Henry VIII (All Is True)

Henry VIII, also known as All Is True, is a late history play written with John Fletcher about the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, the divorce of Katherine of Aragon and the birth of the future Elizabeth I.

Main characters

• King Henry VIII
• Queen Katherine of Aragon
• Cardinal Wolsey
• Anne Bullen (Boleyn)
• The Duke of Buckingham
• Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury

Plot summary

This summary gives away the ending.

The play is built from a sequence of falls. The Duke of Buckingham is executed on charges engineered by Cardinal Wolsey. Henry, now attracted to Anne Bullen and troubled about his marriage to his brother's widow, seeks a divorce. Queen Katherine defends herself with great dignity at her trial and dies in retirement, attended by a vision of heavenly spirits.

Wolsey, caught out when letters revealing his wealth and his secret opposition to the divorce reach the king, loses everything and gives a famous farewell to greatness. Henry marries Anne, and Archbishop Cranmer survives a plot against him. The play ends with the christening of the infant Elizabeth, as Cranmer prophesies the glories of her reign and that of her successor, James I.

Themes

• The fall of the great
• Conscience and power
• Pageantry and spectacle
• Providence and the Tudor succession

Famous lines

Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness!

Wolsey, Act 3 Scene 2

More in our collection of famous Shakespeare quotes.

Sources

Holinshed's Chronicles and John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (the Book of Martyrs).

On stage and screen

On 29 June 1613, during a performance at the Globe, a cannon fired to mark the king's entrance set the thatched roof alight and the theatre burned to the ground. A letter by Sir Henry Wotton records that nobody was hurt, apart from one man whose breeches caught fire and were put out with ale.

See where Henry VIII (All Is True) sits in Shakespeare's career on the timeline, or read about the playhouses it was written for.