Heinrich VIII / Henry VIII

Shakespeare’s last drama, Henry VIII, is one of his greatest works with its national-political themes and compositional innovations. It depicts the conflicts at the English court in London at the beginning of the Reformation and concludes with a vision of the future fate of the English nation. The focus is on the King’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his development into a responsible ruler. The portrayal of Catherine, one of the great female characters in Shakespeare’s work, is unsurpassed. The relationship between Henry and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, is characterized by the consistent absence of the private and personal and the restriction to the political and dynastic, a unique phenomenon in dramatic literature. It is also very significant that Shakespeare uses the element of pageantry to involve the citizens of London in the events at court.

Cover picture: Portrait of Catherine of Aragon, Queen of England, copy after the painting by Michiel Sittow (1469-1525).

About the editors: Wolfgang G. Müller was Professor of English Literature at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena from 1992-2007. His works on Shakespeare include the monograph Die politische Rede bei Shakespeare and the volume Hamlet, which he edited together with Norbert Greiner in the English-German Study Edition of Shakespeare’s plays.

Peter Wolfensperger taught at a cantonal school in Winterthur, but was also a Shakespeare researcher in his own right. After his habilitation in 1992, he regularly taught as a private lecturer at the University of Zurich. His work on the edition of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII came to an end when he died in 2005, before it could be completed.

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