SOURCE: “Shakespeare's King Henry VIII and the Triumph of the Word,” in English Studies, Vol. 75, No. 3, May, 1994, pp. 225-45.

In the following essay, Hunt argues that Henry VIII shares with Shakespeare's late romances an attention to the redemptive function of speech.

For several decades, critics have recognized that Shakespeare's interest in the proper use of language, most intense during the phase of the great tragedies, extends to the late romances.¹ Recently a paradigm of unusual kinds of speech that either rectify or offset inadequate language has been described in the group of plays beginning with Pericles and ending with The Tempest.² Critics have also identified romance motifs and dramatic methods in King Henry VIII, a play written shortly after The Tempest.³ However, no one has yet directly addressed the question of whether Shakespeare's interest in the radical limits and possibilities of language extends to this final history play...