Abstract
En un infierno los dos examines Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, or, All is True as an incomplete honor play and compares it to Calderón’s La cisma de Inglaterra. Both plays place Henry VIII’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon and subsequent break from Rome on the stage. By focusing on the character arcs of Katherine of Aragon (Reina Catalina) and Anne Boleyn (Ana Bolena) and how each queen’s actions, whether they were virtuous or full of vice, were corrected, punished, or rewarded by the playwrights, the incomplete honor play arc in Henry VIII becomes apparent and both the redemptive honor arcs, Catalina’s and Enrique’s, in La cisma are fleshed out.
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Notes
- 1.
Pedro Calderón, The Schism in England (La Cisma de Inglaterra), trans. and ed. Kenneth Muir and Ann L. Mackenzie (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips Ltd., 1990), jornada segunda, ll. 1111–14. As Muir and Mackenzie’s translation does not contain line numbers, quoted lines will be numbered from the Spanish version. They use Anglicized versions of names (e.g. Catherine, Anne, Mary, Jane), and when quoting directly from their translation, I have preserved this spelling choice. For clarity’s sake, however, outside of quotations, this chapter refers to Katherine and Anne in Henry VIII and Catalina and Ana in La cisma de Inglaterra.
- 2.
Pedro Calderón, The Schism in England, 11. Through the gathering of circumstantial evidence, Mackenzie asserts that this play was produced and performed before the king at one of his palace theaters, as well as in the documented stagings in public of later centuries. Her ideas on casting are derived from circumstantial information as well, but knowing the company that staged the play—Andrews de la Vega’s—as well as the roster of actors within that company gives us a good idea on who originated which role.
- 3.
According to Irving Ribner, “if a play appears to fulfill what we know the Elizabethans considered to be the legitimate purpose of history and if it is drawn from a chronicle source which we know that at least a large part of the contemporary audience accepted as factual, we may call it a history play.” See Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957), 25. According to Walter Cohen, history plays in Spain were different than those in England because the “dramatic energy” and moral instruction are the foremost concerns for the playwright, and “history becomes marginal.” See Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1985), 218–19.
- 4.
For how Katherine is used as a proxy for England’s Catholic past while being portrayed in its Protestant present see Gaywyn Moore, “You Turn Me into Nothing: Reformation of Queenship on the Jacobean Stage,” Mediterranean Studies 21.1 (2013): 27–56. She dissects Katherine’s role as queen and contrasts it with what she argues is Anne’s fulfillment of a biological imperative for Henry and satisfaction of his sexual needs. Hero Chalmers argues that Shakespeare utilized the character of Katherine to interrogate monarchical power, and relates her representation in the play to Anna of Denmark’s use of performance in masques to demonstrate royal power and to express royal prerogatives. See “‘Break up the Court’: Power, Female Performance and Courtly Ceremony in Henry VIII,” Shakespeare 7.3 (2011): 257–68.
- 5.
Comparative explorations of the queens in Henry VIII abound. Gaywyn Moore and Amy Appleford put Henry VIII into conversation with contemporary plays also featuring the historical Henry VIII’s queens. Kim Noling compares Katherine and Anne’s “coronation” scenes, and demonstrates how Anne’s absence at the end of the play is necessary to create a space for the infant Elizabeth. Micheli asserts that audience response to the queens is central to the interpretation of the play as a whole. See Moore, “‘You Turn Me into Nothing’”; Amy Appleford, “Shakespeare’s Katherine of Aragon: Last Medieval Queen, First Recusant Martyr,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 1 (2010): 149–72; Kim Noling, “Grubbing up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39.3 (1988): 291–306; Linda Micheli, “Sit By Us: Visual Imagery and the Two Queens in Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38.4 (1987): 452–66.
- 6.
Roy Norton tracks these character arcs and contextualizes them figuratively and literally as rising and falling, ascent and descent, comparing them to allusions within the play as celestial bodies or the physical acts of lifting up and lowering down. This is made plain in his discussion of Volseo’s and Ana’s deaths (Volseo jumps off a cliff and Ana’s corpse is used as María’s footstool). Roy Norton, “‘La verdad que adoro es la que niego’: Symbolism and Sophistry in Calderón’s La cisma de Inglaterra,” Bulletin of the Comediantes 68.1 (2016): 159–77.
- 7.
Arden editor Gordon McMullan mentions performances in 1628 and under William Davenant’s supervision in 1668. See “Introduction,” William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, King Henry VIII (All is True), ed. Gordon McMullan, Arden 3rd edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 21–22.
- 8.
Paula de Pando, “Unqueening the queen: the Spanish image of Anne Boleyn,” The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern, eds. Liz Oakley-Brown and Louise J. Wilkinson (Dublin: Four Courts, 2009), 186–98.
- 9.
De Pando, “Unqueening the queen,” 186–87.
- 10.
Maria Cristina Quintero, Gendering the Crown in Spanish Baroque Comedia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 125. While Shakespeare’s actors were all men and boys, the actors on the Spanish stage included women. “We should not forget,” Dawn L. Smith asserts, “that the plays were written to be performed by acting companies that included women for a public composed of a large number of women. These sociological factors undoubtedly had an influence on shaping the repertoire.” See “Introduction,” in The Perception of Women in Spanish Theatre of the Golden Age, eds. Dawn L. Smith and Anita K. Stoll (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1991), 17. Quintero also argues that “while it was true that the display of women opened them up to an erotized surveillance, the ostentatious display of the feminine body also had the potential to contest the sexist attitudes and conventions of this society” (13).
- 11.
Ribadeneyra alludes in particular to the rumor, spread by Anne’s enemies and popularized by Nicholas Sanders, that Anne was the product of a liaison between Thomas Boleyn’s wife and Henry VIII, thus rendering their marriage incestuous. Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s “Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England”: A Spanish Jesuit’s History of the English Reformation, trans. and ed. Spencer J. Weinreich (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 153.
- 12.
Ribadeneyra, “Ecclesiastical History,” 154.
- 13.
Ribadeneyra, “Ecclesiastical History,” 154.
- 14.
Ribadeneyra, “Ecclesiastical History,” 155. Another interesting parallel is that the “Flanders Mare” was an unflattering nickname for another of Henry’s wives, Anne of Cleves.
- 15.
Melveena McKendrick, Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age: A Study of the Mujer Varonil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 261.
- 16.
Alexander A. Parker, “The tragedy of honour: El medico de su honra” in The Mind and Art of Calderón: Essays on the Comedias, ed. Deborah Kong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 213.
- 17.
McKendrick, Women and Society, 261.
- 18.
For examples of the differences between real life and the stage in terms of honor in early modern Spain, see Renato Barahona, “Between Ideals and Pragmatism: honor in Early Modern Spain,” in Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama, edited by Laura R. Bass and Margaret R. Greer (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2006), 39–44.
- 19.
Lucrece talks much of her virtue and her husband’s honor, which leads to her decision to take her own life, claimingVerse
Verse Yet am I guilty of thy honour’s wrack; Yet for thy [Collatine’s] honour did I entertain him. Coming from thee, I could not put him back, For it had been dishonor to disdain him. Besides, of weariness he did complain him, And talked of virtue: O, unlooked-for evil, When virtue is profaned in such a devil!
In Shakespeare’s Poems, eds. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2007), ll. 841–47. - 20.
Othello first appeared in print in the First Quarto in 1622 and was in the First Folio in 1623.
- 21.
Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 50.
- 22.
Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 51.
- 23.
John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. Marion Lomax (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 5.6.156.
- 24.
I would be remiss in not citing Prof. Ian Borden for his theories on punishment, correction, and reward on the early modern stage. I was introduced to these ideas during the seminar “Challenging Gender in Renaissance Theatre,” which took place in Spring 2017 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
- 25.
Mary K. Nelson argues that the world of Henry VIII “constructs Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn as possessors of ‘disabled wombs,’” because they could only produce surviving daughters. Because Henry perceived these women as “failures as mothers,” they are constructed as disabled, which could have been seen as the physical manifestation of a spiritual deficiency, thus also putting the blame for lack of a male heir squarely on Katherine and Anne’s shoulders. Mary K. Nelson, “Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: Stigmatizing the ‘Disabled’ Womb,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009).
- 26.
Quintero, Gendering the Crown, 146.
- 27.
This trope appears throughout conduct books in the late medieval and early modern period. See, for example, The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter/ The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage/ The Thewis of Gud Women, trans. Tauno F. Mustanoja (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran, 1948); Christine de Pizan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies or The Book of the Three Virtues, trans. Sarah Lawson (New York: Penguin, 1985); Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) 265–82.
- 28.
For more specific advice from Vives to mothers, see Education of a Christian Woman.
- 29.
Vives champions a learned mother, as seen in Education of a Christian Woman, 270–71. The song, “En un ifierno los dos” or “Now we are both in hell” is presented as an “ancient air, with fine and charming words.” Calderón also foreshadows Enrique’s future interest in Jane Seymour by his compliment of her singing and choice of song.
- 30.
Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada tercera, lines 2705–11.
- 31.
Tauno F. Mustanoja, The Good Wife, 79.
- 32.
Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada segunda, stage direction after 1705, page 130.
- 33.
Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada segunda, lines 1911–17.
- 34.
Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada tercera, lines 2432–4.
- 35.
Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada tercera, lines 2429–31.
- 36.
Henry’s claim that Cranmer has “made me now a man” through his prophecy of Elizabeth’s future greatness sets up Henry’s incomplete honor arc with Anne. Thus, it is not only a reward for him (he is rewarded for setting aside Katherine in favor of Anne) but also a reminder to the audience of Anne’s downfall and Henry’s use of her execution to regain control of his reputation.
- 37.
Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada tercera, lines 2562–6. This quote is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s bestial description of Margaret of Anjou, another queen of England who was raised in France, as “tiger’s heart wrapped in woman’s hide” in 3 Henry VI, (3H6, 1.4.140).
- 38.
For examples and analysis of some conduct books, see Suzanne Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982).
- 39.
See Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient, 31–70, for an examination of books specifically aimed at helping women maintain households.
- 40.
Appleford, “Shakespeare’s Katherine,” 152.
- 41.
Appleford, “Shakespeare’s Katherine,” 155.
- 42.
Gaywyn Moore, “Exhuming Henry VIII’s Court: The Tudor Household on the Jacobean Stage” PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2011, ProQuest LLC (349897), 140.
- 43.
Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 54.
- 44.
Alan Morris Cochrum, “‘Becomes a Woman Best’: Female Prophetic Figures in Shakespeare’s Plays” (unpublished PhD diss., The University of Texas at Arlington, 2015), 89.
- 45.
Cochrum, “‘Becomes a Woman Best,’” 89.
- 46.
In a study of the processions within the play, Marissa Greenberg demonstrates another way that Shakespeare and Fletcher foreshadowed Anne’s eventual execution. By making the Duke of Buckingham’s procession toward his execution the first procession of the play, the playwrights link the idea of procession with death. Much like her joyful coronation procession, Anne would make a much sadder procession to the Tower to await her execution in 1536. Marissa Greenberg, “Processions in History and Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII,” English Literary Renaissance 45.2 (2015): 275–302.
- 47.
Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada segunda, lines 1095–96, jornada tercera, line 2301, and jornada segunda, jornada segunda, lines 1059–60.
- 48.
See Carlos’ description of her as a “divine lady,” Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada primera, lines 490–91; Volseo points out that “For royal dignity and majesty / Never conceal their heavenly status,” jornada primera, lines 644–65; after Catalina is angry with Volseo for keeping her from Enrique, Volseo describes her as “Catherine the Queen/ Ready to be compassionate to all / […] That her loyal heart— / Though terrible in anger—gentle to everyone,” jornada primera, lines 685–90.
- 49.
Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada primera, lines 27–9, 34–5, and 60.
- 50.
Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada tercera, lines 2124–30.
- 51.
Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada tercera, lines 2156–8.
- 52.
Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada segunda, lines 1872–83.
- 53.
Calderón, The Schism in England, jornada segunda, lines 1804–6.
- 54.
Lope de Vega, “Punishment Without Revenge,” Lope de Vega: Three Major Plays, trans. Gwynne Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), act one, lines 225–32.
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Herber, C. (2018). En un infierno los dos: Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn in Shakespeare & Fletcher’s Henry VIII and Calderón’s La cisma de Inglaterra. In: Finn, K., Schutte, V. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's Queens. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74518-3_23
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