ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION HENR Y VIII was first printed in the First Folio as 'The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight'. The text there is good, with act-and scene-divisions and some full stagedirections for ceremonial purposes of the kind found in earlier plays such as Richardus Tertius and Thomas qf Woodstock, in which the Chroniclers were drawn on for descriptions of pageantry. The Folio text was set up from a scribal copy, probably made from the author's own MS.1