Necromancing the Past in "Henry VIII."

Shakespeare and Fletcher's "Henry VIII" follows the trend established by Shakespeare's history plays beginning with "King John": of privileging forgetting as at least equal to remembering as a constitutive principle of dramatic design, historical representation, monarchal power, and national identity. "History" in "Henry VIII" becomes largely a procession not of those destined to be remembered but of those consigned to oblivion by royal authority. Taking up the rear of this procession, Henry VIII seems firmly in charge of the realm's collective memory through his possession of written documents, which appear to trump Wolsey's unequalled command of the spoken word. Elizabeth, represented as an enduring pattern of English monarchy, appears to embody her father's superior command of memory. The irony of Shakespeare and Fletcher's representation of Elizabeth is that Shakespeare's patron would have liked nothing more than for his predecessor to join the march to oblivion of Buckingham, Katherine, and Wolsey. In representing history as a process of obliteration, "Henry VIII" reflects both the character of the English Reformation and the private and public struggles of King James with memory. Like English unity before it, British unity, according to James, would have to be built not on the rock of remembrance but on the quicksand of oblivion. The play also recalls the Balmerino affair, which James described as the greatest ordeal of his dual reigns, exceeding even the travails of the Gowrie and Gunpowder Plots. Providing a mirror image of the Balmerino affair in its representation of Wolsey's downfall, the play illustrates the manifold dangers and ruses of public memory in the Jacobean era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]