Places: Henry VIII

*Westminster Henry VIIIPalace. Royal palace in London in which most of the play is set. The vast palace affords the play’s producers rich opportunities for sumptuous spectacle. Life at the royal court often consisted of revels, masques, and displays of splendor. There is plenty of pageantry in Henry VIII, but there is also harsh and cold realism. As Shakespeare shows, King Henry’s court was a place of intrigue and counter-intrigue, of fulsome emotion and eloquence. His play exploits the size and layout of Henry’s palace for the various conflicts that are played out.

The play uses various rooms for different dramatic purposes. An antechamber, for example, is the setting for the duke of Buckingham’s outrage at Cardinal Wolsey and his aim–which is forestalled–to report to the king about the cardinal’s treachery. The palace itself is the place in which news of the birth of the daughter of Anne Bullen (Anne Boleyn) is first heard, and it serves as the locale for the play’s climax, in which the infant Elizabeth is baptized and eulogized by Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, in the final scene. The council chamber is the place where Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon, makes suit to the king on behalf of the people who are upset by the court’s extravagance. An anteroom and yard are used for brief scenes in act 5 dealing with the bishop of Winchester’s unsuccessful attempt to destroy Cranmer.