gency was it is impossible to tell at this late date. It has been suggested that the play was written to celebrate the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth with the Elector Palatine, which took place on the fourteenth of February, 1613. But as runs were very brief in that age, it is questionable whether Wotton would have described it four months later as 'new' if that had been the case. There is no need for positing a great ceremonial, or an affair of state, to call for the play. The emergency may equally well have been purely theatrical: that the manager was disappointed in a play for which he had contracted, or that the play he had intended to produce was unavailable for one of a hundred reasons, and a new play had to be substituted. At least, Henry VIII shows signs of hurried work. As we do not have the manuscript, it is always possible that the obvious errors in the text are due to the mistakes of the typesetter. That is not true in some cases here. The authors themselves must be held responsible for imprisoning Wolsey in Asher House, the residence of the Bishop of Winchester, when Wolsey was himself Bishop of Winchester. Such a slip can mean only that the authors had read their Holinshed rapidly. The banquet after the coronation is plainly stated to have been held in Westminster Hall; on a preceding page, following the account of a previous procession, Holinshed tells us that Anne retired to Whitehall. Presumably the authors lost the place in the chronicle and they have put the coronation banquet in Whitehall. Sandys, who was 'Lord' Sandys in Act I, is degraded to mere knighthood in Act II. Such mistakes as these are not due to an ignorant typesetter; they are due to a writer that cares vastly more for the theatrical significance of the scene than for historical accuracy. Other errors, while possibly typographical, are probably due to careless composition. Reading the black letter of
