SOURCE: “The Politics of Conscience in All Is True (or Henry VIII),” in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, Vol. 43, 1991, pp. 59-68.

In the essay that follows, Slights argues that Henry VIII represents the politically subversive potential of Christian conscience, in a way that negotiates between a glorification of Henry VIII's reign and an examination of its undermining.

Most historians today see the religious changes that took place during the reign of Henry VIII as a series of discrete events that only gradually were understood to constitute a Protestant Reformation. The text that was published in the Shakespeare first folio with the title, The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight, is part of that process of interpretation.¹ Performed first in 1613, it appeared while rumours of a second Spanish Armada were kindling anti-Catholic feeling and a few months after the marriage...