Grubbing Up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII

Abstract

IN THE ROMANCE WORLD OF THE WINTER'S TALE, Leontes learns in his widowerhood to care not for issue (V.i.46),1 vowing not to remarry for the sake of the succession; with Paulina's prompting, he concludes that Hermione is irreplaceable. But for anyone dramatizing the reign of King Henry VIII of England, an unavoidable subject is his obsession with begetting male heirs and his repeated substitution of one queen for another as the means to that end. Shakespeare,2 preparing his Henry VIII (1613) under the patronage of James I, created a dramaturgy of queens that, although admitting some dissent against such an expedient use of queens, ultimately endorses Henry's patriarchal will. Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me (1605) had already dramatized Henry's bittersweet experience in gaining his one male heir, the future Edward VI, at the cost of his wife Jane Seymour, whom he loved. Shakespeare's Henry VIII, setting itself apart from both the tone and the historical matter of Rowley's merry, bawdy play (H8, Prologue, 1. 14), instead dramatizes the substitution of queens culminating in the birth of Princess Elizabeth, that glorious failure of Henry's aspirations for a male successor. To get Elizabeth born legitimately required a husbandry of queens even more ruthless than that advocated by perhaps the most despicable character in the play, Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester: