ABSTRACT
The character of the Old Lady, confidante to Anne Bullen, appears in two scenes in King Henry VIII, each of which is conventionally attributed to the hand of Shakespeare. By the time Shakespeare opts to treat the Bryn Glas incident so carefully in Henry IV, over 200 years have passed since the battle. And by the 1590s a Welsh family has occupied the throne for over 100 years. Moreover, the union of England and Wales had been ratified more than 50 years earlier. It is obvious, but perhaps worth stating, that Shakespeare and Fletcher must have been aware of the sensitivities involved in portraying onstage the mother of their previous monarch. The ambiguities evident in Shakespeare and Fletcher's equivocal treatment of the character of Anne, then, can be seen as not merely the product of caution, but rather as a layered, nuanced and assured strategem of opaqueness that coheres aptly with the historical subject in question.
