ACADEMIA Letters Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII: What ‘Reformation’? Margie Burns, University of Maryland Baltimore County Shakespeare never used the words ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’ in his plays. Neither word oc- curs in any form in any Shakespearean plays, or in any parts of plays on which Shakespeare collaborated. This observation may seem narrow as an approach to the works, but it is not just that the two names, found in contemporaneous discourse, are missing in Shakespeare. Like the terms ‘Catholic’ (‘Catholick,’ ‘Catholicke,’ ‘Catholique’) and ‘Protestant,’ most of the polarizing internecine Christian diction of Shakespeare’s lifetime is missing. 1 As a play- wright, Shakespeare chose not to employ much of the lexicon used in religious polemics in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries–’Anti-Christ’ or ‘Reformation,’ ‘heresy’ or ‘idola- try.’ Polarizing terms appear either never, rarely, or in non-religious contexts. When they do appear, the exception proves the rule; their usage is discredited, usually transparently, by the character of the speaker. Thus, one of the bloodiest divisions in England and in Europe during Shakespeare’s life- time, the overt and covert conficts between Protestantism and Catholicism, went literally unnamed in the entire corpus of Shakespeare’s works. The divide may be seen and felt in Shakespeare’s plays, but most of the explicit terms for it are either omitted or discredited— even when the main action centers around the confict, as in the early King John and in the late project Henry VIII in 1613. The focus of this paper is Henry VIII, where the lexical acts and omissions are truly remarkable. However, the context for Henry VIII is still the overall Shakespeare corpus. To apply this kind of lexical analysis to Henry VIII, one must begin with summary points about the lexicon overall. 2 1 References to individual words discussed signify all contemporaneous spellings, indicated by one modernized spelling for convenience. 2 For occurrence of individual words and names, see OpenSourceShakespeare, George Mason University Academia Letters, October 2021 Corresponding Author: Margie Burns, margie.burns@gmail.com Citation: Burns, M. (2021). Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII: What ‘Reformation’? Academia Letters, Article 3743. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3743. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0