He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and
under the presentation of that he shoots his wit.
(As You Like It, 5.4.104-5)
In his introduction to the 3rd Arden King Henry VIII (All Is True), Gordon McMullan entitles one of the subsections, 'The conscience of the King' ; McMullan is the play's first editor to explicitly acknowledge a sexual double entendre of the word conscience, - in part, owing to its pronunciation, but more importantly, to its contexts. That conscience, defined by the OED as the 'faculty which pronounces upon the moral quality of one's actions and motives', is, as McMullan calmly observes, 'inseparable in the King's imagination from his lover's vagina' (McMullan, 81) has been veiled by former editors. Foakes used the term 'quibble' as a verbal modesty board to cover such innuendos.
It should be stated at the outset that I am in agreement with McMullan's reading of conscience. I believe the conflation of conscience with genitalia, however, to be no mere verbal conceit on Shakespeare's part, but an ironic barb comparable to those in the caustic lines of King Lear and Timon of Athens.
Only within the framework of pagan classical literature would the association of conscience and genitalia be as unremarkable as it appears to the editor of the 3rd Arden Henry VIII. McMullan suggests that Terence's Andria and Plautus' Amphitryo were models for Henry VIII as 'the most unlikely of comedies' (McMullan, 139) in which 'what looks initially like an inappropriate match between a king and a whore is validated in due time by the birth of the prodigious issue, Elizabeth.' (McMullan, 141) It is an interesting interpretation; but its implied antinomianism does not account for the muscularity of irony which motivates selected uses of the word conscience. That these uses are selected I argue below.
Although McMullan states, 'The play itself, as the alternative title under which it was first performed - All Is True - suggests, is obsessed with truth. The word "truth" itself turns up no fewer than twenty-five times, and there are six occurrences of "truly", one of "true-hearted" and eighteen of "true"'(McMullan, 2-3). A Midsummer Night's Dream (45 occurrences), Much Ado About Nothing (52), Measure for Measure (50), and Troilus and Cressida (61) have higher proportions than Henry VIII of the same root words.
The twenty-four occurrences of conscience in Henry VIII, on the other hand, distinguish it as having the highest relative frequency of the word among Shakespeare's plays, - nearly twice that of Henry V, the next highest (14). For Shakespeare, the average number of occurrences of conscience is between three and four per play.
Twelve instances of conscience in Henry VIII are not ironic with respect to the OED's definition. Unremarkable in themselves, their contexts are adumbrated in Appendix I.
All occurrences of conscience in the play are numbered below in their order of appearance. The table provides an overview. Through Line Numbers (TLN) anchor references to the Norton Facsimile. The act, scene, and line numbers refer to the 3rd Arden Henry VIII. A brief context is included and the speaker indicated.
Under the heading 'Irony', 'I' indicates an ironic sense of conscience, 'non-I' indicates a non-ironic sense. The final two columns, 'S/H' for Spedding/Hope and 'Dev' for Deviant Lines, give authorship attributions for the sections containing the occurrences of conscience, as explained below.
| 'CONSCIENCE' | |||||||
| No. | IRONY | S/H | |||||
|
|
and, o' my c.,Wish him ten fathoms deep | ||||||
|
|
And if I have a c., let it sink me | ||||||
|
|
Has crept too near his c. | ||||||
|
|
No, his c. Has crept too near another lady. | ||||||
|
|
Dangers, doubts, wringing of the c. | ||||||
|
|
The quiet of my wounded c. | ||||||
|
|
But c., c., O 'tis a tender place | ||||||
|
|
But c., c., O 'tis a tender place | ||||||
|
|
Of your soft cheverel c. would receive, | ||||||
|
|
My c. first received a tenderness, | ||||||
|
|
This respite Shook the bosom of my c. | ||||||
|
|
Thus hulling in The wild sea of my c. | ||||||
|
|
I meant to rectify my c. | ||||||
|
|
Nothing I have done yet, o' my c., Deserves | ||||||
|
|
what I found There-on my c. put unwittingly | ||||||
|
|
By what means got, I leave to your own c. | ||||||
|
|
A still and quiet c. | ||||||
|
|
For truth's sake and his c., that his bones | ||||||
|
|
strains that lady, I cannot blame his c. | ||||||
|
|
yet my c. says She's a good creature | ||||||
|
|
Both in his private c. and his place | ||||||
|
|
I make as little doubt as you do c. | ||||||
|
|
On my Christian c., this one christening will | ||||||
|
|
for, o' my c., twenty of the dog-days now |
The first unquestionably ironic use of conscience occurs in the second act. In the course of a conversation between the Lord Chamberlain and the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the following exchange takes place.
Nos. 3 and 4
CHAMBERLAIN
It seems the marriage with his brother's wife
Has crept too near his conscience.
SUFFOLK
No, his conscience
Has crept too near another lady.
NORFOLK
'Tis so;
(2.2.15-17)
Only the latter occurrence is, strictly speaking, ironic, but it colours the one preceding. McMullan's note is apposite:
Conscience begins here to acquire the sexual connotations it bears in the rest of the play. It is unclear if Suffolk's ironic observation is, as Vaughan conjectured, an aside, since Norfolk's 'Tis so could (both in sense and metrically) be a response either to Suffolk or to the Lord Chamberlain. It is also unclear if Suffolk has Anne Bullen specifically in mind as he makes this remark or is simply thinking of Henry's general susceptibility, especially since Norfolk goes on to talk about Wolsey's plans for Henry to marry the Duchess of Alençon. (MaMullan, 280, n. 16-17)
Although McMullan acknowledges the irony of Suffolk's remark, the ease with which he perceives sexual connotations throughout the play (connotations so hesitantly, if at all, alluded to by editors in the past) lowers the emotive threshold from which irony derives its vigour.
That all occurrences of conscience 'in the rest of the play' have sexual connotations is credible only in the light of a committed Freudian reading. In particular, a reading of sexual connotations in 14, 16, 18, 21, and 22 requires a mind preoccupied with innuendos, or willing to impress a theoretical paradigm upon the text. There is no evidence that 14 (3.1.30), 16 (3.2.327), 18 (3.2.397), 21 (5.2.74), and 22 (5.2.101) have the sexual connotations or the irony of 4 (2.2.17).
There are, however, two occurrences of conscience, 2.2.141, which resonate with 4 (2.2.17).
Nos. 7 and 8
But conscience, conscience -
O, 'tis a tender place, and I must leave her.
(2.2.141-2)
Although tender conscience is familiar, the identification of a 'faculty which pronounces upon the moral quality of one's actions and motives' with a locus more specifically literal than the tender heart, alerts the listener to an inversion of values. There is a Biblical template which variously applies to the sexual ironies of conscience in Henry VIII. In Luke 11:27-8 a woman says to Jesus, 'Blessed is the womb that bore thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.' The contrast between womb and breasts on the one hand, and obedience to the revealed moral code on the other, is one explored in the use of conscience in the play.
This irony receives its explicit expression, its veritable epicenter, in the scene which follows immediately. The Old Lady says to Anne Bullen.
No. 9
and which gifts -
Saving your mincing - the capacity
Of your soft cheverel conscience would receive,
If you might please to stretch it.
(2.3.30-3)
The inversion of the traditional meaning of conscience is unmistakable. Conscience is the elastic opening of the womb. Conscience casts its irony here back upon the examples noted, 3 (2.2.16), 4 (2.2.17), 7 (2.2.141) and 8 (2.2.141), and forward to succeeding instances, 10 (2.4.167), 11 (2.4.179), 12 (2.4.197), and 13 (2.4.200). Act 2, Scene 3 is unanimously ascribed to Shakespeare by the authorities McMullan cites (McMullan, 448-9), namely Spedding (1850), Fleay (1886), Farnham (1916), Hoy (1962) and Hope (1994). The lines were written by the playwright who had earlier composed:
Behold yond simpering dame
Whose face between her forks presages snow;
That minces virtue and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure's name.
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't
With a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist
They're centaurs though women all above.
But to the girdle do the gods inherit;
Beneath is all the fiends. There's hell, there's darkness,
there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench,
consumption! Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!
(Lear F, 4.6.116-26)
Although the contexts differ, mincing/minces suffices to link the passages from the two plays in revealing the playwright's acutely felt contrast between ideal and real. The passion is impelled by male sexuality, but its intentional focus is the hypocrisy of pretended female chastity, epitomizing mankind's universal hypocrisy. Lines like these are not the product of 'a network of collaborative relations, normally between two or more writers, between writers and acting companies, between acting companies and printers, between compositors and proof-readers, between printers and censors.' They have the authority of an intended defining aim, as, in a different context, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's ironic 'gentlemen, this is a little late', - apropos the attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944. Hypocrisy is the theme:
Ah, now, really, gentlemen, this is a little late. You made this monster, and as long as things were going well you gave him whatever he wanted. You turned Germany over to this arch-criminal, you swore allegiance to him by every incredible oath he chose to put before you - you, officers of the Crown, all of you. And so you made yourselves into the Mamelukes of a man who carries on his head responsibility for a hundred thousand murders and who is the cause of the sorrow and the object of the curses of the whole of the world.
Confronted with such apocalyptic scorn, worthy of Timon and reminiscent of Job, the blurring of the author as a 'certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses.', fails to recognize and value the anguish which brands the words with their distinct(ive) signature.
Live loathed and long,
Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites,
Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears,
You fools of fortune, trencher-friends, times flies,
Cap-and-knee slaves, vapours, and minute jacks!
Of man and beast the infinite malady
Crust you quite o're.
(Timon 3.7.92-8)
Four subsequent occurrences of conscience appear within 33 lines of each other in the following scene; their connotations are related.
No. 10
My conscience first received a tenderness,
Scruple and prick on certain speeches uttered
By th' Bishop of Bayonne, then French ambassador,
(2.4.167-9)
McMullan notes the juxtaposition of conscience and tender/tenderness, recalling instances 7 and 8 within one line, 2.2.141 (McMullan, 310, n. 167). Although there is no localization of tenderness here, the use of the noun rather than the verb prick in paraphrasing Holinshed's idiomatic 'certeine scrupulosity that pricked my conscience' ironically suggests the genital focus of the three preceding uses of conscience. 'Conscience is again tender, and in the context of the previous ambivalent signified for tender - Anne's (or Katherine's) vagina - the echo of Holinshed's word prick (168) seems deliberately phallic.'(McMullan, 310, n. 167)
Henry continues in his speech to the court at Blackfriars,
No. 11
This respite shook
The bosom of my conscience, entered me,
Yea, with a spitting power, and made to tremble
The region of my breast;
(2.4.178-81)
McMullan notes the eccentric site of the conscience in the bosom, adding the fact that Holinshed wrote 'within the secret bottome of my conscience'. Theobald emended the Folio's bosom to bottom. Whatever the location, conscience, the 'faculty which pronounces upon the moral quality of one's actions and motives', is again reified as in 7, 8 and 9. One bears in mind that the object of irony is now the King and not Anne, who was officially executed for adultery. The explicitness of 9 makes its association with the King, subsequent to the Old Lady's remarks to Anne, more politically sensitive and hence more veiled.
McMullan detects irony in 11.
Henry's language of conscience, as at 167, seems metaphorically to feminize him. Here, conscience is again perceived as physical and perhaps sexual ('the bosom of my conscience'); as a result the Bishop's enquiry into the legitimacy of Princess Mary 'enters' the King 'with a spitting (see 180n.) power' (cf. 1.2.210), making him tremble , and 'forcing [its] way' into him. It is as if the prick is raping him. Cf. 3.2.100, for a parallel use of bosom. (McMullan, 311, n 178-81)
Two further examples of conscience in Henry's speech bear connotations of childbirth and vomiting, - possibly morning sickness. The feminine metaphor persists.
Nos. 12 and 13
Then follows that
I weighed the danger which my realms stood in
By this my issue's fail, and that gave to me
Many a groaning throe. Thus hulling in
The wild sea of my conscience, I did steer
Toward this remedy whereupon we are
Now present here together; that's to say
I meant to rectify my conscience - which
I then did feel full sick, and yet not well -
By all the reverend fathers of the land
And doctors learned.
(2.4.193-203)
'Groaning throe', 'remedy', 'full sick', 'doctors' are additions to Holinshed's account by the playwright. 10, 11, 12, and 13 are from Act 2, scene 4, universally attributed to Shakespeare. Their irony informs Henry's appeal to a court of male judges by means of words that emphasize the subjective, feminine, and Aquarian volatility of his conscience, - 'tender', 'bosom', 'wild sea', and feeling 'full sick'.
Instance No. 15 of ironic conscience is ambiguous. The King accuses Wolsey of bad faith. McMullan points out that it is uncertain whether the papers which the King finds were inadvertently left by Wolsey or whether they were intentionally laid in place in order later to be discovered. If they were planted to trap Wolsey with foreknowledge of the King, then conscience here is ironic. Granted an insufficiency of evidence, the accompanying forsooth suggests overstatement of the King's truthfulness. I incline to believe that conscience here is ironic.
No. 15
and wot you what I found
There - on my conscience, put unwittingly?
Forsooth, an inventory,…
(3.2.122-4)
The sexual irony of conscience, in 4, 7, 8, 9, and 10, returns in the words of the 2nd Gentleman.
No. 19
Our King has all the Indies in his arms,
And more, and richer, when he strains that lady.
I cannot blame his conscience.
(4.1.45-7)
McMullan notes that strains means 'hugs, holds, with a clear sexual connotation.' (McMullan, 368, n. 46) The irony of the 2nd Gentleman's holding the royal conscience up to judgement and thus implying its subjective fallibility, was debatably acceptable in the political climate of the divine right of kings. The irony of conscience is linked to the larger political ironies of the play itself.
Lovell uses a similar, though milder, ironic sense of conscience in Act 5.
No. 20
…and yet my conscience says
She's a good creature and, sweet lady, does
Deserve our better wishes.
(5.1.24-6)
It may be asked why the need for such a detailed examination of conscience. Jay L. Halio affirms that, 'the question of conscience and of the truth to which it answers lies at the core of this play.' McMullan states that conscience was 'so central to the struggles of the Reformation'. He adds, on the other hand, that
Henry's crass, contingent reworkings of the concept of conscience, in other words, are only one example of a thoroughgoing scepticism about the possibility of access to the truth of motivation and of historical event that permeates the play. (McMullan, 96)
For McMullan the ironies of conscience are representative of the play's undifferentiated scepticism. As with his assertion of the concept of truth throughout the play (McMullan, 70), and the 'blurring of lines between the Henrician and the Jacobean' throughout (McMullan, 13), McMullan admits no substantive division within the play. (Italics mine.)
Despite McMullan's assertion, vis-à-vis the Surveyor's claim to be truthful (1.2.177), that 'Truth, as throughout, is problematic here.' (McMullan, 245, n. 177), 46 of the 50 occurrences of truth, truly and true in the play are not ironic. They do not in my view demand 'a much more radical understanding of the nature of truth than editors and critics (with one or two honourable exceptions) have tended to allow' (McMullan, 2). Nor does their number testify to the play's obsession with truth. Only two occurrences of truth are unquestionably ironic: Anne's denial that she has the limbs to bear the load of title of duchess, when asked by the Old Lady - 'No, in truth.' (2.3.39) and then later accepts the title; Wolsey's pleading his innocence in the face of Katherine's accusations in the trial scene, ' If it be known to him, / That I gainsay my deed, how may he wound, / And worthily, my falsehood - yes, as much / As you have done my truth.' (2.4.93-6) - Wolsey next demands that Katherine 'unthink her speaking', which casts doubt on his own proclaimed 'truth'. (2.4.102).
All three ironic uses of truth (the Surveyor's, Anne's, and Wolsey's) are found in parts of the play ascribed to Shakespeare. Conversely, references to Jacobean fashion in the penultimate scene (McMullan, 146 and 423, n. 46) and those to James I in Cranmer's prophecy in the final scene belong to parts of the play generally attributed to Fletcher. Prima facie, they point to a conceptual divide within the play.
Ironic conscience like ironic truth is characteristic of Shakespeare, and is not diffused generally throughout the play. The asymmetry of conscience is crucial to perceiving Henry VIII with sharper resolution.
Ironic and non-ironic meanings of conscience are roughly divided in two. There are eleven ironical usages denoted 'I' in Table One, with one undetermined usage marked '?' (15). There are twelve non-ironical usages denoted 'non-I'. The twelve non-ironical usages are found in parts of the play attributed to Fletcher by Spedding and Hope. Six of the ironical uses are in parts of the play attributed to Shakespeare by Spedding and Hope. Five ironical uses are found in parts of the play attributed to Fletcher by Spedding and Hope.
Is there a correlation between authorship and the two categories of conscience? Of the twenty-three determined ironic/non-ironic cases, five are 'erroneously' assigned to Fletcher; none are so assigned to Shakespeare. The binomial distribution indicates that five errors in twenty-three have a probable chance occurrence of 0.01062 or one in ninety-four. Authorship and irony are significantly correlated with the Spedding and Hope attribution.
A line-by-line analysis of the play's prosody yields a division of the play that corresponds generally with Spedding's and Hope's. But a cumulative sum chart (not shown) of the fluctuations between sections with greater-than-average density of deviant lines (Fletcher), and lower-than-average density of deviant lines (Shakespeare), shows small regions that are neither clearly one nor the other. Ambiguities are indicated with a question mark under the column heading 'Dev' in Table One. The remaining unambiguous occurrences of conscience are twenty, three of which are 'erroneously' assigned to Fletcher, and none 'erroneously to Shakespeare. The binomial distribution indicates that three errors in twenty have a probability of chance occurrence of 0.00248 or one in 404. Authorship and irony are significantly correlated on the basis of prosody.
It may be thus inferred that there is a fault-line of meaning with respect to the keyword conscience that corresponds to the division of authors. Although capable of irony, Fletcher did not share or express Shakespeare's sardonic view of Henry's appeal to conscience in divorcing Katherine. In the England of 1613, only a few years after the Gunpowder Plot, such a view of the divorce still required a measure of concealment. Fletcher provided that concealment by acting as a stalking horse to the older playwright.
The play's treatment of Henry's apologia for his divorce from Katherine is unlikely to have been the 'result of a process of textual negotiation at a given historical moment which has a broader reach than can be encompassed by the comprehension of a writer or writers at any given moment' (McMullan, 199). Equating the royal (and head of the Church in England's) conscience with his lover's vagina was not casually negotiable within the bounds of Jacobean polity. James was the patron of the King's Men for whom the play was written.
The fact that the placing of conscience 'in a frank and unsettling relationship to sexuality' (McMullan, 81) has gone unremarked by Shakespeare editors for four centuries is worth noting. It has been sexually, politically, morally and religiously intimidating for editors until McMullan. And if is has been so for editors, it was more so for the playwrights. As with Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, the ultimate guarantee of the intentional 'authority' of lèse majesté is juridical punishment, an honour for which few are keen to negotiate, textually or otherwise. The peril attendant on Henry VIII's veiled criticism of the King's Great Matter makes arguable McMullan's contention that collaboration,
makes any attempt to limit responsibility for the play to two writers treated as autonomous 'authors' both an historically inappropriate gesture and a clear diminution of the processes of textual production. (McMullan, 199)
None of the 134 uses of conscience in plays listed in the Chadwyck-Healey English Verse Drama database by John Fletcher are seriously ironic. 57 (42.5 %) occurrences are of the type 'o' my conscience'/'upon my conscience'/'a my conscience'/'in my conscience'/'on my conscience' - used as a common oath.
Those who doubt Shakespeare's preoccupation with the ironies of conscience may recall Lancelot Gobbo's soliloquy.
Certainly my conscience will serve me to run from this Jew my Master. The fiend is at mine elbow and tempts me, saying to me 'Gobbo, Lancelot Gobbo. good Lancelot,' or 'good Gobbo' or 'good Lancelot Gobbo - use your legs, take the start, run away:' My conscience says, 'No; take heed, honest Lancelot, take heed, honest Gobbo,' or as afore- said, 'honest Lancelot Gobbo - do not run, scorn running with thy heels;' Well, the most courageous fiend bids me pack. 'Via!' says the fiend; 'Away!' says the fiend. 'For the heavens rouse up a brave mind,' says the fiend, 'and run.' Well, my conscience hanging about the neck of my heart says very wisely to me,' My honest friend Lancelot - being an honest man's son or rather an honest woman's son, for indeed my Father did something smack, something grow to; he had a kind of taste - well, my conscience says. 'Lancelot, budge not'; 'Budge! says the fiend; 'Budge not', says my conscience. Conscience,' say I, 'you counsel well' 'Fiend,' say I, 'you counsel well.' To be ruled by my conscience I should stay with the Jew my Master, who God bless the mark, is a kind of devil; and to run away from the Jew I should be ruled by the fiend, who saving your reverence, is the devil himself. Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation; and in my conscience, my conscience is a kind of hard conscience to offer to counsel me to stay with the Jew. The fiend gives the more friendly counsel. I will run, fiend. My heels are at your commandment. I will run.
(Merchant, 2.2.1-29)
Othello provides examples which illustrate Shakespeare's ability to endow conscience with biting irony.
Though in the trade of war I have slain men,
Yet do I hold it the very stuff 'o th' conscience
To do no contrived murder.
(Othello, 1.2.1-3)
In later poisoning Othello's mind, Iago tells of the deception of Venetian husbands practiced by their wives.
Look to't.
I know our country disposition well.
In Venice they do let God see the pranks
They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience
Is not to leave't undone, but keep't unknown.
(3.3.204-8)
An intentionally ironic sense of conscience is distinctive of Shakespeare, not Fletcher. One is also hard put to find non-ironic instances of conscience in Shakespeare which are casual or humdrum. 'The play's the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.' (Hamlet, 2.2.606-7)
Is there evidence that this sexual irony of conscience is deliberately cloaked? It has notably failed to attract the attention of editors.
John Margeson's King Henry VIII does not regard conscience as sexual. However, the editor observes Henry's ironic appeal to conscience and an overall irony in the play.
The play has an ironic quality as essential to its meaning as celebration.
Although Henry VIII is not continuously ironic in the way Troilus and Cressida is, nevertheless the action, the characters, and much of the dialogue are given an ironic colouring which creates a degree of scepticism in the audience about protestations of innocence and conscience and a sense of more than one interpretation of words and deeds is possible….
Halio's Oxford Henry VIII, or All is True omits conscience from the words glossed in the Commentary. (Halio, 218-30) It nevertheless draws attention to the irony noted in three instances numbered above, 7-8, 9, and 19.
In the first, 7-8 (2.2.142 in Halio's edition), the editor remarks that '….Henry's doubled use of 'conscience' may also point to Anne.' (Halio, 122, n. 142-3) In the second, 9 (2.3.32), Halio leaves the possibility of an ironic conscience to the reader's judgement. 'The image recalls Henry's tenderness of conscience (2.2.142-3) and summarizes the impression of conscience that dominates Acts 1 and 2;' (Halio, 124, n. 32) the word conscience does not occur in Act 1 and the impression of it gained in Act 2 is ambiguous.
The third instance, 19 (4.1.47), the 2nd Gentleman's 'when he strains that lady/ I cannot blame his conscience.', elicits the observation, 'An allusion to scruple that afflicted Henry's conscience, but an oblique reference as well to Anne as the motive for his divorce from Katherine.' (Halio, 174, n. 47) Halio's reference to Judith Anderson in connection with 9 approaches an acknowledgement of the ironic meaning of conscience.
Foakes considers a possible ironic sense of conscience in a question he poses after the words, 'No his conscience has crept too near another lady', note on 4 (2.2.18 - his edition) - 'Is Suffolk's aside the first allusion to Anne's being with child?' (Foakes, 61, n. 17-18)
McMullan does not mention Humphreys's King Henry VIII. Humphreys's note on 3-4 directs the reader to his edition's introduction.
Twice, at II.2.16-17 and IV.1.47, there are sardonic references to the King's ambiguous 'conscience' in preferring Anne Bullen to Queen Katherine. These references occur one before and one after the great - and certainly Shakespearian - scene of Queen Katherine's trial, in which Henry passionately insists on his anguish of conscience and his concern to be theologically correct (II.4.167-230). If these sardonic references are Shakespeare's, the King becomes a cynic and hypocrite, and this the play does not seem to intend. If they are Fletcher's - and both occur in scenes attributed to him - this explanation is the simple one that, inadequately consulting Shakespeare's intentions, he intruded them from his sense of worldly court gossip and thus confused the rendering of Henry's motives at a time when, one would deduce, Shakespeare meant them to be honest.
Humphreys rejects the idea that 'the King becomes a cynic and hypocrite' because of the general trend of the play - which entails the ending ('and this the play does not seem to intend'), as well as Spedding's ascription of 3, 4, and 19 to Fletcher. Humphreys overlooks the equation of conscience and vagina in 9, commenting only on the quasi-proverbial nature of a pliant, flexible conscience. (Humphreys, 216, n. 32)
Humphreys reads 3, 4, and 19 as 'sardonic'. In commenting on 19, he refers the reader to the note on 1.4.75 in which he states, 'The quite unhistorical introduction of Anne to the banquet looks like dramatic confusion, since Henry is bound to appear deceitful when he later insists that only conscientious scruples separate him from Katherine.' (humphreyes, 206, n.75) So strong is the editor's presumption that Shakespeare did not intend Henry to appear deceitful, that he posits confusion stemming from divided authorship.
Humphreys sees no irony of conscience in the trial scene, 2.4 - 'in which Henry passionately insists on his anguish of conscience and his concern to be theologically correct'. (Humphreys, 19) McMullan is the only editor to detect irony in conscience in 10 (2.4.167), reflecting and affected by 7, 8 and 9 (2.2.141 and 2.3.32).
Confusion concerning Henry VIII's authorship is traced in part to the editors of the 1623 First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell. The title page reads, 'The Workes of William Shakespeare, containing all his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies: Truly set forth, according to their first ORIGINALL.' Heminges and Condell included Henry VIII in the volume which they prefaced with the much-pondered affidavit, '….where, before, you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters that exposed them, even those are now offered to your view, cured and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them;' This statement, regarded by one authority as 'the most crucial single document in the annals of authorship attribution', is held by many as a guarantee of Shakespeare's sole authorship of the Folio and an earnest of its textual orthodoxy.
It can be shown that the logometric characteristics of the collaborative play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, which names John Fletcher and William Shakespeare on its title page, are similar to those of Henry VIII. The diagram below is a box plot summarizing the multivariate testing of twenty-four Shakespeare and eight Fletcher control plays in relation to Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The Fletcher plays are Bonduca, The Chances, Demetrius and Enanthe, The Island Princess, The Woman's Prize, The Loyal Subject, Monsieur Thomas, and Valentinian. The Shakespeare plays are Antony and Cleopatra, All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, King Henry IV Part 1, King Henry V, Julius Caesar, King John, Love's Labour's Lost, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Richard II, King Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Winter's Tale.
The first principal component of the relative frequencies of Thomas B. Horton's variables, all, are, dare, did, in, must, now, sure, these, too, and which, of the Shakespeare plays are symmetrically distributed. The Fletcher plays are less symmetrical because of they are fewer in number. Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen are adjacent and situated vertically between the Fletcher and Shakespeare plots. There is no overlap in the box plots. The first principal component encapsulates 63.85% of the total variation of the correlation matrix, derived by matrix algebra from the 34-by-11 data matrix taken from Horton's published tables collated in Appendix II. The 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th principal components (not shown) encapsulate 9.45%, 6.15%, 5.16%, 3.54%, 3.36%, and 2.34% of the total variation respectively. Almost two-thirds of the total variation of Horton's eleven variables are devoted exclusively to differentiating Shakespeare and Fletcher.
Peter Alexander wrote,
The only real evidence for Fletcher's hand in Henry VIII is provided by The Two Noble Kinsmen, entered in the Register, and published in 1634 as the joint work of Shakespeare and Fletcher, though later included in a Folio collection of Beaumont and Fletcher. This play can be divided into two sets of scenes similar to those that make up Henry VIII. But neither the metrical evidence, which admits of various interpretations, nor the attribution of 1634 of part of T.N.K. to Shakespeare, can weigh against the fact that Heminges and Condell included Henry VIII in the First Folio and omitted T.N.K.; for their knowledge and good faith are no longer open to question.
The statement is not true. The logometric evidence in Appendix II is more rigorous and comprehensive than the metrical evidence to which Alexander alludes. Moreover, it confirms the correctness of the title page attribution of The Two Noble Kinsmen to Fletcher and Shakespeare, while associating the characteristics of Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. It affirms the similarity of the two plays with respect to criteria that distinguish Fletcher from Shakespeare. The evidence comes as near relating the two plays as possible as to authorship.
Heminges and Condell dedicated their dramatic works of Shakespeare to the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, brothers who opposed King James's intention to marry his son Charles to the Infanta of Spain in 1623 when the Folio was published. By its encomium of Princess Elizabeth Tudor, according to Foakes and McMullan the final Fletcherian scene of Henry VIII alludes to James's daughter, Princess Elizabeth Stuart, whose marriage to Frederick, Elector Palatine, was celebrated at the time of the play's first appearance in 1613. Like 1623, 1613 was a year of acute religious and social apprehension; there was the danger of a possible Papal-inspired invasion. (Foakes, xxxi) The Protestant marriage of 1613 and the proposed Catholic marriage of 1623 coincided with periods of heightened tension between Catholics and Protestants in England. The 1620 defeat of Frederick, lately elected King of Bohemia, and the consequent occupation of part of the Palatinate by the Catholic League led to an English outcry in support of the dispossessed champions of Protestantism. The Parliament of 1621 attempted to deflect James's foreign policy away from negotiations with Spain towards a military rescue of his daughter and son-in-law. The publication of Shakespeare's First Folio, aimed at a wealthy readership, did not take place in a political vacuum. In Gary Taylor's view, the work demonstrated that Shakespeare, as the author of all its contents, endorsed the Protestant ascendancy of Queen Elizabeth I and her namesake, whose marriage with Frederick cemented the treaty of mutual assistance with the German princes of the Protestant Union. The Folio's publication, ten years later, was another move in the ideological Cold War of the seventeenth century; it was indeed the 'result of a process of textual negotiation at a given historical moment which has a broader reach than can be encompassed by the comprehension of a writer or writers at any given moment', - a negotiation involving Fletcher, the King's Company, and possibly Sir Henry Herbert. It was he, the cousin of the same earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, who was Master of Revels in November 1623 when Henry VIII was registered for publication.
Granted the correctness of the title pages of Halio's Oxford Shakespeare and McMullan's 3rd Arden Henry VIII (the first single editions to include the names of both playwrights) in naming Fletcher as collaborator, Heminges and Condell must have known him to be co-author of the play. As managers of the King's Men in 1613, they were responsible for paying the playwrights who wrote for the company. Schoenbaum's caution as to their knowledge of the collaboration - 'Whether they did or did not know the circumstances of composition we cannot definitely say; but as Shakespeare's friends and professional colleagues at the time, the likelihood is that they did.' typifies a wide-spread reluctance to entertain, even provisionally, the thought of deception by the men who preserved and transmitted half of Shakespeare's plays for posterity. .
Heminges and Condell did not discourage purchasers of the 1623 Folio in the belief that Shakespeare wrote Henry VIII in its entirety. The play need not have been included in the Folio. It was included for reasons of state. Charles I, for whom among others the volume was intended, counted the Folio among his most valued possessions..
John Fletcher, leading playwright of the King's Men in 1623, knew that the Folio's words 'cured and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them' were in part written by himself. He colluded in the presumably harmless deception.
No Shakespeare editor at work in the 1960s could fail to acknowledge the debt owed Alexander and E.K.Chambers for countering the extremes of Victorian and Edwardian scholars in determining the canon by subjective criteria. For Alexander and Chambers, the First Folio was the benchmark on which Shakespeare studies were aligned. It was their canonical Bible. The solidity of professional Shakespeare scholarship depended on the reliability of Heminges and Condell. Hence, in Alexander's words, 'their knowledge and good faith are no longer open to question'.
Humphreys was reasonably misled by Heminges and Condell, Alexander, E.K. Chambers, and by Foakes. He could not divest himself of the idea that Henry VIII ended on a Shakespearian note. The following lines, in their apotheosis of the reigning monarch, dedicated not only Henry VIII but the entire First Folio to James, the King's Men's patron.
So shall she leave her blessedness to one,
When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,
Who from the sacred ashes of her honour
Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was
And so stand fixed. Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,
That were the servants to this chosen infant,
Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to him.
Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honour and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and make new nations, He shall flourish,
And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches
To all plains about him. Our children's children
Shall see this and bless heaven.
(5.4.43-55)
Spedding's division of the play, Humphreys's perceptive appreciation of Shakespeare's and Fletcher's contrasting styles and his recognition of the sardonic use of conscience in two cases (Humphreys, 27-33), his acquaintance with the work of Thorndike (1901), Nicolson (1922), Partridge (1949), Waith (1952), Oras (1953), Greg (1955), Munro (1958), Law (1959), Mincoff (1961), Maxwell (1962), Leech (1962), and Jackson (1962), - none of these sufficed to overcome prejudice in favour of external evidence for the New Penguin Shakespeare's title, 'William Shakespeare, King Henry the Eighth' .
There was the possible wish on the part of those brought up within the culture of English-speaking Protestant ascendancy that Shakespeare bestow his (posthumous?) blessing upon it in the words of the prophetic Cranmer.
It was Shakespeare's habit to cloak his authentic expressions in the ironic word-play of Erasmian fools and clowns. The list of Shakespeare's nonsensical truth-sayers might include the Clown in Titus Andronicus, Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream, Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, Touchstone in As You Like It, Falstaff/Oldcastle, the Hostess and Fluellen in Henry V, the Gravedigger and his Companion in Hamlet, Feste in Twelfth Night, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, Lear's Fool and Tom o' Bedlam in King Lear, the Porter in Macbeth, the Clowns in Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale, Gonzalo in The Tempest, and, most importantly for present purposes, the Old Lady in Henry VIII. Although a pattern is evident when surveyed in a variety of Shakespeare plays, when viewed separately in performance, it is easy to mistake their ironies solely for comic relief, - poorly understood and unconsciously set aside. Fools and clowns reflect back on the protagonists of their plays the truth of their unperceived folly.
The concealment of their words is skilful and deliberate. The poetry of Cleopatra's final speeches eclipses the earlier triple entendres and malapropisms of the rustic clown who brings the basket of figs. Contrary to the impression that the clown's appearance is a diversion only for purposes of contrast with Cleopatra's apotheosis, interpretation of the play depends on an awareness of the precision with which his ironies are aimed at Cleopatra. Wilders testifies to both:
Even the most transcendentally moving moment in the play, the suicide of Cleopatra towards which the whole of the final scene has been moving, is interrupted by the entry of the Clown with his basket of figs. His garrulous chatter and his reluctance to leave (perhaps, as Bowers suggests, he's hoping for a tip) delay Cleopatra's death and thereby create suspense but they also modify our impression of her final speeches during which, as Mack remarks, 'we also hear echoing between the lines the gritty accents of the opposing voice.' (Italics mine.)
Few take 'the gritty accents' sufficiently to heart in order to decipher what the Clown actually means. Critical comments include: 'primitive lump of humanity in juxtaposition with the gorgeous Eastern magnificence, the rich fancy', 'country fellow with due portion of wit and satire', 'terrifying humor', 'true masculine relish for a snide comment on the ladies', 'stupid, garrulous, elderly', 'loquacious', 'a secret philosopher', 'vulgar, well-meaning; comic relief', 'comic contrast with Cleopatra's gravity', 'embodies personified Death', all of which oversimplify and blunt the rapier of his prose. For Janet Adelman the Clown's words are banter. His apparent use of immortal for mortal, is sand to Cleopatra's oyster. His intervention serves but to temper the magnificence of Cleopatra's farewell.
The Clown interrupts Cleopatra, but she turns his presence to her own account: his banter serves as an impetus to her immortal longings. Though he qualifies the solemnity of her death, he does not provide the radical shift in perspective that we have come to expect in this play. We can take her as seriously as she takes herself, participate with her in this tragic perspective.
The absence of 'the radical shift in perspective that we have come to expect in this play' is intentional.
Rather than the recognized opposition of Rome and Egypt, male and female, reason and emotion, the central opposition in Antony and Cleopatra is that between faith and works which so absorbed King James as theological arbiter of Europe. In the confidence of Antony and Cleopatra in their own immortality, Shakespeare created a poetic monument to the possible consequence of justification by faith alone.
There are lies and dreams that are more true than truth itself; the hyperbolical version of the story which the lovers present at the end of the play is one of these lies. The poetry in which the lovers create their version of the story may be only true lies; but the paradoxical true lie may be the only sort of truth available to us in this world. (Adelman, 164)
The faith of Antony and Cleopatra apparently justifies their love by conferring on them an immortality that transcends the infidelities of their deeds. This faith finds its poetic climax in Cleopatra's death. Only Shakespeare could have portrayed its aesthetic Götterdämmerung with such brilliance as to cast the Clown's irony, ' the gritty accents of the opposing voice' almost entirely in shadow.
Shakespeare's view is concealed in the Clown's 'uplandish, or churlish, and unmannerly' words of prose, as richly allusive as any verse, - replete with associations of female figs, (and later glossed as fig leaves covered with slime left by the asp), figs as the embodiment of fruitful works, male organs, corpse-consuming worms, serpents, Satan, Adam and Eve. As with the Old Lady in converse with Anne Bullen, the sexual innuendos bemuse the playgoer with their intensity and fecundity.
The heart of the Clown's speech lies in the words, 'Truly, she makes a very good report o' th' worm; but he that will believe all that they say, shall never be saved by half that they do.' (5.2.249-53)
CLEOPATRA Remember thou any that have died on't?
CLOWN Very many, men, and women too. I heard of one of them no longer than yesterday, a very honest woman, but something given to lie, as a woman should not do but in the way of honesty, how she died of the biting of it, what pain she felt. Truly, she makes a very good report o'th' worm; but he that will believe all that they say shall never be saved by half they do, but this is most falliable; the worm's an odd worm.
CLEOPATRA Get thee hence, farewell.
CLOWN I wish you all joy of the worm.
(5.2.244-55)
The word saved, coupled with believe and do, is theological. The woman who makes a very good report of the worm is variously Eve - 'saved by half that they do', Cleopatra, and those who place their confidence in belief alone, 'fides sola'. The Clown does not agree with one who 'will believe all that they say'. Nor does he share the expectation that salvation will be by what they (the woman/women) do, because of the unsatisfactory nature of their actions. In other words, the belief of the lovers which transcends good works is illusory. He warns Cleopatra that there is 'no goodness in the worm'. (5.2.261-2) His wishing her the joy of the worm is ironic.
That the Clown's words are directed at Cleopatra is evident. The 'very honest (chaste) woman' is ironically Cleopatra; 'Something given to lie' is also ironic in the sense that something or somewhat applied to Cleopatra is sexual understatement. Lie in the sense of telling a falsehood is not, however, ironic. Cleopatra caused Antony's death by informing him that she had taken her own life. She attempted to conceal her wealth from Octavius. She lies doubly in saying,
Let him speak, my lord,
Upon his peril, that I have reserved
To myself nothing. Speak the truth, Seleucus.
(5.2.141-3)
The Clown's talk of the Devil's dressing a woman foreshadows Cleopatra's 'Give me my robe. Put on my crown.' (5.2.275) The Clown's reference to women, 'for in every ten that they make, the devils mar five', alludes to Matthew 25:1-2, the theme of which is preparation for the absent bridegroom. Cleopatra will say 'Husband, I come!' (5.2.282)
Whatever the precise meaning of the Clown's words, their tenor is Biblical within a play which is classical in source, theme and style. Charmian's cavalier wish to 'be married to three kings in a forenoon and widow them all. Let me have a child at fifty to whom Herod of Jewry may do homage.' (1.2.22-5) makes reference to the Magi who came to Herod on their way to pay homage to a child. It alerts the reader to the possibility that the play's classical ambiance is circumscribed by a Biblical framework, much as the references to 'heathen gods' and 'cherubims' in Henry VIII (1.1.19 & 23) subordinate the earthly splendor of the Field of the Cloth of Gold to a (Biblical) heavenly one.
At 3.3.4-5 when Cleopatra exclaims in anger, 'That Herod's head/ I'll have!' there is a reminder of Herodias' whim in asking Herod for the head of John the Baptist in revenge for his charging her with adultery. The scene is devoted to Cleopatra's envy of Antony's wife Octavia and her determination to displace the Roman matron.
Antony and Cleopatra ends with the apotheosis of Cleopatra; Henry VIII ends with the apotheosis of Elizabeth. Shocking as it may seem, their climaxes are ironic. The Old Lady and the Clown have analogous functions derived from Encomium Moriae.
By 1613, Shakespeare's mastery of this device had attained virtuosity. Shakespeare anticipated Halio's perception of the ambivalence and complementarity of Act Two, Scene Three's dove-tailing with the play as a whole.
By contrast to Wolsey's machiavellianism, Anne's behavior in the next scene is utterly naïve. Her professions of concern for Katherine ring sincere, but her insistence that she would not change places with her does not. The Old Lady undercuts her repeatedly and successfully, as Emilia does not with Desdemona (Othello 4.3). Of course history supports the Old Lady; but if Anne protests too much, she also reflects an ambivalence that, however tinged with insincerity, fits into the overall pattern of ambivalence or complementarity that the play insistently develops.
Shakespeare anticipated Foakes's views of the scene as dramatic heightening of what follows. 'The placing of this gay little scene of Anne's rise before the trial lends added poignancy to Katherine's refusal to yield.' (Foakes, li) The dialogue between Anne and the Old Lady is a divertissement intended to appear as innocent as Anne's behavior to Halio, or as ineffective as the Clown's banter to Adelman. But it is far more.
There are minor parallels between the Clown in Antony and Cleopatra and the Old Lady of Henry VIII, even to the suggestion that the Clown delays his departure from the regal presence in hopes of a tip. The Old Lady is explicit in what she expects for her services to the King,
An hundred marks? By this light, I'll ha' more.
An ordinary groom is for such payment.
I will have more or scold it out of him.
(Henry VIII, 5.1.171-3)
What is dramatically compelling is not, however, compulsory. Of that Shakespeare was clearly aware. If one persists in believing, as so invited, that the apotheoses of Elizabeth and Cleopatra are non-negotiable, then the Old Lady and the Clown are relegated to the roles of comic adjuncts.
The importance of Henry VIII lies in the dualist fault-line which divides Shakespearian and Fletcherian authorship. The divide illuminates the irony of contrasting shadow and substance in plays of Shakespeare's undivided authorship. Shakespeare delegated the golden casket of Henry VIII's consummation to his successor, while reserving to himself the leaden casket of the Old Lady, that 'experienced, courtly, and unscrupulous companion' (McMullan, 130). In so doing, he concealed his view of Henry's religious and political settlement under the appearance of political correctness.
By 1606, when Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra, he was a master of Erasmian irony. The golden casket was Cleopatra's verse, the leaden casket the Clown's prose. Shakespeare had not altered his views from 1596-7 when he wrote (italics mine):
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the voice of evil? In religion,
What damned error but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.
How many cowards whose hearts are all as false
As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars,
Who, inward searched, have livers white as milk?
And these assume but valour's excrement
To render them redoubted. Look on beauty
And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight,
Which therein works a miracle in nature,
Making them lightest that wear most of it.
So are those crisped, snaky, golden locks
Which makes such wanton gambols with the wind
Upon supposed fairness, often known
To be the dowry of the second head,
The skull that bred them in the sepulcher.
Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea, the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,
The seeming truth which cunning times put on
To entrap the wisest.
(Merchant, 3.2.74-101)
Similar criticisms of ornament are expressed in Sonnets 54, 68, 70 ('the ornament of beauty is suspect,'), and 142. I would interpret the word ornament not simply in a pejorative sense, but in the sense of conveying the tendency of appearance to deceive. The fundamental contrast in the speech quoted is between a hidden inward truth and an overt outward falsehood. In Henry VIII the contrast parallels a dual division of authors, and this concurrence offers an essential, if certainly incomplete, insight into the political roots of the ironic dichotomy in Shakespeare's work. The cunning times are Shakespeare's own.
McMullan elides appearance and reality in Henry VIII by denying a priori (on grounds of literary theory) the possibility of intentional differences between Shakespeare and his stalking horse, Fletcher. According to McMullan, Henry VIII calls for 'a much more radical understanding of the nature of truth' (McMullan, 2), being a play both 'obsessed with truth' (McMullan, 2) and permeated with 'a thoroughgoing scepticism about the possibility of access to the truth of motivation and of historical event…' The effect of these comments, analogous to a formal gavotte played throughout with sustaining pedal depressed, is to blur distinctions which actually matter.
The irony of Henry VIII is the product of the playwright's being 'at a little odds' with the society in which he lived. The irony of this condition is, ironically itself, a key to Shakespeare's universal appeal.
Three non-ironic examples of conscience (1, 14. and 24) are contained in the oath, 'o' my conscience'. Elsewhere in Shakespeare, the two other occurrences are found in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Acts 2 and 4, acts thought to be generally by Fletcher. Fletcher's The Woman's Prize has six occurrences, Monsieur Thomas five, The Humorous Lieutenant three, The Pilgrim two, while the word/oath occurs one in each of The Chances, The Island Princess, The Queen of Corinth, Valentinian, The Wild Goose Chase, Wit Without Money, The Captain, Love's Pilgrimage, The Mad Lover, and The Loyal Subject. The similar expression 'in my conscience' occurs five times in Shakespeare on the lips of minor characters. Outside Henry VIII, 'On my conscience' occurs once in Cymbeline.
'O' my conscience' appears in parts of Henry VIII attributed by Spedding and Hope to Fletcher. 'On my Christian conscience' (5.3.34), 23, precedes the last occurrence of 'o' my conscience' by five lines. The proximity of the two suggests an absence of irony in the earlier one (23). McMullan, however, regards this speech by the Porter's Man as juxtaposing sexual activity with conscience (McMullan, 422, n. 34-6).
Of the remaining eight non-ironic uses of conscience, two are spoken by Wolsey, and two by Cranmer. Wolsey assures Cromwell,
No.17
I know myself now, and I feel within me
A peace above all earthly dignities,
A still and quiet conscience. The King has cured me,
I humbly thank his grace,…
(3.2.378-81)
No. 18
May he continue
Long in his highness' favor, and do justice
For truth's sake and his conscience, that his bones,
When he has run his course and sleeps in blessings,
May have a tomb of orphans' tears wept on him.
(3.2.395-9)
No. 21
Nor is there living -
I speak it with a single heart, my lords -
A man than more detests, more stirs against,
Both in his private conscience, and his place,
Defacers of a public peace than I do.
(5.2.71-5)
No. 22
That I shall clear myself,
Lay all the weight ye can upon my patience,
I make as little doubt as you do conscience
In doing daily wrongs.
(5.2.99-102)
Of Buckingham's use of conscience, McMullan says it is 'the first deployment of many of this word at moments of personal crisis in the play; conscience and judgement seem rarely to coincide' (McMullan, 271, n.60). Nonetheless, it is devoid of irony.
No. 2
…yet heaven bear witness,
And if I have a conscience, let it sink me,
Even as the axe falls, if I be not faithful.
(2.1.59-61)
In the scene following, two occurrences of conscience shadow Holinshed's 'The cardinal verelie was put in most blame for this scruple now cast into the king's conscience.…' Norfolk paraphrases Holinshed,
No. 5
He dives into the King's soul and there scatters
Dangers, doubts, wringing of the conscience,
Fears and despairs - and all these for his marriage.
(2.2.25-7)
No. 6
O my Wolsey,
The quiet of my wounded conscience,
Thou art a cure fit for a king
(2.2.72-4)
Surrey uses conscience in threatening Wolsey in the latter part of Act 3, scene 2.
No. 16
Then, that you have sent innumerable substance -
By what means got, I leave to your own conscience -
To furnish Rome and to prepare the ways
You have for dignities, to the mere undoing
Of all the kingdom…
(3.2.326-30)
The examples of conscience cited above are found in sections of the play which have been attributed to Fletcher by many following Spedding. McMullan suggests possible irony for 17 (3.2.380) and 23 (5.3.34), but only by association with occurrences of conscience outside their respective contexts. As for 17 (3.2.380), 'Other occurrences of King and conscience in the play (e.g. 4.1.45-7) may either suggest the fragility of Wolsey's 'reformation' here or contrast with its sincerity.' (McMullan, 357, n.380) In the case of 23 (5.3.34), 'a powerful image converting the scene to one of general (and uncontrolled) fertility, carnivalizing the christening we are about to watch, and once again juxtaposing conscience with sexual activity' (McMullan, 422, n. 34-6). Neither footnote adduces substantive evidence for an ironical sense of the word.
WORDS |
all |
are |
dare |
did |
in |
must | |
ANT |
24117 |
102 |
86 |
8 |
69 |
286 |
53 |
AWW |
22890 |
96 |
96 |
10 |
35 |
327 |
47 |
AYL |
21465 |
92 |
110 |
0 |
54 |
320 |
38 |
CE |
14546 |
43 |
46 |
1 |
56 |
223 |
14 |
COR |
26981 |
125 |
160 |
5 |
62 |
363 |
63 |
CYM |
27188 |
116 |
126 |
9 |
58 |
321 |
60 |
1H4 |
24268 |
132 |
80 |
6 |
71 |
374 |
31 |
H5 |
25022 |
127 |
98 |
8 |
47 |
426 |
49 |
JC |
19232 |
96 |
109 |
4 |
74 |
225 |
36 |
KJ |
20503 |
91 |
54 |
1 |
40 |
272 |
42 |
LLL |
21020 |
88 |
102 |
2 |
53 |
326 |
26 |
MAC |
16336 |
81 |
72 |
12 |
39 |
208 |
35 |
MAN |
20959 |
84 |
91 |
13 |
39 |
304 |
35 |
MND |
16219 |
86 |
68 |
0 |
37 |
240 |
44 |
MV |
21098 |
83 |
101 |
4 |
48 |
300 |
35 |
MWW |
21385 |
74 |
71 |
0 |
23 |
290 |
34 |
R2 |
21945 |
106 |
84 |
5 |
37 |
294 |
50 |
R3 |
28285 |
134 |
94 |
2 |
56 |
395 |
32 |
ROM |
24174 |
95 |
66 |
5 |
41 |
315 |
41 |
TEM |
16302 |
91 |
76 |
2 |
41 |
177 |
25 |
TGV |
17114 |
65 |
74 |
5 |
27 |
175 |
28 |
TN |
19722 |
49 |
86 |
2 |
45 |
274 |
29 |
TS |
20692 |
115 |
89 |
5 |
23 |
247 |
31 |
WT |
24970 |
104 |
117 |
10 |
38 |
257 |
51 |
BONDUCA |
20449 |
171 |
117 |
38 |
12 |
176 |
71 |
CHANCES |
16447 |
155 |
100 |
19 |
13 |
150 |
60 |
DEMETRIUS |
24590 |
183 |
151 |
37 |
30 |
226 |
83 |
PRINCESS |
22623 |
144 |
184 |
33 |
12 |
201 |
82 |
PRIZE |
23283 |
169 |
130 |
18 |
24 |
187 |
66 |
SUBJECT |
25779 |
199 |
182 |
25 |
16 |
201 |
67 |
M.THOMAS |
21015 |
155 |
99 |
12 |
27 |
192 |
69 |
VALENTINIAN |
24844 |
172 |
191 |
39 |
21 |
205 |
99 |
H8 |
23635 |
159 |
144 |
20 |
44 |
302 |
57 |
TNK |
23884 |
134 |
146 |
16 |
38 |
276 |
80 |
|
now |
sure |
these |
too |
which | |
ANT |
88 |
8 |
22 |
38 |
108 |
AWW |
53 |
11 |
21 |
42 |
87 |
AYL |
58 |
11 |
32 |
29 |
59 |
CE |
46 |
13 |
29 |
23 |
22 |
COR |
68 |
8 |
35 |
38 |
102 |
CYM |
64 |
12 |
39 |
51 |
124 |
1H4 |
85 |
9 |
35 |
46 |
48 |
H5 |
93 |
5 |
29 |
23 |
68 |
JC |
63 |
10 |
39 |
27 |
47 |
KJ |
68 |
1 |
53 |
20 |
61 |
LLL |
49 |
4 |
44 |
56 |
66 |
MAC |
50 |
4 |
23 |
25 |
79 |
MAN |
50 |
12 |
23 |
43 |
56 |
MND |
67 |
3 |
31 |
19 |
38 |
MV |
47 |
10 |
31 |
31 |
60 |
MWW |
83 |
15 |
24 |
37 |
26 |
R2 |
60 |
1 |
35 |
36 |
72 |
R3 |
92 |
2 |
43 |
38 |
75 |
ROM |
80 |
5 |
40 |
57 |
60 |
TEM |
79 |
5 |
33 |
21 |
72 |
TGV |
76 |
8 |
17 |
25 |
42 |
TN |
71 |
8 |
24 |
26 |
24 |
TS |
83 |
6 |
30 |
26 |
26 |
WT |
104 |
9 |
53 |
55 |
121 |
BONDUCA |
91 |
21 |
67 |
54 |
23 |
CHANCES |
115 |
35 |
40 |
75 |
22 |
DEMETRIUS |
200 |
57 |
89 |
106 |
20 |
PRINCESS |
94 |
36 |
82 |
105 |
35 |
PRIZE |
132 |
28 |
40 |
84 |
37 |
SUBJECT |
148 |
39 |
86 |
166 |
28 |
M.THOMAS |
140 |
18 |
43 |
110 |
45 |
VALENTINIAN |
120 |
8 |
41 |
112 |
39 |
H8 |
98 |
13 |
50 |
50 |
83 |
TNK |
97 |
17 |
41 |
49 |
64 |
