plicity of treatment. This progress is chiefly due to the increased facilities for economy in the lighting of scenery-suggestion is often stronger than actuality where purely fantastic and imaginative works are concerned. I would, of course, not apply this law to scenes of realism, in which most of Shakespeare's plays pass. In Hamlet I have found myself most happy in the purely suggestive surroundings of tapestries, and I have received assurances from many playgoers that they were more impressed by this mode of treating the play than by any other. In our recent production of Macbeth, too, the scenery was characterised by simple grandeur rather than by magnificence of detail. Rugged simplicity was the note of an admirable production of King Lear at the Haymarket Theatre. It would, of course, be an artistic mistake to apply this treatment to such plays as Julius Cæsar or Richard II. or Henry VIII., or indeed to any of the history plays. Simplicity is certainly an enviable state. In life -as in art-it is only arrived at after wandering through the maze of complexity. It is the slow process of elimination of unessentials.

KING HENRY VIII

INTRODUCTORY

In these notes, written as a holiday task, it is not intended to give an exhaustive record of the events of Henry's reign; but rather to offer an impression of the more prominent personages in Shakespeare's play; and perhaps to aid the playgoer in a fuller appreciation of the conditions which governed their actions.

Marienbad, 1910.

KING HENRY VIII.

HOLBEIN, with skilful brush, has drawn the

His
Character.

character and written the history of Henry in his great picture. Masterful, cruel, crafty, merciless, courageous, sensual, through-seeing, humorous, mean, matter of fact, worldly-wise, and of indomitable will, Henry the Eighth is perhaps the most outstanding figure in English history. The reason is not far to seek. The genial adventurer with sporting tendencies and largehearted proclivities is always popular with the mob, and "Bluff King Hal" was of the eternal type adored by the people. He had a certain outward and inward affinity with Nero. Like

Nero, he was corpulent; like Nero, he was red-haired; like Nero, he sang and poetised; like Nero, he was a lover of horsemanship, a master of the arts, and the slave of his passions. If his private vices were great, his public virtues were no less considerable. He had the ineffable quality called charm, and the appearance of goodnature which captivated all who came within the orbit of his radiant personality. He was the beau garçon, endearing himself to all women by his compelling and conquering manhood. Henry was every inch a man, but he was no gentleman. He chucked even Justice under the chin, and Justice winked her blind eye.

It is extraordinary that, in spite of his brutality, both Katharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn spoke of him as him as a model of kindness. This cannot be accounted for merely by that divinity which doth hedge a king.

There is, above all, in the face of Henry, as limned by Holbein, that look of impenetrable mystery which was the background of his character. Many royal men have this strange quality; with some it is inborn, with others it is assumed. Cavendish, who was Wolsey's faithful secretary-he who after the Cardinal's fall wrote the interesting "Life of Wolsey," one of the manuscript copies of which evidently fell into Shakespeare's hands before he wrote Henry VIII.