Comparative Drama

The True Chronicle Historie of the Whole Life and Death of Thomas Lord Cromwell by "W.S.," printed in 1602, was first performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men around 1599, and it remained part of the company's repertory.¹ The play's title upon publication links the play with a historical figure, leading virtually every critic to treat Cromwell as a history play, regardless of how one defines the genre.² If considered a history, the group of texts with which it could most readily be associated is the topical cluster focusing on the court intrigues that brought about the rise and fall of the "three Thomases" who served as chief ministers to Henry VIII: Sir Thomas More by Anthony Munday and John Chettle (1600), revised by Thomas Dekker, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Heywood (post-1603); Chettle's lost play The Life of Cardinal Wolsey (1601) and its prequel The Rising of Wolsey (1601) by Chettle, Munday, Michael Drayton, and Wentworth Smith; Samuel Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me (c.1603; printed 1605); and Shakespeare and John Fletcher's All Is True/Henry VIII (1613).³

The printed title suggests that it might have been conceived as a type of humanist vita grafted onto a de casibus tragic arc, unfolding sequentially from Cromwell's youth in Putney, through his maturation on the Continent, to the pinnacle of his political success, and thence rapidly to the last station of his progress around Fortune's wheel—a sudden, undeserved downfall and death. Cromwell's life-trajectory, when considered in these terms, does indeed present a de casibus tragedy—an [End Page 389] unsubtle hint taken up by Michael Drayton in writing his long poem in ottava rima, The Legend of Great Cromwell (1607), which Richard Niccols included in his 1610 text of The Mirror for Magistrates. True to the generic form, Cromwell's fall is unambiguously predicted and effected by Bishop Gardiner in the role of the envious rival and villainous political enemy, and Cromwell responds to the misfortune with the decorous humility of a virtuous sufferer (F4^v–G1^r).⁴ In his last moments as a tragic hero, Cromwell indulges in the stock affective tropes that "humanize" characters whose high political status or historical and cultural remoteness keep them apart from the common experience of the average theatre-goer, and attempts to control memory in a de rigeur moment of tragic parting with a little child (G2^r–v).⁵

But to present the synopsis of Cromwell in this fashion is to miss the true points of interest and emphasis in the play's plotline. Here history plays a cameo role. Historical reality barges onto the stage for a moment, tracing within the span of a dozen lines Cromwell's meteoric rise to the pinnacle of power through a shower of titles (D4^v), only to exit and return ten quarto pages later, to conclude Cromwell's decade-long political career in another breathtakingly fast descent. The play actually unfolds according to a very different generic template—one commonly associated with comedy. Though it ends in political tragedy, the threats to happiness and welfare in its central plots are resolved so rapidly that it does not resemble tragicomedy either, because that form typically relies on protracted yet unfulfilled threats of misery. For most of the play, Cromwell's life is crowded out of the center of our attention by the economic bustling of other characters, lending credence to Baldwin Maxwell's hypothesis that the printed text may be an imperfect "telescoping of a two-part play into a play of five acts."⁶

If the play belongs to the Henry VIII topical cluster, understanding its place in the group is crucial for any attempt to decipher its messaging as well as to identify how it might have been responding to other texts or initiating contacts with future respondents in a larger cultural conversation. Following dates suggested by the Oxford editors and G.K. Hunter, the first play would be Sir Thomas More (c.1593) written collaboratively for...