The saints must have her

Liz, hold on to your knickers, you're in for a ride.

Going into my first reading of King Henry VIII with my mind colored by Anne of the Thousand Days and The Tudors, I was hoping for some juicy courtly intrigue and doomed romance. Instead, I got stuffy clergy gossip and repressed lust that insists on calling itself legitimate love and a wish to fulfill the King's "conscience." So, perhaps it's just as well that the short speech I chose probably wasn't actually written by Shakespeare himself, but one of his collaborators, John Fletcher (who also had a hand in The Two Noble Kinsmen).

Anyone who's read a number of Shakespeare texts knows there's a plentiful lack of stage directions included within the scenes. So when you crack open Henry VIII, you're relatively drowning in lengthy and nauseatingly specific instructions on how the characters are dressed and what order they should enter and stand on the stage. The coronation scene reads more like a shot-by-shot manual for a hired photographer.

The reason for this is quite clear: it's an account of the then-current Queen Elizabeth's father and how he begot her with Anne Bullen (or "Boleyn" if you're as snobby as Anne was about her French upbringing). Shakespeare and Fletcher had to tread carefully, so as to please the crown. That's why all the overwrought excitement and ceremony.

There's so much pomp and circumstance involved in this play that during its first performance, one of the cannon shots fired in one of these epic scenes made the Globe catch fire, and it burned to the ground. There's even an urbane account written by Sir Henry Wotton that described how one man's breeches caught fire, and "that would have perhaps broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit to put it out with bottle ale."

If I remember nothing else about this play (other than how the precious baby Elizabeth was born at the end), I'll have the image of a man's beer-soaked trousers to make me smile.

King Henry VIII, Act V, Sc. IV
Cranmer: She shall be, to the happiness of England,
An aged princess; many days shall see her,
And yet no day without a deed to crown it.
Would I had known no more! but she must die,
She must, the saints must have her; yet a virgin,
A most unspotted lily shall she pass
To the ground, and all the world shall mourn her.