Henry VIII: King and Man in Literature, History, and Faction

Abstract

This paper focuses on exploring and analyzing Henry VIII as a British king and man described in the literary, historical, and factional views of the early twenty-first century. Henry VIII, King of England from 1509 to 1547, has been recast on worldwide stages and writings throughout the centuries onto the twenty-first century. In 2009, two books on Henry VIII were published: Henry VIII: Man and Monarch published by British Library which was recaptured by several writers and Wolf Hall, a faction written by Hilary Mantel. Furthermore, King Henry VIII, or All is True, a history play edited in 1999, has brought out innumerable recreated versions of king mostly on stages. In King Henry VIII, or All is True, Henry VIII is ‘heroic’, humanistic, and poetic, but tragic as a man, husband, lover, and king. He does have noble nature, has gone beyond the learned, surfing the early humanism, and spectating the ache of early modernism. But Henry VIII described in Henry VIII: Man and Monarch takes a flowering role of swimming in the mainstream of the early first humanism he faces and of the religion of humanity in the Renaissance era. He looks for the breakthrough to invisible world for his own and human or ‘thing’ over god in macrocosm. On the other hand, Henry VIII in Wolf Hall bids his subjects make the inevitable to the evitable, necessity. In macrocosm, the change from the inevitable to the evitable is derived from human nature of which the Henry VIII is made, and the entire world partly contributes. The change from human nature is the vitality and the nature of human being, which is getting more ‘wolfish.’ The poetic, humanistic, and wolfish Henry VIII pursues truths, ‘things’, and ‘ideas’ over god or to be God(?), which are good enough to live out in the space as long as humans exist.