King Henry VIII, or, All is True, and: King Henry VIII (All is True) (review)

The Oxford Shakespeare King Henry VIII, or All is True. Edited by Jay L. Halio. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 230. $75.00 cloth, $7.95 paper.

The Arden Shakespeare King Henry VIII (All is True). Edited by Gordon McMullan. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000. Pp. xxiv + 506. $45.00 cloth, $12.95 paper.

Of all the plays in the First Folio of 1623, there is none whose recent editing has been more radical than Henry VIII. In the past three years both the Oxford and Arden series have published editions of the play, not simply with a revised text, polished notes, and enriched introductions but with new attributions of title and author as well. Jay L. Halio's Oxford edition is titled King Henry VIII, or All is True, and Gordon McMullan's Arden 3 King Henry VIII (All is True); both are ascribed to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. These changes, once emergent, are now dominant: whereas fifteen years ago the decisions of the Oxford Complete Works to list Henry VIII as All is True and to welcome its collaborative authorship seemed daring, they are now approaching scholarly consensus. Yet such changes do not guarantee fresh readings. It is one thing to acknowledge two titles and two authors for this play, quite another to reinterpret the work accordingly; and here lies the difference between these new editions. Put simply, Halio's Oxford takes a cautious step back from the advances of the Complete Works, while McMullan's Arden opts for an energetic leap forward. The Oxford is to be commended, but the Arden is to be celebrated and contested; the latter is the edition no Shakespearean can afford to ignore.

Curiously, it is Halio who begins with the more adventurous text. In editing the play for the Oxford Works, William Montgomery restored the original title All is True, added Fletcher as Shakespeare's co-author, and inserted a number of stage directions clarifying questions of performance. The result was a text primed for a thorough critical reevaluation. In Halio's volume, however, that challenge has been only partly met. The introduction contains strong sections on the play's language and staging but is otherwise somewhat more conservative than one would expect from the textual innovations, not to mention from the exciting criticism of other Oxford volumes, among them Michael Neill's Anthony and Cleopatra, Stephen Orgel's Tempest, and Susan Snyder's All's Well That Ends Well. It is puzzling to find in this series an introduction that begins with a summary of Tudor history; follows with accounts of sources, date, authorship and printing; culminates in a section called "The Play"; and concludes with treatments of language and performance. This sequence—the givens of history, the redactions of chronicle, the circumstances of printing, the ideas of "Play" itself, the contingencies of staging—is traditional but tendentious, implying, as it does, a spectrum of fact and opinion with history on one end and performance on the other. Such a scheme might suit a play called Henry VIII, but what of one called All is True?

In fact, for all its solid research and fine writing, the Oxford introduction gives short shrift to the double title and the shared authorship. The drama's frequent and unsettling claims to truth are explored only as far as an essay by Lee Bliss, certainly essential reading but now over twenty-five years old. In a similar vein, Fletcher's share in the authorship is acknowledged, then swiftly muted: the sources, analogues, language, and canon invoked are invariably Shakespeare's. What, then, was the point of two titles and two authors? It is hard to see this edition as a great advance on John Margeson's 1990 Henry VIIIfor the New Cambridge Shakespeare, which saw neither pair as especially promising. The compensations of that volume, however, included a rigorous review of...