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The forest walks are wide and spacious, And many unfrequented plots there are, Fitted by kind for rape and villainy. 2.1.115—117
Freud was not the first to invent Freudianism,
(the Latin word infans means, literally, “unable to speak”).
“A better head her glorious body fits / Than his that shakes for age and feebleness” (187–188).
“Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand,” says a stage direction in act 3, scene 1.
Titus Come, brother, take a head, And in this hand the other will I bear. And Lavinia, thou shalt be employed. Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thine arms. 3.1.278–281
plot that is about political redemption will also be achieved through ironic reversal: the downfall of Tamora the Goth will come at the hands of her own people.
Titus will give himself over to tragedy, and Lucius, to history.
The old man hath found their guilt, And sends the weapons wrapped about with lines That wound beyond their feeling to the quick. But were our witty Empress
well afoot She would applaud Andronicus' conceit. 4.2.26–30
Why, there they are both, bakèd in this pie, Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred. 5.3.59–61
Like the earlier rape and mutilation of Lavinia, this is a fairly direct borrowing from the tale of Philomela and...
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A personal note: It was the staging of this scene, in Julie Taymor's film Titus (1999), that turned me— a lifelong meat-eater—against the eating of mammals' flesh.
Funny.
O, let me teach you how to knit again This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf, These broken limbs again into one body. 5.3.69–71
If one good deed in all my life I did I do repent it from my very soul.
Like other Elizabethan Machiavels, Aaron goes to his fate declaring his unchanging resolve.
Henry VI Part 1
Four
HIS EARLY PLAY has sometimes been attributed entirely to Shakespeare, but the consensus of scholars and editors today suggests that it is more likely a collaborative effort
Such collaborations were common in the period—our modern notion of “authorship” is really an eighteenth-century one, having developed at the same time as copyright law—and
The “Shakespeare” that we have come to admire, revere, quote, and cite is often in part a composite author, since his works, even the most greatly honored ones, have been improved and altered over time by the conjectures of editors trying to make sense of what may appear to be gaps or errors in the printed text.
iHenry VI is a lively, smart, sophisticated, and well-designed play, full of strong characters and fast-paced action. It plays exceedingly well onstage, and it does not deserve the literary condescension that has sometimes come its way.
The popularity of history, or chronicle, plays, a new genre in the sixteenth century, is arguably tied to an emergent sense of English nationalism and cultural pride.
The King's historical age in the play has been calculated as progressing from four years old (in 2.5) to ten (at his coronation in Paris, 4.1) and then finally to twenty-two in the scene in which he eagerly (perhaps too eagerly) embraces for the first time the idea of marriage:
As will happen in play after play when Shakespeare deals with history, the quelling of external war often leads to “internal” war, both political (rivalry, usurpation, and sedition) and psychological.
the plays familiarly known to modern theatergoers as Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3—were written, performed, and published in quarto form as a two-part sequence before what was called The First
Part of Henry the Sixt was written, making 1 Henry VI what today would be called a “prequel.”
There is historical evidence, from the obligatory registering or licensing of plays with the Master of the Revels, that what we call Part 1 was licensed for the stage at a later date.
Richard III, we should note, begins with a funeral cortège, just as does 1 Henry VI: in Richard III the body is that of Margaret's weak, pious, and ineffectual husband, Henry VI,
they contain, both individually and taken together, patterns of symmetry, echo, inversion, and opposition that demonstrate their powerful effectiveness as dramatic vehicles, and as stage pictures.
“None do you like but an effeminate prince, / Whom like a schoolboy you may overawe” (1.1.35–36).
Posterity, await for wretched years, When, at their mothers' moistened eyes, babes shall suck, Our isle be made a marish of salt tears, And none but women left to wail the dead. 1.1.48–51
early works like this one have an extraordinarily fine sense of composition, theatricality, and—when they strive for it—emotional power.
Henry VI Part 2
Five
Henry VI Part 2 is the source of another such celebrated floating quotation, and whereas citers of the “Tomorrow” and “To be” speeches are fairly likely to know the context from which they derive, this is less likely for those who quote, often gleefully, sometimes ruefully, one line from act 4 of the play: “The first thing we do let's kill all the lawyers” (4.2.68).
addresses a whole range of topics, from law to literacy, that are central to the design of the play.
Nay, that I mean to do. Is this not a lamentable thing that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? 2 Henry VI 4.2.69–71
Shakespeare is here conflating two different insurrections, the Peasants' Revolt of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw in 1381 and the historical Jack Cade's rebellion of 1450. Tyler's revolt was strongly antiliteracy, reflecting the belief that the skills of reading and writing were socially divisive and anti-egalitarian.
Here, the Jack Cade rebellion, a classic version of “the world turned upside down,” imagines a world without law, degree or rank, sartorial distinction, education, writing, or print. All these issues were matters of anxiety—and excitement—in the humanist early modern period, and all were actively under debate.
The play embeds the Cade rebellion in a larger structure of civil war, claims and cross-claims, and competing modes of authority, including religion, magic, witchcraft,
genealogy, and history.
Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the bulwark of old England and its values,
O peers of England, shameful is this league, Fatal this marriage, cancelling your fame, Blotting your names from books of memory Razing the characters of your renown, Defacing monuments of conquered France, Undoing all, as all had never been! 1.1.94–99
Books, letters (“characters”), and monuments are ways of ensuring fame through history. Without them there is not only anarchy, but also historical for-getfulness and neglect.
this play and Henry VI Part 3 were almost certainly written before Part 1.
Gloucester, “the good Duke Humphrey,” is in moral reputation the strongest figure in Henry VI's England. But Gloucester is shortly to be undone by matters both domestic and political, as his wife, Eleanor, is convicted of dabbling in witchcraft,
Ah, gracious lord, these days are dangerous. Virtue is choked with foul ambition,
Great line.
3.1. 142–153
Her sight did ravish, but her grace in speech, Her words yclad with wisdom's majesty Makes me from wond'ring fall to weeping joys, Such is the fullness of my heart's content. 1.1.30–34
And force perforce I'll make him yield the crown, Whose bookish rule hath pulled fair England down. 1.1.238–258
