SOURCE: Cook, Albert. “The Ordering Effect of Dramatized History: Shakespeare and Henry VIII.” The Centennial Review 42, no. 1 (winter 1998): 5-28.

In the following essay, Cook examines the moral and political concerns of Henry VIII and contends that the play is a “historiography that interprets history by organizing it in the process of evoking it.”

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Henry VIII at its most powerful, like Shakespeare's other history plays, redeploys a meditation on and reenactment of actual history on the special, itself tensed space of the stage. It recombines into fulfillment the charged constituents of its themes, rather than just pointing toward any single theme. The fullness of effect comes through the managed combination of contradictory ideological elements as these undergo a represented supersession on stage.

In the domain of public action, which preoccupied Shakespeare through all of his histories and most if not all of his tragedies, a sense of Realpolitik is...