Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

York's grievances against King Henry are two: Henry is not the rightful heir, and he is a weak monarch, with “church-like humours” and “bookish rule.”

Margaret's portrait of Henry paints him as unmanly, preferring prayer before combat and rule. Holiness, like childishness, is a disability:

From her first arrival, then, Margaret dominates the King. Gloucester's wife, Eleanor Cobham, will combine the two kinds of mastery into one dismissive phrase when she warns Henry against his wife's subversive

“Good King, look to't in time! / She'll pamper thee and dandle thee like a baby. / Though in this place most master wear no breeches” (1.3.148–150). In Henry's court the woman wears the pants, or breeches, and the husband, though king in name, is treated like a child.

Somerset is killed by York's son Richard at the end of the play, and Suffolk decapitated by his captor, Walter Whitmore, in act 4, scene 1, and his head taken to the mourning Queen.

But in this play of tempered idealism and persistent political cynicism, York's ringing genealogy is

itself countered and balanced by the comic and anarchic claim of lineage offered by the rebel Jack Cade,

The magic ceremonies would surely have been theatrical crowd-pleasers, however forbidden by contemporary religion and law.

But if magic is good for theater, it is dangerous for its practitioners, on the stage and off, and the witch, wizard, and accomplice are all betrayed to the Duke of York and sentenced to death.

partnering these scenes of necromancy, or black magic, are scenes that purport to show miracles, the “magic” of pre-Reformation Christian faith, dismissed in Shakespeare's time by Protestant theologians.

Henry VI Part 2 consistently plays these “folk,” or common, characters off against the noblemen, to powerful theatrical effect.

The murder of Gloucester, his body graphically described by Warwick, marks a turning point in the play's attitude toward the display of violence.

O, torture me no more—I will confess. Alive again? Then show me where he is. I'll give a thousand pound to look upon him. He hath no eyes! The dust hath

blinded them. Comb down his hair—look, look: it stands upright, Like lime twigs set to catch my wingèd soul. 3.3.11–16

Decapitated heads were not uncommon stage props in the period, and the actual heads of traitors were displayed at the city gates of London as warnings to potential malefactors. Beheading (literal “capital punishment”)

the age of Shakespeare was brutal

was the ordained method for noblemen; persons of lesser rank were hanged, witches and heretics burned to death.

But in 2 Henry VI the severed heads are not only produced as props, they are made to “perform.”

The stage direction “Enter two with the Lord Saye's head and Sir James Cromer's upon two poles” makes this image graphically clear. The “kissing” of Saye and his kinsman thus visually mocks the Queen's desperate cradling of her lover's head.

The Cade rebellion that breaks out in the fourth act, significantly after the murder of “the good Duke Humphrey,” thus speaks directly to numerous themes established in the play.

Lord Saye's response is a spirited defense of humanist education,

“Large gifts have I bestowed on learnèd clerks / Because my book preferred me to the King, / And seeing ignorance is the curse of God, / Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven” (4.7.53, 64–67).

“York not our old men spares; / No more will I their babes” (5.3.51–52),

as always in these history plays, laden with an irony unintended by the speaker but clearly perceptible to an audience:

Henry VI Part 3

Six

Shakespeare's “first tetralogy”—1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, and Richard III—this

this play has generally been treated either as one in an epic series describing the events of the Wars of the Roses and the Tudor succession or as a very early work by a playwright still struggling to find his mature voice.

the play features at least two brilliantly memorable characters, Richard of Gloucester and Queen Margaret,

The quality of the poetry, and especially of the imagery, is vivid throughout,

In an equally evocative soliloquy in act 5, Richard will return to this imagined scene of his birth:

5.6.70–71, 74–77

I am myself alone. 5.6.81– 84

“I am myself alone” is the triumphant—and despairing—cry of the Machiavel.

The story of Richard of Gloucester's prodigious birth, and, indeed, the story of his crooked and misshapen body, was—as we will note again in Richard III— a fiction, deriving from the work of political opponents,

no document contemporary with the historical Richard (1452–1485) describes him as crookbacked or deformed,

in looking at the design of 3 Henry VI an audience will be concerned not so much with historical accuracy (the play, in Shakespeare's

usual way, takes many liberties with dates, events, and the presence or absence of historical actors in specific places and times, and does not purport to be a chronicle record), but rather with dramatic effect.

“[l]ascivious Edward, and thou, perjured George, / And thou, misshapen Dick” (5.5.34–35)

balancing this physically “monstrous” man is a politically “monstrous” woman, the powerful and vituperative Queen Margaret, the wife of Henry VI.

O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide! How couldst thou drain the life-blood of the child To bid the father wipe his eyes withal, And yet be seen to bear a woman's face? Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible—

Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless. Bidd'st thou me rage? Why, now thou hast thy wish. Wouldst have me weep? Why, now thou hast thy will. 1.4.138–145

The monstrous Richard and the monstrous Margaret—he constantly compared to a dog, she to a tiger—thus frame the “human” action of 5 Henry VI,

In 3 Henry VI, Richard of York loses Rutland, Margaret loses Edward, and both loudly lament their losses.

The idealizing vision of royal rule as “sweet fruition” is never allowed to stand in Shakespeare's plays without a realistic political and moral corrective.

(Clifford is this play's version of a character like Tybalt or Hotspur, full of energy and drive, impelled by revenge or the sensibility of insult, heedless of political moderation.)

Henry's lengthy reverie on the simple life, beginning “O God! Methinks it were a happy life / To be no better than a homely

swain. / To sit upon a hill, as I do now; / To carve out dials quaintly, point by point” (3 Henry VI 2.5.21–24),

(King Henry VI: “So many hours must I tend my flock, / So many hours must I take my rest, / So many hours must I contemplate, / So many hours must I sport myself” [31–34];

The entire scene is a play-within-the-play, of a kind at which Shakespeare the dramatist excels.

He sees very clearly in this moment that the civil war is internal and emotional as well as external and political: “I'll aid thee tear for

tear; / And let our hearts and eyes, like civil war, / Be blind with tears, and break, o'ercharged with grief” (76–78).