Telescoping time
I’m not a great fan of Henry VI part 3 (needed fewer writers and more editors). But it does contain one of my favourite lines:
My parks, my walks, my manors that I had
and I’ve been thinking about why it moves me. It is of course spoken by the dying Warwick, on Barnet battlefield. Warwick has not been a sympathetic character; as the line, with its three "mys" rather indicates, his guiding principle has been acquisitiveness. Now, however, he is on the point of death and inevitably attracts a certain degree of sympathy from those of us conscious that we will all be going that way soon enough. It’s partly that, partly also the line’s rhythms and longing repetitions. But mostly, I think it’s about time.
At the point when Warwick speaks this line, all the things he wistfully mentions are in fact still his, in the present. He could say “that I have”. But it is the last time, literally the last moment, he will be able to call them his: as soon as he is dead, they will become what he “had”. And for the audience, watching a play set in the past, they already are the things he “had”. It was Philip Schwyzer’s brilliant book Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III that first made me aware of how often characters in plays are speaking of what for them is the future but for the audience is the past – a past which may very well be used by the playwright to hint at parallels with the present. Warwick in this line telescopes past, present and future into one vanishingly short moment.
This is why I feel sure, despite the fact that the play had more than one author, that this particular line is Shakespeare’s. Not because of its quality: many Elizabethan playwrights, on form, could produce a memorable line, but because of its preoccupation with time. What it does is reminiscent of what happens in the famous opening lines of Richard III where, as Schwyzer points out, the audience is, or thinks it is, momentarily misled. “Now is the winter of our discontent” could easily be a complete sentence. But the next line, “Made glorious summer by this sun of York” subverts it and seems to totally change the meaning: not “we are in a winter of discontent”, but “our winter of discontent has become a glorious summer”.
The audience is thus wrong-footed at the start, appropriately for a drama in which deception plays such a large role. But that isn’t the end of it. By the time Richard has finished his first speech, it will have become clear to them that in fact the era of peace which looks like being ushered in is not at all welcome to a man who is by nature and training a soldier and who, because of his physical appearance, feels better suited to a camp than a peacetime court. For him, in fact, it really is a winter of discontent, and the audience was right the first time.
The double-bluff is beautiful and economical, but Warwick’s reduction of all time to one line is even more so, and more universal, for few of us will ever be in quite the position Richard was in, but every one of us, albeit with a few substitutions for parks, walks and manors, will one day be able to echo Warwick.
Schwyzer’s book, with its remit “to observe how the present turns into the past […] and to explore how the past negotiates a place for itself in the present”, is fascinating on the subject of time both in reality and on stage, and well worth a read.
