THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

The internal ‘problems’ that are supposed to determine the nature of the ‘problem’ plays are largely the invention
of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism. It was argued that because a play like Measure
for Measure did not necessarily accord with the tidy romantic syntheses of a play such as Twelfth Night, Shakespeare
was likely to have been distracted while writing it by some kind of (undetermined) personal crisis. Unease, uncertain
or divided responses, and relative judgements shape all his plays, whether comic or tragic. The tendency to divide his
dramatic works into groups and subgroups, with their own internal reflections and parallels, has also helped to
determine the varied critical fortunes of Shakespeare’s last plays-the four heterogeneous comedies Pericles (c. 1607-
8), Cymbeline (c. 1610-11), The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609-10), and The Tempest (c. 1610-11) - and the equally
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heterogeneous history play Henry VIII (sometimes also known as All is True, c. 1612-13). Where some critics have
seen evidence of harmony and spirituality, others have noticed only untidiness and tiredness; where some have
insisted on Shakespeare’s fresh experimentation, others have objected to a rehashing of moribund theatrical
conventions; some recognize a new realism, others insist on a calculated retreat from realism.
Shakespeare’s last plays effectively continue the irregular line of development of his earlier work by interfusing
comic and tragic themes with a new intensity. More piquantly, they seem to affirm that in certain kinds of comedy,
human happiness can be rescued from the jaws of despair. Imogen in Cymbeline and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale
are faced with personal and political crises and meet them with a mature and articulate dignity. Both the untidy and
textually problematic Pericles (which the editors of the Folio left out of their collection) and the almost neo-classically
neat The Tempest (to which these same editors gave pride of place) stress the intensity of a father-daughter
relationship. The Winter’s Tale moves jerkily between seasons, kingdoms, and generations, while the action of The
Tempest takes place on one island in one afternoon. All the last plays require elaborate stage-machinery and all seem
to have exploited the scenic effects available in the Blackfriars Theatre. All, in their distinct ways, contrast the sins
and shortcomings of an older generation with the resurgent hopes represented by a new, and all balance the advances
of death with enactments of rediscovery, rebirth, and resurrection. In each play treachery, calumny, and tyranny
distort human and political relationships, and in each the humanist ideals of self discipline and self knowledge are
represented as counters to public and private misgovernment.
In the last of his plays (probably written in collaboration with John Fletcher) Shakespeare returned to the ‘matter’
of England. In the often paradoxical political world of Henry VIII the true eminence of the King seems to rise as his
former allies, friends, and counsellors fall. The play ends with the King benignly content with the prophecies of a
glorious future for his infant daughter Elizabeth, but its course has suggested quite how vexed, deathly, and dangerous
life could be at Henry’s court. For Buckingham and, above all, for Wolsey a reversal of political fortunes, and an
impending judicial end, occasion dignified confessional meditations. For Queen Katherine, rejected by the King for
reasons of state, but sure and certain of her justification before God and man, the approach of death requires an act of
reconciliation with her enemies. In accordance with the accepted rules of a Christian death-bed it also required an
ordering of her earthly affairs. Katherine, blessed by a stately vision of bliss, quietly commands a funeral which will
proclaim her personal integrity and her unusurped dignity:
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When I am dead, good wench,
Let me be used with honour. Strew me over
With maiden flowers, that all the world may know
I was a chaste wife to my grave. Embalm me,
Then lay me forth. Although unqueened, yet like
A queen and daughter to a king inter me.
Queen Katherine dies peacefully in her bed, not raging against heaven or threatened by the ministers of hell.
Significantly, too, she is neither condemned to the scaffold nor slaughtered on a battlefield, she is removed neither by
poison nor by an assassin’s dagger. For all its indeterminate mixture of history, tragedy, comedy, pageant, and
spectacle, the once much-admired and now much-neglected Henry VIII also introduced the quiet death-bed to nondevotional
literature. It both dignified a wronged woman and, perhaps more distinctively, it domesticated a queen.