The Life Of King Henry VIII by William Shakespeare (illustrated)

Henry VIII, the first of two surviving collaborative plays written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher (the third, Cardenio, is lost to us), is an ironic celebration and a historically complicated pageant. It suggests a progressive view of history that moves to a glorious end, and yet that dynamic is undercut by a cyclical rise-and-fall pattern of human history. Buckingham and Wolsey and Katherine fall, while Anne and More and Cranmer rise. Yet, as we know from history, Anne, More, and Cranmer, would fall after the end of the play — the first two by the hand of Henry VIII, and the last by the hand of his daughter Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary herself would fall by the hand of Queen Elizabeth I, whom this play celebrates in a retrospective prophecy. —- ISBN: 9798485191610