Euro-trash academics can equivocate all they please, but we Americans have long known what to make of England’s king Henry VIII: a debauchee and serial wife-killer. So it may come as a surprise to see a considerably cuddlier Henry portrayed on Ashland’s Elizabethan Stage this season - maybe not quite as winsome as the Herman’s Hermit cockney version, but still a far cry from the gouty despot in the famous Holbein portrait.

In fact, as played by Ashland neophyte Elijah Alexander, Henry bears a striking physical resemblance to our own Wally Herger - same close-set stare of befuddlement, same brillo-frizz haircut, same coprophagous grin. He’s even mastered the spraddle-splayed Herger stride; it looks like a swagger, at first, until you recognize it as a desparate bid to gain “sea-legs” and simply stay standing upright on a deck that’s forever pitching and yawing underfoot.

For Henry, like Wally, has every reason to be anxious about his footing. Here he finds himself - through no special talent or achievement of his own - in a position of unchallengeable pre-eminence. Yet, like Wally, he remains obsessively jittery about the long-term ascendancy of his faction (in Henry’s case the royal Tudor lineage). Such incumbents are not exactly evil; just petty, flighty, utterly self-centered and forever whip-lashed by the flattery or innuendo of their surrounding flunkies.

Far be it from Shakespeare to question the fitness of such a sovereign to reign. The Bard was, after all, the Mainstream Media of his day, a (handsomely) paid propagandist for the monarchial party (cf. NewsCaf review of “Equivocation”). For him, the Divine Right of Kings was simply taken for granted, a law of nature, much like the Indelible Redness of California Congressional District 2 for today’s MSM.

And, besides, Henry had been dead for just 80 years - a mere eye-blink on the scale of 17^th century news cycles - by the time the play was produced in 1613. Better treat him with studied circumspection, even at the cost of some blandness. After all, we’re talking about the father and grandfather, respectively, of Shakespeare’s two royal patrons, Elizabeth Tudor and James Stuart.

Never mind that Henry led his country out of Roman Catholicism, founded the Anglican Church, annexed Scotland, Ireland and Wales, empowered Parliament and established a ruthlessly efficient police state. As far as this play is concerned, the title character’s signal achievement is begetting a daughter - a department in which Wally, with his nine offspring, easily outshines Henry.

But Shakespeare is still a genius, as well as a hack, and can’t quite content himself with such anodyne fare. More than his shallow portrait of the king, he’s interested in the collateral damage of Henry’s heedless egomania: his spurned first queen, Katherine of Aragon, and the scheming Cardinal Wolsey, who engineers Katherine’s downfall before succumbing, himself, to palace intrigue.

These two characters, rather than Henry, form the twin foci of this elliptical drama. It is an old man’s play - Shakespeare’s last - full of rueful rumination on lost powers and the transience of worldly glory. Vilma Silva plays Katherine with Iberian hauteur, even in defeat. Anthony Heald’s fawning Wolsey conceals a core of hard-headed realism, both as a cynical schemer in his heyday and a resigned penitent after his fall.

Wolsey and Katherine get some decent speeches, but nothing approaching the iconic soliloquies of the Shakespearian canon. Henry VIII would probably pass the latest computerized sniff test for authorial authenticity, but it’s not exactly first-rate Shakespeare; a bit of an anti-climax for the last-staged production of the Bard’s theatrical career.

But why judge the script by the standards of high tragedy? Rather accept it as a series of court masques, a kind of sumptuous didactic pageant that was all the rage among Jacobean audiences, whether royal and plebian. To grasp the concept of a masque, think of a cross between a Las Vegas kewpie show and a medieval morality play.

Director John Sipes has studded the Ashland production with no fewer than six of these extravaganzas - everything from a mock-joust to a costume ball to the christening of the infant Princess Elizabeth. This is the sort of show-stopping production number that Ashland does very well, largely thanks (in this instance) to costume designer Susan Mickey and choreographer Suzee Grilley.

Much of the credit should also go to the hyperkinetic Alexander. In the title role, he’s right in the center of most of these tableaux, whether he’s fencing or jousting or morris-dancing or tripping a measure with the beauteous Anne Bullen (Christine Albright) - quite the testimonial (as Shakespeare no doubt intended) to Tudor dynastic vigor. More convincing, anyway, than Wally on water-skis as a poster child for Republican vim.

Lincoln Kaye is a forest fire lookout on Ironside Mountain in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. He was a foreign correspondent in Asia for nearly 30 years before retiring to Trinity County.

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