Introduction

Henry VI: the reign and the plays

Rather than describing the ‘transgressions against history’¹ that Shakespeare was guilty of in his Henry VI plays – his account, that is, of the period from the funeral of Henry Ⅴ in 1422 to the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 – or rehearsing arguments over what parts of the text Shakespeare may or may not have written,² let us first consider what might have drawn him to this complicated chapter in the history of fifteenth-century England. Complicated it is, and so it was inevitable that its very wealth of incident led the dramatist to begin his career as a writer of history plays by concentrating as much on actions and their outcomes as on personalities and their motives: he could not avoid investigating politics and the secular as well as morality and the theological.

Unlike the reigns of Henry Ⅴ or Richard Ⅲ, that of Henry VI was not dominated by the personality of its monarch; Edward Ⅳ’s rule during the last years of Henry’s reign is stark evidence of this. Rather it was a period of war between nations (the Hundred Years War) and within the kingdom (the Wars of the Roses). It was also a time of dynastic strife which manifested itself in both aristocratic factionalism and popular insurrection, a sequence of contests between allegiance to the monarchy and alliance between peers. Shakespeare offered to the playhouse audiences of sixteenth-century London a deliberate rearrangement of historical events into dramatic themes. For this reason, therefore, the plays are best regarded not simply as ‘adapted history’ or as dramatic biography but as a complex essay on the politics of the mid fifteenth century – an essay which, of course, also offers reflections on his own times. For it was only after Shakespeare had in this way learned to convert chronicle into political analysis that he turned to the kind of history that thrusts personality out into the foreground of the action: Richard Ⅱ, Henry Ⅳ and Henry Ⅴ were written after the Henry VI plays and Richard Ⅲ. The great sequence of studies of the history and politics of England was not composed in the order of the chronology of her Plantagenet rulers.

As this introduction will argue, Shakespeare did not slavishly follow ‘the Tudor myth’, unlike certain of the authors of his sources. ‘The Tudor myth’ held that God led England through these troubles to fulfil her destiny. Shakespeare suggests frequently, for example, that it is internal dissension, in particular seditious squabbling among the nobility, that damages England’s power and authority abroad. The variety of styles found throughout the sequence may not, contrary to much scholarly opinion, be evidence of multiple authorship or revision, but of perspectivism, a dramatic cross-examination from differing points of view, embodied in different dramatic styles, of the issues raised and events enacted on the stage. From the theatrical shorthand techniques Shakespeare used to depict the battles between England and France in Part 1, through the developing complexities of character in the events of Part 2 – which is centred around the death of good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester and the rebellion of York – to the opposition of tormented Henry VI and murderous Richard of Gloucester¹ under Edward Ⅳ in Part 3, Shakespeare demonstrated a quite extraordinary capacity to ‘set a form upon that indigest’.² The heroical idioms and scenical strutting of 1 Henry VI disappear from the stage to be replaced by more workaday theatrical registers as Shakespeare traces the wane of England’s glory and the mounting ferment of political intrigue.

The loss of France and the wars of the roses

Henry VI came to the throne as a nine-month-old infant in 1422³ and, while he was a minor, England was ruled through a council, his uncle ‘good’ Duke Humphrey of Gloucester being protector. During Henry’s reign, despite the heroism on the field of battle of John Talbot, first Earl of Shrewsbury, and the overthrow and capture of the champion of the French, Joan, La Pucelle (see 1 Henry VI 5.3–4), the French territory won back for England by virtue of his heroic father Henry Ⅴ’s victory at Agincourt in 1415 (Henry Ⅴ 4.1–8) had by 1453 been recovered by his maternal uncle, Charles Ⅶ of France.

In 1 Henry VI, Shakespeare moves from the funeral of Henry Ⅴ through to the marriage of his son. He takes us a through a sequence of battles at Orléans (1 Henry VI 1.2 ff.), Rouen, and Bordeaux (1 Henry VI 3.2 ff. and 4.2 ff.),⁴ leading to a truce which was called at Tours in 1444 (1 Henry VI 5.4) and which centred on a politic marriage for Henry (arranged with an eye to his own benefit by the Earl of Suffolk) with Margaret of Anjou, a cousin to King Charles. Although 1 Henry VI thus ends, unhistorically, with an English triumph, Shakespeare has demonstrated en route that the empire has been irremediably weakened and that this was principally caused by internal sedition.

Margaret’s coronation in 1445 marks the beginning of 2 Henry VI, which concentrates largely on the conspiracy between Buckingham, Somerset, and Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, to drive Humphrey of Gloucester from power, and on civil tumult, the Wars of the Roses. These had begun when Henry’s cousin Richard, third Duke of York, laid claim to the throne. The claim was based on the grounds that York was the maternal great-great-grandson of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward Ⅲ (1327–77), whereas Henry was great-grandson of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the fourth son (see pp. 202–4 below). York chose as his badge a white rose, while the Lancastrians, led by York’s enemy Somerset, wore red roses (1 Henry VI 2.4). (Henry VI’s claim was further weakened by the fact that his grandfather Henry Ⅳ – ‘Bullingbrook’ – was commonly held to have usurped the throne and murdered the childless Richard Ⅱ in 1400.) Moreover, rebellion broke out in Ireland, and York, who was assigned to put it down, took the opportunity to make his army serve his own ambition (2 Henry VI 3.1), winning the first battle of St Albans on 22 May 1455. This is depicted in the final sequence of 2 Henry VI.

Henry was compelled to acknowledge York as heir apparent to the crown in 1460 (3 Henry VI 1.1), but York was defeated and savagely killed at the battle of Wakefield at the end of the year (3 Henry VI 1.3–4), a battle in which the barbarous Cliffords played a prominent part on the Lancastrian side. The Yorkists were defeated again at the second battle of St Albans in February 1461 (3 Henry VI 2.1),¹ but the Lancastrians then withdrew north while York’s eldest son Edward was proclaimed as King Edward Ⅳ in London. The next month Edward marched northwards and won the battle of Towton which established him on the throne (3 Henry VI 2.3–6), and Henry took refuge in Scotland (his wife and son going into exile in France) until he was captured (3 Henry VI 3.1). He was imprisoned in the Tower (3 Henry VI 3.1) from 1465 until 1470 when he was restored to the throne by the ‘Kingmaker’ Earl of Warwick (3 Henry VI 4.2 and 4.6). Warwick had been enraged by the news that Edward, ‘taking counsel of his own desire’,² had made an impolitic marriage with the widow Elizabeth, Lady Grey (3 Henry VI 3.2), while Warwick was abroad negotiating the hand of a French princess for the new king. In April 1471, after losing the battle of Barnet in which Warwick was killed (3 Henry VI 5.2–3), Henry fell into the hands of Edward again, and Queen Margaret was defeated by Edward’s younger brother, Richard of Gloucester, at the battle of Tewkesbury the next month (3 Henry VI 5.4–5). Henry was recommitted to the Tower, where, on the night of Edward’s return, he was murdered (3 Henry VI 5.6) – by Gloucester, it is supposed. The sequence ends with a brief appearance by Edward’s twelve-year-old son, later Edward Ⅴ, who also was to be murdered in the Tower by Gloucester, along with his brother Richard.³

The reign then was a pattern of disorder, a mirror for Shakespeare’s contemporaries of the disasters caused by the type of dynastic strife, centred on personalities and not ideology, which could so easily have broken out upon the death of Elizabeth. Francis Bacon was to rejoice at the succession of King James, fearing that without it:

after Queen Elizabeth’s decease, there must follow in England nothing but confusions, interreigns, and perturbations of estate, likely far to exceed the ancient calamities of Lancaster and York.¹

To dramatise all this was massively ambitious, innovative – there were no popular plays on English history before the Armada in 1588 – and potentially radical. On 12 November 1589 the Privy Council instructed the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Mayor of London and the Master of the Revels to inspect the ‘books’ (that is, the prompt-books) of all the players in the city so that ‘matters of divinity and state’ might be censored.⁵ A dramatic sequence as long as this must also have created distinctive theatrical conventions – as modern revivals have demonstrated. It would have been expensive to perform in sequence without recourse to a standardised repertory style with some uniformity in costumes and with doubling – which may well have made telling political comments on the action. These plays are not vehicles for star performers – although modern actors have amassed great reputations from playing in them.

Political plays fell out of favour in the Jacobean period, and in the eighteenth century the plays disappeared almost completely from the canon of performed works. Perhaps they were too radical and anti-establishment; the female characters, moreover, were not objects of sentiment but seekers after power.⁶ For the nineteenth century, they were unsuited for performance on naturalistic stages – and perhaps their anatomy of empire was too strong. In our own times critics have found them disappointingly based on narrative rather than significant structure, lacking both psychologically complex characters and the kinds of verbal density that Shakespeare was to attain in his later plays. The account of a modern actor’s excited encounter in rehearsal with Molière, who in some respects is like the early Shakespeare, might sum up the disabling preconceptions actors and readers have brought to these texts in our time:

There’s no poetry, no sub-text, just a very basic situation, like sit-com. [Our director] says, ‘All there is is what is there, but that happens to be brilliant.’ He says the French find Shakespeare [i.e. the later Shakespeare] difficult for the opposite reason. Why is he so oblique, they cry in Gallic confusion, why doesn’t he just say what he means?¹

The decay of empire²

In the second speech of 1 Henry VI, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, delivers in praise of his dead brother, King Henry Ⅴ, an oration that constitutes a dramatic prologue to the sequence:

England ne’er had a king until his time:Virtue he had, deserving to command;His brandished sword did blind men with his beams,His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings;His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire,More dazzled and drove back his enemiesThan midday sun fierce bent against their faces.What should I say? His deeds exceed all speech:He ne’er lift up his hand but conquerèd.

(1.1.8–16)

The speech is similar to the Pyrrhus speech in Hamlet (2.2.450 ff.).² That is obviously epic in mode, perhaps serving to set the dramatic qualities (and thus the political realities) of the surrounding play into relief. But the Pyrrhus speech also feels deliberately archaic, offering glimpses of an antecedent culture in which enterprises of revenge were not overlaid by the scruples of a more sophisticated society.³ Both passages offer a degree of ‘defamiliarisation’⁴ (are written in such a way as to draw attention to their textual strategies) and thereby stand as preliminary measures of the play’s other styles – and other realities – rather than as assertions. In the Hamlet passage, Shakespeare, it may be argued, was saying hail and farewell to the manner and achievement of his earlier work. In this, our earlier text, the iconic style serves as a way of evoking a mythic past and thereby measuring the present.

For archaism need not imply primitivism. The play is far more sophisticated than Maurice Morgann’s dismissal of it as ‘that Drum-and-trumpet Thing’⁵ would imply. Even at this stage in his career, Shakespeare was working with deliberate artistry and forging a dramatic narrative that accommodated the straggling chronicles of his sources into tough-minded historical, historiographical, and constitutional

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The play may have been written shortly after the defeat of the Armada,¹ when the flush of self-congratulation occasioned by the defeat of the Spanish was to give way to a fin-de-siècle awareness of decay which was fed by uncertainty over the problem of determining a successor to Elizabeth and readily evoked by the spectacle of civil war manifest in the Wars of Religion in France. It was composed not very long after the Babington Plot of 1586 that led to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.² It was a time when the Virgin Queen was hiding the ravages of age with make-up and concealing her person in costumes that gave her the profile of a funerary statue: Elizabeth had herself become an icon worshipped as a memorial to a dream of romantic feudalism. (The reality was what has been called ‘bastard feudalism’, a system by which patronage was based on payment rather than personal loyalities,³ and fair Eliza had to cope not only with love-lorn ‘servants’ but with religious opposition, insurrection in Ireland, and rising food prices.) Typological parallels between past and present were constantly alive to the Elizabethans,⁴ and Shakespeare chose to match – and sometimes subvert⁵ – the symmetries and statuesque ornamentation of the new popular playhouses of Renaissance London (the façades of which so resembled the arches of triumph and fame used in civic pageantry) with an epic narrative inhabited by heroic personages stamped into the collective consciousness of the nation. Personalities are subsumed into themes, characters tend to archetypes, scenes to tableaux, and the verse embroiders around them the great symbols of garden⁶ and court, innocence and machination.

Structure and style

Shakespeare’s archaism is like Spenser’s in The Faerie Queene, which was being published in the years of the play’s composition. As in the allegory of the poet, the art is one of presentation as well as of representation. Narrative in this play, moreover, tends towards montage, a procession of speaking pictures that defines a bold dramatic rhythm. The liaison des scènes is figurative rather than causal; it is non-Aristotelian in that the action is not end-directed, and the meaning cannot, therefore, be deduced simply from the play’s resolution.¹ The play examines by implicit comparison, for example, the relationships between the various fathers and sons to be found in it: Henry Ⅴ and Henry VI, the Earl of Cambridge and the Duke of York, Old Talbot and Young Talbot.² Other examples of the technique can be seen in the insertion of 1.3 (depicting aristocratic factionalism in England) into the sequences of scenes that depict the struggles at Orléans between England and France, and in 5.3.30 ff., where York’s capture of Joan is immediately followed by Suffolk’s capture of Margaret. The effect of this pattern can be stunning – as it was to R. W. Chambers who, after seeing a performance of the first tetralogy at the Pasadena Playhouse, wrote that to see these plays ‘was to realize that Shakespeare began his career with a tetralogy based on recent history, grim, archaic, crude, yet nevertheless such as, for scope, power, patriotism, and sense of doom, had probably no parallel since Aeschylus wrote the trilogy of which The Persians is the surviving fragment’.³

The structure of the play, then, is processional as a series of characters, events, and images is presented successively to the audience – rather in the manner in which the pageants of the mystery plays passed in order before the spectators as they stood in the streets or squares of a medieval town. Indeed the opening sequence of Act 2 can be understood only if we recognise its montage technique: the scene opens with the setting of the French watch at Orléans – presumably on the tiring-house balcony. Below the English enter in a procession. They are bearing scaling-ladders and also sounding a dead march on their muffled drums: Salisbury has been killed and they are grimly mustering for revenge. These two images tell us all we need to know about the opposing armies. (In like manner a film director in a western might cut from shots of one camp to another.) We do not read the scene naturalisticially, for then we should assume that the French would ‘hear’ the English drums and be thereby warned before they are eventually attacked.⁴

1 Henry VI was written for and, in my opinion, demands to be acted upon a stage which makes no attempt to create scenic illusion. The play is as much about the present – Shakespeare’s present and our own – as it is about the beginning of the Wars of the Roses. Scenery depicting any kind of late-medieval ‘reality’ therefore would be not only inappropriate but would hinder the fluid groupings that the fast

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