Page:Henry VIII (1925) Yale.djvu/139

King Henry the Eighth arrested with him and Brandon accompanies him, there is only one person, Norfolk, left on the stage.

The Council Chamber. These locations of the scenes are later additions. On the Elizabethan stage there was no front curtain and ordinarily no intermission. As Buckingham and Abergavenny are led off at one side, with Norfolk following, trumpets are heard and the King enters from the other side. Sir Thomas Lovell was the Constable of the Tower. The scene follows the long account of the charges against Buckingham as given in Holinshed, with the important exception that the petition of Katharine and her attack upon Wolsey are the creation of the dramatists.

Suffolk. Charles Brandon, created Duke of Suffolk in 1514, married Mary Tudor, Henry's sister, the dowager Queen of France.

King riseth from his state. The 'state' was a raised throne with a canopy. This had been brought on by stage hands after the end of the first scene.

there have been commissions. This account is taken from Holinshed (1587), p. 891. But the chronology is confused. The commissions were sent in March, 1525, four years after Buckingham's death. But for this there is the dramatic reason that antedating these events enables Katharine to plead both for the people and for Buckingham, and by so doing to intensify Wolsey's dislike of her.

Stand forth. J.S. Brewer comments on this scene as follows:

'It will be remembered that in Shakespeare's play the Duke is declared guilty by the King at a meeting of the Privy Council, even before his regular trial had taken place;—a process altogether informal. In the Council Chamber in which Queen Katharine and Wolsey are present, the King is represented as conducting the examination of the Duke's surveyor,