SOURCE: “When All Is True: Law, History and Problems of Knowledge in Henry VIII,” in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, Vol. 52, 1999, pp. 166-82.

In the essay that follows, Kreps studies Henry VIII, claiming that the play is preoccupied with issues of time, particularly with the retrospective glance of history and the anticipatory impact of law.

In the last scene of The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight,¹ Cranmer's prophecy provides Elizabeth's father with knowledge of the future not available at the play's ostensible chronological cut-off point in 1533; nor, because of the legal arrangements Henry left, was this future imaginable when Henry died in 1547. The panegyric delivered from the perspective of 1613 is a utopian evaluation of the Elizabethan past and the Jacobean present which the stage Henry receives as an ‘oracle of comfort’ (5.4.66), and the obvious flattery requires Cranmer's prefatory...