SOURCE: “Dramatic Mode and Historical Vision in Henry VIII, in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer, 1986, pp. 175-89.

In the following essay, Dean contends that while Henry VIII shares many of the dramatic elements of the late romances, it also adheres closely to its chronicle sources.

In her recent book Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing, Judith H. Anderson includes a chapter on Henry VIII in which she neatly observes, “Divorce is more than an historical problem and event in Henry VIII. It is a theme in a broader and more conceptual way, involving the disjunction of inner and outer and private and public lives.”¹ Indeed, the two problems which have dominated modern criticism of the play—its authorship and the exact nature of its genre—are both also, in a sense, problems of divorce: Shakespeare versus Fletcher, History versus Romance. A temporary settlement of...