This is the state of man. Today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth.
So let's start by saying that Henry VIII is not very good. It really has two claims to fame among Shakespeare's play: one, it has more stage directions than any other. These are mostly descriptions of kingly processions and pomp, and not the fun kind about being chased by bears. Two, it was long controversially argued, and now widely accepted, that Henry VIII is a collaboration between Shakespeare and his contemporary John Fletcher. This composite composition helps to explain why the play is often seen as a kind of incoherent mash of parts, even by contemporary-ish observers like Samuel Pepys.
I actually found Henry VIII to be fairly coherent and unified as a play. It read to me as being about the way that the elite are locked into a cycle of rise and fall, from Henry's scheming cardinal Wolsey to Queen Katherine (of Aragon), at one moment on top of the world, and the next exiled or sentenced to death. The king himself is depicted as being rather weak and fickle, led by Wolsey as much as he is his lust for the woman called here "Anne Bullen." Wolsey engineers the downfall of the Duke of Buckingham, and later sits in judgment of Katherine, who has been suspicious of his influence, but later on, Wolsey himself--caught writing to the Pope in opposition to the king's marriage to Anne--is the meteor who falls.
As a result, the best parts of Henry VIII seemed to me to be those moments where a character speaks elegiacally about their own downfall and doom. I liked Katherine's incensed rejoinders to Wolsey:
Sir,
I am about to weep; but, thinking that
We are queen, or long have dreamed so, certain
The daughter of a king, my drops of tears
I'll turn to sparks of fire.
And even Wolsey's sudden realization that his life of glory is over:
I have touched the highest point of all my greatness,
And from that full meridian of my glory
I haste now to my setting. I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening,
And no man see more.
Anne speaks wisely to her maid when she says, ignorant of the heights to which she is about to be raised, that "'tis better to be lowly born / And range with humble livers in content / Than to be perked up in a glistering grief / And wear a golden sorrow." I expect that those lines resonated quite loudly with Shakespeare's audience, who were not all that far removed from Anne's execution. And yet, the play must hedge a little on the wisdom of Henry and Anne's union, because it produced the legendary Elizabeth (who had died and been succeeded by James I by the time of Henry VIII's performance), who gets held up and prophesied over in a bit that felt like pure propaganda. One can only imagine what James' court thought, though, of these depictions of great people doomed to fall.