By Derek Charles Livingston
In approaching directing Henry VIII (in 2024), for only the third time in the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s history I feel I got an insight to the challenge that Shakespeare and John Fletcher must have encountered in dramatizing the life of the man who, arguably, 400 years later is England’s best-known king.
The responsibility to stage this rarely-performed work comes with creating an edit suitable for our faithful audiences. This was no insignificant feat for our dramaturg, Dr. Isabel Smith-Bernstein and me. Originally titled, All Is True, it is clear that the writers altered, embellished, and fabricated many aspects of the story. Furthermore, the play is filled with characters and events that are lost to modern audiences, particularly American audiences who have grown up far from the machinations of Henry’s court.
Therefore, in deciding what story to tell, we started with some assumptions. The primary one was that our audiences will know that Henry led his country away from the Catholic religion and established what would evolve into the Church of England in order to annul his marriage of twenty-four years to Catherine of Aragon and marry the much younger Anne Boleyn.
We also assumed that our audiences would know that Henry ultimately would have six wives and that some number of them would be “dispatched” by the king. (For the record: he “divorced” by annulment two of them; and two were beheaded on flimsy charges of treasonous marital infidelity. Henry himself, as well as the men who tried these women, had numerous well-known affairs; but, alas, they were men in a different time). We assumed some would know Henry was widowed by his third wife who died shortly after giving birth to the long desired male heir, and the sixth wife would outlive him. We also assumed that many would know that Henry was considered a tyrannical petulant.
Shakespeare’s play, however, condenses into a little over a year the seven years in which Henry sought his annulment and subsequently married Anne Boleyn to focus on that story. Henry VIII is also filled with then-important figures with whom and events with which those audiences would have been more familiar. Leaving many of those in place in 2024 would have created head-scratching confusion.
When the play was produced, James I had ascended the throne. His right to the position, given some of the previous challenges to the throne, could have been questioned. Doing so was not in the zeitgeist, plus, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s company were known as The King’s Men; clearly, the authors could not question their primary patron’s right to be sovereign. James I ascended the throne after the death of his popular cousin, Elizabeth I, who had occupied England’s throne for over forty years of relative peace and prosperity. Elizabeth’s parents were Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. And though Anne was not highly regarded, Catherine, whom she “replaced,” and Elizabeth I, whom she birthed, were.
What were Shakespeare and Fletcher to do? They could not disparage the recently deceased popular queen’s parents nor question the route by which James ascended the throne. And what would a good play be without an antagonist?
Fortunately, there was Cardinal Wolsey whose reputation had sufficiently been tarnished to make him an antagonist to Henry VIII. Wolsey is such a great presence in the first three acts of the Shakespeare (and Fletcher) drama, that he, at times, seems to be the leading character, although one who proves duplicitous to the heroically portrayed Henry VIII. Of course, Wolsey was the primary liaison to the Vatican’s during the king’s ‘Great Matter’ (as the annulment pursuit was euphemistically called), and the Catholic strain that remained in England during the play’s production might not have stomached a complete demonization of Wolsey, even if he would betray the popular queen’s late father. So, the playwrights go to great pains to have other characters exalt him even as they recognize his faults.
Many fans of the Henry VIII/Tudor Saga are familiar with Wolsey and likely would accept his large presence in the play. However, Shakespeare and Fletcher pivot from the Cardinal after the third act in deference to Henry. What is the modern theatre to do with the various assumptions and the many tellings and retellings of these various people’s stories, many of which would be better known than Shakespeare’s Henry VIII?
Ultimately, our guiding force was the Festival itself. The Utah Shakespeare Festival exists, in part, to keep the works of Shakespeare alive and to provide our audiences a chance to see this play in a way in which the Bard’s work could be celebrated––even with the convoluted and questionably historical accuracies. The word wizardry permeating the Shakespeare canon is alive in Henry VIII and so we have pared away that which may be too muddied to allow what is at the heart of the play to emerge. That is, the story of a king who finds himself in royal, religious, romantic, and constitutional crises, and, in resolving those crises, has to painfully break with another man who has betrayed him. The separation then allows him to mature, emerging fully as England’s King. Now, that is a story that epitomizes the Bard. And that is the Henry VIII the Utah Shakespeare Festival presents.
