‘Swimming on bladders’: the Dialogics of Reformation in Shakespeare & Fletcher’s Henry VIII

Abstract

Henry VIII was, as is generally known, responsible for burning down the Globe. This is the report of a young merchant called Henry Bluett, writing in early July 1613 to his friend Richard Weeks: On Tuesday last there was acted at the Globe a new play called All is Triewe, which had been acted not passing 2 or 3 times before. There came many people to see it insomuch that the house was very full, and as the play was almost ended the house was fired with shooting off a chamber which was stopped with towe which was blown up into the thatch of the house and so burned down to the ground. But the people escaped all without hurt except one man who was scalded with the fire by adventuring in to save a child which otherwise had been burnt.1 All is True, or Henry VIII as it is better known to us, was Shakespeare’s penultimate stageplay and the second of his three collaborations with Fletcher; it is also that rare bird, a play for which we can give an exact date of first performance, simply because of its peculiar status as the play that destroyed the Globe.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.