2012 Modern Library Paperback Edition Copyright(c) 2007, 2009 by The Royal Shakespeare Company All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
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MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks
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or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.
The version of Henry VI and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-1-58836887-4
www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction to the Three Parts of Henry VI
After Agincourt
Sequence and Authorship
Structure and Style
The Popular Voice
The Tragic Agon
About the Text
Henry VI Part I: Key Facts
Henry VI Part I
Act 1
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Act 2
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Act 3
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Act 4
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Act 5
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Textual Notes
Henry VI Part II: Key Facts
Henry VI Part II
Act 1
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Act 2
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Act 3
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Act 4
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Scene 8
Scene 9
Scene 10
Act 5
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Textual Notes
Henry VI Part III: Key Facts
Henry VI Part III
Act 1
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Act 2
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Act 3
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Act 4
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Scene 8
Act 5
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Textual Notes
Synopses of the Plots of Henry VI Part I, Part II, and Part III
Henry VI in Performance: The RSC and Beyond
Four Centuries of Henry VI: An Overview
At the RSC
The Director's Cut: Interviews with Edward Hall and Michael Boyd
Designing Henry VI: Tom Piper
Shakespeare's Career in the Theater
Beginnings
Playhouses
The Ensemble at Work
The King's Man
Shakespeare's Works: A Chronology
Kings and Queens of England: From the History Plays to Shakespeare's Lifetime
The History Behind the Histories: A Chronology
Further Reading and Viewing
References
Acknowledgments and Picture Credits
INTRODUCTION
TO THE THREE PARTS OF
HENRY VI
AFTER AGINCOURT
Shakespeare's epic drama of Henry V ends with the Chorus speaking an epilogue in sonnet form. It offers a forward look that somewhat deflates the triumph of Agincourt. King Henry, the "star of England," will live but a small time. "The world's best garden," having been brought to order by his charismatic arts, will soon be choked with weeds. His son will be crowned King of France and England while still an infant. So many rivals then had the managing of his state "That they lost France and made his England bleed, / Which oft our stage hath shown." Shakespeare thus reminds his audience that his cycle of history plays is complete: the sequence from Richard II to Henry V at this point joins on to the earlier written tetralogy of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III. Sometimes gathered together in modern productions under a title such as The Wars of the Roses or The Plantagenets, these plays tell the story of England's self-scarring and "dire division."
In Henry VI Part I, Henry V's miraculous conquest of France goes into reverse, despite the exploits of the noble Talbot; meanwhile civil war brews at home. In Part II, the war with France is brought to an end by the marriage of King Henry VI to Margaret of Anjou, but the weak king cannot prevent the rise of the Yorkist faction. At the beginning of Part III, the succession is surrendered to Richard Duke of York, but his ascendancy is halted on a Yorkshire battlefield, where Queen Margaret brings his life to an undignified end; his sons spend the rest of the play avenging him--and it is one of those sons, Richard of Gloucester, the future Richard III, who proves most unscrupulous and therefore most to be feared.
SEQUENCE AND AUTHORSHIP
The Romantic poet and Shakespearean commentator Samuel Taylor Coleridge did not think well of this bloody triple-header. He said of the opening lines of Part I, "if you do not feel the impossibility of this speech having been written by Shakespeare, all I dare suggest is, that you may have ears--for so has another animal--but an ear you cannot have." To his own finely tuned ear for poetry, the rhythm of the verse was crude and far inferior to that of even Shakespeare's earliest plays. Coleridge was lecturing on Shakespeare only a few years after the publication of Edmond Malone's scholarly Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI, tending to show that these plays were not written originally by Shakespeare. Ever since Shakespeare rose in the course of the eighteenth century to his status as supreme cultural icon, there has been a tendency to assume that any less than perfect work--Titus Andronicus, say, or Pericles--must have been the product of some lesser dramatist, or at the very least that Shakespeare was merely patching up a rickety old play for which he was not originally responsible. In the case of the Henry VI plays, support for the latter possibility seemed to come from the existence of early editions of versions of the second and third parts under the titles The First Part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster with the Death of the Good Duke Humphrey (published in 1594) and The True Trage
dy of Richard Duke of York and the Death of Good King Henry the Sixth, with the Whole Contention between the two houses Lancaster and York (1595). Malone and his successors argued that these were the originals, written by another dramatist (probably one of the so-called "university wits," Robert Greene or George Peele), and that Shakespeare merely undertook the work of a reviser. As for Henry VI Part I, Malone regarded it as almost wholly un-Shakespearean. Though grounded in textual scholarship, his arguments were driven by critical distaste for the play's style of verse, the "stately march" whereby "the sense concludes or pauses uniformly at the end of every line."
More recently, scholars have suggested that The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York are in fact texts of works by Shakespeare, albeit poorly transcribed ones. The titles The First Part and The Whole Contention strongly suggest that the plays that we now call Part II and Part III of Henry VI originally constituted a two-part work. They were probably first produced in the early 1590s, when Christopher Marlowe's mighty Tamburlaine the Great had established a vogue for two-part plays filled with battles, processions, and high-sounding verse.
What we now call Henry VI Part I would then stand slightly apart. Since it appears to have been premiered--to considerable acclaim--in 1592, it was probably written after the two Wars of the Roses plays that are now called the second and third parts. Perhaps it was what in modern film parlance is called a "prequel," designed to cash in on the success of a blockbuster. Its lack of unity, and its use of different source materials for different scenes, suggest that it may have been a collaborative work. Thomas Nashe, who also wrote in partnership with Marlowe, has been suggested as a prime contributor, but there may have been three or even four hands in the composition. The possibility that Shakespeare was not the principal author of the Talbot/Joan of Arc play would account for some of the inconsistencies in the sequence considered as a trilogy. Among these are the fact that in Part II Humphrey Duke of Gloucester is a statesmanlike figure, a Lord Protector worthy of his late brother Henry V, whereas in Part I he is more rough-hewn, and the plot discrepancy whereby the surrender of Anjou and Maine, a condition of the marriage between King Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou, is much resented in Part II yet not mentioned in the marriage negotiations in Part I.
There is a long tradition of attempting to establish literary authorship by stylistic tests--preference for feminine endings in verse lines, contractions (them versus 'em), frequency of grammatical function words, and so forth. The availability of large-scale databases of texts and computer programs to crunch them means that such tests are becoming ever more sophisticated and reliable. When an array of different tests gives the same result, one can speak tentatively of the evidence attaining scientific standards of probability. Twenty-first-century stylometric research of this kind suggests that nearly all of Part II can be confidently attributed to Shakespeare, that there are some doubts about Part III, and that Shakespeare probably only wrote a few scenes of Part I. Perhaps the only thing that makes one hesitate about these results is that they seem too convenient, in that they so neatly mirror the consensus about the relative dramatic quality of the three plays: Part II has gloriously Shakespearean energy and variety, and nearly always works superbly in the theater; Part III has some immensely powerful rhetorical encounters but many longueurs; Part I is generally the least admired--save for the rose-plucking scene in the second act and the moving dialogue of Talbot and his son in the fourth-act battle, the very sequences which the computer tests ascribe to Shakespeare.
It cannot be determined whether the traces of non-Shakespearean language are the vestiges of older plays that Shakespeare was revising or whether they are signs of active collaboration. Nor do we know whether the plays were ever staged as a trilogy in Shakespeare's lifetime. They only came to be labeled as such in the posthumously published 1623 Folio, where all his histories were collected and ordered by the chronology of their subject matter as opposed to their composition. Since the charismatic villain Richard of Gloucester appears in Part II and Part III, it becomes very tempting to think of the whole group as a tetralogy capped by The Tragedy of Richard the Third. Perhaps the best approach is to try to treat each of the plays both on its own terms--they were, after all, designed to be performed one at a time--and as part of Shakespeare's unfolding panorama of English history.
STRUCTURE AND STYLE
Richard III, probably first staged between 1592 and 1594, does seem to represent a quantum leap in Shakespeare's dramatic art. While Crookback Richard has been a role that has made the names of great actors from David Garrick in the eighteenth century to Edmund Kean in the nineteenth to Antony Sher in the twentieth, the Henry VI plays have not fared well on the English (or any other) stage. The second and third parts were given a few outings in heavily adapted and compressed form between the Restoration and Regency periods, but almost three hundred years elapsed before there was a full-scale revival of the entire sequence, and even the twentieth century, which restored to favor such previously unpopular early Shakespearean plays as Love's Labour's Lost and Titus Andronicus, only saw some half dozen major productions: those of F. R. Benson at the beginning of the century, Sir Barry Jackson shortly after the Second World War, John Barton and Peter Hall (rewritten and compressed into two plays under the title The Wars of the Roses) at Stratford-upon-Avon in the early 1960s, Terry Hands and Adrian Noble in succeeding decades at Stratford (the latter reducing the tetralogy to a trilogy entitled The Plantagenets), and Michael Bogdanov as part of a brave attempt to stage all of the history plays in modern dress, with a strong anti-Thatcherite political agenda, for the touring English Shakespeare Company in the 1980s.
The early twenty-first century, however, witnessed a reversal of fortune: Michael Boyd directed a much-admired version with full texts under the title This England in the intimate space of the Swan theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, then on becoming artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company revived his productions on a larger stage. Edward Hall, meanwhile, followed his father Peter in reducing three to two, with an energetic version set in a slaughterhouse and entitled Rose Rage. In a new millennium, at a time of renewed religious war and deep uncertainty about the meaning of nation and national identity, Shakespeare's exploration of the foundations of the fractured Tudor polity seemed powerfully prescient.
Sometimes even the directors who have taken it upon themselves to give the plays a chance have sounded apologetic. For Jackson, they were "ill-shaped, lacking the cohesion brought of practice, a spate of events viewed from a wide angle." The succession of battles, busy messengers, and bombastic exhortations has been ridiculed by critics ever since the playwright Robert Greene, in what is the earliest extant allusion to Shakespeare, mocked Stratford Will as "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his 'Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide,' supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you." Greene's quotation is a parody of a line in Part III, where the Duke of York is in the full flood of a formal rhetorical vituperation directed at Queen Margaret, the "She-wolf of France." There is, however, a note of anxiety in Greene's mockery: he doesn't like provincial Master Shakespeare's easy adoption of the grand style which had hitherto been regarded as the hallmark of the university-educated dramatists who dominated the London stage in the early 1590s, such as Marlowe and Greene himself.
The Henry VI plays reveal Shakespeare learning his art with great rapidity. Poetic styles and stage business are snapped up from the university men, source material from the prose chronicles of English history. Edward Hall's Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York (1548) is compressed in such a way as to give a pattern to the march of history. The action is concerned less with individual characters than with the roles that individuals play in the drama of the nation's destiny. Shakespeare is quite willing to change someone's age or even their nature in order to subordinate them to his overall scheme. The demonization of Joan of Arc in Part I is among the most striking e
xamples. Whereas we associate the mature Shakespeare with contemplation--King Harry or Prince Hamlet in troubled soliloquy--the driving force of these early plays is action. Part I deploys a set of variations on an underlying structure in which dramatic action precedes explanation, then a scene will end with epigrammatic recapitulation; each scene is presented in such a way that a different character's viewpoint is emphasized or a new aspect of an existing character developed. The scene with Talbot in the Countess of Auvergne's castle, for instance, highlights the courtesy and prudence of a man who has previously been seen as the exemplar of heroic courage. It also provides a contrast against which the later confrontation of Suffolk and Margaret can be measured: Talbot is a relic from the days of Henry V and England's conquest of France, while Suffolk is a harbinger of division and the Wars of the Roses.
In Part II, Shakespeare used a structural pattern to which he returned in later tragedies such as King Lear and Timon of Athens: the hero, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, is progressively isolated as prominence is given to the legalistic conspiracies of his malicious enemies. But since the subject is the nation, not an individual hero, Humphrey is dispatched in the third act, and the remainder of the play turns to the subject of rebellion (Jack Cade's proletarian rising in Act 4) and attempted usurpation (the altogether more dangerous Duke of York's march on London). Part III begins in chaos, with each of the first two acts ending in a battle (at Wakefield, then Towton), then proceeds in an uneasy equilibrium which sees two kings alive simultaneously and their respective claims only resolved after a bewildering series of encounters, parleys, and changes of allegiance.
Balanced scene structure is paralleled by formal rhetorical style. The formality of the world of these plays is also apparent from the use of dramatic tableaux. The civil strife of the Wars of the Roses could have no better epitome than the paired entrances in Act 2 Scene 5 of Part III, where a son that has killed his father appears at one stage door and a moment later a father that has killed his son emerges through the other. Their entry rudely interrupts King Henry's meditation on how he only wants a quiet life, how he'd rather be a shepherd than a king. The aspirations of the weak but pious king are formally visualized in the stage direction for his next entry, in Act 3 Scene 1: "Enter the King, [disguised,] with a prayer-book." Only in retreat and disguise can he fulfill his desire to be a holy man. And even then his peace lasts only an instant, for two gamekeepers overhear and apprehend him, taking him to captivity in the hands of usurping King Edward. By contrast, when Richard of Gloucester becomes King Richard in the next play, a prayer-book is itself a form of disguise.