Henry VIII and the Masque

Abstract

One of the few virtues that has consistently been allowed Shakespeare's Henry VIII is its success on the stage. To be sure, this virtue is usually regarded as compensatory, something a critic can talk about conclusively after giving one more inconclusive opinion on the play's dual authorship. Yet the virtue is real, if we can trust the consensus that traces it to the play's unusual concern with pageantry and spectacle. In the opening conversation between Norfolk and Buckingham we are immediately confronted with an elaborate description of sixteenth-century England's most extraordinary royal show: the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Now this / Was cried incomparable, remarks Norfolk; and while he clearly uses the term masque in a broad generic sense, he nevertheless serves notice of the play's preoccupation with royal entertainment. Late in the first act Henry entertains Wolsey in a rudimentary pastoral masque, accidentally infamous for its theatricality because it was announced with a discharge of small cannon whose wadding fired the thatch of the old Globe during the play's first performance, burning Shakespeare's most important theater to the ground. Later in the play vizarded angels appear in a vision to Katherine, and elaborate royal ceremonies and processions are fully staged for the execution of Buckingham, the trial of Katherine, the coronation of Anne Bullen, and the christening of Elizabeth. No other Shakespearean play is so full of pageantry, not even Richard II, a play whose monarch is characteristically fonder of royal display than Shakespeare's Henry VIII. Despite the emphasis on spectacle in Shakespeare's last play, no satisfactory explanation has yet been offered for it. To observe that the play succeeds on stage because of its royal pageantry is doubtless true, but as an explanation of the play's effect the observation still fails to account for the unusual dramaturgy that produces that effect. What we lack is a thoroughgoing explanation for Shakespeare's artistic choice of royal spectacle and pageantry in his last play.2 External historical reasons have not satisfied this need, though an attractive case has been made for the play's

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