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Critical Survey of Shakespeare: Film Adaptations

Henry VIII

by Nicholas Birns

Type of plot: Historical

Time of plot: 1520–33

Locale: England

First performed: 1613; first published, 1623

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

King Henry VIII

Thomas Wolsey, cardinal of York and lord chancellor of England

Cardinal Campeius, papal legate

Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury

Duke of Buckingham

Duke of Suffolk

Duke of Norfolk

Gardiner, the bishop of Winchester

Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey’s servant

Queen Katherine, wife of Henry, later divorced

Anne Bullen, maid of honor to Katherine, later queen

THE STORY

Cardinal Wolsey, a powerful figure at court during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, was becoming too aggressive. Wolsey was of humble stock, which fact accentuated his personal qualities. He had lacked the advantages of family and ancestral office, and his political prominence was entirely the result of his own wisdom, manner, and persistence. Unscrupulous in seeking his own ends, he had ruthlessly removed obstacles in his climb to power.

One such hindrance to his ambitious designs was the Duke of Buckingham, accused of high treason. When Buckingham was brought before the court for trial, Queen Katherine, speaking in his defense, protested against the cardinal’s unjust taxes and informed the king of growing animosity among his people because he retained Wolsey as his adviser. Wolsey produced witnesses, among them Buckingham’s discharged surveyor, who testified to Buckingham’s disloyalty. The surveyor swore that, at the time of the king’s journey to France, the duke had sought priestly confirmation for his belief that he could, by gaining favor with the common people, rise to govern England. In his long and persistent testimony the surveyor played upon earlier minor offenses Buckingham had committed, and his accusation rose to a climax with an account of the duke’s assertion that he would murder the king in order to gain the throne.

In spite of Katherine’s forthright protestations against Wolsey in his presence, her repeated contention that the testimony against Buckingham was false, the accused man was found guilty and sentenced to be executed. The duke, forbearing toward his enemies, recalled the experience of his father, Henry of Buckingham, who had been betrayed by a servant. Henry VII had restored the honor of the family by elevating the present duke to favor. One difference prevailed between the two trials, the duke stated; his father had been unjustly dealt with, but he himself had had a noble trial.

Wolsey, fearing reprisal from Buckingham’s son, sent him to Ireland as a deputy; then, incensed and uneasy because of Katherine’s open accusations, he pricked the king’s conscience with questions regarding his marriage to Katherine, who had been the widow of Henry’s brother. Wolsey furthered his cause against Katherine by arousing Henry’s interest in Anne Bullen (Boleyn), whom the king met at a ball given by the cardinal.

The plan followed by Wolsey in securing a divorce for Henry was not a difficult one. In addition to his evident trust of Wolsey, the king felt keenly the fact that the male children born to him and Katherine in their twenty years of marriage had been stillborn or had died shortly after birth. Consequently, there was no male heir in direct succession.

The cardinal’s final step to be rid of his chief adversary at court was to appeal to the pope for a royal divorce. When Cardinal Campeius arrived from Rome, Katherine appeared in her own defense. Wolsey once more resorted to perjured witnesses. Requesting counsel, Katherine was told by Wolsey that the honest and intelligent men gathered at the hearing were of her choosing. Cardinal Campeius supported Wolsey’s stand.

In speeches of magnificent dignity and honesty, Katherine denounced the political treachery that had caused her so much unhappiness. Later, however, Katherine, expelled from the court and sequestered in Kimbolton Castle, was able to feel compassion for Wolsey when informed that he had died in ill-repute; her undying devotion to Henry was indicated in her death note to him. Altruistic to the last, she made as her final request to the king the maintenance of the domestics who had served her so faithfully. Her strength to tolerate the injustices she had endured lay in her trust in a Power which, she said, could not be corrupted by a king.

Ambition overrode itself in Wolsey’s designs for power. His great pride had caused him to accumulate greater wealth than the king had. The cardinal also used an inscription, Ego et Rex meus (“I and my king”), which subordinated the king to the cardinal, and had a British coin stamped with a cardinal’s hat. These, among many other offenses, were of little importance compared with Wolsey’s double-dealing against the king in the divorce proceedings. Wolsey feared that Henry would marry Anne Bullen instead of seeking a royal alliance in France, so Wolsey asked the pope to delay the divorce. When his letter was delivered by mistake to the king, Wolsey, confronted with the result of his own carelessness, showed the tenacious character of the ambitious climber. Although he realized that his error was his undoing, he attempted to ingratiate himself once more with the king.

He could not save himself. He could instigate the unseating and banishment of subordinates and he could maneuver to have the queen sequestered, but Henry wished no meddling with his marital affairs. Repentant that he had not served God with the effort and fervor with which he had served the king, Wolsey left the court, a broken man. He was later arrested in York, to be returned for arraignment before Henry. He was saved the humiliation of trial, however, because he died on the way to London.

Henry, shortly after the divorce, secretly married Anne Bullen. After Wolsey’s death she was crowned queen with great splendor. Cranmer, the new archbishop of Canterbury, became Henry’s chief adviser. Jealousy and rivalry did not disappear from the court with the downfall of Wolsey. Charging heresy, Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, set out to undermine Cranmer’s position with the king. Accused as a heretic, Cranmer was brought to trial. Henry, trusting his favorite, gave him the royal signet ring that he was to show to the council if his entreaties and reasoning failed with his accusers. Cranmer, overcome by the king’s kindness, wept in gratitude.

As he stood behind a curtain near the council room, the king heard Gardiner’s charges against Cranmer. When Gardiner ordered Cranmer to the Tower, stating that the council was acting on the pleasure of the king, the accused man produced the ring and insisted upon his right to appeal the case to the king. Realizing that they had been tricked by a ruse that Wolsey had used for many years, the nobles were penitent. Appearing before the council, Henry took his seat at the table to condemn the assemblage for their tactics in dealing with Cranmer. After giving his blessings to those present and imploring them to be motivated in the future by unity and love, he asked Cranmer to be godfather to the daughter recently born to Anne Bullen. At the christening Cranmer prophesied that the child, Elizabeth, would be wise and virtuous, that her life would be a pattern to all princes who knew her, and that she would be loved and feared because of her goodness and her strength. He said that she would rule long and every day of her reign would be blessed with good deeds.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

Henry VIII is the last of William Shakespeare’s histories, in terms of both time of composition and the date of its setting. It is very different from Shakespeare’s earlier history plays such as Henry V or Richard III. First of all, the events of the play were much closer to those of Shakespeare’s own time. Henry VIII had died only eighteen years before Shakespeare was born, and his daughter Elizabeth, whose birth is hailed at the end of the play, was herself Shakespeare’s patron. Shakespeare had to treat certain political themes that might still have current relevance more gingerly than he would events that had occurred two or three centuries before. At the same time the playwright must have felt more emotion in writing about the recent monarchs of the House of Tudor than remote, long-dead kings; this emotion clearly shows through in the play’s final scene.

Another difference between Henry VIII and the rest of the history plays is its genre. By the time of the play’s composition, Shakespeare had written several of his most successful late romances, including Cymbeline (ca. 1609–10), The Winter’s Tale (ca. 1610–11), and The Tempest (1611). The modes of treatment used by Shakespeare in these plays were also applied to Henry VIII. This is particularly demonstrated by the way the play does not end tragically, but amid joy and reconciliation. The way the overall pattern of the plot predominates over action and narrative is another marked differentiation between this history play and its predecessors.

King Henry himself displays this pattern in the play. He does not so much dominate the action as coordinate it. All the actions of the major characters are in reference to him. All the participants in political intrigue wish to gain his ear or influence. Although he is personally involved in the play’s events, as is evidenced by his divorce from Katherine and remarriage to Anne spurring the drama’s action, he is always somewhat above the fray, an image of the play’s wish for harmony.

If there is tragedy in Henry VIII, it is not that of the king himself, but Cardinal Wolsey, much as it is Brutus, not the title character, who is the tragic figure in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (ca. 1599–1600). The audience sees Wolsey at the height of his power and intrigue as he successfully maneuvers against Buckingham, and suspects that the wheel of fate is about to turn against him. Unlike Shakespeare’s earlier tragic protagonist Macbeth, Wolsey does not get to stir up serious trouble regarding the authority of his king; he is apprehended before his plans go too far. Even though Wolsey is sentenced to death, Shakespeare, with his characteristic late insights into the mixed nature of much human motivation, gives Wolsey’s character a graceful and sympathetic turn as he goes to his end. In Wolsey’s final speech, the audience can see inside his own thought processes, such that they do not necessarily think he has been well motivated from the beginning, but they do perceive that he has faced his demise in a spirit of Christian humility and self-knowledge.

Scholars have speculated that Henry VIII was influenced by the masques prominent in the Jacobean court of the early 1600s. These masques, which integrated music and ceremony into the pattern of drama, prized a kind of serenity and a pleasing overall composition. For all the historical material and political jostling of the play, there is also a stateliness and a gravity that raise the play above the level of chronicle and controversy.

There is controversy in abundance in the historical material of which the play is composed. The reign of Henry VIII was the most eventful period of English history. At the beginning of his reign, England was a minor country in an overwhelmingly Catholic Europe. At its end, England was a rising power of the North, a bulwark of Protestantism, and a pioneer in maritime exploring and trade. This development is shown in the play. At the beginning, Henry meets with the King of France at Field of Cloth of Gold. This lavish and splendid occasion, eloquently described in the opening dialogue between Norfolk and Buckingham, celebrates Henry’s sovereignty. He is, however, one European crowned head in the company of another. At the end of the play, Henry, for better or for worse, has set England on its own course in control of its own destiny. His divorce from Katherine of Aragon, potentially the most pettily personal of issues, has been developed into a metaphor for wresting control of law and morality away from the pope and into the power of the English crown. At the end of the play, when the prophecies are made concerning Elizabeth, it is mentioned that her successor (James VI of Scotland who became James I of England) shall “make new nations,” a possible reference to the English colonization of Virginia that was occurring as Shakespeare was writing the play. The path of English history had been changed forever.

The English Reformation, that is to say England’s religious changeover from Catholicism to Protestantism, is not at the center of Shakespeare’s play. Neither a polemicist nor an ideologue, Shakespeare was concerned to honor the grandeur of the English royal family and the society for which it stood. Though Shakespeare’s positive portraits of Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the accused heretic Cromwell show that his sympathies lie with Protestantism, the play’s spiritual heart is not sectarian. Cranmer’s response of providential joy to the birth of Elizabeth is less political or religious than a kind of miraculous wonder reminiscent of the endings of Shakespeare’s late romances. Elizabeth’s birth, like Leontes’s reunion with his daughter and heir Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, signifies that there is a bright future ahead for the world of the play. The unusually auspicious portents that arrive with the birth of the child operate to soothe the tensions and rivalries that have just transpired and open the way for a calmer, more serene era. Shakespeare may have just been trying to flatter the royal family and Elizabeth’s successor James. Most likely, however, Cranmer’s speech represents the genuine praise of the playwright for the society that had fostered his talent.

—Nicholas Birns

FILM ADAPTATIONS

1979 BBC Shakespeare Plays Production

This adaptation, directed by Kevin Billington, starred John Stride as Henry VIII; Julian Glover as Duke of Buckingham; Jeremy Kemp as Duke of Norfolk; David Rintoul as Lord Abergavenny; Timothy West as Cardinal Wolsey; John Rowe as Cromwell; Lewis Fiander as Duke of Suffolk; Claire Bloom as Katharine of Aragon; and Ronald Pickup as Cranmer.

In his essay on “The Production” for the BBC booklet accompanying the first broadcast of this version, Henry Fenwick reported that everyone involved with preparations for the BBC broadcast was surprised by how good the play is, since it is often neglected or disparaged, a reaction that the BBC producer (Cedric Messina) considered unfair (18). The production’s script editor, Alan Shallcross, had assumed that much of the play would need to be pruned, but in fact only the scene that comes before the christening of the baby Elizabeth was trimmed (19). Shallcross, noting that this play was one of the few in Shakespeare’s time to deal so realistically with recent events (19–20), called it a “drama documentary,” explaining that the play attempts to cover over a dozen years of actual history, thus necessitating the use of a compressed timeline—one that the BBC production in turn occasionally rearranged (20). Shallcross commented that this play’s language is stripped down, so that it lacks many metaphors or much imagery and is thus the kind of language politicians often use and a kind that seemed especially suitable to television (20–21).

The director, Kevin Billington, observing that the play is often seen as a piece of pageantry that emphasizes just a few speeches, said he considered the work much more coherent and complex than this prejudice implies, adding that the fact that the play is not often staged surprised him but also allowed him a certain freedom from expectations and conventions in formulating the present production (21). He wanted to make sure the play was staged on location, not in a studio, thinking the location shots would make it seem more realistic and give it a greater sense of atmosphere (22). Costume designer Alun Hughes, explaining how he was able to present a variety of costumes without spending much money, described in detail the nature of Tudor clothing in its own day, how improvised it often was, and how he tried to imitate these traits in his own designs (23–24).

Many of the actors researched their characters as historical figures, but then had to discard some of their findings because they did not fit in with the ways the characters are presented by Shakespeare (24). Timothy West noted the complexity of Cardinal Woolsey and the sheer immensity of his power, saying that both that complexity and that immensity are hard for modern people to understand (24–25). He remarked, “we most of us think it’s a good play for television because it isn’t a play of enormous rhetoric. It’s a play where thoughts change very rapidly and there’s an awful lot the television camera can help you with, which perhaps would need a lot of work to get over on stage” (25). West commented that although most of Shakespeare’s tragedies and history plays take the main character right up until the moment of the character’s death, Henry V and Henry VIII take him to the apex of his power (25). He saw this work as a series of falls and rises, the fall of one character preceding the rise of another and so on (25). Claire Bloom, playing Queen Katharine, was especially impressed by the real Katharine’s pride and dignity and by her early and continuing love for Henry (26). Playing Henry, John Stride saw him fairly sympathetically, as a man torn between his love for his wife and his obligations to his country (26–27), while director Billington saw Henry as “a man who goes from being a king who reigns to a king who rules,” someone erratic when young but “righter and righter as he ages.” Explaining that he saw the text’s prologue as a kind of flashback (27), Billington added, “It’s also a play about dying, about how you face your maker. As it says in the prologue, it’s about mightiness meeting misery. It’s Shakespeare’s last play and there’s a fascination with men in power fighting and struggling but then facing God.” Billington thought that “[t]hey all have good deaths—Buckingham, Woolsey, Katharine,” adding, “For a Protestant playwright in the early seventeenth century to write about a Catholic Spaniard as if she was a saint is astonishing. And absolutely fundamental to an understanding of the play is the belief that there is some reconciliation, you can actually face your maker. And through the suffering, through the deaths, through the complications the nation comes through to our new religion and our new queen.” He concluded: “I don’t think people look at the play in the right way—you have to accept certain Christian basics” (27).

Claire Bloom and John Stride in Henry VIII.

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Image by Keystone Press, via Alamy. [Used under license.]

In their 1988 anthology Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen described and quoted from some early reviews of the broadcast, with a writer for the New York Times calling this production “well-suited” to its stately settings (255); a writer for the London Times praising the costumes; and a writer for the Christian Science Monitor calling it a “brave and bravura production” with “lush processions, songs, and dances” and with Claire Bloom “hauntingly vulnerable,” John Stride and Timothy West “fascinatingly complex” as Henry and Wolsey and Ronald Pickup “as a shrewd and manipulative Cranmer.” Another writer found the production “worth watching for design and set alone” and considered Bloom’s Katherine “moving,” while a second writer for the New York Times said this film was “[taped] attractively in authentic castles” but thought that the obviously cold weather led to “a seeming epidemic of vocal nasality among many of the actors.” A critic for the Washington Post complained of “low-keyed” acting, and a prominent scholar thought that “[c]lose-ups” were overused “to represent conflict and intense emotion” (256).

Another prominent scholar, Jack Jorgens, reviewing the film for the Shakespeare Quarterly, thought it “less successful” [than previous productions of Season One] but thought the fault was Shakepeare’s, who had provided a script with “pronounced weaknesses,” so that the play “simply fails to sustain interest for three hours.” Jorgens wrote that “the actors bore it very well, especially Timothy West as a superb, brooding, villain Cardinal Wolsey,” and he also admired the “elegance of design and the control of camera and editing” (415).

Reviewing the broadcast for the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, R. Scott Colley called it “one of the best productions so far in the series. Kevin Billington’s interpretation of the play demonstrates how certain Shakespearean plays can come alive on the small screen, and how some of these plays can merit popular attention as melodramatic adventure stories.” Colley thought Billington and his crew had “brought Henry VIII to television with great skill indeed” (6), adding that “Sentimentality works well on television” and that “it works particularly well when it is a part of the atmosphere Shakespeare created. For instance, Buckingham’s, or Wolsey’s, or Katharine’s faces fill the screen as they speak their respective farewells: their speeches seem to be directed as much to themselves as to others, and television captures that half-musing quality of the several monologues.” Colley concluded that the “production itself is a kind of nationalistic romance in which time stops at a moment of birth and reconciliation. It is good melodrama and excellent television” (7).

In her 1991 book on the BBC Shakespeare series (187–90), Susan Willis called this adaptation a “very popular” production (24)—one that “benefited from being taped on location,” as in its emphasis on ceilings in rooms (188). She noted its use of “elegant” costumes and realistic depiction of court life (189).

Three years later, in his 1994 book about this play (108–20), Hugh M. Richmond called the BBC version an especially “thoughtful” production, praising its effective use of real Tudor settings (109), its “intimate approach” (110), its “successful documentary” flavor (111), and the “conversational intimacy of the script” (112), which he said “avoided … [the] big rhetorical effects” often used in productions of this play (113). He admired its “very subtle exploitation of the close-up” (113), particularly in the close-ups of Claire Bloom (114), but wrote that “[t]his very subdued version of the play lost much of the high style of earlier productions of Henry VIII despite its dexterous introduction of authentic backgrounds.” Richmond thought that “[b]ecause the text so often suits a casual tone, the director could avoid the disaster which resulted from the attempt in the BBC Othello to reduce that play’s exotic rhetoric to mere modern, casual conversation. However, the scenic options presented by shooting Henry VIII on location did not include the grander effects of processions and tableaux, which are mostly presented indirectly by close-ups of observers” (115). But he asserted that “these limitations in authentic vitality serve only to heighten the production’s central success in the one subtle performance which redeems them all: the casting of Claire Bloom as the ageing but still deeply seductive Queen Katharine. This highly naturalistic performance,” he wrote, “vindicated the supremacy of the role asserted by Samuel Johnson” (116). He concluded that “[o]nce again the BBC production brings us closer to corroboration of critical insights, for Frances Yates has written of ‘the tolerance and kindliness of Shakespeare to both sides in Henry VIII’” (120).

In his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (358–60), Peter Cochran called this production “excellent”; noted the “real historical locations, both interior and exterior” (358); found Timothy West as Wolsey unconvincing as an ultimately changed man; but praised Claire Bloom as Katharine (359). He noted that the last act is somewhat cut but called the direction “self-effacing and highly professional” (360).

2010 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Production

This adaptation, performed at the outside Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in 2010, was directed by Mark Rosenblatt and starred Dominic Rowan as Henry VIII; Kate Duchene as Queen Katharine; and Ian McNeice as Cardinal Wolsey.

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book titled Small-Screen Shakespeare, called this production overblown, inept in delivery, annoying, and incoherent (360).

Bibliography

Bulman, James C., and Herbert R. Coursen, editors. Shakespeare on Television: An Anthology of Essays and Reviews. UP of New England, 1988.

Cochran, Peter. Small-Screen Shakespeare. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

Colley, R. Scott. “The Shakespeare Plays on TV [Henry VIII].” Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, vol. 4, no. 1, December 1979, pp. 6–7.

Fenwick, Henry. “The Production.” The Shakespeare Plays, edited by John Wilders, et al., Mayflower Books, 1979, pp. 18–27.

Jorgens, Jack. “The BBC-TV Shakespeare Series.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 3, Summer 1979, pp. 411–15.

Richmond, Hugh M. King Henry VIII. Shakespeare in Performance series. Manchester UP, 1994.

Willis, Susan. The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making the Televised Canon. U of North Carolina P, 1991.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Birns, Nicholas. "Henry VIII." Critical Survey of Shakespeare: Film Adaptations, edited by Robert C. Evans, Salem Press, 2025. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSSF_0020.

APA 7th

Birns, N. (2025). Henry VIII. In R. C. Evans (Ed.), Critical Survey of Shakespeare: Film Adaptations. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Birns, Nicholas. "Henry VIII." Edited by Robert C. Evans. Critical Survey of Shakespeare: Film Adaptations. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2025. Accessed December 08, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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