'Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness!'
Cardinal Wolsey, stripped of the seal and the chancellorship
Shakespeare · Histories
Henry VIII
1613
History (All Is True) — written with John Fletcher
A late collaboration with John Fletcher, and the play during which the Globe burned down. Its alternative title is All Is True, and it proceeds by a series of falls: the Duke of Buckingham to the scaffold, Queen Katherine of Aragon divorced after a great trial scene at Blackfriars, and Cardinal Wolsey stripped of everything and left to a famous farewell. It ends not with the king's death but with Cranmer's prophecy over the infant Elizabeth at her christening — a Jacobean glance back at the queen who had died ten years before.
How to spot them
- ▸A cannon fired during a performance set fire to the Globe's thatch in 1613
- ▸Its alternative title is All Is True
- ▸A cardinal's fall, and a farewell to all his greatness
- ▸A divorced queen's trial, and a dream of dancing spirits with garlands
- ▸It ends with a christening, not a death
Scenes, characters & lines
'Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, He would not in mine age Have left me naked to mine enemies'
Wolsey to Cromwell, a few lines later
A queen refuses to plead before the court, kneels to her husband and then walks out
Katherine of Aragon at the legatine trial at Blackfriars
The Field of the Cloth of Gold, described in the opening scene by men who were there
The 1520 meeting of the English and French kings, all cloth of gold and ruin
A dying queen's vision of six white-robed spirits dancing with garlands over her head
A rare stage direction for a dream, in Act 4
An archbishop prophesies greatness over a baby at her christening
Cranmer on the infant Elizabeth: 'She shall be, to the happiness of England, An aged princess'
A play whose alternative title is All Is True
The name under which Sir Henry Wotton saw it in 1613
The performance during which the Globe caught fire from a stage cannon, on 29 June 1613
The theatre burned in under two hours; nobody was hurt
Key ideas
- Its structure is a chain of de casibus falls — Buckingham, Katherine, Wolsey — set against a rising Tudor future
- The praise of Elizabeth at the end is complicated by the play having just shown the ruthlessness that produced her
Quick-fire facts
- •The Globe burned down on 29 June 1613 when a cannon fired for the king's entrance set the thatch alight; Sir Henry Wotton's letter describes a man whose breeches caught fire being doused with bottle ale
- •Wotton calls the play All Is True, which was probably its original title; it was printed as The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight in the First Folio
- •James Spedding argued in 1850 that John Fletcher wrote much of the play; collaboration is now generally accepted
- •It is one of three late collaborations with Fletcher, with The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio
- •The sources are Holinshed's Chronicles and John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, the Book of Martyrs
- •The action covers roughly 1520 to 1533, from the Field of the Cloth of Gold to Elizabeth's christening, and omits the later wives entirely
- •With King John, it is one of only two Shakespeare histories outside the two tetralogies
- •Anne Boleyn appears as 'Anne Bullen'; the Duke of Buckingham is executed on perjured evidence in Act 2
Drill it — 9 cards
1 / 9new card
Sources
- Folger Shakespeare Library — Henry VIII
- Gordon McMullan (ed.) — King Henry VIII (All Is True) (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series)