Tudor Remembering, Tudor Forgetting

My last post was about collective memory, how empirical studies are seeking to define its characteristics, and how literary examples might explore the problems and dynamics of collective memory as it changes over time. In this post I want to discuss a long passage from Henry VIII, a play by Shakespeare and Fletcher; the bit in question is generally considered to be by Shakespeare. It is mostly made up of a long speech by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, in which he prophesies about the glorious future of the King’s new-born daughter, later Elizabeth I. It is a special case for considering collective memory, because it made its first audience (c.1613) experience a shared act of remembering. They could think back to a queen’s long reign, which ended ten years before, to her birth and its aftermath eighty years before, and key points in between.
      If you hover your mouse over the highlighted phrases in the speech, then a running commentary will conveniently appear. If you’re reading this with a mouseless device, then I believe it should be possible to use your finger or parietal cortex to make it work. Of course you may be so at one with your Google Glasses that space and time, cause and effect, all and nothing, have become interchangeable, in which case, good luck.

Let me speak, sir,
For heaven now bids me; and the words I utter
Let none think flattery, for they’ll find ’em truth.
– heaven still move about her! –
Though in her cradle, yet now promises
Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings,
Which time bring to ripeness: she shall be –
But few now living can behold that goodness –
A pattern to all princes living with her,
And all that shall succeed: was never
More covetous of wisdom and fair virtue
Than this pure soul shall be: all princely graces,
That mould up such a mighty piece as this is,
With all the virtues that attend the good,
Shall still be doubled on her: truth shall nurse her,
Holy and heavenly thoughts counsel her:
She shall be loved and fear’d: her own shall bless her;
Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,
And hang their heads with sorrow: good grows with her:
,
Under his own vine, what he plants; and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:
; and those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honour,
And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.
Nor shall this peace sleep with her: but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create ,
As great in admiration as herself;
So shall she leave her blessedness to one,
When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,
Who from the sacred ashes of her honour
Shall star-like rise, ,
And so stand fix’d: peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,
That the servants to this chosen infant,
Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to him:
Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honour and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and : he shall flourish,
And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches
To all the plains about him:
Shall see this, and bless heaven.

The king briefly interjects, ‘thou speakest wonders’, before Cranmer finishes his speech…

She shall be, to the happiness of England,
An ; many days shall see her,
And yet no day without a deed to crown it.
! but she must die,
She must, the saints must have her; yet a virgin,
A most unspotted lily shall she pass
To the ground, and .

i.e. Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, second in line to the throne at the time.
The future tense is pointed here because it has already happened for the audience. Cranmer is truly inspired because he is prophesying things that have already happened.
i.e. the Biblical Queen of Sheba, who came from her homeland (perhaps in modern Yemen) to Jerusalem, with great pomp and ceremony, to question King Solomon.
The word means ‘always’ routinely in Shakespearean English, but in the context of a prophecy-that-has-already-happened, the adverb is a bit disorienting. She is dead; it can’t ‘still’ happen.
Cranmer evokes something like a Golden Age, a perfect timeless time; timelessness is a complex concept when timescales are such a part of the scene.
This is not just a claim about Golden Age closeness to God. It is a reference to the establishment of protestantism in England during Elizabeth’s reign. This might rally the audience around a common cause, but it would surely draw attention to the struggles and divisions of the Reformation. This is perhaps the passage’s first test of collective memory: how much does any individual audience member know how much ‘we’ recall (by choice or otherwise) collectively?
i.e. King James I; and here, at close range, is another collective memory test. James was Elizabeth’s heir, but not her son. His accession was almost miraculously untraumatic, but it could have been otherwise. How much had that been smoothed over; not a lot, perhaps, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.
In my previous post I mentioned research into the patterns of decay in the popular memory of US Presidents. This moment offers an approximate parallel: if fame is something like prominence in the collective memory, then here the audience was invited to consider whether, how, and when Elizabeth’s fame and James’s would match.
The grammar here isn’t a big problem — Cranmer imagines the future perspective looking back on the infant’s adult life. However, the switch from ‘shall’ to ‘were’ gets us into the problem of linking prophecy and memory in the same speech.
i.e. the union of England and Scotland, which had not been completed — and wouldn’t be for a long time — in 1613.
This strikes a timeless and universal note, but it is technically feasible in this case.
Elizabeth grew old but never married; the ‘aged princess’ idea captures how something associated with youth, the state of a princess, thus lasted throughout her life.
As with ‘were’ above, the tense isn’t hard to fathom, but the present tense prophetic moment, turning future into past, puts the ‘would… had’ construction into a strange time-space; see also the vivid present tense ‘must’ later in the line.
At the end of the speech, the big question is: are the things not mentioned, forgotten? One is the fate of Elizabeth’s mother, beheaded before her third birthday. The other is the fate of Cranmer himself, burnt as a heretic in the reign of Mary I, which came between those of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. The speech prophesies, in a way, a collective memory in which these things no longer figure. The audience, individually and collectively, may well have had to work out whether that act of forgetting had really happened; whether they would let it be taken as having happened; whether that was a desirable thing.
E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk

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