1. Thanks to the editors for giving permission for me to include a revised version of my article, “Henry VIII: The Play as History and Anti-History,” Aevum 65, no. 3 (September-December 1991): 561–70, for inclusion in this book. This essay was written in the late 1980s. Since the original publication, a number of interesting analyzes of the play have appeared. Here is a selection of them. For a discussion of the public and private sides of Protestantism, see Camille Wells Slights, “The Politics of Conscience in All Is True (or Henry VIII),” Shakespeare Survey 43 (1991): 59–68.
2. Peter L. Rudnytsky, “Henry VIII and the Deconstruction of History,” Shakespeare Survey 43 (1991): 43–57.
3. A. L. Magnusson, “The Rhetoric of Politeness and Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 391–409.
4. Julia Gasper, “The Reformation Plays on the Public Stage,” in Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 190–216.
5. Maurice Hunt, “Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII and the Triumph of the Word,” English Studies 75 (1994): 225–45.