Book Review: Shakespeare's Prince

Keeping Up with the TudorsShakespeare’s Prince: The Interpretation of “The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth”By Guy Story BrownMercer University Press, 2013 Readers unfamiliar with the work of Guy Story Brown might get depressed right around Page 3 of his new book. In Shakespeare’s Prince, Brown’s study of Shakespeare’s last play “The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eighth,” he brings up right away one of the only things the common reader might know about the play – namely, that it might not be Shakespeare’s work, that he might have merely touched up the work of some other, younger playwright. The common reader might know about this little controversy, and he might lick his lips in anticipation of getting a good juicy re-hashing of the whole business. Nothing beats a good Shakespeare controversy, after all, and Brown goes so far as to quote the always-combustible John Berryman on the subject, saying “The system of semi-research in modern education has produced so many pseudo-students, pseudo-critics, that it may be well to say that their assent or dissent in such matters as this is wholly without meaning.” Fighting words!But no, not a syllable. Instead, Brown takes the whole thing at a walk:

… we of course may admit at the beginning that those who are adherents to the view that Shakespeare did not write any part or much of the play, not having been persuaded by the Folio of 1623 itself in the first place, will not be persuaded by anything we might address. We need not detain them.

What’s left, these readers may fear, is just page after page of dreary Shakespearean lit-crit, unenlivened by the always-entertaining spectacle of academics throwing crockery at each other.Those readers should buckle down and let Guy Story Brown work his magic. Fans of his previous two books, Shakespeare’s History: Introduction to the Interpretation of “The First Part of King Henry the Sixth” and the English Histories and Shakespeare’s Philosopher King: Reading “The Tragedy of King Lear” will greet the appearance of Shakespeare’s Prince with bookish glee. Here will be thought instead of mere controversy. Here will be an act by act, scene by scene, line by line microscopically close reading of one of Shakespeare’s oddest and in some ways least penetrable plays. No hobbling theories. No interpretive blinders. No paradigms to shift, unseat, or de-sex. In short, no lit crit – just an extremely detailed and powerfully intelligent engagement with the play itself.The result is terrific, as always, although it’s also fairly exclusive. Brown’s book doesn’t include the text of the play (such an inclusion – in smaller type and double-columned, to keep the page-count down – would be the only way to improve the volume), so the more familiar you are with the play, the more immediate, reading-speed enjoyment you’ll get out of the proceedings. Readers unfamiliar with the play should have it handy while reading Brown, but even admirers of “The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth” will encounter frequent challenges to their complacency, and frequent revelations. Take one instance, the highly charged scene where Cardinal Wolsey realizes an instant too late that he’s handed the King a packet of documents that somehow includes incriminating personal financial records. It’s a very nimble stage moment – truly human in its head-slapping urgency – and it’s quietly thrilling to watch Brown take it apart:

Underlying these speeches there remains the question of how Wolsey’s incriminating letters got into the packet given the king in the first place. That Wolsey supposes that he somehow put the letters there out of negligence himself – which certainly does not speak very highly of his virtu – only proves that he suspects nothing, including his servants, that is, including, especially, Cromwell – which simply throws all his supposed virtu altogether into question. The dramatic Wolsey, of unexampled capacity and vision and England’s greatest statesman, is no “new prince.” What we learn from the dramatic Wolsey’s remarks is that both the personal accounts and the personal letters to the people were actually in the packet, and thus, for instance, that the king was not merely pretending the one was the other. The king, who might seem the most likely suspect, has sworn, after a fashion, that he did not do it (I.123). He may have done, of course, yet that possibility does not explain how he came by the papers in the first place. The same applies to Norfolk and Suffolk, who know of the discovered papers, or some of them, before the king comes out of his bedroom (II.25-37). Yet how did they come to know of the event? What did they know and when did they know it? Upon reflection, it is hard to avoid considering Wolsey’s secretary Cromwell here as the prime suspect.

This kind of tightly-quartered inquiry is always thrilling, and Brown does it as well as anybody currently doing it. He trains his scrutiny on every crevice of the play, watching where and when characters appear and weighing every silence. Shakespeare in Henry VIII is a very busy man, bustling headlong through highly-compressed years of English history, hurrying from one adapted bit of Holinshed to the next, crafting a pageant of beautifully-realized scenes to bring to a close his life-long dramatization of the past. He doesn’t fill in his own blanks, but that’s all the fun of exegesis – especially exegesis as well-done as this:

It is important not to overlook the fact … that Cromwell has evidently spoken to the king independently about the Cranmer affair. This conversation, which Shakespeare does not depict (Unlike the cases of Gardiner and Cranmer, Shakespeare does not ever depict any private or even any direct conversation between Cromwell and Henry VIII.), had to have taken place after the dismissal of Cranmer earlier in the morning.

A book like Shakespeare’s Prince represents an immense amount of work and reflects an equally immense amount of passion. Probably those precious two things preclude the possibility of Guy Story Brown ever getting around to the whole of the Shakespeare canon. But we can hope just the same.