Chapter 5 “Griped by Meaner Persons”?: Wolsey in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII or, All Is True

After a century of various representations, the evolving literary image of Cardinal Wolsey had accumulated a wide range of features, many of which were contradictory or purely polemical. As we have seen, Wolsey has been rep- resented in terms ranging from Skelton’s obscure Biblical jabs to Foxe’s polemi- cal editorializations, and while many of the individual features faded away, a number gained currency and were passed onto the next group of character- izations. We have seen how a number of these features (like calling Wolsey a ‘dog’, for example) originated as generalized insults and only through repeti- tion came to acquire more specific elements which became inextricably linked with the cardinal (calling Wolsey a “butcher’s dog,” if we continue with our previous example). William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s collaborative his- torical drama Henry VIII, or, All Is True provides an ideal bookend to a study of the sixteenth-century representations of the cardinal both in a chronologi- cal sense (the play was likely finished in the first decade of the seventeenth century) and in a more summative sense: Shakespeare and Fletcher drew on a century of evolving images of Wolsey to craft their own. We are thus given an opportunity to examine how these two master playwrights reflected upon Wolsey’s various literary incarnations and adapted those characterizations to reflect both contemporary concerns and interests. In addition, it provides us with a chance to better understand how chroniclers like Foxe and Holinshed cemented Wolsey’s negative reputation even up to the present day. Finally, this play’s title reveals a fundamental concern with representations of truth, a theme that runs throughout the heart of the corpus of texts examined in this study. Henry VIII is an often-neglected text, generally remembered for having been the play being staged when the original Globe Theatre burned down in 1613.1 Little study has been devoted to it: Howard Felperin complained in 1966 that “that fraction of commentary on the play not worried by the academic question of who wrote it is mostly patronizing and wholly disappointing,” and little has changed in the decades since, despite the appearance of Gordon McMullan’s

1 Gordon McMullan, introduction to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, King Henry VIII (London: Arden, 2000), 9.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004317529_007 “Griped by Meaner Persons”? 185 excellent Arden edition in 2000.2 The play itself is usually characterized by its often grandiose staging—taken from the stage directions in the First Folio— which, in many ways, is exemplified by Cardinal Wolsey: his masque in 1.4 and his participation in the legatine court at Blackfriars in 2.4 are often portrayed magnificently, along with Anne Boleyn’s wedding in 4.1 and Elizabeth I’s bap- tism in 5.4. The final feature of the play that is generally recalled is the title itself: Henry VIII, Or, All Is True.3 The titling of the play is potentially problem- atic: in many ways, the play is not about Henry VIII at all. Rather, the subtitle “All Is True” is an ironic comment on the conflict between ‘real’ history and the characterization of history. As we shall see, the text continually unsettles stock images of received history, and particularly those relating to Wolsey, Katherine, and Buckingham. These characterizations are drawn from historical chronicles and incorporate large sections of reported speech; as a result, the stock public understanding of many of these figures is undercut. In the play, Katherine is not merely a pious and compliant wife, the great noblemen are not chivalrous and noble magnates, and Thomas Wolsey is not (exclusively) the overproud prelate so often depicted throughout the sixteenth century. Instead of constructing this text as a good/evil morality fable, with obvious vil- lains and heroes, this play adapts features of the Tudor de casibus tradition and presents the main characters as possessing flaws that eventually bring about their morally instructive falls. Though the play is ostensibly about the iconic Henry VIII and the events leading to the birth of the future Elizabeth I, it is Cardinal Wolsey who domi- nates the first three acts. Wolsey’s fall from power is the central structural fea- ture of the first half of the text, on which the other characters are inextricably focused. The first scene, which features the dukes of Buckingham and Norfolk discussing with the Lord Abergavenny the recent Field of Cloth-of-gold sum- mit, is centered on Wolsey by line 45; the cardinal goes on to dominate the discussion for nearly 200 lines until the scene ends. Wolsey appears in seven of the ten scenes to the end of Act 3; in two others (1.3 and 2.1) he is the topic of the dialogue but does not appear on stage. Only in 2.3 is Wolsey totally absent (excluding Acts 4 and 5, after Wolsey’s death). No other character in the play appears with such frequency: in these same scenes, Katherine appears three times and is discussed in a further four scenes; the duke of Buckingham only

2 Howard Felperin, “Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: History as Myth,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 6, no. 2 (1966): 225. 3 The play originally was performed as “All Is True,” with the title “Henry VIII, or, All Is True” appearing in the First Folio. Numerous editors and directors—most recently Gordon McMullan—have attempted to reclaim the original title, generally with limited success.