A Study of Shakespeare's Henry VIII

King john is in the nature of a Prologue. A strong antipathy to the power of the Church and the authority of Rome is expressed in this play, and the subject is then dropped until it is taken up again in the relation of the struggle between the adherents of the Old Faith and the New in Henry VIII, which may be described as the epilogue to the historical dramas.

Shakespeare ends his sequence with the christening of the infant Princess Elizabeth, at the actual dawn of what was the modern era of his own day. 'this little one shall make it holiday', runs the last line of the King's speech, which concludes the play.

In an age very soon after that of the old Miracle and Mystery Plays, which were designed to teach the multitudes Biblical stories and history in the only way they could comprehend them, visually, the Dramatist taught his contemporaries the stirring history of their own land for the past hundred and fifty years, covering a period of the greatest impor tance and interest in the chronicles of this country since the Norman Conquest.

Shakespeare was a close and accurate copyist wherever the plot of his drama was founded on historic fact as set forth by an historian. But with the alchemy of his genius he transformed the sober narratives of Holinshed, Hall, and Cavendish into a moving pageant of that colourful epoch. The imagination of the Poet clothed the dry facts with an inspiring splendour, a nobility, and moving tragedy which metamorphosed them and imbued them with human interest.

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