Now comes a comic interlude. The Physician, Reason, has been called in, has prescribed, and the Physic he recommended has saved the patient’s life. But, as patients do, S has not persevered with the prescription, and, as doctors sometimes do, this one has given up his patient and gone off in high dudgeon. S’s Reason has left him. Abandoned and despairing, he is proving by experience that desire is death, that his disease is terminal, and that the Physic had ‘excepted’ desire, removed it. The nearest support for this interpretation of ‘except is in Richard II 1.2.72, ‘which fear, not reverence, makes thee to except,’ where ‘except’ is glossed as ‘set aside’ (by Peter Ure in the 1956 Arden Shakespeare edition). ‘Except against’ meaning ‘take exception to’ occurs in Two Gentlemen of Verona at 1.3.83 and 2.4.153.
9-12 The proverb ‘past cure, past care’ expresses the traditional wisdom that, if a patient is incurable, care will not help him. Shakespeare has not merely repeated this sentiment, but has inverted it to fit his argument, ‘past care, [therefore] past cure.’ Now that care has abandoned the patient, he cannot be cured. In 10 his sleeplessness has driven him mad, and in 12 his thoughts are ‘At random from the truth, vainly expressed.’ In Henry VI I 5.5.41 ‘He talks at random; sure the man is mad.’
13-14 The commanding logic of this writing shines clear in 11-13, ‘Thoughts’ and ‘discourse’ are caught up in order in 12 with ‘truth’ and ‘expressed,’ and then in reverse order in ‘sworn’ and ‘thought.’ He has sworn her fair but she is black as hell; he has thought her bright but she is dark as night.
The poem is not pointless hypochondria. It has been leading to its dire conclusion, all the more crushing because of its monosyllables. His love for the Black Lady became a craving and a fever and has driven him mad. It will lead to his death. The madness is defined in the last two lines, and ‘fair…bright…black…dark’ all contain moral meanings. (144.3, 152.13). The darkness is not simply the absence of light. It is the presence of evil.”
My next post: Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning – my introduction to our final play, The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Act Five: The new Queen is soon pregnant, but the news only antagonizes the King’s secretary Gardiner, who vows to attack her and Cranmer, Henry’s virtuous Archbishop of Canterbury (and latest confidant). But the King is not to be outplayed; when Gardiner and his cronies turn against Cranmer in council, Henry’s support is steadfast. Amid scenes of wild public rejoicing, Anne’s newborn daughter Elizabeth – the future queen (as we and the audience well know) is christened. Cranmer predicts that her reign, and that of her successor, will be blessed.
Katherine’s decidedly unlovely fate makes it difficult to accept in simple terms, I think, the role of her successor as Queen, Anne Boleyn, who is crowned even before Katherine’s death. The play decidedly leaves Anne’s motives and experiences largely in shadow, and although it ends with yet another spectacular occasion celebrating the birth of Elizabeth (a daughter Henry is desperate to avoid – he wants a male heir), the Queen’s silent presence at the ceremony of thanksgiving seems almost foreboding. Though everyone else present looks towards the future, to the ‘thousand thousand blessings’ of Elizabeth’s reign as Queen (5.4.19), from the perspectives enabled by the play it is difficult to avoid the sense that before that comes to pass, Anne herself will be accused of adultery and beheaded, Henry will have remarried another four times and England will have been plunged into bitter religious turmoil. Anne’s own words on the subject much earlier in the play, though they dissolve and are forgotten during the pomp and ceremony of the closing scene, seem uncannily accurate. Discussing the sorry state of Katherine with her companion the Old Lady, Anne’s opinion is strongly – truthfully – held. “Verily, I swear,” she declares,
‘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.
(2.3.19-22)
“Our content/Is our best having,” the Old Lady agrees; wanting any more is incalculably dangerous. That message is one of the truest things that Henry VIII, or All Is True, contains.
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From Tanner:
“The play ends with the dazzling Elizabethan sunrise. But that sun had set ten years before this play was put on. So what was it? An exercise in patriotic nostalgia? Larger claims have been made for it. ‘Henry VIII is a resplendent Finale, ritualistically expanding through conflict into grace and happy augury…there is suffering in the play, but the movement on the whole is towards the triumph of goodness, not through physical battle, as in Richard II and Henry V, but by dignified acceptance, by the strength of its own nature’ (Bullough). Foakes sees the play as ‘a whole of visionary power, culminating in a mood of joy and reconciliation, and a prospect of lasting peace and well-being. Wilson Knight (another Henry as Prospero man0 makes the largest possible claims for the play. ‘The play is rich with both a grand royalism and a thrilling but solemn Christianity; orthodox religious colouring being present and powerful throughout far in excess of any previous play.’ He admires its ‘blending of national and religious colouring being present and powerful throughout far in excess of any previous play.’ He admires its ‘blending of national and religious prophecy,’ saying ‘it is as though time and eternity were seen converging as the play unfurls.’ His final verdict is: ‘If in The Tempest Shakespeare gives us a comprehensive and inclusive statement of his furthest spiritual adventures, in Henry VIII he has gone yet further, directly relating those adventures to the religion of his day and the nation of his birth.’ I think all these men are describing, not without some material justification, the play they would like it to be. But, despite the themes of reconciliation, resignation, and even miraculous conversion which are undoubtedly there, this is not, finally, assimilable to Shakespeare’s other ‘last plays’ (one small piece of overlooked evidence, which would work for such critics, is the curiously frequent use of ‘strange’ in the play – ‘strange’ is a very ‘last play’ word). For we must bear in mind the truth claims of the play. The Prologue claims that the audience ‘may here find truth too’; and Sir Henry Wotton, who described the burning of the globe theater during one performance, tells us that the play was called All is True (possibly an alternative title). But, an audience of 1613, invited to watch the play as ‘real’ history and ‘truth,’ would know very well that the truth included the following historical facts:
that Henry was bitterly disappointed that Elizabeth was not a
male heir, and that, when Anne miscarried a deformed son, he
was convinced God had damned his second marriage, so he
destroyed Anne in a palace coup in 1536;
that Henry went on to have a series of other wives, some also
violently removed;
that Henry had Sir Thomas More beheaded in 1535, and Thomas
Cromwell beheaded in 1540;
that Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was burnt at the stake by
Henry’s daughter, Mary, in 1556.
You might keep all such matters out of the play, but there is no way you could keep them out of a 1613 audience’s mind. It is hard to imagine that Shakespeare was unaware of the sheer irony of what was being depicted on stage. And certainly, he does not give us a drama of the reign of Henry VIII, as he had done, one way or another, for his previous kingly subjects. There is simply no real drama in the play. So what is it? Festivity, celebration, nostalgia – a dream of history as it might-have-been, as it ought-to-be? Or is there a deep sadness and irony running inerasably through it all? I, myself, tend to register the sadness and irony [MY NOTE: So do I]; but there will always be a individual variation (predisposition?), and presumably a Hazlitt and a Foakes would never agree. And why Shakespeare wrote it – to the extent that he did write it – is simply beyond the reach of informed conjecture.”
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From Frank Kermode:
“The voice of the opening scene of Act I is heard again at the beginning of Act V; muscularity characterizes the words even of the Old Lady who comes to announce the birth of the Princess. But the play ends with Cranmer’s encomium of the child and his prophecy of her greatness. This speech (V.iv.14-55) is not surprisingly thought by some to lay it on too thick as a compliment to the Virgin Queen Elizabeth and also to James:
…as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir
As great in admiration as herself,
So shall we leave her blessedness to one
(When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness)
Who from the sacred ashes of her honor
Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix’d.
The effect is of a sermon preached before the monarch by his archbishop, and properly so; Cranmer, as we know, was a master of style and of occasion. The speech is full of appropriately biblical references and has a quasi-liturgical grandeur, which is after all in character.
Henry VIII is an odd play, very skilful. The character of the King is strongly drawn, the pathos and dignity of Katherine is understandably celebrated, the farewells of Buckingham and Wolsey can please a crowd. There are valuable tensions in the structure; between the King’s conscience and his desires, between the two Queens (Anne represented as innocent and without ambition; Katherine as regal, abused, and unhappy). And the contrasts between the moods of the verse, whether or not the differences arise from differences in authorship, reflect that structural tension. But in so far as Shakespeare was involved, he was writing with muscularity, but also, it is possible to think, carelessly, writing far too many of those passages censured by Dr. Johnson – as if he had no more time to bestow upon them. If anybody was going to sort them out it would not be himself; the job was left to his careworn editors.”
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From Garber:
“Henry VIII ends with a double epitaph on Cardinal Wolsey (Katherine’s bitter estimate then revised and gentled by her gentleman usher Griffith), with Katherine’s dream vision and her death, with Henry’s gift of the ring to Archbishop Cranmer, and with the birth of Elizabeth. Katherine’s dying petition to Henry on behalf of their daughter and her own faithful attendants ends with her request for a seemly burial, in tones that again recall the spirit of the romances and tragicomedies for which both Shakespeare and Fletcher were known:
Strew me over
With maiden flowers, that all the world may know
I was a chaste wife to my grave. Embalm me,
Then lay me forth. Although unqueened, yet like
A queen and daughter to a king inter me.
(4.2.169-173)
In the course of the next act the new Queen, Anne, is brought to bed with a daughter, the announcement made to the King by the Old Lady in an exchange that is more comic than sublime.
The play’s last and climactic scene – probably not written by Shakespeare – presents the baptism of the infant Elizabeth and a stirring prophecy, by Cranmer, that predicts with exemplary accuracy Elizabeth’s reign, her lifelong virginity, and the succession of King James, unnamed but clearly identifiable (‘She shall be, to the happiness of England/An aged princes’; a virgin,/A most unspotted lily shall she pass/To th’ ground’; a ‘maiden phoenix,’ she will from her ashes ‘new create another heir/As great in admiration as herself’; she will rise ‘star-like,’ ‘great in fame,’ flourishing ‘like a mountain cedar,’ and ‘make new nations’ [5.4.56-57, 60-62, 40, 41-42, 46, 46, 53, 52]). Like all such prophecies embedded in the history plays (the Bishop of Carlisle in Richard II; Queen Margaret’s curse in Richard III), this theatrical prediction has the benefit of perfect hindsight, since it is written and performed long after the historical events it ‘foretells.’”
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And finally, from Bloom:
“Wolsey’s great orations of loss are almost too magnificent for so venal a person; their sonority again hints at a private grief:
So farewell, to the little good you bear me.
Farewell? a long farewell to all my greatness.
This is the state of man; to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes, to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him:
The third day comes a frost, a killig 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 ventur’d
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth; my high-blown pride
At length broke under me, and now has left me,
Weary and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream that must for ever hide me.
Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye;
I feel my heart new open’d. O how wretched
Is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favours!
There is betwist that smile we would aspire to,
That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,
More pangs and fears than wars or women have;
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again.
(III.ii.350-72)
It is not possible for the auditor or reader to care about Wolsey, a mean-souled cleric who deserves anything that exposure and humiliation bring to him. Again like the Funeral Elegy, the melody of disgrace seems intensely close. Is the prince here truly not Henry VIII but Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton? The question, though unanswerable, has its critical use, if only because the poetry of Wolsey’s fall is so grandly in excess of what so mean a role merits. The problem is not Wolsey’s wickedness but his littleness. This is no Iago or Macbeth, just a crooked administrator, an archetypal politician. Wolsey cannot fall like Lucifer; he is no morning star gone down to perdition. And yet the astonishing resources of Shakespeare’s most mature style are summoned up to hymn a mere hypocrite’s discomfiture. A pageant is a pageant, however, commercially speaking, and the strongest style in the language might lavish its exuberance where it would. Wolsey, addressing his aide, Cromwell, urges this loyal servant to abandon him, in accents enormously beyond the decorum of a politician’s fall:
Let’s dry our eyes, and thus far her me Cromwell,
And when I am forgotten, as I shall be,
And sleep in dull cold marble, where no mention
Of me must be heard of, say I taught thee;
Say Wolsey, that once trod the ways of glory,
And sounded all the depths and shoals of honour,
Found thee a way (out of his wrack) to rise in,
A sure and safe one, though thy master miss’d it.
Mark but my fall, and that that ruin’d me:
Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition,
By that sin fell the angels, how can man then,
The image of his maker, hope to win by it?
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: then if thou fall’st, O Cromwell,
Thou fall’st a blessed martyr.
Serve the king: and prithee lead me in:
There take an inventory of all I have,
To the last penny, ‘tis the king’s. My robe,
And my integrity to heaven, is all
I dare not call mine own. O Cromwell, Cromwell,
Had I but serv’d my God with half the zeal
I serv’d my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.
(III.ii.431-57)
Eloquent beyond eloquence, this sublimity certainly is not applicable to Shakespeare himself, whose worldly ambitions did not exceed the renewal of a gentleman’s coat of arms and the comfortable affluence of his final return to Stratford. Nor does the godly zeal suit Shakespeare, though there is a curious medley of defensive piety and skeptical doubt of resurrection in the Funeral Elegy for William Peter. The playwright perhaps felt ‘naked to mine enemies’ in 1612-13, since that is the aura of the Funeral Elegy, but if those enemies existed at all, we again do not know who they were. Shakespeare, nearing his fiftieth birthday, may have been physically ill, or somewhat traumatized by slander, or both. We reflect that, unlike Marlowe or Ben Jonson, he always in his right hand had carried ‘gentle peace/To silence envious tongues.’ One need not be the great and good Dr. Samuel Johnson to be immensely moved by Queen Katherine’s final lines:
When I am dead, good wench,
Let me be us’d with honour, strew me over
With maiden flowers, that all the world may know
I was a chaste wife to my grave: embalm me,
Then lay me forth; although unqueen’d, yet like
A queen, and daughter to a king inter me.
I can no more.
(IV.ii.167-73)
And yet it is the lines that touch us; poor Katherine is too pathetic to sustain this hushed harmony, and we can wonder again why Shakespeare should be so inspired. Paradoxically, he had attained a condition in which drama, from which he had become estranged, still kindled his powers, while the sincere grief of the Funeral Elegy provoked a poem so frequently banal (though not always) that many scholars reject the authorship as not being good enough for him.
I cannot solve the puzzle of Henry VIII, and I have trouble responding to the rapture and exultation of Cranmer’s concluding prophecy concerning the infant Elizabeth. Dead at fifty-two, Shakespeare never experienced old age, and yet the style of old age dominates Henry VIII. Falstaff, one of Shakespeare’s prime surrogates – more so, perhaps, than Hamlet – refused to acknowledge his years and is all the more heroically funny for it. The world seems very old in Henry VIII, and in the scenes Shakespeare wrote for The Two Noble Kinsmen. Through his uncanniness, Shakespeare knew the end of his era, whatever we now choose to call that time. Henry VIII is an elegy for Shakespeare’s world-altering achievement in poetic drama, and consciously bids farewell to the playwright’s highest powers.”
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For those of you who are interested, you can read Funeral Elegyhere.
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So what did you think? I was more impressed by the play than I thought I was going to be, and definitely found in it Tanner’s “sadness and irony.” It’s interesting that while Shakespeare’s ability to create characters – life – has been throughout our reading perhaps the thing that most defines his greatness, here, where characterization is pretty much thrown out the window, the play itself and the power of his language (especially in Wolsey and Katherine’s speeches) is more than enough to sustain our interest.
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My next posts: Sunday evening/Monday morning, Sonnet #147; Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning, my introduction to our last play, full of “magnificent poetry,” The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Act Four: The coronation of Anne takes place with great ceremony, but her triumph cruelly coincides with Katherine’s decline. Lying sick at Kimbolton, Katherine has a vision of celestial spirits before receiving a visit from Lord Caputius. She dies after commending her daughter, Mary, to the King’s care.
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In time, Wolsey too has good reason to rue the realities of political life in Tudor England (his fine speech acknowledging his weakness has been widely anthologized), and the insistent parallels between his and Buckingham’s downfalls – both tell the truth, both are undone by omnipresent enemies – overcome the differences between them. The play begins to look less like the straightforward story it seems to be at first, and more like a satire on the ever-rumbling treadmill of power – Kott’s view of all Shakespeare’s histories (and tragedies). But like King John, another play that looks unsparingly at the messy business that is politics anytime, any place, in its next depiction of a downfall Henry VIII presents a properly tragic aspect: the suffering of the blameless Queen Katherine, who forms another and more pitiful embodiment of the truth – the kind of truth hinted at by Buckingham, the commitment to absolute constancy. Initially, the play sets her up (ahistorically) as a kind of heroine, ranged against Wolsey in a fight for the people. In the play’s second scene, we see her kneeling before Henry and exclaiming that his subjects are “in great grievance” because of what she earnestly calls “exactions” – ruinously high taxes set by Wolsey in defiance of his royal master (1.2.20-6). As soon as the matter comes to light, Henry rescinds them and the royal couple are confirmed in their strength. But Katherine’s next involvement in “power politics” will not be so fortunate: after the banquet at Wolsey’s, rumors begin to circulate of the King’s eagerness to seek a divorce, and when we next see the Queen it is at her trial. Ritually kneeling once more to her husband, she movingly describes what it is like to be outmaneuvered politically. “Heaven witness/I have been to you a true and humble wife,” she addresses Henry,
At all times to your will conformable,
Ever in fear to kindle your dislike,
Yea, subject to your countenance, glad or sorry
As I saw it inclined. When was the hour
I ever contradicted your desire,
Or made it not mine too? Or which of your friends
Have I not strove to love, although I knew
He were mine enemy?
(2.4.20-29)
These are questions for which Henry has no answers – he will not even speak until much later in the scene – and in fact Katherine’s ‘enemies’ are already gaining the upper hand. The Queen eloquently attempts to clear her name of any taint of suspicion, but she had little idea until now that being “true” could harm her. “Have I lived this long,” she cries, “a wife, a true one?”
A woman, I dare say, without vain glory,
Never yet branded with suspicion?
Have I with all my full affections,
Still met the King, loved him next heav’n, obeyed him,
Been out of fondness superstitious to him,
Almost forgot my prayers to content him?
(3.1.124-31)
“Truth loves open dealing,” she earlier warned Wolsey (3.1.39), and as she finds herself gambled out of her throne, truth has never seemed more isolated among the scheming and plotting at court. Before the play is out Katherine will be dead – but not before experiencing a miraculous vision in which “spirits of peace” crown her with garlands in a symbol of divine innocence.
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From Garber:
“Wolsey wants Henry to marry the sister of the King of France, not Anne Bullen, whom he regards as too lowborn to be Queen of England:
It shall be to the Duchess of Alencon,
The French King’s sister – he shall marry her.
Anne Bullen? No, I’ll no Anne Bullens for him:
There’s more in’t than fair visiage. Bullen?
No, we’ll no Bullens. Speedily I wish
To hear from Rome. The Marchioness of Pembroke?
(3.2.86-91)
The modern spelling, ‘Boleyn,’ Anne’s own preference, emphasizes the French element – she was educated at the French court – while the play’s ‘Bullen’ is more flatly English, emphasizing Wolsey’s point: for him she is a local upstart, not a real Frenchwoman of title. As Norfolk and Suffolk watch, unobserved, from another part of the stage – for this is another of the play’s superb onlooker scenes – Norfolk notes with splendid lack of emphasis, ‘He’s discontented.’ In fact, Wolsey’s fall will be directly linked to this preference for a liaison with the French throne. He is exposed, and ruined, by the discovery of a letter to the Pope asking him to delay granting the divorce so Wolsey can try to persuade Henry to marry the French princess. In this play, although not in the historical sources, Wolsey has inadvertently included in a letter to Henry an inventory of all his own wealth and possessions, another error that turns Henry against him. (Long before the heyday of the ‘Freudian slip,’ this seems, in the context of the drama of Wolsey’s overreaching, to be the playwright’s way of signifying the Cardinal’s psychological self-betrayal.)
Although he is an onlooker rather than an actor in the play, Henry has a few strong dramatic moments, notably his expose of Wolsey’s financial chicanery, nicely and pointedly expressed in a speech that underscores the materialism and materiality of this supposedly spiritual figure (‘You are full of heavenly stuff, and bear the inventory/Of your best graces in your mind,’ Henry says, ‘You have scarce time/To steal from spiritual leisure a brief span/To keep your earthly audit.’ [3.2.138-139, 1490142]), and his clever ploy in giving Cranmer his ring to protect him against enemies at court.
Much later in the play, the new Queen, Anne Bullen, is described – though in a ‘Fletcher’ scene – in what seems yet another reminiscence of Cleopatra. The scene is delightfully earthy and comic in spirit, as the Third Gentleman joins his friends, reporting that he has been
Among the crowd i’ th’ Abbey, where a finger
Could not be wedged in more. I am stifled
With the mere rankness of their joy.
Second Gentleman: You saw the ceremony?
Third Gentleman: That I did.
First Gentleman: How was it?
Third Gentleman: Well worth the seeing.
Second Gentleman: Good sir, speak it to us.
(4.1.58-63)
This amusing – and audience-teasing – taciturnity soon turns into volubility, as the Gentleman comes to describe the Queen, who sat
In a rich chair of state, opposing freely
The beauty of her person to the people.
Believe me, sir, she is the goodliest woman
That ever lay by man; which when the people
Had the full view of, such a noise arose
As the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest,
As loud and to as many tunes. Hats, cloaks –
Doublets, I think – flew up, and had their faces
Been loose, this day they had been lost. Such joy
I never saw before. Great-bellied women,
That had not half a week to go, like rams
In the time of war, would shake the press,
And make ‘em reel before ‘em. No man living
Could say ‘This is my wife’ there, all were woven
So strangely in one piece.
(4.1.69-83)
We may notice the attention in this passage to physicality: smell and sensuality, ‘rank’ bodies (without rank – the same joke as in Cymbeline). (The historical Anne Bullen was pregnant at her coronation, though this is of course never mentioned in the play.) That no man could say ‘This is my wife’ is innocently ominous, since this becomes Henry’s problem all too soon. The image of the crowed all blended together into ‘one piece’ also strangely recalls the opening description, also of a magnificent and indescribable offstage event, of the meeting of the two kings on the Field of the Cloth of Gold: ‘how they clung/In their embracement as they grew together’ into ‘a compounded one’ (1.1.9-12)”
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From Tony Tanner:
“But what of King Henry himself – the Henry of the play? it is hardly a very probing study, and, indeed, he speaks fewer than 450 lines. There is certainly nothing here of the profligate, the gourmand, the sensualist, the wife-killer of popular image. Bullough finds him ‘generous and trusting until he realizes he has been deceived or that villainy is intended,’ and says that ‘From being Defender Fidei he becomes the Defender, not perhaps of Protestantism, but of the rights of the private conscience; and the enemy of divisions in Church and State.’ The play, he says, ‘sets forth a King who is no Prospero controlling all men and events in justice…who can be misled by self-seekers but who nevertheless does good in the main…growing (uncharacteristically) in wisdom and benevolence.’ R.A. Foakes, the Arden editor, is even more positive. Of the three falls he asserts – ‘in no case is there any recrimination, or blame attached to Henry; the law operates in its normal course…’ I find this an astonishing proposition. The play itself makes it clear that it is at least gullible of Henry to believe the deeply suspect surveyor rather than the everywhere respected Buckingham; that he wants to find legalistic reasons for getting rid of old-wife Katherine because he has fallen for Anne; and that he is responsible for allowing Wolsey’s unconscionable sway over himself over himself and the land. (Foakes allows that the one ironic exchange in the play does rather glance at Henry’s dubious motives in wanting to ‘divorce’ Katherine:
Chamberlain: It seems this marriage with his brother’s wife
Has crept too near his conscience.
Suffolk: [Aside]. No, his conscience
Has crept too near another lady.
(II.ii.16-18)
— yet he finds Henry ‘blameless!’ We will come to Henry’s ‘creeping’ conscience.’) But Foakes then makes a larger claim (and he is not alone in this): considering Henry’s ‘growth in spiritual stature’ he contends ‘when he administers the law himself, justice as of heaven operates, and in this assumption of control Henry may be compared to Prospero, for he seems to stand above fate, and in all accidents of fortune which befall other characters is praised and blessed…Like Prospero, he has a kind of vagueness, not a lack of solidity, but a lack of definition, as a representative of benevolent power acting upon others.’ This is part of the attempt, which I mentioned, to recruit Henry VIII as another of Shakespeare’s genuine ‘last plays’ – The Tempest continued in another key, as it were. As against all this rather hagiographic reading of Henry in the play, we may put this burst of uncompromising asperity from Hazlitt: ‘The character of Henry VIII is drawn with great truth and spirit. It is like a very disagreeable portrait, sketched by the hand of a master. His gross appearance, his blustering demeanour, his vulgarity, his want of common decency and common humanity, are marked in strong lines.’ You would hardly think that Foakes and Hazlitt had been to the same play, as it were! As it happens, Hazlitt’s account is demonstrably more spirited than accurate, but, at that, hardly as misguided, I think, as the attempt to promote Henry to the status of a Prospero. Power, he has; but no magic.
The play does, admittedly, protect him to some extent; not only by stopping where it does, but in one or two little matters – for instance, by making Anne innocent, demure, totally unambitious, pitiful of Katherine, and clearly chaste; as opposed to the ‘scapegrace’ (Bullough) she apparently was, already Henry’s mistress before the wedding, by which time she was pregnant. And in the matter of taxation. Queen Katherine warns him that the people are being taxed beyond endurance, by the orders of Wolsey, to the point that ‘Tongues spit their duties out, and cold hearts freeze/Allegiance in them’ (I.ii.61-2). Henry (in the play) is shocked, and is prompted to one of those strong and vigorous Shakespearean images:
Why, we take
From every tree lop, bark, and part o’ th’ timber,
And thou we leave it with a root, thus hacked,
The air will drink the sap.
(1.ii.95, my bold)
He, benevolently, orders the tax to be rescinded, and, magnanimously, all those who refused to pay pardoned. But it was by historical Henry’s order that the tax was levied in the first place! It is a small act of sanitization, but perhaps indicative of larger protective intentions.
But he clearly washes his hands of Buckingham:
If he may
Find mercy in the law, ‘tis his; if none,
Let him not seek’t of us. By day and night!
He’s traitor to th’ height.
(1.ii.211-14)
His evidence for this is of the poorest, and this determined abjuration of ‘mercy’ does him no kingly credit. We also see him clearly making up to Anne – ‘O beauty,/Till now I never knew thee’ (I.iv.76-6), before we hear his accounts of his protracted struggles with his conscience (over having married his brother’s widow – but, by any account, twenty years is a strangely long time to wait for a call of conscience!). Thus, when we hear him lament about Katherine,
O, my lord,
Would it not grieve an able man to leave
So sweet a bedfellow? But, conscience, conscience!
O, ‘tis a tender place, and I must leave her.
(II.ii.140-43)
we are bound to be skeptical and hear the words as hollow. Particularly as in the very next scene, when the so modest and demure Anne protests to her ‘Old Lady’ companion that ‘I would not be a queen,’ the Old Lady (worldly, experienced) simply retorts ‘so would you,/For all this spice of your hypocrisy,’ and goes on to refer to ‘(Saving your mincing) the capacity/Of your soft cheveril conscience’ (II.iii.25-6, 31-2). There is more than a ‘spice of hypocrisy’ in more than one part of this play, and Henry is capable of his own kind of ‘mincing.’ ‘Cheveril’ is kidskin, for high-quality gloves and such like, and the ‘cheveril’ of Henry’s conscience is, as the play shows, of the softest and most stretchable. By the end, he is indeed in control, all oppositions and problems in one way or another dispersed; with Cranmer and Sir Thomas More safely installed, Cromwell about to begin his reliable work – and baby Elizabeth to crown it all. Still, the Court of King Henry VIII is a long way from Prospero’s isle.”
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And from Kermode:
“Yet Wolsey’s manner is described by Norfolk (111-19) as agitated (‘In most strange postures/We have seen him set himself’ (118-19)). The King, having in his hand the evidence of Wolsey’s earthly ambition, declines to believe these contortions have religious causes; he accosts him ironically and teases him into extravagant expression of allegiance and devotion before thrusting at him the papers that prove his guilt: ‘Read o’er this,/And after, this, and then to breakfast with/What appetite you have’ (201-3).
This passage of dialogue, well managed, tinged with royal ironies, getting its business done, is again marked with weak endings and run-on lines, though it is rarely as self-involved as the verse of the act’s opening scene. At its end the stage clears, and Wolsey soliloquizes, now in a very different tone. He sees from the papers that his personal wealth has been made known to the King, and that his dealings with Rome in the matter of the King’s marriage are also uncovered. And here, at line 222, the tone of valediction, the elegy for one’s own greatness, is re-established:
Nay then, farewell!
I have touch’d the highest point of all my greatness,
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.
(222-27)
The figure, though fine, is simply expounded, not self-involved; his career has been like a meteor, supposed to be caused by an escape of terrestrial gases that burn up when they reach the sphere of fire (perhaps with allusion to his rise from humble birth, so resented by the noblemen at court). Wolsey is now allowed a dignified resistance to the demands of his exultant enemies. After their altercation the stage is again cleared and a sort of aria, akin to Buckingham’s, brings Wolsey to the end of his remarkable career: ‘Farewell? a long farewell to all my greatness!’ (351).
In the simplicity of language in this celebrated speech, in the slow working out of its figures, it bears a stronger resemblance to the meditations of Henry VI than to the Machiavellian contortions of much verse in Henry VIII. There is the slowly evolved imagery of promise and failure – tender leaves of hope, full-blown honors, nipping frost, the death of the hopeful plant (352-58) – than the image of boys swimming on bladders, out of their depth, at ‘the mercy/Of a rude stream’ (363-64). A general reflection on fallen greatness brings the speech to a close. The reprise at the end of the scene is for the benefit of Cromwell: ‘Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition!/By that sin fell the angels’ (440-41).
With the falls of Buckingham and Cromwell and the blessed demise of the Queen (heralded by a masque-like heavenly vision [IV.ii]) the play has depicted the fated falls of the great rather in the manner of the old ‘tragedies’ such as A Mirror for Magistrates, in which the ghosts of noble personages return to recount their falls. The twist to this plot lies in the treatment of Cranmer, who by the King’s grace survives the plot against him; he survives to christen the Princess and reform the liturgy (there is here no hint of his ultimate fat at the hands of Henry’s successor, Mary). In the play the last days of Katherine are contemporary with the coronation of the new Queen, with more opportunities for theatrical display.”
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And finally, from The Bardathon, his review of the 2010 Globe production of Henry VIII:
“Since Dominic Dromgoole took over at Shakespeare’s Globe, the prioritisation of the “house dramatist” over all others has disappointingly extended to the exclusion of plays by his contemporaries from the repertory – a real shame, as this was one of the features that used to make the Globe such an important venue from an academic space. Over the last few seasons, however, this has extended even further to the exclusion of Shakespeare’s collaborators from their works. Timon of Athens was “By William Shakespeare” on all publicity materials, and this year it’s John Fletcher’s turn to be excluded from his own play. Not only does the title page of the programme and all publicity material only mention Shakespeare, but even Dromgoole’s introduction to the season merely talks of the play as “a great blend of pageantry and realpolitik, written at the end of Shakespeare’s career and showing all his formidable understanding of the passions and pettiness of those in power.” Not until halfway through the lengthy booklet does Fletcher make an appearance. Happily, Gordon McMullan later dedicates a whole three page essay to the discussion of Fletcher’s involvement, but this only comes once the Globe has enacted its own policy of exclusion on the younger dramatist.
This is, of course, incidental to the production, but serves as useful context for the Globe’s first staging of the play. Following the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s crowning celebrated widely last year, Shakespeare’s unofficial role as the nation’s historian was here strengthened by the assertion – in marketing terms at least – of his sole authorship. Tying together national history and Shakespearean authorship has long been a method of consolidating British culture, and the image of Dominic Rowan’s Henry VIII, dressed as in the Holbein portrait, striding out onto Shakespeare’s stage at the climax of Shakespeare’s play for the christening of Queen Elizabeth, couldn’t have been more culturally conservative.
While it has to be noted, however, it’s not a fair direction to pursue in reviewing this production, one of the Globe’s best of the last few years. Mark Rosenblatt’s intelligent, clear and entertaining production breathed life into a play often accused of being a string of processions, turning the pageantry into visual storytelling and injecting humour and energy into the court politics.
Key to the production’s success was an intelligent use of the Globe’s staging possibilities, incorporating modern tricks into a traditional design. An extended thrust jutted out downstage into the middle of the pit, which acted as a public space: here, Buckingham addressed the crowds and Anne processed in state. The centrality of this catwalk, surrounded by groundlings, effectively distinguished “public” moments from the rest of the play, providing a clear structure for the action. On the stage, a simple device allowed various levels of privacy to be easily established. Interior scenes were accessed via the upstage doors, but people exiting via these doors would immediately reappear via one of the side entrances on a red carpet that extended around the outer edges of the stage. Scenes were thus allowed to spill out of rooms and into the corridors, the liminal spaces that linked formal spaces. In these corridor spaces, nobles argued and whispered passionately, voicing in anger what they could not say in, for example, the King’s presence. As well as making scenes more dynamic by allowing for shifts of pace and register, this created a fluidity of movement that kept the play moving at surprising speed, and allowed for the various Dukes to be better individualised, breaking out of their formal court characters as soon as they left the presence.
It was in these courtiers that much of the play’s interest lay. The conflict between John Dougall’s deliciously scornful Gardiner and Colin Hurley’s naively enthusiastic Cranmer was a particular highlight, particularly as Henry ordered Gardiner to embrace Cranmer and found himself enveloped in the other man’s arms. John Cummins found a sincere and volatile man in Cromwell, squaring up to Gardiner during the Privy Council’s meeting and only agreeing reluctantly to the Council’s demands, while Anthony Howell’s Thomas More wore spectacles and presided over the other councillors with an uptight but just air. It was Peter Hamilton Dyer as Norfolk, though, who came through as the audience’s touchstone. From his first appearance trying to soothe Buckingham while voicing his own displeasures, through his scornful treatment of Wolsey and deferrence to the King to his complicity in Cranmer’s “trial”, Norfolk came to represent the complexities of maneuvering the murky waters of this court. Constantly living on edge, always guarded in tone, his active but quiet background presence acted as the safe counterpoint to his more foolhardy peers, including Dickon Tyrrell’s young Surrey, here an impetuous and aggressive young man who openly drew his sword on Wolsey and found himself the victim of Henry’s screaming wrath after Cranmer’s aborted arraignment.
This rich background of politics, coming into its own towards the end of the play, lent richness and depth to the main plot, dealing with the successive falls of Anthony’s Buckingham, Kate Duchene’s Katherine and Ian McNeice’s Wolsey. That these characters provided the main interest was interestingly stressed by a Globe crowd who, unbidden and against what I certainly perceived to be the production’s intentions, gave ovations following the final speeches of both Wolsey and Katherine, applauding their ultimate farewells in an unusual gesture of appreciation. The politics of Globe audiences occasion more attention in reviews than is often appropriate, but here I was fascinated, particularly as the final speeches are not especially grandstanding. As far as I could see, it was the recognisability of these famous historical figures that occasioned the reaction, but also the structured and formal arrangement of their departures. Breaking up the action neatly, and considering the original Globe performances would not have had intervals (although those at the Blackfriars would), these moments seemed to constitute natural breaks that were instinctively recognised by the audience, despite the fact that the production itself did not stress them. Part of the immense value of the Globe experiment is in documenting and interrogating these natural responses.
Duchene’s performance, heavily accented, imagined Katherine as a sympathetic but volatile figure, all Spanish fire and confidence. Whether pleading for herself at Henry’s feet or screaming blue murder at the servant who burst in on her repose, she was a fearsome figure and a real power at court. The dynamic between her and Wolsey was particularly fascinating: Wolsey used her tempestuousness as a negative standard against which to position his own apparent humility and reason, rearticulating their entire conflict as emotion vs intellect, passion vs reason. It was rare we saw Katherine outside of a public context, and thus with her defences down, but Duchene made the most of those moments. Alone with Ben Deery’s gentle Griffith and Mary Doherty’s emotional Patience (a lovely singing voice quivered as she attempted to comfort her queen) in her dying moments, her weariness allowed a much quieter side to Katherine’s nature to emerge. As she dreamed, the court’s Fool emerged with a puppet boy she had carried all along. The boy was made to bow to Katherine, and then to a smiling Buckingham, who entered to greet the Queen. Turning, she then saw Wolsey, who lifted a crown from the boy’s head and began to place it on Katherine’s own, before suddenly the whole troupe ran away, waving mockingly at her. Katherine awoke screaming, the vision of heavenly peace cruelly snatched from her, leaving the vision more troubling and disconcerting than usual, and her own death somewhat more ambiguous.
Howell’s Buckingham, tall and casual, was imagined in an heroic vein, and his semi-ghostly appearance during his former steward’s denunciation of him to Henry served to shed further doubt on the steward’s testimony. Buckingham delivered his own reported lines with a tired and disappointed air, lightly mocking his enemy while accepting the weight of the testimony against him. McNeice’s Wolsey, meanwhile, all jowls and underskirts, was a traditionally villainous Wolsey, bloated and arrogant. His presence in court was formidable, however much he presented himself in an attitude of humility. Yet it was the more sympathetic scenes that stood out, particularly his emotional parting from Cromwell, who wept for his master. This Wolsey knew and understood people, which was his strength, and McNeice impressively manipulated the feelings of his offstage as well as onstage audiences, resulting in the spontaneous applause that accompanied his final exit.
Miranda Raison was a very modern Anne Bolyen, right down to the make-up that distinguished her from her ladies. She was portrayed from the start as the consummate court player, flirting with Henry while keeping him at arm’s length. When his true identity was revealed, she knelt in supplication, yet her eyes remained wide open and she breathed heavily as her mind worked overtime, evaluating both the consequences of her actions and how she might best take advantage of the position she found herself in. Her self-defence to Amanda Lawrence’s Welsh Virginia, a worldly-wise and comically vulgar old lady, was clearly not meant, and she was able to stare Katherine in the face in her own chamber without apparent embarrassment. The first half closed as Anne left Katherine’s presence to join Henry’s embraces, and her later appearances – significantly with her headdress removed and her hair about her shoulders – saw her thoroughly confident in her new public position, already full-bellied even as she processed the Globe’s pit. Her absence from the final scene, consequently, took on extra implied significance.
Through all of this moved Rowan’s Henry VIII, a very human king. Henry’s strength came from his ability to be whatever he needed to be at any given moment: thus, he performed the ceremonies with due reverence, joked freely with his nobles when playing at cards, and articulated rage at moments calculated for maximum effect, particularly as he defended Cranmer. This king was not weakened by his absence from court politics; rather, he was cast as above it, and the intervention of the final scenes was stage-managed to assert an absolute authority over his proud councillors. That coups such as this and his exposure of Wolsey seemed so effortless was a key part of Rowan’s performance; the king not only got what he wanted, but in the way he wanted it too.
Under all the above was a rich seam of comedy. Michael Bertenshaw and John Dougall’s randy Lovell and Sandys were an early comic highlight, particularly in the reaction of the women whom they attempted to court. The best was reserved for Sam Cox though, in a gloriously indulgent scene as the First Citizen in which he attempted to rig up poles on the catwalk for Buckingham’s public confession, and repeatedly made a mess of it. The applause he received from the audience upon finally completing his task was such that both citizens were completely thrown off and forgot their lines, and a period of adlibbing was warmly encouraged by the audience as the actors attempted to get back into the flow. Moments such as these are again unique to the Globe, the participatory atmosphere adding much to any comic moment. This was similarly the case in the penultimate scene, as the Porters picked out unsuspecting targets in the audience as the butts of their abuse.
The addition of Amanda Lawrence’s Fool, speaking the Prologue and Epilogue, was a final comic but also poignant innovation. In one revealing scene, Henry was revealed in private with the Fool as she dandled the puppet of a boy before her. In this simple image, we saw Henry’s genuine anguish over the lack of a male heir, motivating all of his actions within the period of his career shown in the play. As Norfolk and Suffolk blundered in on him in this private moment, his rage reached a peak unmatched elsewhere in the play. By finding this neat emotional hook for Henry, Rosenblatt found the play’s true heart: Henry, the king with absolute control over his court, in despair for the one thing he cannot control.”
My next post: Thursday evening/Friday morning
Our next reading: Act Five of Henry VIII (All Is True)
Act Three: The case stalls until Katherine decides to relent following a visit from Wolsey and Campeius. But a further hold-up occurs when deceitful letters sent from Wolsey to the Pope are revealed to the King. With his career in ruins, Wolsey is replaced as Chancellor by Sir Thomas More – A Man For All Seasons.
If Henry isn’t a spotless hero, it’s fair to say that Wolsey is not an out-and-out villain. Although the plays seems eager to offer up a tale of regal redemption – the kind of tale that Shakespeare’s earlier romances had created a taste for – its commitment to historical ‘truth’ among the web of Tudor politics (even the seemingly unpalatable truth about Henry’s sexual interests), opens up plenty of other options. The play begins with a grim demonstration of the Cardinal’s malevolence: the downfall of the Duke of Buckingham, whose error is to criticize too openly Wolsey’s dominance, and who then shortly afterward pays the price. But as we observe Wolsey’s snarling enemies turn on the former Lord Chancellor himself, Buckingham’s earlier words on the fickleness of power seems more acute than ever. Heading to his execution, Buckingham grimly warns anyone within earshot that the court is a dangerous place to eke out a career. “You that hear me,” he calls,
This from a dying man may receive as certain –
Where you are liberal of your loves and counsels,
Be sure you be not loose; for those that you make friends
And give your hearts to, when they once perceive
The least rub in your fortunes, fall away
Like water from ye, never found again
But where they mean to sink ye.
(2.1.125-32)
It is the kind of counsel given weight by the speaker’s proximity to death: like John of Gaunt in Richard II, who, you might recall, insists that “the tongues of dying men/Enforce attention” (2.1.5-6), Buckingham hopes that his stark message will be taken for truth. Power is slippery, he warns: anyone can suffer a fall, and friends inevitably become enemies, “fall[ing] away/Like water” (a vivid and surprising poetic image) before they turn against you. In the treacherous world of the sixteenth-century court – Henry VIII is the only one of Shakespeare’s histories to be set in the Renaissance – the only person you can trust to be true is yourself.
“In architectural elevation there may not be anything very imposing in Henry VIII. It is no towering edifice, based and buttressed, one substructure resting upon another. But everything is meshed, consequential, and more subtly interrelated than one may suspect at first.”
(Kristian Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare’s History Plays, 1982)
From Tanner:
“Buckingham is soon caught in Wolsey’s ‘net,’ and betrayed by his ‘false’ surveyor. Henry, about whom more later, unquestionably believes the surveyor’s slanderous evidence (that he heard Buckingham say he wanted to kill the King), and we have another of those kingly speeches of horror at the unforeseeable treachery of a trusted subject:
This man so complete,
Who was enrolled ‘mongst wonders…
Hath into monstrous habits put the graces
That once were his, and is become as black
As if besmeared in hell.
(I.ii.118-24)
Except that it is very far from clear whether Buckingham is guilty of anything approaching treason, while it is clear enough that the surveyor has been put up to his lethal defamations by Wolsey. What is interesting, to me, is that Buckingham doesn’t seem to know whether he is guilty or not (I find this entirely plausible – did I say that? Perhaps I did. But did I mean it? Was I expressing an intention or releasing an anger? I could kill him – how many unmurderous people have not said such a thing. And can a man ever know the full extent of what he harbours in his heart? Even Holinshed is not clear as to Buckingham’s guilt – or innocence.) His last speeches are those of a resigned and quiescent man, rather than a guilty one – indeed, even while accepting the verdict against him, he refers to his ‘guiltless blood’:
I have this day received a traitor’s judgment
And by that name must die. Yet, heaven bear witness,
And if I have a conscience, let it sink me
Even as the ax falls, if I be not faithful!
The law I bear no malice for my death:
‘T has done, upon the premises, but justice.
But those that sought it I could wish more Christians.
Be what they will, I heartily forgive ‘em.
(II.i.58-66)
This strikes me as mild. But, in this play, finally mildness is all. The description of Buckingham, and his bearing, at the bar when he receives the dread sentence, in a way encapsulates the whole play:
When he was brought again to th’ bar, to hear
His knell rung out, his judgment, he was stirred
With such an agony he sweat extremely
And something spoke in choler, ill and hasty.
But he fell to himself again, and sweetly
In all the rest showed a most noble patience.
(II.i.31-6)
From sweat to sweetness; from choler to patience – and seemingly without effort or inner struggle, rather as if it was a miraculous conversion: this is the very stamp of the play. And so this ‘noble ruined man’ goes to ‘the long divorce of steel,’ speaking of ‘sweet sacrifice,’ ‘angels,’ ‘soul,’ ‘heaven’ – his nobility intact, indeed enhanced.
Justice, we feel, has not been done. But another ‘divorce’ is looming – here is the Second Gentleman:
If the Duke [i.e. Buckingham] be guiltless
‘Tis full of woe. Yet I can give you inkling
Of an ensuing evil, if it fall,
Greater than this.
(II.i.139-42)
The ‘evil’ (strong word) is the rumor that the King is going to ‘divorce,’ or rather set aside, Katherine, his wife for twenty years. We have already seen Henry helplessly attracted to Anne ‘Bullen’ at the masque, so that, despite the legal and theological debates which follow (concerning the ‘separation’ he clearly both wants and intends to have), we can have no doubts concerning Henry’s real reason for wishing to have this separation somehow legitimized. Katherine’s speeches, both at her ‘trial,’ and thereafter, are the most moving of the play. She appeals to the King with a simple dignity:
Alas, sir,
In what have I offended you? What cause
Hath my behavior given to your displeasure
That thus you should proceed to put me off
And take your good grace from me?
(II.iv.18-22)
But, remembering that she is a queen, she refrains from weeping, and ‘my drops of tears/I’ll turn to sparks of fire’ (II.iv.72-3). It is time for some very justifiable ‘choler,’ and we duly get the ‘sparks,’ or – rather, Wolsey does: ‘your heart/Is crammed with arrogancy, spleen, and pride’ (II.iv.109-110) and more of the spirited same. She sweeps out of the Hall, saying ‘They vest me past my patience’ (II.iv.130). She feels ‘the last fit of my greatness’ (III.i.78). To Wolsey she says ‘Ye turn me into nothing’ (III.i.114), and, while he rebukes her for her anger and stubbornness, she is tenacious of the rightness and justice of her position:
I dare not make myself so guilty
To give up willingly that noble title
Your master wed me to. Nothing but death
Shall e’er divorce my dignities.
(III.i.139-42)
As she fairly complains – ‘And am I thus rewarded? ‘Tis not well, lords’ (III.i.133). Not – it is not well.’ ‘Evil’ was, I think, the Gentleman’s word.
But, after ‘choler’ – ‘Patience, be near me still’ (IV.ii.76). This is addressed to her maid named Patience, but the larger implication is entirely apt. Although she does permit herself a rather tart remark when Griffith brings her ‘commendations’ and ‘comfort’ from the King when she is effectively on her death-bed – ‘Tis like a pardon after execution’ (IV.ii.121) – she dies in a spirit of reconciliation. She has a ‘Vision’ of ‘Spirits of peace,’ in which white-robed figures hold a garland over her head – ‘at which, as it were by inspiration, she makes in her sleep signs of rejoicing, and holdeth up her hands to heaven.’ Her last message to the King is:
Remember me
In all my humility unto his Highness
Say his long trouble now is passing
Out of this world. Tell him in death I blessed him,
For so I will. Mine eyes grow dim. Farewell,
My lord.
(IV.ii.161-5)
It is, one feels, somewhat better than Henry deserves. But that is, here, not the point. She has had her vision, her ‘good dreams’ (another touch of miracle), and departs in peace – ‘unqueened,’ yet more royal than ever.
But it is the third fall – the absolutely just one – which is in many ways the greatest, for Wolsey came from almost out of nowhere to reach dizzying heights of power, influence – and a sumptuous way of life. Wolsey is the most marked and distinctive character in the play; evil (or ruthless ambition combined with insatiable pride), as ever, having a more complex and dimensioned physiognomy than simple goodness, or even not-so-simple fortitude and forbearance. He is not ‘propped by ancestry’ (he was a butcher’s son), but, in one of Buckingham’s images, he is a spider who has made his own spectacular career ‘out of his self-drawing web’ (I.i.63). This suggests a ‘self-fashioning’ of a distinctly venomous kind. We catch glimpses of the range of his influence and power – hosting a banquet for the King, commandeering a lord’s horses which he coves (‘He will have all, I think’); and we are given clear indications of his dominance and manipulation of the King:
He dives into the King’s soul, and there scatters
Dangers, doubts, wringing of the conscience,
Fears and despairs…
(II.ii.26-8)
and – ‘he hath a witchcraft/Over the King in’s tongue’ (III.ii.18-19). The lords both hate and fear him, not least they seem like helpless putty in his scheming hands:
We had need pray,
And heartily, for our deliverance,
Or this imperious man will work us all
From princes into pages. All men’s honors
Lie like one lump before him, to be fashioned
Into what pitch he pleases.
(II.ii.44-9)
As Buckingham explains, Wolsey’s ascent and mastery effectively proclaim ‘there’s difference in no persons’ (I.i.139). He threatens their rank, status, and distinction – seems, indeed, willing and able to subvert hierarchy itself to serve his purposes, and, more dangerously, to further his influence and alliance with Rome. To this end, he tries to delay the Papal dispensation for divorce which Henry initially seeks – because Wolsey wants Henry to marry, not Anne (‘a spleeny Lutheran’), but his own choice – the Duchess of Alencon. And this is where he overreaches himself, and everything goes wrong.
All his tricks founder, and he brings his physic
After his patient’s death: the King already
Hath married the fair lady.
(III.ii.40-42)
Henry has already lost patience with the cardinals (‘I abhor/This dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome’ II.iv.236-7) and called back his ‘well-beloved servant Cranmer’ who has duly obliged in providing sound theological justification for the ‘divorce’ (this is the only oblique reference to the great break from Rome, and the Reformation0. But, for Wolsey, it is not just a matter of a foiled plan. His letters to Rome ‘miscarried,/And came to th’ eye o’th’ King’ (III.ii.30-31); even worse, by a slip so disastrous that it begs to be called ‘Freudian,’ Wolsey includes in some state papers he sends to the King a ‘schedule’ of all the ‘treasure’ he has raked and heaped together for himself. ‘What piles of wealth hath he accumulated/To his own portion!…it outspeaks/Possession of a subject’ (III.ii.107-8, 127-8) exclaims the by now angry King. He confronts Wolsey, and gives him the two incriminating papers, adding, grimly enough:
Read o’er this;
And after, this; and then to breakfast with
What appetite you have.
(II.ii.201-3)
Wolsey knows that the game is up. With something of his old imperious pride, he tries to outface the nobles beginning to gloat over his impending disgrace and ruin. But, left alone, he confronts the truth, in the one powerful soliloquy of the play:
Farewell! A long farewell to all my greatness!
This is the state of man: today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope; 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 aripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do.
(III.ii.351-8)
This occurs at about the middle of the play, and it may be taken as a central statement of its theme. But, almost immediately, the miraculous transformation or conversion begins:
Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye.
I feel my heart new opened. O, how wretched
Is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favors!
There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to,
That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,
More pangs and fears than wars or women have.
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again.
(III.ii.365-72)
He tells his ‘amazed’ servant, Cromwell, that though he is ‘fall’n indeed,’ he was ‘never so truly happy,’ and goes on:
I know myself now, and I feel within me
A peace above all earthly dignities,
A still and quiet conscience. The King hath cured me,
I humbly thank his Grace; and from these shoulders,
These ruined pillars, out of pity, taken
A load would sink a navy – too much honor.
O, ‘tis a burden, Cromwell, ‘tis a burden
Too heavy for a man that hopes for heaven!
(III.ii.378-85)
From his radically changed perspective, he gives Cromwell advice which runs exactly counter to his own life:
Mark but my fall and that that ruined me.
Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition.
(III.ii.439-40)
Cromwell’s last advice is ‘Good sir, have patience’; to which Wolsey replies, as do the other falling stars – ‘So I have.’ He dies in ‘peace,’ having ‘found the blessedness of being little’ (IV.ii.66). It is in keeping with the generally benign, charitable, and forgiving atmosphere of the play that, when Griffith brings the news of Wolsey’s death to the dying Katherine, while Katherine understandably recalls his ‘evil manners,’:
He would say untruths and be ever double
Both in his words and meaning. He was never,
But where he meant to ruin, pitiful.
(IV.ii.38-40)
Griffith asks permission to ‘speak his good,’ and proceeds to do so. So the last we hear of Wolsey is an account of his abilities and virtues: it is a moment of imaginative generosity to this detested Catholic not to be found in the Protestant chronicles.”
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And to finish with William Hazlitt:
“…the scene of Buckingham led to execution is one of the most affecting and natural in Shakespeare, and one to which there is hardly an approach in any other author. Again, the character of Wolsey, the description of his pride and of his fall, are inimitable, and have, besides their gorgeousness of effect, a pathos, which only the genius of Shakespeare could lend to the distresses of a proud, bad man, like Wolsey. There is a sort of child-like simplicity in the very helplessness of his situation, arising from the recollection of his past overbearing ambition. After the cutting sarcasms of his enemies on his disgrace, against which he bears up with a spirit conscious of his own superiority, he breaks out into that fine apostrophe:
Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness!
This is the state of man; to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours 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 ventur’d,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
These many summers in a sea of glory;
But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride
At length broke under me; and now has left me,
Weary and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me.
Vain pomp and glory of the world, I hate ye!
I feel my heart new open’d; O how wretched
Is that poor man, that hangs on princes’ favours!
There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to,
That sweet aspect of princes, and our ruin,
More pangs and fears than war and women have;
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again!—
There is in this passage, as well as in the well-known dialogue with Cromwell which follows, something which stretches beyond commonplace; nor is the account which Griffiths gives of Wolsey’s death less Shakespearian; and the candour with which Queen Katherine listens to the praise of ‘him whom of all men while living she hated most’ adds the last graceful finishing to her character.
Among other images of great individual beauty might be mentioned the description of the effect of Ann Boleyn’s presenting herself to the crowd at her coronation.
—While her grace sat down
To rest awhile, some half an hour or so,
In a rich chair of state, opposing freely
The beauty of her person to the people.
Believe me, sir, she is the goodliest woman
That ever lay by man. Which when the people
Had the full view of, ‘such a noise arose
As the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest,
As loud and to as many tunes’.
The character of Henry VIII is drawn with great truth and spirit. It is like a very disagreeable portrait, sketched by the hand of a master. His gross appearance, his blustering demeanour, his vulgarity, his arrogance, his sensuality, his cruelty, his hypocrisy, his want of common decency and common humanity, are marked in strong lines. His traditional peculiarities of expression complete the reality of the picture. The authoritative expletive, ‘Ha!’ with which ne intimates his indignation or surprise, has an effect like the first startling sound that breaks from a thunder-cloud. He is of all the monarchs in our history the most disgusting: for he unites in himself all the vices of barbarism and refinement, without their virtues. Other kings before him (such as Richard III) were tyrants and murderers out of ambition or necessity: they gained or established unjust power by violent means: they destroyed their or made its tenure insecure. But Henry VIII’s power is most fatal to those whom he loves: he is cruel and remorseless to pamper his luxurious appetites: bloody and voluptuous; an amorous murderer; an uxorious debauchee. His hardened insensibility to the feelings of others is strengthened by the most profligate self-indulgence. The religious hypocrisy, under which he masks his cruelty and his lust, is admirably displayed in the speech in which he describes the first misgivings of his conscience and its increasing throes and terrors, which have induced him to divorce his queen. The only thing in his favour in this play is his treatment of Cranmer: there is also another circumstance in his favour, which is his patronage of Hans Holbein.—It has been said of Shakespeare, ‘No maid could live near such a man.’ It might with as good reason be said, ‘No king could live near such a man.’ His eye would have penetrated through the pomp of circumstance and the veil of opinion. As it is, he has represented such persons to the life—his plays are in this respect the glass of history—he has done them the same justice as if he had been a privy counsellor all his life, and in each successive reign. Kings ought never to be seen upon the stage. In the abstract, they are very disagreeable characters: it is only while living that they are ‘the best of kings’. It is their power, their splendour, it is the apprehension of the personal consequences of their favour or their hatred that dazzles the imagination and suspends the judgement of their favourites or their vassals; but death cancels the bond of allegiance and of interest; and seen AS THEY WERE, their power and their pretensions look monstrous and ridiculous. The charge brought against modern philosophy as inimical to loyalty is unjust because it might as well be brought lover of kings. We have often wondered that Henry VIII as he is drawn by Shakespeare, and as we have seen him represented in all the bloated deformity of mind and person, is not hooted from the English stage.”
Act Two: As Buckingham heads to his execution, rumors begin circulating that Henry plans to divorce his wife Katherine with Wolsey’s approval, and in fact Cardinal Campeius has traveled from Rome to arrange matters. Meanwhile, Anne Boleyn expresses her qualms about queenship to the Old Lady. At the divorce court in Blackfriars Katherine put up strong resistance, however, and refuses to be intimidated by Wolsey and his henchmen.
———————
As I mentioned in my last post, the play was performed at the Blackfriars theater, built directly on the site of the old Dominican monastery where Queen Katherine’s divorce case was tried. But, even if the play’s early audiences were unaware of the location of Katherine’s downfall, the dizzying sense that history was intimately entwined with the present must have inescapable if they paused to “think” about the monastery itself, whose change-of-use was instigated by Henry VIII’s most wide-reaching political act: the split with the Catholic hierarchy, the foundation of the church of England and the dissolution of religious houses. Indeed, the fact that Henry VIII hinges on the momentous events of the English Reformation – a schism instigated by Henry’s wish to divorce Katherine despite being refused by the Pope – has been taken by many to argue that Fletcher and Shakespeare’s play is nothing more than Protestant propaganda dressed up as history. After all, it does climax with the birth of Princess Elizabeth, a Protestant monarch who will preside over a country in which “God shall be truly known,” as Archbishop Cranmer puts it in the play’s closing minutes (5.4.36). Writing a full decade after that same Elizabeth’s death, the playwrights were freed from the Queen’s injunction not to perform plays touching “either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the common weal,” and took the opportunity to retell some of the events of her father’s reign, events that were only just beyond living memory for some of those spectators.
In one sense the play’s overall trajectory does seem to confirm a Protestant message: it also pivots on the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey; the Lord Chancellor historically sacked by Henry as soon as it became clear that he would be unable to broker the King’s “great matter,” and arrange a divorce. During his time as chief royal adviser, many were appalled at Wolsey’s influence over Henry: all-powerful, vainglorious and with a larger household even than the royal one (the magnificent royal palace at Hampton Court was in fact originally his), the Cardinal was seen to embody everything that was wrong with England. By the time that Wolsey had outlasted his usefulness, Protestant commentators rejoiced that he would be rejected alongside the devilish Roman Church he represented. The play itself makes the reason for Wolsey’s downfall more specific, and more ironic. Wolsey’s bitter enemy Suffolk gleefully narrates the ins and outs:
The Cardinal’s letters to the Pope miscarried,
And came to th’eye o’th’King, wherein was read
How that the Cardinal did entreat his holiness
To stay the judgment o’th’ divorce, for if
It did take place, ‘I do,’ quote he, ‘perceive
My king is tangled in affection to
A creature of the Queen’s, Lady Anne Boleyn.’
(3.2.30-6)
And with these words Wolsey signs what will eventually prove his death sentence as well as his ejection from office. The complicating factor is of course that, at least in this instance, he has done absolutely nothing wrong: in fact, Wolsey has simply told the truth. The difficulty of course is that this truth is just a bit too sensitive to be heard – it makes the King’s actions seem somewhat…grubbier than he would prefer. But by this stage, everyone knows that Henry has tired of Katherine and fallen for Anne Boleyn (after dancing with her in Wolsey’s house, ironically enough). Even so, Henry is quick to claim that he desires a divorce not because he has fallen in love with Anne, but because Katherine is unable to give him the male heir he so desperately needs and wants. It is a curse that has resulted, or so Henry claims, because the marriage between them is actually void: Katherine was initially married to his older brother Arthur, but Arthur died soon afterwards and rather than break the political alliance with Spain, she was handed over to Henry instead. “Hence I took a thought,” Henry heatedly explains to the papal legate Campeius,
This was a judgment on me that my kingdom,
Well worthy the best heir o’th’ world, should not
Be gladded in’t by me.
(2.4.190-3)
If Campeius is unimpressed by these arguments (as Henry suspects he is), it is a cynicism only encouraged by the play. The King has often been portrayed as the play’s out-and-out hero, a Protestant monarch who finally banishes the arch-tempter Wolsey (as a previous King Henry banished Falstaff?) and takes control of England for himself. Yet that exemplary image is hardly to be found in Henry VIII. While in real life Henry married Anne Boleyn some four years after the rift with Katherine, in the play the marriage follows with what seems like indecent haste. Likewise, for all the King’s bluster about his “wounded conscience,” his courtiers (who are always the ones who know) have little doubt as to the reality:
Lord Chamberlain:
It seems the marriage with his brother’s wife
Has crept too near his conscience.
Suffolk:
No, his conscience
Has crept too near another lady.
(2.2.16-18)
The rib-nudging tone of the exchange – and its unfussy language, somewhat characteristic of the play – speaks volumes. And though Henry publicly undertakes to stay with his wife if the cardinals prove the marriage ‘lawful,’ Katherine sadly reveals that he has long since banished her from his bed.”
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From Garber:
“The cyclicality of structure offered by a play that ends with the birth of Elizabeth is mirrored, as well, by the clever and knowing way that locales within the play are tied to their contemporary (Jacobean) use. Thus York Place, the sumptuous palace that was the home of Cardinal Wolsey, grander than any residence owned by Henry VIII, is taken over by Henry after Wolsey’s fall, renamed Whitehall, and chosen as the place for the celebration after Anne Bullen’s coronation as queen. In act 4 the Second Gentleman says the coronation procession “paced back again/To York Place, where the feast is held,” and the First Gentleman corrects him:
Sir,
You must no more call it York Place – that’s past,
For since the Cardinal fell, that title’s lost.
‘Tis now the King’s, and called Whitehall.
(4.1.95-98)
Whitehall was King James’s palace at the time of the first performance of the play; the audience would have registered the pertinence of this ‘doubling,’ as they would, at the same time, have appreciated that ‘’Tis now the King’s’ was true in their time as in Henry VIII’s.
Likewise in the play the divorce proceedings of King Henry against his first wife, Katherine, takes place at Blackfriars, which had been – before Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries – a residence for Dominican friars (whose black robes gave the building its name). ‘The most convenient place that I can think of/For such receipt in learning is Blackfriars,’ the King declares to the Cardinals Wolsey and Campeius, who are appointed by the Pope as supposedly ‘unpartial’ judges in the divorce case (2.2.137-138). But by 1613 – and in fact, since 1608 – Blackfriars was not a monastery but a private theater leased by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men. It is quite possible that All Is True (as the play would then have been known) was first staged there in 1613. So Henry’s mention of Blackfriars, like the First Gentleman’s mention of Whitehall, might well have produced for the Jacobean audience that sense of uncanny déjà vu that is one of the most unsettling and pleasurable sensations of drama.
Although the play begins with an account of Wolsey’s venality and thus in some sense aims, dramatically, at his discomfiture and disgrace, the plight of Katherine is at the center of the action. Katherine herself appears early in the next scene to plead with the King on behalf of the ordinary people who suffer from unjust taxation. (Those afflicted, ‘clothiers all,’ including, in the Duke of Norfolk’s summary, the ‘spinsters, carders, fullers, [and] weavers’ who make up the domestic cloth trade (1.2.32, 34), contrast sharply, in their homely product, with the fancy and affected French fashions that will be deplored in the following scene). This initial introduction to Katherine presents her as well-spoken, and passionate, and the King treats her as a partner (‘You have half our power’ [1.2.12]). His meeting with Anne, and their flirtation, arouses in him some belated qualms of ‘conscience’:
Chamberlain:
It seems the marriage with his brother’s wife
Has crept too near his conscience.
Suffolk:
No, his conscience
Has crept too near another lady.
(2.2.15-17)
Henry’s official doubts derive from the fact that he has married his brother’s widow. Katherine, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, had wed Henry’s older brother, Arthur, then Prince of Wales, in 1501. Arthur’s death a year later left Henry the heir to the throne, and he and Katherine were married shortly after he became King in 1509. As she reminds the King – and the audience – Katherine bore Henry many children, but only one lived, the future Mary I (‘Bloody Mary,’ 4. 1553-1558, succeeded by Elizabeth I), and Henry, whether disingenuously or not, takes this as a sign that the marriage was unlawful. (Various biblical injunctions proscribed the marriage of a brother’s widow as a kind of incest.) His request for a papally sanctioned divorce led ultimately to his split with Rome and the founding of the Church of England.
The question of ‘incest,’ and especially Katherine’s long and eloquent speech on her own behalf, invites comparison with the situation of Gertrude in Hamlet, who married her husband’s brother. Hamlet calls the liaison ‘incestuous’ (Hamlet 1.2.157), and the ghost of old Hamlet describes his brother as ‘that incestuous, that adulterate beast’ (Hamlet 1.5.42). In Henry VIII, Henry’s description of Katherine as ‘[s]ometimes our brother’s wife’ (2.4.178) is close to the play’s source in Holinshed, but also, inevitably to modern ears, recalls Claudius’s ‘our sometime sister, now our queen’ (Hamlet 1.2.8). Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, a play written in 1610, close to the time of Henry VIII, is another queen accused in open court, and wrongly; her words of love and self-defense in act 3, scene 2, of that play are often compared to Katherine’s. Hermione is accused of adultery with Polixenes, a man her husband once regarded as his ‘twinned’ brother. Hermione’s defense, like Katherine’s is at once proud and loving, and makes reference to her royal heritage (‘The Emperor of Russia was my father’). Katherine’s ‘We are a queen, or long have dreamed so’ links her with both historical affinity with a story that goes – quite understandably – unmentioned in the play: the fact that Henry VIII had an affair with Anne Bullen’s sister Mary before he met Anne. Leviticus forbade marrying a brother’s wife and was equally firm about not ‘taking a wife to thy sister’ (Leviticus 18:16, 18). Ultimately the King accused Anne of being both adulterous and incestuous. She was sentenced to death together with her brother, with whom, it was claimed, she had had an incestuous affair.
Katherine’s refusal of Wolsey as her judge allows for a magnificent exit, as she storms out of the consistory, to the admiration of the King, who is moved to an expression of familiar affection: ‘Go thy ways, Kate’ (2.4.130). Nowhere else in the play does he use this affectionate nickname, and to this point the audience may not have associated the royal, and Spanish, Katherine with her Shakespearean namesakes, from Kate in The Taming of the Shrew to Hotspur’s wife in Henry IV Part I, nor to that French Princess Catherine whom an earlier King Henry also suddenly called ‘Kate’ (Henry V 5.2). The King’s subsequent speech in her praise (‘That man i’th’ world who shall report she has/A better wife, let him in naught be trusted’ (2.4.131-132), however reluctantly delivered, rings true.”
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From Bloom:
“The puzzle of the play is the king, who is not the Holbein-Charles Laughton Henry VIII, and always remains ambiguous. Shakespeare, with his customary political caution, avoids any suggestion that Henry is particularly culpable when his favorites fall, though the playwright also never quite exonerates the king. Even the Catholic-Protestant confrontation is so muted that Shakespeare hardly appears to take sides. The play is eloquently plangent, though it purports to conclude with a celebratory patriotism when Cranmer prophesies the glorious reign of the just-born Queen Elizabeth. The audience has to reflect that queen Anne Bullen (Boleyn) joined Cromwell and Thomas More (mentioned in the play as replacing Wolsey) in being beheaded, and that Cranmer is spared by Henry only to be burned alive at a later time. No one in the drama is endowed with any inwardness; they are heraldic pictures with beautiful voices, which is all that Shakespeare wants them to be. Only the king is not a speaking portrait; whether he is more or less than that is beyond judgment, because of Shakespeare’s evasiveness. Henry, with all-but-absolute power, somehow escapes responsibility for the evil he has sanctioned in Wolsey, and perpetrated against Buckingham and Katherine. We are not even offered conflicting perspectives on the king; he lacks the nasty consistency that might have made him interesting. A director and an actor can do about anything they wish with the part; every staging I’ve seen did not abandon the Holbein-Laughton archetype, though there is little in the text to support it.
Why did Shakespeare write Henry VIII? The alternating title, All Is True, is capable of various interpretations, none of them particularly persuasive. Some is true, some isn’t, as Shakespeare probably realized. The representation of the king would be unlikely, except that it scarcely exists. Henry at first is not at all clever; he is Wolsey’s gull, and is enlightened only when the wicked Cardinal-Chamberlain gets careless in correspondence. A different Henry saves Cranmer late in the play, but we are told nothing about why the king’s judgment has improved. We cannot even know whether Henry discards Katherine because of his insatiable temperament, though blaming it on Wolsey is implausible. Shakespeare accepts everything. ‘All is true’ translates into: Don’t make moral judgments; they are neither safe nor helpful. Look at this grand pageant; listen to these elegiac laments; share the nostalgia for the glory that was Elizabeth.
Henry VIII is a processional, a reversion to pre-Shakespearean theater. Shakespeare, weary of his own genius, here undoes most of what he had invented. We are not upon the stage in Henry VIII, except insofar as any of us believes that she or he has fallen from greatness. A dramatic poem of things-in-their-farewell, this is a performance piece, perhaps a last hurrah (though Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen followed it). Russell Fraser, commending Shakespeare for having ‘mastered the noblest rhetoric ever fashioned in English,’ wryly also notes that the protagonists of Henry VIII ‘dance to the same tune when the last fit of their greatness is on them.’ Going down, everyone indeed is equally noble in this play; Shakespeare’s ‘distincts’ are gone. Dr. Johnson thought that ‘the genius of Shakespeare comes in and goes out with Katherine,’ a judgment that surprises me, since the last fits of Buckingham and of Wolsey remarkably resemble the laments of Katherine. Still, Johnson, the great moralist, was moved by ‘the meek sorrows and virtuous distress’ of the cast-off queen, and Buckingham is hardly meek or Wolsey virtuous. This dramatic poem went a little to one side of Johnson, who loved Cordelia best of Shakespeare’s heroines. And yet Henry VIII, considered for its poetry alone, deserves more aesthetic esteem than it has been accorded. Like The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII marks a new and original style, one that transcends the stage images who chant it. We hear its first culmination when Buckingham goes to his ‘long divorce of steel,’ and compares his fate to his father’s, murdered by Richard III’s command:
When I came hither I was Lord High Constable
And Duke of Buckingham: now poor Edward Bohun;
Yet I am richer than any base accusers,
That never knew what truth meant: I now seal it,
And with that blood will make ‘em one day groan for’t.
My noble father Henry of Buckingham,
Who first rais’d head against usurping Richard,
Flying for succor to his servant Banister.
Being distress’d, was by that wretch betry’d,
And without trial feel; God’s peace be with him.
Henry the Seventh succeeding, truly pitying
My father’s loss, like a most royal prince
Restor’d me to my honours; and out of ruins
Made my name once more noble. Now his son,
Henry the Eighth, life, honour, name and all
That made me happy, at one stroke has taken
For ever from the world. I had my trial,
And must needs say a noble one; which makes me
A little happier than my wretched father:
Yet thus far we are one in fortunes; both
Fell by our servants, by those men we lov’d most:
A most unnatural and faithless service.
Heaven has an end in all; yet you that hear me,
This from a dying man receive as certain:
Where you are liberal of your loves and counsels,
Be sure you be not loose; for those you make friends
And give your hearts to, when they once perceive
The least rub in your fortunes, fall away
Like water from ye, never found again
But where they mean to sink ye. All good people
Pray for me; I must now forsake ye; that last hour
Of my long weary life is come upon me:
Farewell;
And when you would say something that is said,
Speak how I fell. I have done, and God forgive me.
(II.i.102-36)
Shakespeare’s own obsession with betrayal by a friend seems very strong in this, reminding us of the situation of the Sonnets, and of the Player King’s speech on the contrariness of wills and fates in Hamlet. There is also an affinity with the Funeral Elegy for Will Peter, composed just before Henry VIII, where the poet’s bitterness at having been slandered is pungently conveyed, with several anticipations of the play’s laments. Perhaps Shakespeare himself felt that he was only ‘a little happier than his wretched father.’ We do not know, nor are we at all certain whether the Blatant Beast of gossip had impugned the poet with regard to Will Peter, perhaps for a relationship like that conveyed by the Sonnets. There is a spiritual music in the formal complaints of Henry VIII that carries an undersong of personal sorrow, at least to my ear.”
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And from Frank Kermode:
“Henry VIII, or, to give it its alternative title, All Is True, displays, in the parts of it that seem certainly to be Shakespeare’s, what the Oxford editors call ‘grammatical muscularity.’ It is an episodic history play, beginning with the fall of the Duke of Buckingham as contrived by Cardinal Wolsey; the King’s divorce and his preference for Anne Bullen over his first wife, Katherine; Wolsey’s disgrace; the coronation of Anne and the birth of her daughter, Elizabeth; the King’s promotion of Thomas Cranmer and the new favorite’s escape from a plot to overthrow him; and, finally, the baptism of Elizabeth, with a prophecy of her glorious future.
These events are enacted with notable energy and strong characterization. Shakespeare’s earlier history plays ended with the accession of Henry VII, but this one, in describing the reign of his son, was presenting to an audience all of whom had lived under Elizabeth I – dead only ten years or so – an account of the circumstances of her birth. Her very existence was a defiance of Rome, and her long reign, though full of religious conflict, saw the end of the Marian Catholic persecutions and the establishment of the Church of England. The early part of the reign of James I was marked by a revival of interest in the dead Queen’s achievements; she had presided over the establishment of England as an imperial power and won a victory over the Pope, now seen as Antichrist. King Henry VIII’s divorce was a happy one (though not for Katherine) in that it made possible the birth of this incomparable Queen.
King James liked to be thought a peace-maker, and he wanted peace with Spain, the great Catholic enemy; so the Spanish Katherine is treated tenderly, with much attention to the sadness of her fate. The King’s theological scruples concerning the legality of his marriage to the widow of his brother are given their place, but so is his imperious passion for Anne Above all, the play is a vindication of Protestantism, and its conception is plausibly related to the marriage celebration, in February 1613, of James’s daughter Elizabeth to the Protestant Elector of Bohemia. It would seem that at the time of its writing the play had a more acute historical and political interest than any of the earlier history plays.
The opening passages are beyond doubt Shakespearian. Norfolk’s description of the ceremonies at the Field of the Cloth of Gold may bring to mind some passages of Antony and Cleopatra, and certainly do not lack ‘muscularity:’
Men might say
Till this time pomp was single, but now married
To one above itself. Each following day
Became the next day’s master, till the last
Made former wonders its. To-day the French,
All clinquant, all in gold, like heathen gods,
Shone down the English; and, to-morrow, they
Made Britain India: every man that stood
Show’d like a mine. Their dwarfish pages were
As cherubins, all gilt; the madams too,
Not us’d to toil, did almost sweat to bear
The pride upon them, that their very labor
Was to them as a painting. Now this masque
Was cried incomparable; and th’ ensuing night
Made it a fool and beggar.
(I.i.14-28)
Norfolk is an enemy of Wolsey, who ‘set the body and limbs’/Of this great sport together’ (46-47), and a touch of irony contributes to his excess, but the verse has that tortured, involuted quality I have noted elsewhere. The idea is of pomp marrying pomp and being the stronger for it, or, as Johnson put it, ‘Pomp is only married to pomp, but the new pomp is greater than the old.’ He calls the passage ‘a noisy periphrase.’ One single pomp seems to be greater than the other, its nationality not specified (and presumably changing from day to day). The complexity of this idea seems much beyond its value; nothing much is gained by the introduction of the notion that one day married another ‘above itself,’ and little by adding that ‘Each following day/Became the next day’s master’ (where ‘next’ means ‘the one before’ and the culminating point is that the last day owned all the others). The awkward terminal possessive reinforces the sense that nothing above the ordinary is being said, though it seems to cultivate an appearance of meeting exceptional lexical and metaphorical demands.
The point about the gilded pages and sweating ladies is better made and amusing. But Norfolk continues in the knotty vein, so that as one reads one is always pausing (as audiences cannot) to work out what he is saying and to wonder why he is doing it so obscurely:
As I belong to worship and affect
In honor honesty, the tract of ev’ry thing
Would by a good discourser lose some life,
Which action’s self was tongue to.
(39.42)
These lines mean that he is prepared to swear that even an expert raconteur could not, in his description of it, equal the thing itself as it was. The personification of actions, the redundant affirmation of his honor and honesty, the affected ‘tract’ – all this is typical of the muscle-bound contortions of the late Shakespeare’s language. The remainder of the opening scene carries a load of explanation and is more business-like, though the style is heavily parenthetical, as if, even in simple exposition, there was always some justification or second thought one had better not leave unsaid.
The fine second scene contains the Queen’s protest against Wolsey and the King’s response to the accuser of Buckingham, strongly written though occasionally obscure. Before Buckingham’s trial there is comment on new fashions, and a prime example of what this play offers more than any other, spectacle – the feast given by Wolsey, and the masque.
The opening of Act II is the first scene in which the tone and quality of the verse are distinctly different. Its centerpiece is the farewell speech of Buckingham, which, from its opening lines, announces the change of key:
All good people,
You that thus far have come to pity me,
Here what I say, and then go home and lose me.
I have this day receiv’d a traitor’s judgment,
And by that name must die; yet, heaven bear witness,
And if I have a conscience, let it sink me,
Even as the axe falls, if I be not faithful!
The characteristic feminine endings, giving each line a sort of dying fall at the end, are already established, their elegiac quality contrasted with the rough ‘masculine’ force of that opening scene (or of Coriolanus or indeed of Prospero’s expository speeches in The Tempest). This is a manner normally associated with Fletcher, though I suppose it would not have been beyond Shakespeare to achieve, if he wanted, a softly elegiac tone, such as is required here and in the later scenes of Wolsey’s disgrace. The transition from one manner to the other is particularly marked in III.ii, where Shakespeare is commonly credited with the first 203 lines, the remainder being left to Fletcher. The scene describes the King’s reaction to the discovery that Wolsey has been lavishly lining his pockets as well as working secretly against his master’s matrimonial plans. It is most lively and effective narrative. Not knowing that the King has been given written evidence of his treachery, Wolsey mediates, aside, against the presumption of Anne Bullen and her friends:
The late Queen’s gentlewoman? a knight’s daughter?
To be her mistress’ mistress? the Queen’s queen?
This candle burns not clear, ‘tis I must snuff it,
Then out it goes. What though I know her virtuous
And well deserving? yet I know her for
A spleeny Lutheran, and not wholesome to
Our cause, that she should lie i’th’ bosom of
Our hard-rul’d king. Again, there is sprung up
An heretic, an arch-one, Cranmer; one
Hath crawled into the favor of the King,
And is his oracle.
(94-104)
This is serviceable Shakespeare of the late period, not the kind of excited meditation we find in Aufidius or Prospero but a persuasive representation of thoughts turned over in the mind. The run-ons between 98 and 99, and more particularly from 99 to 100 and from 100 to 101, almost give the effect of prose divided as verse, of a marked, easy informality. All four lines, 98-101, end in prepositions, which hardly permit more than the slightest pause.”
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Thoughts? Enjoying the play?
Our next reading: Act Three of Henry VIII (All Is True)
Katherine of Aragon, Henry’s wife, soon to be divorced
Anne Boleyn, Katherine’s maid-of-honor and Henry’s soon to be second wife
Cardinal Wolsey
Thomas Cranmer, later Archbishop of Canterbury and his colleague, Bishop of Lincoln
Stephen Gardiner, Henry’s new secretary, later Bishop of Winchester
Cardinal Campeius, ambassador of the Pope
Lord Caputius, ambassador of Emperor Charles V
Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s advisor
Duke of Buckingham
Lord Abergavenny and the Earl of Surrey, Buckingham’s sons-in-law
Nobles, gentlemen and officials at the English court: Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, Lord Sands, Sir Thomas Lovell, Sir Anthony Denny, Sir Henry Guildford, Sir Nicholas Vaux, the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Chancellor
Three Gentlemen at the court
Buckingham’s Surveyor
Griffith, Katherine’s usher
Patience, Katherine’s waiting woman
Old Lady, Anne Boleyn’s companion
Doctor Butts, Henry’s physician
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Act One: The English court is abuzz with news from the Field of Cloth of Gold, a spectacular peace conference between England and France. But the influence wielded by Cardinal Wolsey (Lord Chancellor and the mastermind behind the event) is the source of much jealousy among certain lords. Sneering at his ambition and low birth, Buckingham, Abergavenny and Norfolk grumble that the peace deal with the French is already falling apart. But Wolsey is one step ahead of his enemies, and Buckingham is arrested. The Cardinal seems unstoppable: no sooner are they repealed than Wolsey cunningly puts out word that it is he who has called for the changes. Though suspicions run high, the King has other matters to attend to: namely the beautiful Anne Boleyn, his wife’s maid-of-honor, whom he dances with and kisses at the Cardinal’s palace.
Apparently, one reason that the Globe burnt down so quickly was that its audience was too engrossed in the play to notice. While their eyes were “more attentive to the show,” wrote the diplomat Sir Henry Wotton to his nephew, the flames “kindled inwardly, and ran around like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds.” The authors may thus have had cause to rue the success of Henry VIII, only in its third or fourth performance (or first, according to Marjorie Garber) at the time: perhaps if some of the spectators had allowed their attention to wander, the theater might have been saved. The very fact that a cannon was being fired to welcome King Henry – not as the more usual shorthand for a battle scene – speaks volumes. Henry VIII was written to astound its first audiences.
Even in its four-hundred-year-old play script, Henry VIII gives a vivid impression of its visual punch. Many of the play’s pivotal moments are attended by grand theatrical set pieces, all described with unusually detailed (for Shakespeare) stage directions. The first big moment, Wolsey’s banquet in Act One – the first scene that hints that the King, dancing with Anne Boleyn, will stray from his marriage – requires several tables on stage, copious guests and plenty of music. In Act Two (as you shall see), the aftermath of the Duke of Buckingham’s trial is designed to seize our attention with his ignominious entrance, flanked by ‘halberdiers’ (armed soldiers) and a throng of noblemen and commoners.
But these pale in comparison to the visual splendors later in that same Act when Queen Katherine herself is put on trial. As scene four begins, both “trumpets” and “cornetts” sound as the court proceeds, ever so majestically into session, led by a train of twenty-four names personnel, ranging from functionaries, such as “two vergers with silver wands” and “two gentlemen bearing two great silver pillars,” all the way up to a gang of some five bishops – not to mention the estranged King and Queen themselves, each attended by numerous flunkies (2.4.0.SD). As is attested by the extravagant 1520 peace conference between England and France known as the Field of Cloth of Gold (with which the play begins), Henry VIII’s real-life court was acutely aware of the political value of majestic ceremonial trappings – and Henry VIII does it best to reproduce them. Following that court scene, three other spectacular events map out the course of the rest of the play: Anne’s coronation, represented by an extensive “royal train”; Queen Katherine’s dream vision, featuring “six personages in white robes” who dance around her to the accompaniment of music; and finally the christening of the young Princess Elizabeth (Anne Boleyn’s daughter and the future Queen) that brings the play to its conclusion.
The play itself urges audiences to take this kind of realism seriously. From Wotton’s letter describing the fire we get the impression that “The Life of King Henry the Eight,” as it was printed in the 1623 First Folio, was more usually known by a jaunty alternative title, All Is True. There was also a brief Jacobean fad for colloquial, playful titles – Samuel Rowley’s play When You See Me, You Know Me (which was revived in 1613) was also about King Henry, while Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1605) appears to have been a source for Shakespeare and Fletcher. Shakespeare’s own taste for tongue-in-cheek names appears in the comedies as Much Ado About Nothing and What You Will, the latter being better known, of course, as Twelfth Night. But “All is True” is more outrageously daring than any of those: it seems to suggest not merely that “all” will be “true” in the end, but insists that what the playwright (or playwrights) are putting on stage really did happen. As I mentioned, the play’s taste for spectacular staging makes it quite apparent that reproducing the visual realities of Henry’s court is a major concern. And as the Prologue himself puts it,
To rank our chosen truth with such a show
As fool and fight is, beside forfeiting
Our own brains, and the opinion that we bring
To make that only true we now intend,
Will leave us never an understanding friend,
Therefore, for goodness’ sake, and as you are known
The first and happiest hearers of the town,
Be sad as we would make ye. Think ye see
The very persons of our noble story
As they were living; think you see them great,
And followed with the general throng and sweat
Of thousand friends; then, in a moment, see
How soon this mightiness meets misery.
(Prologue, 17-30)
This is no knockabout farce, no “fool and fight” show, but a drama to feed the mind. Furthermore, it is drama intended to be indistinguishable from the “truth” of real life: unlike Henry V’s Chorus, who urges spectators to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” (Prologue, 23), there is no apology here for the limitations of the Globe. And there would have been an even more heightened sense of “truth” at the King’s Men’s new venue, where the play may have transferred after the fire. Located in the upmarket Blackfriars area north of the river, their recently refurbished indoor theater sat on the site of an old Dominican monastery, and contained the very hall in which Queen Katherine’s divorce case was tried, eighty-odd years earlier. When the trial occurs on stage in Act Two, it must have been difficult to avoid a sense that events were being played out as, once upon a time, they had been for real. “The very persons of our noble story,” it seems had stood almost on the same spot as the actors.
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From Garber:
“As for onstage/offstage reports, among the key scenes in this last category are the discussion by Norfolk and Buckingham of the (offstage) meeting of Henry VIII and Francis I of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold (I.1); a comically dismissive account of the deleterious effects of French fashion at the English court, in which the sartorial style is discussed as a kind of heretical religion (returned travelers are imagined as ‘renouncing clean/The faith they have in tennis and tall stockings,/Short blistered breeches, and those types of travel’ in order to ‘understand again like honest men (1.3.29-32)); the conversation between two gentlemen in act 2, scene I, in which they describe the dignified bearing of Buckingham when accused of high treason, and later in the scene, after Buckingham has entered, spoken, and gone off to his death, the same gentlemen’s court gossip about the impending divorce (‘Did you not of late days hear/A buzzing of a separation/Between the King and Katherine?’ (2.1.148-150)); and the remarkable description by the Third Gentleman, who has been to the Abbey to see Anne’s coronation (4.1)
The discussion of the meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold is a particularly effective example of a Shakespearean ‘unscene,’ closely resembling the scene (5.2) in The Winter’s Tale in which various gentlemen report on the offstage ‘wonder’ of Perdita’s return, and also Encobarbus’s account of the meeting of the lovers at the Cydnus in Antony and Cleopatra (2.2). In The Winter’s Tale one gentleman asks, ‘Did you see the meeting of the two kings?’ and, receiving a negative answer, launches into a panegyric: ‘Then have you lost a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of. There might you have beheld one joy crown another (Winter’s Tale 5.2.36, 38-40). The rhetorical ‘inexpressibility topos’ of narrative poetry (the idea that words cannot do justice to this event) here comes to life on the stage. The Duke of Norfolk in Henry VIII offers similar report – Buckingham has missed the events, kept home by an ‘untimely ague’ – with the key difference that Norfolk’s report of offstage marvels is deeply ironic:
Norfolk:
Then you lost
The view of earthly glory. Men might say
Till this time pomp was single, but now married
To one above itself. Each following day
Became the next day’s master, till the last
Made former wonder its. Today the French,
All clinquant all in gold, like heathen gods
Shone down the English; and tomorrow they
Made Britain India. Every man that stood
Showed like a mine. Their dwarfish pages were
As cherubim, all gilt; the Mesdames too,
Not used to toil, did almost sweat to bear
The pride upon them, that their very labor
Was to them a painting…
……………….
The two kings
Equal in lustre, were now best, now worst,
As presence did present them…
When these suns –
For so they phrase ‘em – by their heralds challenged
The noble spirits to arms, they did perform
Beyond thought’s compass, that former fabulous story
Being now seen possible enough, got credit
That Bevis was believed.
Buckingham:
O, you go far!
(I.1.13-38)
The similarities to Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra are worth noting. The gilt cherubim and almost-sweating ladies, whose ‘very labour/Was to them as a painting,’ are close relatives to Cleopatra and her Cupid-like fanning boys:
Enobarbus:
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne
Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description. She did lie
In her pavilion – cloth of gold, of tissue –
O’er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With diver’s coloured fans whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.
Agrippa:
O, rare for Antony!
(Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.197-212)
But even the skeptical Enobarbus was, for the moment, enraptured by the Egyptian queen. Norfolk is far less enchanted by the ‘masque’ at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, especially when it comes time to identify the master of ceremonies for these expensive entertainments. Henry’s Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey:
Norfolk:
All this was ordered by the good discretion
Of the right reverend Cardinal of York
Buckingham:
The devil speed him! No man’s pie is freed
From his ambitious finger.
(Henry VIII. I.1.50-53)
Wolsey, the lowborn son of a butcher, is in Buckingham’s view ‘a keech,’ or lump of fat (I.1.55) and a ‘butcher’s cur…venom mouthed’ (120). The Cardinal is his enemy, and ‘the private difference’ between the two men will present the first of the play’s several one-on-one rivalries.
What is also established, very clearly, in this scene is Wolsey’s profligacy, or rather his willingness to spend others’ money for political effect. The costs of the French adventure have, for several noble families, ‘sickened their estates,’ and ‘many/Have broke their backs with laying manors on ‘em’ (1.1. 82, 84-85). The familiar metaphor of sickness in the state afflicts the nobility. Shortly King Henry will take up a version of the same theme for his own purposes, blaming the absence of a male heir on his ‘incestuous’ marriage to Katherine.”
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And from Tony Tanner:
“The play starts with a description of the famous meeting of Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520) – a vast Renaissance tournament at which the kings vied to show off their magnificence. It ends with an extended depiction of the baptism of Elizabeth (1533), accompanied by a rapturous ‘prophecy’ by Cranmer of the glories she will bring to England (not so difficult to write, one might think, with the hindsight of 1613);
This royal infant – heaven still move about her! –
Though in her cradle, yet now promises
Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings,
Which time shall bring to ripeness.
(V.v.17-20)
‘Thou speakest wonders’ says the happy father-king, and that is the note the play ends on, a climax very suitable for a dramatic epithalamion in honor of the just-married Princess Elizabeth, as Bullough points out. In between we have, primarily, the trial, fall, and death of, in turn, Buckingham, Katherine of Aragon, and Cardinal Wolsey; plus the (thwarted) trial and rise of Archbishop Cranmer. Then – the ground clear – Henry’s happy marriage to Anne Boleyn and the rapidly ensuing (historically, somewhat too rapidly!) birth of Elizabeth. As usual, Shakespeare does some selecting and rearranging and chronological collapsing. Henry did not marry Anne until 1532, but his meeting with her is placed before Buckingham’s condemnation in 1521; while his marriage to Anne is placed before Wolsey’s fall and death, which in fact took place in 1530. Katherine of Aragon died in 1536, but in the play this is made to occur before Princess Elizabeth is born (1533), as is the plot against Cranmer, which probably took place in 1540. My details are, as usual, from Bullough, who gives his opinion that the reasons for the changes were ‘to give some illusion of enchantment or interconnection to the incidents, and to suggest dramatic parallels or contrasts emergent in a survey of the whole reign.’ Cutting the action off where he does means that Shakespeare does not oblige himself to (avoids having to) address the darker and more problematical aspects of Henry’s reign, and allows him his triumphant, not to say triumphalist, conclusion, packed with happy auguries under a cloudless sky.
But whatever we make of this conclusion (and truncation), the predominant mood is one of sadness, as indeed the Prologue anticipates:
I come no more to make you laugh. Things now
That bear a weighty and serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,
Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow,
We now present. Those that can pity, here
May, if they think it well, let fall a tear:
The subject will deserve it…
Be sad, as we would make ye. Think ye see
The very persons of our noble story
As they were living. Think you see them great,
And followed with the general throng and sweat
Of thousand friends. Then, in a moment, see
How soon this mightiness meets misery;
And if you can be merry then, I’ll say
A man may weep upon his wedding day.
(1-7, 25-32)
Sad – not tragic. Sad, rather in the way Hardy describes sadness. ‘It is the ongoing – i.e. the becoming – of the world that produces its sadness. If the world stood still at a felicitous moment, there would be no sadness in it.’ ‘Becoming’ also involves ‘Be-going’ (if I may be allowed the word), just as ‘ongoing’ must end in ‘off-going,’ and it is the going off of greatness which produces the sadness of this play. ‘My soul grows sad with troubles’ (III.i.1), says Queen Katherine, foreseeing her displacement and demise. ‘And when you would say something that is sad,/Speak how I fell’ (II.i.135-6) – these are, effectively, Buckingham’s last words. The word ‘fall’ tolls throughout the play. The Cardinal/will have his will, and she must fall’ (II.i.167).
I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening.
And no man see me more.
(III.ii.225-7)
Wolsey rightly predicts. ‘Press not a falling man too far’ (III.ii.333), says the compassionate Lord Chamberlain, echoed later by Cromwell – ‘tis a cruelty/To load a falling m an’ (V.iii.76-7). ‘These are stars indeed,’ says the Second Gentleman, watching the Coronation process of Henry and Anne. ‘And sometimes falling ones,’ rejoins the First Gentleman. He may intend a slight joke about the royal ladies’ virtue; but, more generally, the play is, indeed, full of falling stars. ‘No more of that,’ adds the well-mannered Second gentleman; and indeed, the play now puts the ‘falls’ behind, and concentrates on ‘ongoing’ and ‘becoming’ – marriage and birth. But the play as a whole has, unmistakably and inexpugnably, a dying fall. (The falls, incidentally, are more fully elaborated, and the ‘stars’ made more noble in their falling, than they are in Shakespeare’s sources. Frank Kermode once described the play as ‘an anthology of falls,’ and thought it represented a return to the medieval conception of history as found in The Mirror for Magistrates).
One of the falls is fully deserved; one is singularly unjust; and one is curiously indeterminate – but they have one feature in common. The one who falls is, initially, in some way ‘chafed’ – angry, rebellious, resistant: but they all come to accept their doom with dignity, ‘patience,’ and forgiveness. And they approach their deaths in a state of ‘calm of mind, all passion spent.’ Reconciliation, both to one’s lot, and with former enemies, accusers, opponents, is the order of the day. It is this that has led some critics to see the play as fully consonant with, even a continuation of, Shakespeare’s more famous ‘last plays.’ I will come back to this view with which, while I understand it, I ultimately strongly disagree. But let us consider the fallen in their falling, for these are undoubtedly the most powerful moments, or scenes, in the play.
The play effectively starts with Buckingham in a temper about Wolsey’s devious manipulations and ruthless self-advancement. Norfolk warns him against Wolsey’s malice, potency, and ‘high hatred’:
And let your reason with your choler question
What ‘tis you go about…
Anger is like
A full hot horse who, being allowed his way,
Self-mettle tires him…
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot
That it do singe yourself. We may outrun
By violent swiftness that which we run at,
And lose by overrunning. Know you not
The fire that mounts the liquor till’t run o’er
In seeming to augment it wastes it?
(I.i.130-34, 140-45)
This sort of compression of thought and vigor of image is characteristic of parts, but only parts, of the play (and, of course, claimed for Shakespeare by those who want to give the somewhat more soft-focused, languid, even sentimental parts to Fletcher.) This power often shows in Buckingham’s angry speech; as, for instance, when he is blaming Wolsey for arranging the ruinously pompous expensive Field of the Cloth of Gold show –
That swallowed so much treasure, and like a glass
Did break i’ th’ wrenching.
(I.i.166-7)
‘Wrenching’ is a dialect word for ‘rinsing,’ and more strongly suggests a powerful, even violent, physical act. In this, it is characteristic of many of the images in the play which, as Caroline Spurgeon noted, evoke ‘bodily action of almost every kind: walking, stepping, marching, running and leaping; crawling, hobbling, falling, carrying, climbing and perspiring; swimming, diving, flinging and peeping; crushing, shaking, trembling, sleeping, stirring, and – especially and repeatedly – the picture of the body or back bent and weighed down under a heavy burden.’ At one point, after a distressed Cranmer has left the King, Henry comments:
He has strangled
His language in his tears.
(V.i.156-7)
That is a line, I venture to say, that only Shakespeare could have written.
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Our next reading: Act two of Henry VIII (All Is True)
Act Three: Separated from the royal party while out celebrating May Day, Arcite is suddenly confronted by Palamon. The two argue over Emilia once again, before agreeing to fight a duel over her. At the same time, the Jailer’s Daughter, is desperately searching the woods for Palamon when she comes upon a group of countrymen rehearsing an entertainment. Realizing that she has seemingly lost her mind, the performers include here in their masque, which they then present to Theseus and his companions. And in yet another part of the wood, Arcite brings his cousin armor but no sooner do the two begin go fight when they are interrupted by Theseus and his party. When the Duke condemns them to death, Emilia pleads for the sentence to be commuted to banishment, but the kinsmen turn down the offer (both preferring to die rather than never see her again). Theseus then demands that Emilia choose between the two, but when she is unable to do so, he agrees to supervise a final contest to win her hand.
“We then go off to prison with Palamon and Arcite, but since this is part of John Fletcher’s share in the play, we can evade it, except for noting that the cousins fall in love with Emilia at first sight, thus destroying their own friendship forever, as in Chaucer. Shakespeare began writing again by supplying a first scene to Act III, where Arcite, long since liberated by old acquaintance with Theseus’s friend Pirithous, is wandering lovelorn in the woods, while everyone else is off a-maying. On this fateful Mayday, the still-shackled Palamon, freshly escaped from prison, confronts Arcite, and the two agree on a fight to the death, the winner take Emilia. The scene has a mad, irrealistic charm, as Shakespeare juxtaposes their high rhetoric of chivalry with their mutually insane, regretful need to immolate one another. It is difficult to describe the comedy of their encounter, parallels being few, but some lines of Arcite’s catch the flavor:
“There is, however, another love story in the making, one with a less ‘noble’ shape and – for a while at least – boding a far less happy ending. For the Jailer’s Daughter has fallen in love with Palamon, just as Palamon has fallen in love with Emilia. Smitten, the Jailer’s Daughter frees Palamon from prison. He encounters Arcite in the wood, where the two kinsmen determine to fight a duel for the right to claim Emilia as ‘my mistress’ (3.1.29) – a duel that takes place in act 3, scene 6, and constitutes the second of this play’s ‘broken,’ or interrupted, ceremonies.
The Play's The Thing 