Disenthrallment

"So clokedlye vndre darke couer-ture | we haue not walked / in this Historye," Forrest writes, his ambition being that "Readers / may vndrestande sure | the meane of oure mentioned memorye | not fygured/ as by Alligorye." (14) If the literature of the Henrician age was a literature under threat, one that was required to tiptoe around the domineering will of the monarch, then The Seconde Grisilde is a poem of cultural disenthrallment, one that "playnlye" tells the "Historye" of Henry VIII's "Great Matter," and this from the queen's perspective, not the king's.