SOURCE: “Possible Pasts: Historiography and Legitimation in Henry VIII,” in College English, Vol. 58, No. 2, February, 1996, pp. 192-215.

In the following essay, Kamps claims that Henry VIII emphasizes the “relative unimportance of individuals in the historical process” and resists the idealizing tendencies of literary history.

The methods and politics of history writing intrigued Shakespeare throughout his career as a dramatist. Among his earliest plays, Shakespeare's first tetrology already offers a full-blown conception of the shape of English history, interlacing Machiavellian ideas, providentialism, and Tudor ideology (see Rackin 27-9). The second tetrology, culminating in Henry V, successfully dramatized a more complex grasp of the past, tarnishing the popular Elizabethan notion of the “great man” who bends history to his will (see Kamps 94-104). Even in a late romance such as The Tempest we discover that Shakespeare frames the basic conflict between Prospero and Caliban in terms of Prospero's “history” of...