Response to Prompt #1 2009

"In the following speech from Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey considers his sudden downfall from his position as advisor to the king. Spokesmen for the king have just left Wolsey alone on stage. Read the speech carefully. Then write a well-organized essay in which you analyze how Shakespeare uses elements such as allusion, figurative language, and tone to convey Wolsey’s complex response to his dismissal from court."

            Understanding Wolsey’s soliloquy requires the reader to examine the changes in tone during his response to dismissal, and what these changes indicate about his emotional state. In the process of expressing himself, he uses a variety of literary devices and allusions. The soliloquy can be broken up into three different stages in his reaction. In the first (1-9), he expresses anger and frustration at such a rash decision. In the second (9-15), he is more self-reflective, trying to justify his dismissal by considering his own behavior, and in the final section (16-23), he considers what has happened to him from a more general perspective.

Wolsey’s tone in the first section can be seen as both contemptuous and enraged. This is clear from the first line when he says “Farewell-to the little good you bear me.” He mainly portrays himself as a victim of circumstance, using a metaphor to compare himself to a flowering plant who “falls” because of a “killing frost” (9, 6). In essence, he first sees the king’s hasty decision is one of malicious deliberation, intended to stifle his own potential.

In the second section, Wolsey takes a step back to look at how he ended up in this situation. He uses the simile of the “wanton boys that swim on bladders” to describe his own “high blown pride,” saying that he considered himself more important than how the king actually valued him. The simile relates directly to his fall from power by comparing it to the bladder breaking under him (10, 12, 13). While it would be more clearly elucidated in a live performance, it appears through the shift from accusation to contemplation that Wolsey has calmed down and begun to consider the errors in his ways and not simply the injustice of his predicament.

The final section of the soliloquy is considerably more broadly applicable than the preceding lines. After overcoming his initial reaction and reflecting, he now returns to a more aggravated state to say “how wretched is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favors!” (17-18). He considers the service at the hands of royalty a great burden, not only because of the task itself, but because of the pain of a fall from the king’s graces. In fact, he considers the contrast between working for the king and the rejection that he suffered comparable to a fall from the grace of God. This is clear when he states that when a man working for a monarch falls, “he falls like Lucifer.” Not only does this allusion to the Biblical story of the fallen angel express the literal magnitude of his demotion, but how a fall from the favor of Henry VIII is as detrimental as a fall from heaven into hell in this society.

Overall, Shakespeare uses Wolsey’s soliloquy to express a deeply complex, personal reaction in beautifully concise language. Through this reaction, he also succeeds in providing the audience with a historical perspective on the harrows of living in a society ruled by a king as quick tempered as Henry VIII from the intimate viewpoint of one of his closest advisers.