This has been a very popular play, to judge from its frequent revivals; though, curtailed in most of them, more as fine spectacle than as great drama. But disaster accompanied, or followed not long after, its introduction to the stage. The fire which destroyed the Globe Theatre, on 29 June 1613, was caused by the discharge of small pieces of ordnance; the thatch caught fire, wrote one Thomas Lorkin on the 30th, and Sir Henry Wotton on 2 July, when ‘King Henry’ was ‘making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey's house’, and the whole building was burnt to the ground in ‘less than an hour’. Though Wotton calls the play All is True, other letters name it Henry VIII, and Lorkin's and Wotton's allusions to ‘Chambers discharged’ at 1. 4. 38 S.D., are unmistakable. Wotton's title was probably an alternative one (cf. Prol. 9, 18, 21). Ben Jonson a few years later vividly recalls the fire in a poem. The only other notice of a pre-Restoration performance is of one at the rebuilt Globe on 29 July 1628, ‘bespoken’ by the Duke of Buckingham, who, however, left after his stage counterpart had gone out to execution (2. 1).

Pepys on 10 December 1663 mentions ‘a rare play to be acted this week…the story of Henry the Eighth’; he went to see it (‘much cried-up’) on I January, but except for ‘shows and processions’ found in it ‘nothing in the world good or well done’.