ABSTRACT
In the final moments of Shakespeare and Fletcher's All Is True (Henry VIII), Thomas Cranmer waxes prophetic on the nativity of Princess Elizabeth, figuring her virtuous reign as a golden age, wherein “God shall be truly known, and those about her/From her shall read the perfect ways of honour,/And by those claim their greatness, not by blood” (5.4.36–38). Cranmer's lengthy monologue to the king, like the downfall of Wolsey and Catherine and the ascension of Anne, insists that the old epistemologies of blood that governed faith, family, honor, and royal power are passing away. In their place is the prospect of an England in which the political dimensions of blood are always subject to negotiation. For Shakespeare's English queens, political power was always expressed (if not inherited) through blood; over the course of All Is True's pageantry; however, the discourses of blood crucial to histories of Catherine and Anne—guilt, execution, incest, passion, reproduction, and honor—are scrutinized and, ultimately, abandoned. This chapter examines the depiction of Queens Catherine, Anne, and Elizabeth in All Is True, arguing that the play's litigation of bloodline and inheritance reveals the legacy of public and private blood necessary to its theatrical fantasy of a bloodless past.
