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영어

This study is to read Shakespeare's Henry VIII(1613) as a play containing congratulation and instruction written for a marriage ceremony. This attempt is based on the assumption that the play is performed to celebrate the marriage in 1613 of Princess Elizabeth, King James's daughter, to Prince Frederick, the Elector. Palatine, a leader of the protestant union in Germany. The assumption supports a reason why Shakespeare after his retirement to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1611 should have set his hand to another play. The major attractions of Henry VIII are a lot of pageantry, magnificent and spectacular scenes, like as the masque at York Place, Queen Anne's Coronation, and the Christening of baby princess Elizabeth. These scenes celebrate the royal wedding, and moreover main events in any person's life, love, marriage, and his child's birth. The main story of this play is about the divorce between King Henry VIII and Queen Katherine of Aragon Shakespeare provides many-sided viewpoints of the king, the courtiers, and the gentlemen of London. He also provides his own interpretation on the events and the persons with the Old Lady's punning, Katherine's 'Vision', the arrangement of the scenes and the ordering of the events. The playwright sets the meeting of King and Anne right before the rumour of king's separation, and the honouring Anne with Marchioness of Pembroke right before the divorce trial scene. Shakespeare suggests that king's 'conscience's scruple' is his sexual desire for Anne. The audience doubt on why the celebration play deals in divorce story of all occasion, and the critics speak bitterly of the episodic structure, sympathetic descriptions on the corrupt Wolsey, and the function of the Act V after, the death of the heroine. This paper explains that Henry VIII is a moral play which calls for audience's introspection on the fate of change of love, authority, and human relation through the falls of Katherine, Wolsey, Buckingham, Cranmer, and Anne. In Act V. Shakespeare praises Queen Elizabeth as 'a pattern to all princes', a 'maiden phoenix', and the successor of Katherine's knowledge.