ladyship although she showed neither unto Mistress Anne Boleyn nor unto the king any kind or spark of grudge or displeasure; but accepted all things in good part, and with wisdom and great patience dissembled the same, having Mistress Anne in more estima. tion for the king's sake, than she was before; declaring herself to be a very perfect Grissel, as her patient acts shall hereafter more evidently be declared."

As regards the characterisation of this play, perhaps there need nothing further be said; though there is much more that would well bear dwelling upon. Taken altogether, its most note-worthy feature seems to lie in combining a very strict adherence to history with the Poet's peculiar mode of conceiving and working out character; thus showing that his creative powers could have all the freedom they desired under the severest laws of actual truth. The portrait of Henry, considering all the circumstances in which It was drawn, is a remarkable piece of work, being no less true to the original than politic as regards the author; for the cause which Henry had been made to serve, though against his will and from the very rampancy of his vices, had rendered it a long and hard process for the nation to see him as he was. His ferocious, lowminded ruffianism is set forth without palliation or disguise. yet with such simplicity of dealing as if the Poet himself were scarce aware of it yet when one of the speakers is made to say of the king,- -66 His conscience has crept too near another lady," it is manifest that Shakespeare understood his character perfectly. His little traditional peculiarities of manner, which would be ridiculous, but that his boisterous savageness of temper renders then dreadful, so that they move disgust and terror at the same time; and the mixture of hypocrisy and fanaticism which endeavours to misderive his bad passions, his cruelty and lust, from divine sources, thus making Heaven responsible for the devil that is in him, and in the strength of which he is enabled to believe a lie, even while he knows it is a lie, and because he wishes it true;- all these things are shown up without malignity indeed, but without mercy too; the Poet nowhere betraying any the least judgment or leaning either for or against him, insomuch as almost to leave it doubtful whether himself disapproved of what he was showing. The secret of all which is, that Shakespeare does not expressly and as from himself draw and mould the king's character, but, in his usual way, allows him freely to characterise himself by his own words and deeds.

And in the brief but searching delineation of Anne Boleyn there is drawn together the essence of a long history. With little or nothing in her of a substantive or positive nature one way or the other; with scarce any legitimate object-matter of respect or confidence, she is notwithstanding rather an amiable person; possessed with a girlish fancy and hankering for the vain pomps and fripperies of state, but having no sense of its duties and dignities

She has a kindly and pitiful heart, but is so void of womanly principle and delicacy as to be from the first evidently flattered and elated by those royal benevolences, which to any just sensibility of honour would minister nothing but humiliation and shame. She has a real and true pity for the good queen; but her pity goes altogether on false grounds; and she shows by the very terms of it her eager and uneasy longing after what she scarcely more fears than hopes the queen is about to lose. She strikes infinitely below the true grounds and sources of Katharine's noble sorrow, and that in such a way as to indicate her utter inability to reach or couceive them; and thus serves to set off and enhance the deep and solid character of her of whose soul truth is not so much a quality, as it is the very substance and essential form; and who, from the serene and steady light thence shining within her, much rather than from any acuteness or strength of intellect, is enabled to detect the crooked policy and duplicity which are playing their engines about her. For, as Mrs. Jameson justly observes, this thorough honesty and integrity of heart, this perfect truth in the inward parts, is as hard to be deceived, as it is incapable of deceiving. We can well imagine, that with those of the Poet's audience who had any knowledge of English history, and many of them no doubt had much, the delineation of Anne, broken off, as it is, at the height of her fortune, must needs have sent their thoughts forward to reflect how the self-same levity of character, which lifted her into Katharine's place, soon afterwards drew on herself a far more sudden and terrible reverse than had overtaken those on whose ruins she had risen. And indeed some such thing may be needful, in order to excuse the Poet, on the score of art, for not carrying out the truth of history from seed-time to harvest, or at least indicating the consummation of that whereof he so faithfully unfolds the beginnings. For, that the play is historically true so far as it goes, strengthens the reason for that completeness which enters into the proper idea of historical truth.

Nevertheless, the moral effect of the play is very impressive and very just. And the lesson evolved, so far as it can be gathered into generalities, may be said to stand in showing how sorrow makes sacred the wearer, and how, to our human feelings, suffering, if borne with true dignity and strength of soul, covers a multitude of sins; or, to carry out this point with more special reference to Katharine, the lesson is stated by Mrs. Jameson, with uer usual felicity, to consist in illustrating how, by the union of perfect truth with entire benevolence of character, a queen and heroine of tragedy, though "stripped of all the pomp of place and circumstance," and without any of "the usual sources of poetical interest, as youth, beauty, grace, fancy, commanding intellect, could depend on the moral principle alone, to touch the very springs of feeling in our bosoms, and melt and elevate our hearts through the purest and holiest impulses."

PERSONS REPRESENTED

KING HENRY THE EIGHTH.
THOMAS WOLSEY, Cardinal of York.
CAMPEIUS, Cardinal, and Legate.
CAPUCIUS, Ambassador from Charles V.
THOMAS CRANMER, Archbishop of Canterbury.
THOMAS HOWARD, Duke of Norfolk.
EDWARD STAFFORD, Duke of Buckingham.
CHARLES BRANDON, Duke of Suffolk.
THOMAS HOWARD, Earl of Surrey.

LORD CHAMBERLAIN. LORD CHANCELLOR.
STEPHEN GARDINER, Bishop of Winchester.
JOHN LONGLAND, Bishop of Lincoln.
GEORGE NEVILLE, Lord Abergavenny.
WILLIAM LORD SANDS.

SIR HENRY GUILFORD. SIR THOMAS LOVELL.
SIR ANTHONY DENNY. SIR NICHOLAS VAUX.
THOMAS CROMWELL, Servant to Wolsey.
GRIFFITH, Gentleman-Usher to Queen Katharine.
DOCTOR BUTTS, Physician to the King.
Secretaries to Wolsey. Garter, King at Arms.
Surveyor to the Duke of Buckingham.

BRANDON, and a Sergeant at Arms.

Door-Keeper of the Council-Chamber.

A Crier.

Page to Gardiner. Porter, and his Man.

KATHARINE OF ARRAGON, Wife to King Heary.
ANNE BOLEYN, her Maid of Honour.

An old Lady, Friend to Anne Boleyn.
PATIENCE, Woman to Queen Katharine.

Several Lords and Ladies in the Dumb Shows; Women at tending on the Queen; Spirits, which appear to her; Gen tlemen, Scribes, Officers, Guards, and other Attendants.

SCENE, chiefly in London and Westminster; once at Kim bolton.

KING HENRY VIII.

PROLOGUE.

I COME no more to make you laugh: things now,
That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,
Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow,

We now present. Those that can pity, here

May, if they think it well, let fall a tear;
The subject will deserve it: Such, as give
Their money out of hope they may believe,
May here find truth too: Those that come to see
Only a show or two, and so agree

The play may pass, if they be still and willing,
I'll undertake, may see away their shilling

Richly in two short hours.

Only they,

That come to hear a merry bawdy play,
A noise of targets, or to see a fellow
In a long motley coat, guarded' with yellow,
Will be deceiv'd; for, gentle hearers, know,
To rank our chosen truth with such a show
As fool and fight is, beside forfeiting

2

1 That is, faced or trimmed. This long motley coat was the usual dress of a professional fool. The intention of the writer, says Mr. Boswell, was to contrast the historical truth displayed in the present play with The Famous Chronicle of King Henry the Eighth, by Samuel Rowley; in which Will Summers, the jester, is a principal character.

This is not the only passage," says Johnson, "in which Shakespeare has discovered his conviction of the impropriety of

Our own brains, and the opinion that we bring,’ (To make that only true we now intend,) Will leave us never an understanding friend.

battles represented on the stage. He knew that five or six men, with swords, gave a very unsatisfactory idea of an army; and therefore, without much care to excuse his former practice, be allows that a theatrical fight would destroy all opinion of truth, and leave him never an understanding friend." The Prologue, partly on the strength of this passage, has been by some ascribed to Ben Jonson. It certainly accords well with what he says in the prologue to Every Man in his Humour, though this nowise infers the conclusion some would draw from it:

66

Though need make many poets, and some such

As art and nature have not better'd much ;
Yet ours for want hath not so lov'd the stage,
As he dare serve the ill customs of the age;
To make a child, now swaddled, to proceed
Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed,
Past threescore years; or, with three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot and half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars,
And in the tyring-house bring wounds to scars.
He rather prays you will be pleas'd to see
One such, to-day, as other plays should be;
Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas,
Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please;
Nor nimble squib is seen to make afeard

The gentlewomen; nor roll'd bullet heard

To say
it thunders; nor tempestuous drum
Rumbles, to tell you when the storm doth come;
But deeds and language such as men do use,
And persons such as comedy would choose,
When she would show an image of the times,

And sport with human follies, not with crimes."

H.

3 Opinion, the commentators say, is here used in the sense of character or reputation, as in 1 Henry IV., Act v. sc. 2: Thou hast redeem'd thy lost opinion." To us it seems rather to imply a reference to what, as shown in our Introduction, there is good reason for thinking to have been originally the first title of the play. For by advertising his play under the title All is True the Poet would naturally beget an opinion or expectation of truth in what was to be shown; which opinion or expectation would be forfeited or destroyed by the course in question. And he adds, parenthet. ically,We now intend only to make good that opinion or ex pectation."

H.