SOURCE: “Seeing Tears: Truth and Sense in All Is True,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4, Winter, 1999, pp. 459-76.

In the following essay, Bosman examines the “sensory orientation” of Henry VIII in order to observe the theatrical relation of truth and vision in the play.

I

In 1986 the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare restored to one of Shakespeare's last plays the title by which it had been known to its first audiences: All is True. We now know the play as Henry VIII; but this title does not appear in print before the First Folio of 1623. In fact, spectators of the performance on 29 June 1613, when an ember from a stage cannon set alight the thatched roof of the Globe theater, wrote of “a new play, called All is true,”¹ and their accounts suggest that Henry VIII was not the play's title but simply its subject matter. To the Oxford...