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Uwe Baumann, ed. Henry VIII: In History, Historiography, and Literature. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992, 327 pp., 26 plates, ISBN 3-631-44143-6, DM 81, $55.80.
This collection features twelve essays written to commemorate the quincentenary of the birth of Henry VIII in 1491. Because the political and religious significance of Henry's highly disputed and bizarre personality has so often been the focus of scholarship, these essays mainly consider the ways in which the king has been evaluated in literature and art, although they do not entirely neglect the political, religious, and personal sides of his story. In addition to the essays, this profusely illustrated volume includes a lengthy selected bibliography and a detailed chronology of Henry's life.
The two essays that open the book deal with Henry's portrayal in some works of his own time. Beate Liisse's "Panegyric Poetry on the Coronation of King Henry VIII: The King's Praise and the Poet's Self-Presentation" appraises three works by Skelton, Hawes, and More. Lusse contrasts the poems' frequently topical elements with their relatively few differences in order to accord them their rightful places in the tradition of laus regis. At the same time, however, she makes it clear the poems are not only topical panegyrics to the reigning monarch, but also the authors' own attempts to present their literary credentials to the newly crowned king for the purposes of introducing themselves as competent scholars and counselors. In fact, their courting the king's favor was successful, because Skelton and probably Hawes could return to court and More reached the highest, most influential position in the state about twenty years later.
Skelton is again the subject of Rainer Holtei's '"Measure is treasure': John Skelton's Magnyjycence and Henry VIII," in which he refutes the notion that this morality play is either a thinly disguised portrayal of Henry or even a personal satire of him. Both explanations are wrong, Holtei contends, because they fail to take sufficient account of the work's complex structure and, on the basis of flimsy evidence, they rashly assign the date of composition so as to place it in a specific historical context. Composed between 1 500 and 1520, Magnyfycence admits several interpretations: it makes sense as a warning to the young Prince Henry, composed by Skelton...