SOURCE: Cox, John D. “Henry VIII and the Masque.” ELH 45, no. 1 (spring 1978): 390-409.

In the following essay, Cox contends that Henry VIII can be understood “as an experiment in adapting the principles of the court masque to the dramatic tradition of the public theaters.”

One of the few virtues that has consistently been allowed Shakespeare's Henry VIII is its success on the stage. To be sure, this virtue is usually regarded as compensatory, something a critic can talk about conclusively after giving one more inconclusive opinion on the play's dual authorship. Yet the virtue is real, if we can trust the consensus that traces it to the play's unusual concern with pageantry and spectacle. In the opening conversation between Norfolk and Buckingham we are immediately confronted with an elaborate description of sixteenth-century England's most extraordinary royal show: the Field of the Cloth of Gold. “Now this masque / Was...