A Psycholinguistic Analysis to King Henry the VIII’s Selected Poems and Lyrics

Abstract

Reading and studying the early Renaissance, it might seem out of place to consider King Henry VIII as an author, or even to consider that a monarch such as Henry chose to occupy himself with writing. Yet it is not in the least odd that Henry wrote. Henry VIII was a man drawn to poetic expression, even spontaneously so. Reading King Henry the VIII’s character in history books reveal the fact that there was a foul poet aside, whose poetic indecency results in an increased distance from the monarch to something well known in the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, but less so today: Henry’s literary pursuits, and particularly his love of lyrics as a writer, a composer, and a performer. In the present study, there is an attempt of revealing something of the Henry’s poetic character. King Henry the VIII experienced many events in his life from his early childhood till his death. These events affected his physiological condition which had a great influence on his writings. Throughout this study, some of his poems and lyrics will be analyzed in a way that shows the effectiveness of these events and psychological conditions on the language of the poems and lyrics he used. The paper presents a psycholinguistics analysis to these poems and analysis.