Did you know that Shakespeare wrote an Anne Boleyn? Well, Bullen, as he spells it. It always came as a surprise to my students when I was still teaching, and as we read through Henry VIII, I found they searched desperately for traces of Anne as we now know her. In fact, they were helped in this quest by a lot of the assigned scholarly reading, which pointed out all the subtle hints that no, really, Shakespeare’s Anne is just as manipulative and coy as the Natalies Dormer and Portman in The Tudors or The Other Boleyn Girl.
Only… she’s not.
“You cannot show me.”
Anne has only spoken one line in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII before she’s been kissed without consent. It’s a fitting introduction to a character who never manages to assert herself, and spends the play basically getting passed from hand to hand based on other people’s assuming that she wants what they would want.
Her opening scene is classic Henry VIII: Henry shows up to a party where everyone pretends not to recognize him, because he’s wearing a mask. The purpose of the party basically appears to be sexually harassing the women there: after being greeted with a kiss, Lord Sands explains that what they need to do is get the women drunk. Then he toasts to Anne, who cuts him off before he can make a joke about having sex with her later.
Henry enters—like I said, initially disguised—and when all his followers choose ladies to dance with, he chooses Anne. He greets her with an aside reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet: “The fairest hand I ever touched! O beauty, / Till now I never knew thee.” But unlike Juliet, Anne does not reply. Henry reveals himself and asks her name (of someone else, not of her), and once he gets it, also kisses her without asking—and again, she has no time to respond before everyone has bustled out of the room to continue the festivities.
News spreads of Henry’s intent to divorce Katherine, which gets blamed on Cardinal Wolsey, who is more or less the villain of the piece. We next see Anne discussing this news, and expressing sympathy for Katherine and presciently reflects that maybe it’s better never to know greatness and status than to have it and lose it. “By my troth and maidenhead,” she says, “I would not be a queen.”
This is too much for her companion, who is called only Old Lady. She accuses Anne of hypocrisy, and insists that Anne would indeed give her maidenhead for power, as any woman would. She offers a string of titles—Duchess? Countess?—but Anne insists she has no interest.
Which is a shame, because immediately a servant enters to announce that Henry has made Anne Marchioness of Pembroke. She offers polite and formal thanks. As soon as he’s gone, the Old Lady crows about Anne’s good luck, but all Anne can say is, “This is strange to me.” When Anne recovers herself after a few more brief interjections, it’s to scold the Old Lady and insist that they go see Katherine—and not mention this news to her.
Somehow, this was the scene that drove the article we read’s insistence that Anne is really coyly playing along with Henry’s game. The Old Lady, supposedly, is just speaking all the things that Anne is thinking but can’t say. We’re meant to understand, somehow, that all of Anne’s demurrals are deceit.
Except that’s just never how Shakespeare works. When people are lying, we know it. When characters want something, they tell us. If we were meant to understand that Anne had other intentions than those she expressed in the scene, she would have an aside or a moment left alone onstage to tell us so. But she doesn’t.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to describe a lot more plot, because… Anne doesn’t speak any more in the play. She marries Henry offstage, without further explanation or comment. The dominant female presence in the play is Katherine, never really Anne. Which means that Anne is never given an opportunity to clarify or complicate her feelings… so what we’re left with is a woman who has alternated between silence in public and outright resistance in private, before marrying the King offstage after a courtship we never see.
(Cardinal Wolsey does call her a “spleeny Lutheran,” though, which is very good.)
I can only understand reading Anne this way as people getting distracted by what they think they know, rather than what is there. Of course it’s possible to play her lines coyly—lines that rarely surpass four words can be played a lot of different ways—but what hints do we have that that should be the case?
We know what happens to Anne. And the characters do, too: almost whenever Anne is mentioned by other people, it’s with a flash of prophecy—they see that she is important, and that she will bring a great good to England. The final scene of the play reveals exactly what that good will be: Queen Elizabeth, presented as a baby in the play’s closing tableau. But while Shakespeare lets the characters’ impossible foreknowledge of Elizabeth color their feelings about Anne, we are given absolutely nothing with which to jump to similar conclusions about Anne’s feelings about Henry—nothing to help us assume that, because we know this is going to happen, she must really want him after all. In fact, it is the opposite. While characters strive to pave the way with visions of the greatness of Anne’s child, Anne herself is resolutely silent. Why not let her speak plainly, and claim to instantly love Henry the way Henry instantly loves her? Why not give her an aside, a moment alone, some reassurance that she isn’t being swept along by powerful men with no opportunity to object? Why not let us think she’s flirtatious, coy, manipulative, so we can feel like she wants what she’s getting, like what’s happening to her is okay, the way modern writers work so hard to do?
I don’t know why not—I just know that if Shakespeare wanted us to have that reassurance, it would be there.
By the way, I’ve got another video up on YouTube! It’s based on a question that one of you asked in the form I sent out a few weeks ago—which you can definitely still drop questions into here. I plan to address a lot of them in the newsletter, but some will become videos as well.
As ever, thank you so much for reading dramatis personae. If you’re enjoying it, share this letter with a friend!
I read Henry VIII two weeks ago and wondered again about how to view, or what assumptions to make, about Anne’s motives or response to her role in replacing Katherine. I think you have resolved it for me. I agree that Shakespeare always seems to want us to be “on the inside” in terms of knowing motives, in knowing what he wants us to know in order to best understand his plays’ characters. The fact that we don’t get the private aside moment of disclosure here, as you pointed out so effectively, makes the difference for me, too. I greatly enjoyed your essay.