The Manipulation of Truth: Prophecies and Conspiracies in Shakespeare and Fletcher's All is True, or Henry VIII

In the last controversial play of the Shakespearean canon, the King - Henry VIII - is surrounded by characters who are involved in prophecies and conspiracies whose features will be investigated and examined several times during the performance. The restoration of “truth” as well as the investigation of “conscience” (a religious obsession in the Reformed England) appear then to be pivotal to decipher what happens on the stage: from Buckingham’s conspiracy - due to a false prophecy - to Wolsey’s trial against Queen Catherine, which should restore the word of the Holy Scripture and save King Henry’s soul and reign, up to Cranmer’s final prophecy forecasting the flourishing reign of Elizabeth. The paper will concentrate on the analysis of the trial scenes of the play (whose first title was All is true) in order to show how truth and falsehood reveal themselves to be particularly shifting and ambiguous when the rhetoric of secret (shaping both prophecies and conspiracies) is not only unveiled but even discussed within the juridical frame of the law court. Nonetheless, the unreliability of statements and the partiality of judgment pervading almost every discourse on the scene ultimately seem to call into question the very possibility to state a truth on human words and actions