Recent work by scholars regarding early modern conceptions of the maternal body intersects in fascinating ways with disability studies. Gail Kern Paster's work, for example, examines the early modern notion of the "messy" female body, observing that the maternal body was perceived, in particular, to be both "polluted and polluting" (165). Paster argues, in fact, that early modern culture constructed pregnancy as "a disease" (184). Janet Adelman goes even further claiming that the maternal body in Shakespeare's plays is a "site of deformation and vulnerability" (5). Other scholars, too, have identified how the maternal body was viewed as threatening in early modern culture. Naomi Miller has explored how maternity was viewed as "potentially monstrous" (7) in the early modern period while Peter Stallybrass claims that the female body was viewed as "naturally grotesque" (126). Such a body, according to Stallybrass, was believed to necessitate "constant surveillance precisely because, as [Mikhail] Bakhtin says of the grotesque body, it is 'unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits'" (126).

The language that these scholars employ, that of disease and deformation, the grotesque and the monstrous, suggests that the early modern maternal body is ripe for the application of disability theory. Just as the maternal body provoked anxiety in the early modern world, disability theorists like Susan Wendell have examined how in contemporary society disabled people who are "lacking the ability to control the body" are "despised, pitied, and above all feared" (248). As I will argue, Shakespeare's Henry VIII1 provides an intersection of these two discourses with its depiction of women who are marginalized for their perceived failures as mothers. In keeping with many disability theorists' belief that disability is largely socially constructed,2 the world of the play constructs Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn as possessors of "disabled wombs." Despite their proven fertility, for both women bear healthy daughters, their failure to birth sons leads to their construction as disabled. To use Wendell's nomenclature, they are deemed "unable" to control their bodies and birth healthy boys, and for this perceived failure, they are "despised, pitied and feared." Such fear, as the play reveals, leads to a treatment of Katherine and Anne that mirrors the experience that disabled people have historically faced: they are blamed for their conditions, which are viewed as indicators of their sinful activity, stigmatized in a manner consistent with Erving Goffman's theory of stigmatization, and isolated, both from their own daughters and the world. The play suggests, in fact, that it is actually stigmatization and sequestration that produce a physically depleted body; Katherine, for instance, is physically hearty through much of the play and becomes enervated only after being forced into isolation. Henry VIII, therefore, provides a glimpse of the disabling trajectory that both Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn travel as Henry VIII's queens — a journey that begins with the pomp of queenship, leads to the disappointment of "failed" pregnancies, and ends in subsequent isolation and death.

The Disabled Womb

Though both Katherine and Anne were pregnant numerous times according to historical records, in Henry VIII we see them characterized by their oppressive ableist culture as "disabled" for their failures to produce viable male heirs. As Henry observes of Katherine of Aragon, heaven has

This sinister description of the womb implies that Katherine's female body has essentially killed the male children that Henry claims he has created. Such an ominous description of the womb was not uncommon in early modern writing. Medical writings frequently employed language implying that a fetus was susceptible to mortal danger in his or her mother's womb. Early modern physicians such as Laurent Joubert and Jean Fernal even attributed dangerous attributes to the womb; Joubert described it as, "unclean, filthy, and foul," and Fernal referred to it as "the breeder of the most deadly poison" (qtd. in Paster, 174).

While Anne Boleyn's womb is not under the same scrutiny as Katherine's in the play, in her brief time on stage she too is constructed as incapable of bearing a son.4 An unnamed Old Lady claims that Anne is "weakly made" (2.3.40) and that her "back … 'tis too weak / Ever to get [bear] a boy" (42-44). The Old Lady's claim proves to be prophetic for Anne: as Shakespeare's audience knew, Anne never did bear a son. She was ultimately deemed monstrous because of this failure, and was executed shortly thereafter. As the Old Lady predicts, Anne's body is judged inadequate for "getting" a boy.

Not only are both women constructed as disabled, they are also blamed for their seeming disabilities. Despite their best efforts to fulfill their primary duty as England's queen, both Katherine and Anne confront censure for their failures to birth healthy sons. Such censure was consistent with the early modern belief that, as David Turner explains, "the corporeal and the moral mutually reinforced each other" (5). Therefore any physical anomaly might have been seen as an indication of immoral activity. English physician Nicholas Culpeper's A Directory for Midwives warned expectant mothers, "Your child is nourished by your own blood … rectified or marred by your exercise, idleness, sleep, or watching, & Nature sees and knows how you swerve from what is fitting" (156). As Paster notes, Culpeper and other early modern writers clearly suggested that "the anxious …woman has no one to blame but herself for the difficulties in her pregnancy or the hazards in its outcome" (181). Religious writings of Shakespeare's day were especially vehement in professing that physical difference often signified the sinful. As Turner explains, "links between sin and physical aberration were writ large in the writings of religious moralists" (4). Clergyman Thomas Tuke, for instance, professed "the condition of the mind is 'discerned in the state and behavior of the body'" (qtd. in D. Turner 4). Medical writings, such as French surgeon Ambroise Paré's, confirmed this connection, saying that "physical difference could result from divine wrath for sinful conduct" (Stagg 22). Culpeper, too, frequently warned mothers of the dangers of sinful activities including inappropriate sexual activity which could leave a woman's womb "unfit to do its office" (97).

Anne Boleyn's womb was deemed "unfit" for just such reasons. Though the play ends before Anne's trial and execution, Shakespeare's audience would have been all too aware of the numerous rumors surrounding Anne during her brief reign as queen. After failing to birth a male heir, she was tried for treason and accused of multiple adulterous liaisons, including an incestuous affair with her brother. Such behavior would have more than explained the state of her "unfit" womb that had failed to deliver the long-awaited son. Some of the other explanations for Anne's "failure" were even more sensational. As Retha Warnicke notes, following a miscarriage, rumors spread that Anne participated in witchcraft which led her to bear a "defective fetus" (3). Others gossiped that Anne herself had a "monstrous appearance" that was indicative of her "bewitching" nature that had entrapped the king and deformed any male offspring he hoped to produce with her (201).

In fact both Katherine and Anne endured numerous miscarriages and stillbirths in their efforts to provide a legitimate male heir, and these unsuccessful pregnancies left them vulnerable to speculation that they were in fact possessors of disabled wombs. Katherine, clearly aware of such censure, aimed to divert blame for her first pregnancy, which ended with a stillborn daughter. In her letter to her father, King Ferdinand of Aragon, she pleaded, "Do not storm against me! It is not my fault; it is the will of God!" (qtd. in Luke 120). Yet Katherine's defense, that the stillbirth was the "will of God," would not have exonerated her in the eyes of the early modern world. As Patricia Crawford notes, even for non-royal women in early modern England, "The role of Providence as a direct agent in human affairs caused profound anxiety" (21). Following a miscarriage in Oct. 1662, Elizabeth Turner wrote, "I know not what ocationed [it] But am jealous lest it may be a punishment of some particular sin" (qtd. in Crawford 21). Early modern culture, therefore, would have seen miscarriage as God's judgment that a woman's actions were responsible for her disabled womb. If a baby survived birth, but bore any sign of abnormality, this too could be attributed to the mother. The mother's imagination was seen as a potent force "which operates as a sort of seal stamping the image of the mother's fancy on the child she had conceived in the womb" (McLaren 50). In particular, the woman's "imagination was believed to shape the child's features … [and] deformities could be a punishment for parental sin" (Crawford 7).

Queens such as Katherine and Anne faced the additional pressure of birthing a healthy son. Though they both gave birth to healthy daughters, a female heir, as the play illustrates, simply would not satisfy the patriarchal ethos of Henry's court. Act one of the play begins years into Henry and Katherine's marriage, and though Katherine has already borne Henry a daughter, Mary, Henry is still described as being "without issue" (1.1.135). The absence of a male heir is a political liability for Henry, and as the chief responsibility of a queen was to birth a viable son, the responsibility for Henry's lack of "issue" fell squarely on the shoulders of his queens. Early modern ideas regarding the role of the mother in determining the gender of a fetus only compounded this responsibility. Early modern science had yet to reach the conclusion that the father's chromosomes, not the mother's, determine the sex of a child. Laura Gowing notes that "practical understandings of the sexual and reproductive body were infinitely … contradictory" (20-21). In fact, many early modern childbirth treatises relied on ideas by ancient authorities, such as Galen, who remarked that it is "the uterus, not the semen, that ultimately determines sex" (qtd. in Bicks 314).

Further exonerating Henry for his "sonless" state was the fact that he did, indeed, father a male child, albeit an illegitimate one. Elizabeth Blount, one of Henry's mistresses, gave birth to Henry Fitzroy in 1519, providing corporeal proof that Henry could father a son. Because he was not legitimate, Henry Fitzroy could not succeed Henry as the monarch, and he eventually died at the age of seventeen. However, his survival past infancy indicated Henry's ability to successfully parent a son. His very name "Fitzroy," which is Norman French for "son of the King," served as a linguistic reminder of Henry's virility. As Alison Weir explains, "Henry was delighted to have a boy at last: here was proof-indeed that he himself was not responsible for the lack of a male heir" (123).

Henry certainly depicts Katherine as solely responsible for their failure to have a healthy son. In particular, he seizes on sin as a specific explanation for Katherine's failure. Though the "sin" in question, their supposedly incestuous union (Katherine was married briefly to Henry's older brother, Arthur, before he died), Henry strategically distances himself from both his wife and her failed pregnancies. He reflects on his "marriage with the dowager, / Sometimes our brother's wife" (2.4.177-78) and goes on to consider how "her male issue … died where they were made, or shortly after / This world had aired them" (188-190, my emphasis). Henry, exploiting prevailing beliefs about the mother's responsibility for an unhealthy fetus, employs language which unmistakably shifts the blame to Katherine herself. This is, as James Charlton reveals, consistent with rhetoric typically employed by the hegemony in its treatment of disabled people: "Ruling regimes…instill [their] values in the mass of people through double-speak, [and] misdirection (blame the victim)" ("Dimensions of Disability" 225). Henry does indeed implicitly "blame the victim," by discounting the unviable male children that Katherine has borne as distinctly "her" issue and resulting from the incestuous union he mistakenly made with "the dowager" (a term that typically denotes an elderly woman past her fertile years). Such rhetorical distancing is indicative of Henry's plan to physically remove Katherine: first from his bed, then from his immediate presence, and eventually from his court altogether.

Stigmatization and its Resistance

Charlton, in discussing the worldwide oppression of disabled people, suggests that "perhaps the most fitting characterization of the condition … of people with disabilities is that they are outcasts" ("Dimensions of Disability" 218). Such outcasts, on the periphery of society, often suffer stigmatization. In his landmark work, Stigma, Erving Goffman explains "that the stigmatized is a person reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one" (131). Certainly, by the end of the play, Katherine has been characterized as just such a "tainted, discounted" person. She does not, however, begin the play in this way; instead, her first appearance is in a place of prominence. Henry insists, in fact, when she kneels before him on behalf of his subjects, that she "arise, and take place by us" (1.2.11). Yet after meeting Anne Boleyn in the early part of act two, Henry begins the process of designating Katherine as an outcast and begins to stigmatize her as incapable of procreation. Describing Katherine's womb, once a symbol of fertility and generation, as a fatal "grave" (2.4.188), Henry insists that his court recognize Katherine's newly acquired stigma, and accordingly, avoid, pity, and even fear her.

Despite Henry's efforts, the English people's affection for Katherine appears undiminished. As the duke of Norfolk comments in act two, Katherine is "like a jewel [that] has hung twenty years / About his [Henry's] neck, yet never lost her luster" (2.2.31-32). Though Henry insists on stigmatizing her as an inadequate biological mother, Katherine resists such a depiction of her maternity, and presents herself as a loving metaphoric maternal figure to her English subjects. In her first appearance in the play, she kneels before Henry, identifying herself as "a suitor" (1.2.10). She pleads to Henry as his subjects' intercessor, speaking on behalf of "not … a few" (1.2.19) of his people who are in "great grievance" over unjust taxation (21). Similarly, in Katherine's final scene, her primary concern is for those "wretched women" (4.2.141) who have remained with her in exile from the court. She begs that someone "stand [as] these poor people's friend" (158). The English subjects appreciate her devotion and react to Katherine's misfortune with pity, a typical response to disability. In act two, an unnamed "Second Gentleman" discerns that Cardinal Wolsey will, through his machinations, "undo"(2.1.159) the "good Queen" (158). He goes on to lament, "is't not cruel / That she should feel the smart of this? / The Cardinal will have his will, and she must fall" (2.2.164-166). His companion agrees, "'Tis woeful" (168).

These seemingly compassionate remarks are better understood in light of contemporary disability scholars' perspectives on "pity." As Charlton explains, pity itself "presupposes superiority" ("Culture and Belief Systems" 55). Though able-bodied persons often feel that extending pity is the appropriate response to disability, as former poster child Cyndi Jones insists, pity itself "oppresses" (qtd. in Shapiro 12). This is largely because, as Joseph Shapiro explains, "pity language" tends "to divide the world between the lucky and unlucky, between us and them" (Shapiro 24). So while these English citizens may indeed feel affection for their queen, they perhaps also feel the need to distance themselves from her stigma. Their "pity language" only acts to further reinforce her isolation as the "unlucky" one who has been deemed disabled. Language itself, therefore, alienates Katherine from the public she has mothered.

Despite the public's insistence on treating her as pitiable, Katherine shows great courage in resisting Henry's efforts to disable her. At her divorce trial, Katherine rejects any insinuations that she has been unsuccessful as a maternal figure, claiming instead, "Sir, call to mind / That I have been your wife in this obedience / Upward of twenty years, and have been blessed / With many children by you" (2.4.32-36). In declaring her resolute belief that her body has not been inadequate, but, on the contrary, blessed by "many children,"5 Katherine demonstrates a characteristic sometimes apparent in those who suffer from stigmatization in our culture. As Goffman notes, "it seems possible for an individual to fail to live up to what we effectively demand of him, and yet be relatively untouched by this failure … protected by identity beliefs of his own, he feels that he is a full-fledged normal being, and that we are the ones who are not quite human"(133). Although Katherine's sense of self-worth in the face of the court's effort to stigmatize her is unwavering, as she moves to leave, Cardinal Campeius declares, "The Queen is obstinate, / Stubborn to justice, / apt to accuse it, and / Disdainful to be tried by't. Tis not well. / She's going away" (2.4. 119-122). Though the Cardinal's words describe her movement as she leaves the stage, his words are also prescient: despite her best efforts at resistance, she is "going away" from Henry's presence: first to her own apartments, and ultimately to her sequestration at Kimbolton.

Henry's emissaries move rapidly to isolate Katherine and remove her from her role as queen to the English people. This move, to sequester the disabled from the "able-bodied," is in keeping with a long tradition of segregation of disabled people. As David Braddock and Susan Parish note in their "Institutional History of Disability," the confinement of various disabled populations in Europe dates back to the twelfth century, with the first quarantining of persons with leprosy. As they explain, "this… isolation of lepers was a harbinger of the perceived merits of segregation and confinement of other disabled populations" (20). One such "perceived merit" of such segregation, of course, is that the "able-bodied" population may avoid interaction with disabled people. For Katherine, this forced isolation comes in stages. At first, she is sequestered to her private apartments, alienated from the public and despondent over her inexplicable "fall … from favour" (3.1.20). When Cardinals Wolsey and Campeius arrive to attempt to sway her to accede to the divorce, Wolsey asks, "May it please you, noble madam, to withdraw / Into your private chamber, we shall give you / The full cause of our coming" (27-29). Wolsey's impulse is to sequester her further, removing her from even her most intimate companions. Yet Katherine refuses his efforts to contain her, saying "There's nothing I have done yet, o' my conscience, / Deserves a corner," and she later claims, "Truth loves open dealing" (30-1,39). Katherine staunchly refuses these efforts to construct her as a disabled person in need of sequestration.

The Toll of Sequestration

Katherine's attempts to deny containment are ultimately unsuccessful, however, and in her final appearance of the play, she is further sequestered in Kimbolton Castle. Antonia Fraser notes that the historical "Kimbolton Castle had been built sixty years earlier …[and] was now in a state of great decay. Queen Katherine had not wanted to be taken there" (221). The castle's decay itself may have, metaphorically, mirrored the ostensible decay of Katherine's womb. Separated from the sympathy of the English public, she is now accompanied only by her closest attendants, and denied little other human interaction. Reportedly, this alienation was so painful to Katherine that when she was allowed a rare visit by Spanish Ambassador Eustace Chapuys, she claimed relief at not being "abandoned — like one of the beasts" (qtd. in Mattingly 426). Katherine's remark reveals the dehumanizing effect of her isolation, which is only exacerbated by her physical deterioration.

Separation from her only daughter may have contributed to this deterioration. Historically, Mary was not allowed to visit Katherine in her sequestration, and biographer Mary Luke comments that "worry over her daughter had a debilitating effect on the Queen" (473). Shakespeare too removes Mary, not only from Katherine's isolation, but from the play altogether. She never appears onstage, and the only time Henry ever speaks of Mary is when he deliberates a possible marriage between her and the Duke of Orleans. Katherine attempts to remind Henry of their child throughout the play; Mary serves after all, among other things, as an emblem of Katherine's reproductive success. In her final letter to Henry, Katherine refers to Mary as a "model of our chaste loves" (4.2.133, my emphasis) in a deliberate effort to remind Henry of Mary's unsullied reproductive potential; she might provide an "able" womb for the next generation of Tudors. By the final scene of the play, however, Henry indicates his determination to eradicate Mary from memory. Speaking at Elizabeth's christening, he remarks, "Thou has made me now a man. Never before / This happy child did I get anything" (5.4.64-65, my emphasis). As "get" may literally mean "beget," Henry's statement is the play's most overt attempt to elide Mary altogether; Henry now denies fathering his first born daughter at all. His stigmatization of Katherine seems to extend to their daughter as well.

Though Katherine appears physically strong prior to her removal from court, sequestration and separation from her daughter produce an enfeebled Katherine who is barely able to walk by her final appearance in the play. As an unnamed gentleman comments at the start of act four, "she was divorced, / And the late marriage made of none effect, / Since when she was removed to Kimbolton, / Where she remains now sick" (4.1.32-34). The sequence described in these lines succinctly summarizes the trajectory of the queens in the play; stigmatized, the queen is removed from the court and physically disintegrates. In fact, these lines suggest that Katherine suffers from a disabling "sickness" as a result of the treatment she has received at the hands of the court. Indeed, when the audience sees Katherine in her final appearance, the contrast to her first grand appearance seated "at [Henry's] side" is startling. The stage directions describe her as being "sick," physically supported onstage by her gentleman and buoyed, literally, by Patience, her female attendant (s.d. 4.2.). Katherine's body, dismissed as one incapable of procreation, now seems vanquished by its efforts to fulfill Henry's wishes.

The historical reasons for Katherine's death are debated; the play only refers, repeatedly, to her "weakness" (4.2.118). Ironically, her efforts to birth a male heir and fulfill the role of an "able" bodied queen may have contributed to her physical decline. Fraser notes, "the Queen's numerous pregnancies had not helped her [health]"; one eyewitness referred to her as the "'King's old deformed wife'" (Fraser 75-6). Indeed, Katherine depicts her body as weakening to the point of complete capitulation: "My legs, like loaden branches, bow to th' earth, / Willing to leave their burden" (4.2.2-4). She views her body as a burden, and she progressively lowers herself physically throughout the scene, struggling to "reach a chair," (3) and then later requesting, "set me lower" (76) as she reclines, mirroring her complete social and emotional decline.

Katherine's emotional fortitude has also been diminished by Henry's repeated efforts to stigmatize her. Prior to her sequestration, Katherine is assertive, even brazen, in her own defense, which has often warranted attention from scholars. She insists, for instance, that "Nothing but death / Shall e'er divorce my dignities" (3.1.140-1). Yet repeated degradation at the hands of Henry and his court takes its toll. The play reveals that she does internalize characteristics that are repeatedly ascribed to her, a behavior that is in keeping with what scholars have observed in some contemporary disabled people: "Most people with disabilities actually come to believe they are less normal, less capable than others. Self-pity, self-hate, shame and other manifestations of this process are devastating" (Charlton, "Dimensions of Disability" 220). Katherine does adopt an attitude of self-pity and self-hate, frequently commenting on her "weak" state (3.1.20), her "sick cause," (117) and referring to herself as a "wretched lady," and "a woman friendless, hopeless" (79). At times, she even disassociates from herself altogether and refers to her past self in the third person, asking for help, "For her sake that I have been" (76, my emphasis). Such a complete break from her own identity, coupled with her body's deterioration, provide a moving testament to the destructive power of the stigmatization of disabled people.

Despite this toll of repeated degradation, Katherine's last words reflect her final resolution to resist feelings of self-pity, and instead embrace a last opportunity to be recognized as "able-bodied" within the oppressive ableist culture that she finds herself. Her impending death might, in fact, ironically, buoy her spirits, for it provides her with the means once again to acquire this privileged "able-bodied" status. Her directions for her burial reveal this hope:

Katherine's request for embalming might have struck an early modern audience as peculiar. Embalming was a controversial practice, deemed by many women as too invasive a procedure. As Patricia Phillippy explains, the "desire to avoid the hands of male embalmers seems to have outweighed in the minds of early modern women whatever benefits the procedure might have promised" (58). Queen Elizabeth herself requested that her body not be embalmed, a request that was "typical of the growing distaste among noblewomen for the practice in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" (Phillippy 219). Katherine, however, may have viewed embalming as her last opportunity to acquire a body that was not deemed "deformed," disabled, or otherwise inadequate. With Katherine's embalming, her body would be permanently sealed and no longer susceptible to patriarchal recriminations. Her corpse would return to a preserved, impenetrable state like the virginal body she possessed prior to her numerous efforts at procreation. As Stallybrass notes, in the early modern period, the chaste female body was revered as a "perfect and impermeable container" (129). Katherine's final wish, understandably, is for her body again to be seen as a "perfect container" despite Henry's repeated efforts to characterize it as pernicious.

Anne's Rapid Rise and Fall

Adding to the poignancy of Katherine's complete disintegration is Shakespeare's uncanny coupling of her final scene with the one that immediately precedes it — the coronation of Anne Boleyn. While Katherine experiences ignominy as an outcast and the physical deterioration that prompts even her own gentlewoman, Patience, to comment on Katherine's "earthy" colour (4.2.98), Anne presents the able-bodied antithesis. In contrast to the weakened, prostrate Katherine, lying in obscurity far from the eyes of the English public, Anne's "able-body" is prominently featured for the English public. She sits in a "rich chair of state, opposing [displaying] freely / The beauty of her person to the people" (4.1.69-70). She is described as "the sweetest face … ever … looked on" (43-44). During her procession, four barons bear a "cloth of honour over her" (48), literally enfolding Anne in the royal court from which Katherine is now expelled. An underlying uneasiness, however, pervades Anne's appearance in the play, for even during this ostensibly celebratory coronation scene, the ephemeral nature of her reign is foreshadowed. Referred to as "an angel," she is described as "saint-like" as she "cast her fair eyes to heaven, /and prayed devoutly" (85-86). Unbeknownst to Anne, she has begun the same journey Katherine has completed: adoration by the public, "unsuccessful" pregnancies, stigmatization, and death.

Though Anne's appearances in the play are fewer than Katherine's, Anne is, as the coronation scene indicates, at the heart of the spectacle of the play and described by several characters as the hope of the monarchy. In act two, the Lord Chamberlain remarks "from this lady may proceed a gem / To lighten all this isle" (2.3.78-9). Yet the passive nature of this sentence reveals Shakespeare's strategy in minimizing Anne's role in securing the succession. It is as though Elizabeth, the "gem" mentioned, will proceed by her own volition from Anne's ("this lady['s]") womb to bless England by "light[ing]" the "isle." Echoing this passive construction is Suffolk's comment in act three: "from her [Anne] / Will fall some blessing to this land which shall / In it be memorized" (3.2.50-52). Again, Elizabeth, the blessing, "will fall" from Anne, independent of any action Anne might take. Birthing the future queen is overshadowed by Anne's failure to birth a male heir, and her involvement in Elizabeth's existence is thus elided altogether.

As with Katherine, once the cycle of pregnancy and delivery begins for Anne, so too does her decline. Just as the Old Lady has predicted, Anne's body fails to deliver a male heir. In fact, her delivery of Elizabeth is so difficult that it almost kills her. During the delivery, it is reported that she is "in labour — / They say in great extremity — and feared / She'll with the labour end" (5.1.18-20). While Anne physically survives the difficult delivery, she does, essentially, "end"; like Katherine, she is never seen again in the play and is stigmatized as a failure for failing to birth a boy. Anne's stigmatization is made clear when the Old Lady appears before the king to announce the birth of Elizabeth, Henry says, "Is the Queen delivered? / Say 'Ay, and of a boy'" (163-4). The language here is telling — Anne's "deliverance" is inextricably tied to the arrival of a healthy boy. The Old Lady, desperate to placate the king, first announces "Ay, ay, my liege, / And of a lovely boy" (164-5). She finally confesses, however, that the new baby, " 'Tis a girl / Promises boys hereafter" (166-7). Interestingly the wording implies that it is the infant girl, not Anne herself, who "promises boys" hereafter. The conclusion of the play indeed suggests that it is Elizabeth who finally rights the previous queens' wrongs. By appointing James her successor, she saw that a "boy" did indeed come "after" her and ensured the succession.

Shakespeare moves quickly to sequester Anne before the play is over. Anne, like Katherine, is never allowed onstage with her child. She is offstage for the birth of Elizabeth, in keeping with early modern ideas concerning the female domain of childbirth, and after she gives birth the Old Lady describes the baby Elizabeth to Henry "as like you /As cherry is to cherry" (5.1.169-70).6 This claim suggests that Elizabeth mirrors her father, with no evidence of Anne's role in her conception, gestation, or delivery. This exclusion of Anne extends even into Elizabeth's majestic christening scene. While it was typical for a mother not to be present for the christening of her child, in the final christening scene, as Kim Noling has noted, Elizabeth completely displaces Anne from the play (303). Shakespeare seems to take great pains to prevent the taint of the disabled, ineffective maternal body from contaminating the pure infant Elizabeth. Instead, the infant is presented as the apotheosis of a chaste, pristine body. As Archbishop Cranmer notes, she will live as "a virgin," and upon her death, "a most unspotted lily shall she pass/ To th' ground" (5.4.60-61). This infant, therefore, will provide an unmarred alternative to her physically inadequate predecessors.

Shakespeare not only distances Anne from the spectacle of the christening, he in fact removes Anne from Elizabeth's infancy altogether. Cranmer prophesizes in his paean to the infant Elizabeth that "Truth shall nurse her" (28). Displacing Anne's body, and removing Elizabeth from the possible contagion of her mother's disability, "truth" will successfully separate Elizabeth from the pernicious effects of her mother's womb. Such a break from the cycle of disabled bodies allows the play to conclude with an absolute privileging of the able body: a successful queen's "birthing" of a male heir, albeit through the depiction of Elizabeth's metaphoric maternity of James.

Elizabeth's Transcendence

As the final scene reveals, Elizabeth will not suffer from misfortunes as a biological mother. As Cranmer's speech explains, "Good grows with her" (5.4.32); so while she will not biologically procreate, she will generate goodness itself. Elizabeth will, in fact, continue to reproduce even through her death. Cranmer describes that when she dies, "a virgin, / A most unspotted lily shall she pass / To th' ground" (60-62). Despite her chastity, Elizabeth will survive through self-regeneration

The "one," James I, the reigning monarch at the time of the play's production, is the long-awaited fulfillment of Henry's fondest desire: a healthy male heir.7 Best of all, this fulfillment is accomplished without the risk of an unreliable womb that fails to perform its duty.

As the play reminds us, Elizabeth learned from the trauma of the queens who preceded her. Establishing herself as a maternal body, albeit a metaphoric one, Elizabeth escaped her own mother's fate: designation as a disabled queen mother. She resisted pressure to conform to the biological paradigm and presented an alternative. As she reportedly insisted to parliament, "Reproach me so no more … that I have no children: for every one of you, and as many as are England, are my children and kinsfolks" (qtd. in Hackett 152). As Helen Hackett has noted, this use of metaphoric maternity was Elizabeth's "means of covering up and compensating for her perceived political and physiological deficiencies" (150). So though Elizabeth, too, confronted "reproaches" for her ostensible physical deficiencies, she was able to transcend such criticism by remaking the maternal paradigm and embracing a metaphoric persona. Elizabeth's role in Henry VIII demonstrates what many disability theorists have insisted: disability is not "bodily insufficiency" but is, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson has said, "a problem located in the interaction between bodies and the environment in which they are situated" (16). Elizabeth, all too aware of the oppressive ableist culture surrounding biological mothers in her early modern moment, cleverly circumvented the possibility of being stigmatized as both Katherine and Anne so cruelly were. Elizabeth, as mother to the English people, escaped construction as another possessor of the "disabled" womb.