SOURCE: “Grubbing Up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3, Autumn, 1988, pp. 291-306.

In the following essay, Noling suggests that through the characters of Queen Katherine and Anne Boleyn, Shakespeare was endorsing kingly authority and the notion that the proper function of queens was to produce male heirs.

In the romance world of The Winter's Tale, Leontes learns in his widowerhood to “care not for issue” (V.i.46),¹ vowing not to remarry for the sake of the succession; with Paulina's prompting, he concludes that Hermione is irreplaceable. But for anyone dramatizing the reign of King Henry VIII of England, an unavoidable subject is his obsession with begetting male heirs and his repeated substitution of one queen for another as the means to that end. Shakespeare,² preparing his Henry VIII (1613) under the patronage of James I, created a dramaturgy of queens that, although admitting...