Remembering, Replaying, and Rereading Henry VIII

It traces the evolution of the memory of Henry VIII in the century after his death, studying on Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline literary and dramatic texts down to Cromwell’s Protectorate. Tracing the ways in which Henry VIII was remembered in the period reveals a dominant approach to reading history

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This book begins by asking about the memorial issues involved in the replaying of an old history play, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, at the Globe on 29 July 1628, but it is not primarily concerned with the memory of a single individual, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham who paid for the production, nor even of a single day, when he seemed to try to evoke the memories of a small group of people gathered at the theatre for a singular purpose. In order to resolve the mystery of what a group of people thought about the past in a single moment in time, this book studies Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline textual recollections that inform the moment in 1628. Tracing the ways in which Henry VIII was remembered across these years reveals a dominant approach to reading history in the early modern period, and the varied purposes of memorial activity itself.