SOURCE: “The Hero in History: A Reading of Henry VI,” in Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition, Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 100-139.

[In the excerpt below, Riggs traces Shakespeare's general theme of the deterioration of heroic idealism that took place between the Hundred Years' War and the Yorkist accession in Henry VI.]

1 HENRY VI

The first part of Henry VI recasts the latter part of the Hundred Years' War as an exercise in “parallel lives.” The opening funeral oration indicates that the emphasis will be upon an ideal of heroic conduct, and the ensuing sequence of two council scenes (one English, the other French), three battle scenes, a “triumph,” and a second funeral confirms this impression while introducing us to the two principal antagonists, Talbot and Joan la Pucelle. It is clear from Edward III and The Wounds of Civil War that Shakespeare would have regarded an extended rhetorical comparatio between two such figures as a legitimate dramatic form, but in this case the terms of comparison are rather difficult to isolate, and criticism has been inclined to write the play off as an uncontrolled exercise in rhetorical imitation. Malone could see nothing but pedantry in Shakespeare's attempts to define character through simile and allusion, and his judgments have generally been accepted:

It is very observable that in The First Part of King Henry VI. there are more allusions to mythology, to classical authors, and to ancient and modern history, than, I believe, can be found in any one piece of our author's written on an English story; and that these allusions are introduced very much in the same manner as they are introduced in the plays of Greene, Peele, Lodge, and other dramatists who preceded Shakespeare; that is, they do not naturally arise out of the subject, but seem to be inserted merely to shew the writer's learning.¹

It must be granted at the outset that the poetic texture of 1 Henry VI does not encourage one to expect anything very subtle or even clearly defined in the way of characterization, and my own efforts to show Talbot and Joan as two sides of a complex statement about aristocratic values will rely more on an analysis of the rhetorical structure of the play. But even in the transparently bookish similes cited by Malone there may be some basis for a comparison between the two characters in ethical terms. When Shakespeare compares Talbot to Hercules, Hector, and the “desperate sire of Crete” who sought his fame in “the lither sky” (IV.vi.54; IV.vii.21), on the one hand, and Joan to Hannibal, the greatest of military strategists, and Mahomet, a “pagan” hero who is recalled as a magician and a religious charlatan (I.ii.140), on the other, it need not be supposed that the allusions are inserted “merely to shew the writer's learning.” In order to appreciate their specific meanings, however, they must be seen within a narrow range of conventions and a special system of values—one that is perhaps most easily introduced by some further reference to the profession of arms as it is practiced in 1 Henry VI.

The historical basis for all of the distinctions that I wish to emphasize is treated in such works as Sidney Painter's French Chivalry and Arthur Ferguson's The Indian Summer of English Chivalry,² but the contrasts within 1 Henry VI will be clear enough without any special commentary. A few specific details, taken from the battle scenes, will serve to indicate where Shakespeare's interests lie. While the English, on the one hand, seem scarcely aware that gunpowder has been invented, the French do use artillery, and with devastating effectiveness, on the only occasions when they kill English peers. The master-gunner's boy ambushes Salisbury in the first act, and in his final battle at Bordeaux Talbot finds that “Ten thousand French have ta’en the sacrament / To rive their dangerous artillery / Upon no Christian soul but English Talbot” (IV.ii.28-30). By contrast, the English limit themselves to feats of sheer personal strength. It is reported in the first act, for example, that Talbot has “Enacted wonders with his sword and lance” (I.i.122), and that his French captors held him with a “guard of chosen shot” because they surmised that he could “rend bars of steel / And spurn in pieces posts of adamant” (I.iv.50-53) with his arms, not to mention his “bare fists' (I.iv.35) and “horses' heels” (107).

With regard to military strategy, the French generally seek the security of siege walls, and in two different scenes (III.ii; IV.ii) they taunt the English from the upper gallery of the stage. The English never adopt this posture, and Talbot is quite explicit in his opinion of it: “Dare ye come forth and meet us in the field?” he asks; “Will ye, like soldiers, come and fight it out?” (III.ii.61;66).

                                                            Base muleteers of France!
Like peasant foot-boys do they keep the walls,
And dare not take up arms like gentlemen.

(III.ii.68-70)

The “muleteers” refuse to behave like chevaliers, however, and they never do “take up arms like gentlemen.” Talbot's capture, as reported in the opening scene, occurs when “A base Walloon, to win the Dauphin's grace, / Thrust Talbot with a spear into the back” (I.i.137-138), while the “treacherous manner” of Salisbury's death has already been noted. Thereafter the Dauphin relies on Joan's “stratagems” and “policy,” a mixture of deception and diplomacy by which he “wrongs his fame” (II.i.16)—but gets results.

By contrast, the English are so much concerned with fighting by the book as to appear, at times, almost oblivious to any ulterior objectives. When Talbot first speaks, he is complaining that the French had offered to exchange him for a “baser man of arms” than “the brave Lord Ponton de Santrailles” (I.iv.29; 27). Not only was this offer refused, but Talbot “craved death” in preference to being “so vile esteem’d” (31-32). Whenever the British do battle, it is specifically in revenge for some breach of martial decorum: the “torments” Talbot endured as a French prisoner, the treacherous ambush of Salisbury and Gargrave, the “hellish mischief” used to capture Rouen, and the “false dissembling guile” of Burgundy. For them, every battle represents the fulfilment of a vow to right some violation of chivalric ideals. Their ostensible cause for fighting, Henry's “right,” is mentioned only once in all of those battle scenes, and then in a decidedly offhand manner (“Now, Salisbury, for thee and for the right / Of English Henry” [II.i.35-36]).

These specific contrasts between two different ways of making war form one basis for Shakespeare's general effort to reformulate Marlowe's heroic ideal in a framework of aristocratic values. In the sixteenth century, as in the fifteenth, the right to bear arms was still an operative definition of a gentleman. And the source of that right continued of course to be gentle birth (technically speaking, armigerous parents). Accordingly, the play includes a parallel set of contrasts juxtaposing characters of base and gentle birth, and these comprise the other important factor in the ideal of aristocratic conduct that emerges. A brief exchange between Talbot and his son, who is being urged to flee from the fatal battle of Bordeaux, will help to illustrate how the Talbots unite both requisites:

Tal. Thou never hadst renown,
nor canst not lose it.
John. Yes, your renowned name: shall
flight abuse it?

(IV.v.40-41)

Talbot's “renown,” or fame, is the permanent record of his honorable deeds, and it is symbolized by his “name,” which recalls those deeds. The soldier who finds that “The cry of ‘Talbot’ serves me as a sword” (II.ii.79) is simply putting this premise to practical use. The basis of Talbot's readiness to face death and his circumspect valor is the understanding that his “name” is a timeless family possession, to be transmitted to his son, who will in turn be incited to meet that standard. The Talbots construe this doctrine so literally that valor becomes, in effect, a test of legitimacy: “Surely, by all the glory you have won, / And if I fly, I am not Talbot's son” (IV.vi.50-51), argues Young Talbot. By the same token, the stain of illegitimacy is presumptive evidence of someone's unworthiness to bear arms, as Talbot reminds the Bastard of Orleans:

                                                                                                    I quickly shed
Some of his bastard blood, and in disgrace
Bespoke him thus: ‘Contaminated, base,
And misbegotten blood I spill of thine,
Mean and right poor, for that pure blood of mine
Which thou didst force from Talbot, my brave boy.’

(IV.vi.19-24)

If the “Bastard” is a special case here, Joan's career embodies an extended parody of this ideal, in which her unorthodox tactics on the battlefield only serve to expose the baseness of her origins. When she is introduced to the Dauphin's court (appropriately, by the Bastard of Orleans), the French peers are told that she is a “shepherd's daughter” who has been inspired to forsake her “base vocation” and “be the English scourge” (I.ii.72, 80, 129). She seeks to establish her claims to nobility by “high terms” and “single combat”; but both her sex and her parentage would disqualify her from bearing arms at all. If her martial career amounts to a shameful assortment of policies and stratagems, her death scene, which can be taken as an ironic counterstatement to those of the Talbots, only brings to light the fact that she lacks any family name to augment and transmit. In a desperate effort to escape death she denies her father (an inoffensive old rustic who materializes to make the fact of her base origins perfectly clear) and claims to be issued from the “progeny of kings” (V.iv.38). As this transparent hoax fails to win any mercy from her captors, she claims to be with child herself; but the English will “have no bastards live” (70) and duly proceed to burn her as a witch.

The larger network of comparisons of course extends beyond the special case of Talbot and Joan. If she epitomizes the external forces that threaten the aristocratic ideal of military service and gentle blood, there are signs of internal erosion as well. The most ominous of these come from the professional civil servant Winchester, who is a “bastard” by birth (III.i.42), and from the contentious, quarrelsome gentlemen of the Inns of Court, one of whom, York, also bears a dishonored family name. “Stand’st thou not attained, / Corrupted, and exempt from ancient gentry?” (II.iv.92-93).

The literary expression of these social distinctions is still largely contained within the idiom of Tamburlaine, and focused in the portrayal of Talbot and Joan. The Talbots stand as a refutation of Tamburlaine's dictum “That vertue solely is the sum of glorie / And fashions men with true nobility” (1 Tamb., III.ii.115), because they insist that heroic virtue be distinguished from mere virtù, and construed rather as a set of ethical imperatives, nurtured and transmitted by a select group of “peers”; at the same time, virtù, sheer “capability,” is redefined by its limiting concern with tangible victories, its consequent reliance on base policy and stratagems, and its sham nobility. On this level, Joan becomes the vehicle for a broad parody of Marlowe's heroic prototype, and, more specifically, for a parody of the recognition scenes from 1 Tamburlaine. The outlines of the parody are clear enough from the first scene in the French camp. The offspring of an ungentle shepherd finds herself “assign’d” to leave her “base vocation” so that she may become a famous warrior and the scourge of God. She proceeds to declare her personal superiority through Marlowe's familiar gestures of challenge and vaunt, and she elicits the usual response:

[Joan.] My courage try by
combat, if thou dar’st,
And thou shalt find that I exceed my sex.
Resolve on this; thou shalt be fortunate
If thou receive me for thy warlike mate.
Char. Thou hast astonish’d me with thy high terms.
Was Mahomet inspired with a dove?
Thou with an eagle art inspired then.
Helen, the mother of great Constantine,
Nor yet Saint Philip's daughters, were like thee.
Bright star of Venus, fall’n down on the earth,
How may I reverent worship thee enough?

(I.ii.89-93; 140-145)

Shakespeare has here collapsed the germinal clichés of 1 Tamburlaine into a space of about one hundred lines, and has encased them in miniature set speeches of description, vaunt, and praise. Like the second scene of 1 Tamburlaine, this is a miniature drama of social recognition, one in which the topoi of aristocratic status are used to move and persuade a prince of the blood royal. It is converted to comedy by using this very rhetorical apparatus to expose the comic underside of Joan's character: her base origins. The strain of bawdy double entendre is inaugurated by Reignier's admiring “She takes upon her bravely at first dash” (71). It is formulated more explicitly when Joan tells Charles that if he tries her in “combat” he will find that she exceeds her sex (89-90; see also 92, 95, 103); and it is even given a touch of sublimity in Charles' “Bright star of Venus fall’n down on the earth” (144). The effect of this bawdy punning is to reverse completely the ostensible show of physical energy elevated to moral purity. At best this squeaking boy actor is a figure from a comedy, or perhaps a comic subplot, pretending to belong in an heroic play. A later parody of Marlovian “magnificence,” delivered by Charles after Joan has led the French to victory at Rouen, preserves this emphasis while extending the range of implied judgments:

… all the priests and friars in my realm
Shall in procession sing her endless praise.
A statelier pyramis to her I’ll rear
Than Rhodope's of Memphis ever was;
In memory of her, when she is dead,
Her ashes, in an urn more precious
Than the rich jewel-coffer of Darius,
Transported shall be at high festivals
Before the kings and queens of France.
No longer on Saint Denis will we cry,
But Joan de Pucelle shall be France's saint.

(I.vi.19-29)

Here Marlovian paganism becomes confused with Romish Catholicism in a speech calculated to remind the Elizabethan audience that heroism without ethical sanctions merely becomes another corrupt secular religion. As the representative of that religion, Joan herself would suggest not only divine Zenocrate, but also the charlatans and impostors who peddled “masses and marries” in the popular interludes.³

Beneath these postures, Joan is generically an impostor, created only to exhibit the ornate theatrical façade, as well as the policy and “stratagems,” by which aspirant baseness masquerades as nobility. Hence the scenes in which she is exposed and burnt as a witch, like the stripping of Duessa in The Faerie Queene, serve a formal expository purpose that supersedes any need for a controlled, sequacious plot. A consort of “familiar spirits” (V.iii.10) arrives to make unmistakably plain the truth that lies behind her claim to be the chosen agent of God. These are followed by the shepherd who underscores the real baseness of her origins with his unvarnished testimony that “She was the first fruit of my bachelorship” (V.iv.13). Finally, the reiterated innuendo of sexual misconduct is made utterly explicit in her confession that Charles (or Alençon or Reignier) has left her with the child whom the English will not allow to be born.

Where the rhetoric surrounding Joan uses the conventions of praise to project an image of spurious glamor, the deeds of Talbot and his son, and of Salisbury, Bedford, and their great predecessor Henry V, are for the most part treated through forms of the funeral oration. More than a third of Talbot's three hundred lines would fall into this oratorical genre, and most of what remains either grows directly out of it (as the vow to revenge is a kind of hortatio) or is distinctly elegiac in tone (for example, the speech in rebuke of Falstaffe at IV.i.33-44 beginning “When first this Order was ordain’d, my lords, / Knights of the Garter were of noble birth”). Indeed, Talbot's main function in this play is to solemnize the fall of the great English peers, of whom he is the last representative. While his antagonist defines what is ephemeral and merely glamorous about heroic “bravery,” Talbot finds a context in which to define true heroic virtue and the permanent compensation that it offers in the face of death: the immortality conferred by earthly fame. Fame is introduced as the set topic of consolatio in the extended funeral oration for Henry V that opens the play.

[Bed.] A far more glorious
star thy soul will make
Than Julius Caesar or bright—
Enter a Messenger.

(I.i.55-56)

Introduced, but never formulated: the elegy is broken off by the messenger's “sad tidings” from France. The unresolved problem of fame and the consolation that it provides remains, however, the signal problem posed by the life of Talbot. Does an “honorable” death justify a life that has proved futile in the unforeseeable calculus of human history? Or does the final word remain with Joan as she insults over Talbot's body: “Him that thou magnifiest with all these titles, / Stinking and fly-blown lies here at our feet” (IV.vii.75-76)?

Surveying Talbot's own reflections on this question, as they are formulated in his orations on the deaths of Salisbury, Bedford, Young Talbot, and himself, one finds that there are significant variations in the answers that he provides. The death of Salisbury is first lamented as a “tragedy” that might have been inspired by A Mirror for Magistrates:

Accursed tower! accursed fatal hand
That hath contriv’d this woeful tragedy!
In thirteen battles Salisbury o’ercame;
Henry the Fifth he first train’d to the wars;
Whilst any trump did sound, or drum struck up,
His sword did ne’er leave striking in the field.

(I.iv.75-80)

But subsequently Talbot placates the shade of Salisbury by conquering Orleans, and he commemorates this achievement in a formal elegy over the tomb erected there:

Now have I paid my vow unto his soul;
For every drop of blood was drawn from him
There hath at least five Frenchmen died to-night.
And that hereafter ages may behold
What ruin happen’d in revenge of him,
Within their chiefest temple I’ll erect
A tomb, wherein his corpse shall be interr’d;
Upon the which, that every one may read,
Shall be engrav’d the sack of Orleans,
The treacherous manner of his mournful death,
And what a terror he had been to France.

(II.ii.7-17)

By introducing topics that lie outside the Mirror tradition, with its essentially medieval insistence on the futility of earthly aspiration, Talbot is able to offer Salisbury's death as an argument for the imperishable value of the heroic life. Every drop of his blood was worth the lives of five treacherous Frenchmen, and his tomb will remain in the “middle center” of Orleans as a permanent testimonial to that “worth.” His epitaph for Bedford (III.ii.131-137) is less assertive (“But kings and mightiest potentates must die, / For that’s the end of human misery”), but its very tranquillity depends upon a parallel situation. Bedford's own faith in English valor has been justified by a visible English victory at the very moment of death; and his exequies can be “fulfill’d in Rouen” (III.ii.133; my italics) with due gravity.

At Talbot's last battle, however, the problem of consolation arises in quite a different context. Talbot and his son must die, and Bordeaux will never be retaken. For Shakespeare, this is to be the last battle of the Hundred Years' War and the last stand of English chivalry. Whatever “victory” Talbot and his son might achieve there will not be commemorated in the actualities of human history. Talbot unwittingly formulates their problem when he commands his son, “Fly, to revenge my death if I be slain” (IV.v.18-21). Young Talbot's answer—“He that flies so will ne’er return again” (19)—serves to expose the insolubility of their dilemma. If Young Talbot flees this battle, he will, as it were, cease to be Talbot's son:

Is my name Talbot? and am I your son?
And shall I fly? O, if you love my mother,
Dishonour not her honourable name,
To make a bastard and a slave of me!

(12-15)

But if he remains, as the father reminds the son, their “name” will be extinct in another sense: “In thee thy mother dies, our household's name, / My death's revenge, thy youth, and England's fame” (IV.vi.38-39). Like Antony and Coriolanus, the Talbots discover that the ideal figured by their heroic “name” is too pure for sublunary existence. It can be ratified only in the very act of death. Talbot's final words, spoken over the body of his dead son, accept and transcend this dilemma by returning to the classical consolation of fame and formulating it in an enlarged context:

Thou antic Death, which laugh’st us here to scorn,
Anon, from thy insulting tyranny,
Coupled in bonds of perpetuity,
Two Talbots winged through the lither sky,
In thy despite shall scape mortality.

(IV.vii.18-22)

Here the humanistic reward of earthly fame (suggested by Icarus and Daedalus) is combined, at least implicitly, with the Christian consolation of resurrection after death. Their “name,” and the aspirant quest for fame that motivates the noble life, is not cut off by death, but translated into the permanence of rhetorical exemplum. From this last oration Talbot moves surely to the clear-eyed acceptance of his fate that concludes the speech, even as it foreshadows the final lucidity of Shakespeare's later tragic heroes.

Soldiers, adieu! I have what I would have,
Now my old arms are young John Talbot's grave.

(IV.vii.31-32)

The funeral oration that began the play and was interrupted by the “sad tidings” from France here finds its consolatio: the “bright star” of Henry's fame has been set within a larger constellation.

The subplot involving Somerset, York, and the quarrel of the roses provides a third set of contrasts: the fields of France shrink to the Inns of Court, the epic warrior gives way to the fashionable courtier, the incentives of ancestral fame are replaced by a contentious aristocratic disdain, and the rites of war are but faintly recalled by adversaries who are careful, as Touchstone would say, to “quarrel in print, by the book, as you have books for good manners” (As You Like It, V.iv.94-95). Unlike Joan, the young men who quarrel in the Temple Garden have every reason to behave like aristocrats. They stand as Shakespeare's example of natural nobility diverted to trivial ends. If their modish and courtly wit is something of an anachronism in Talbot's world, the anachronism nevertheless helps us to see just where that world was heading.

The ironic relevance of their quarrel to Talbot's heroic ideals becomes most apparent in their appeals to family honor. York entreats “him that is a true-born gentleman / And stands upon the honour of his birth” (II.iv.27-28) to pluck the white rose, while Somerset taunts the “yeoman” Plantagenet for being “attainted” by his father's ill fame:

Was not thy father, Richard Earl of Cambridge,
For treason headed in our late king's days?
And by his treason stand’st thou not attainted,
Corrupted, and exempt from ancient gentry?
His trespass yet lives guilty in thy blood;
And, till thou be restor’d, thou art a yeoman.

(II.iv.90-95)

The faint parallel to the Talbots' ancestral values is intended, of course, to point up the larger contrasts. Where Talbot's “name” is fully identified with the cause for which he fights, Somerset and York are divided by “nice sharp quillets of the law” (17) too slight even to be mentioned, and immediately forgotten by both sides. The crowning irony of I Henry VI is that this essentially trivial sense of honor should prove a greater threat to Talbot's ideals, and indeed to his very existence, than all the base stratagems devised by the French. In the climactic scenes of act four, while Talbot is “ring’d about with bold adversity” (IV.iv.14), York and Somerset are characteristically quarreling about which of them is to be held responsible for his plight. “York lies,” Somerset insists,

                              he might have sent and had the horse:
I owe him little duty, and less love,
And take foul scorn to fawn on him by sending.

(IV.iv.33-35)

Talbot is thus sacrificed to a point of courtly etiquette. When this happens, Somerset and York stand judged as “seditious” peers, and in a context that would have seemed especially appropriate to the Elizabethan audience. The courtier has failed to accept his real responsibilities as a social and military leader; and this decay of the aristocracy, which is assailed from without by “upstarts” of ungentle birth like Winchester and Joan, portends a more general decline in national greatness.

Hence the final act can be taken as further commentary on the failure of a courtly aristocracy to provide an adequate image of feudal service and chivalry. Criticism of 1 Henry VI has understandably tended to treat Margaret and Suffolk as an end-link to the next play in the trilogy, but they also serve to bring the general declension from heroic action to courtly posturing to its appropriate conclusion: the pseudo-Petrarchan lover. Suffolk appears as a mannered Elizabethan amorist from his earliest exchanges with Margaret:

Be not offended, nature's miracle,
Thou art allotted to be ta’en by me:
So doth the swan her downy cygnets save,
Keeping them prisoner underneath her wings.
Yet, if this servile usage once offend,
Go and be free again as Suffolk's friend.

(V.iii.54-59)

What is at stake here is the power of these romantic clichés to corrupt still further the integrity of the English court. Suffolk's success in installing his “friend” as the English queen effectively violates Henry's contract with the Earl of Armagnac's daughter, which was to have been the basis for an honorable peace. And the reason for that success is fully apparent in Henry's transparent intoxication with such Petrarchan rhetoric as this:

Your wondrous rare description, noble Earl,
Of beauteous Margaret hath astonish’d me:
Her virtues graced with external gifts
Do breed love's settled passions in my heart:
And like as rigour of tempestuous gusts
Provokes the mightiest hulk against the tide,
So am I driven by breath of her renown
Either to suffer shipwreck, or arrive
Where I may have fruition of her love.

(V.v.1-9)

Still later, as if the very triteness of these clichés were not sufficient to make the point, Suffolk concludes the play by acknowledging his own cynical motives, and foreshadowing, in a final portentous allusion to the Trojan débacle, the havoc of 2 Henry VI:

Thus Suffolk hath prevail’d; and thus he goes,
As did the youthful Paris once to Greece;
With hope to find the like event in love,
But prosper better than the Trojan did.
Margaret shall now be Queen, and rule the King;
But I will rule both her, the King, and realm.

(V.v.103-108)

Here the tradition of fame serves as an ironic backdrop, a final testimony to the ethical and political confusions of the present. What began as a viable aristocratic ideal of conduct, rooted in social customs and familial bonds, has become a mere precedent for aristocratic misadventure. The Talbots' fame, as it was earned at Bordeaux, embodies the high ethical ideals of the play; and their death effectively removes those ideals from the world of the play. From the moment of their apotheosis in the “lither sky” their name forfeits its slender hold on the actualities of history and achieves the perfection of heroic exemplum—a tale to be told in an increasingly harsh world.

2 HENRY VI

The opening acts of 2 Henry VI transport a reader of the trilogy from the siege walls and battlefields of France to the public halls and inmost recesses of the English court. For a popular history belonging to the early 1590's, the setting is still relatively novel, especially when it is recalled that this play probably preceded Woodstock and Edward II.⁴ The stage directions that the New Arden editor supplies for its first eleven scenes will immediately suggest how foreign its dramatic environment is to the tradition of Tamburlaine: London, the palace, the Duke of Gloucester's house, Gloucester's garden, Saint Alban's, the Duke of York's garden, a hall of justice, the abbey at Bury St. Edmunds, a room of state, a bedchamber. By introducing a set of Elizabethan courtiers into 1 Henry VI, Shakespeare had begun to engage the political crises of sixteenth-century England within the conventions of popular heroic drama. In 2 Henry VI the nobility become recognizable as precisely what they were for Shakespeare's audience: “brave halfe paces between a throne and a people,”⁵ in Fulke Greville's phrase, centered at the court in London. Scenes such as the one where Suffolk discovers some villagers with a petition “Against the Duke of Suffolk, for enclosing the commons of Long Melford” (I.iii.20-22) dramatize the social status of that nobility in terms that could hardly be more explicit. Nor is this episode at all unusual. Comparable transactions bring the court aristocracy into conjunction with a disloyal household servant (I.ii), a pair of coney-catching vagabonds (II.i), a treasonous armorer and his loyal apprentice (II.iii), an outraged House of Commons (III.ii), a crew of discontented seaman (IV.i), the rebellious tradesmen of Kent (IV.ii-x), and a representative of the squirearchy named Alexander Iden (V.i). As if to emphasize and complicate the social and political implications of these encounters, Shakespeare makes Henry's court into what is virtually a cross section of sixteenth-century aristocracy: there is the judicious administrator and friend of the commons, “Good Duke Humphrey” of Gloucester; the proud, ambitious, and unscrupulous prelate Winchester; the loyal members of the country aristocracy, Salisbury and his son Warwick, who is commended for his “plainness” and “housekeeping” (I.i.190); the courtier Suffolk, an “Image of Pride” (I.iii.176) who has exchanged “two dukedoms for a duke's fair daughter” (I.i.220) in France; and the glamorous conqueror-intriguer York, who is already maneuvering for the “golden mark” of Henry's crown.

Those who agree with Johnson that the principal defect of the early histories “is that they have not sufficient variety of action, for the incidents are too often of the same kind” will welcome this elaboration of social details, and concur in his judgment that the second is the best play of the trilogy.⁶ Certainly all that is known of the Elizabethan repertory between 1587 and 1595 indicates that 2 Henry VI occupies a crucial place in the development of historical drama. Its portrayal of a weak king, flanked by a loyal counselor and a set of courtly “caterpillars,” and confronted with open revolt from his discontented barons, marks the line of development that leads from, say, Tamburlaine and Selimus on the one side, to Woodstock, Edward II, and Richard II on the other. From a loose rendition of heroic aspiration in an exotic setting, the emphasis has shifted towards a drama of ambition and disruption that anatomizes the ambivalent status of the Elizabethan peerage. In Lawrence Stone's analysis, a complex series of events was, by the 1590's, leading to a general failure of nerve among the aristocracy.⁷ Two familiar symptoms of that failure emerge directly from the social drama of 2 Henry VI: Suffolk's fierce, reflexive pride in his noble blood and connections at court, and York's desperate impulse to restore his family's lost eminence by reckless military adventures. Just as these are indices of a more general failure to govern, the one tragic figure in the plan is a governor, Good Duke Humphrey. He can fill the administrative vacuum that results from the defection of Suffolk and York, but he is powerless to resist their determination to destroy and replace him.

In terms of the continuities that I have set out to trace, the consequences of this changed setting—at least for the first three acts—are clear enough. The two characters who might have presented the strongest appeal to the heroic mood, Suffolk and York, are drastically reduced in stature, while Duke Humphrey suggests a new type of ideal ruler, the Ciceronian governor. Thus, if they are read as exempla, the social incidents that have just been listed serve to discount the value of ancestral name and martial fortitude, while laying stress on the importance of prudence, “a vertue that is occupied evermore, in searchyng out the truthe” and justice, “a vertue, gathered by long space, gevyng every one his awne, mindyng in all thynges, the common profite of our countrey.”⁸ The controlling image of Gloucester's judicial rectitude and expertise is established in a series of trial scenes, in which he pronounces variously upon the dispute between Peter and Horner (I.iii), the qualifications of York and Somerset for the French regency (I.iii), the fraudulent “miracle” invented by Saunder Simcox and his wife (II.i), the misdemeanors of Dame Eleanor (II.i), and, finally, the accusations that are brought against him at Bury St. Edmunds (III.i). By contrast, throughout the first four acts York's projected rise to eminence is less a matter of his own special abilities than of his systematic effort to subvert the principles thus established. His principal strategies, the alliance with the Nevilles and the manipulation of Jack Cade, exhibit a valor that has ceased to find expression in the open trial of warfare, while it seeks out the privacy of schemes and soliloquies. Similarly, Suffolk's pride in rank and title is exemplifed not in the martial deeds that would add to his family name, but rather in his illicit courtship of Queen Margaret, and his contemptuous exchanges with such “base” types as the humble petitioners (“Sir knave” and his “fellow”) who mistakenly approach him in act one (I.iii.1-41), the angry Commons (“rude, unpolished hinds,” “a sort of tinkers”) who assail him after the murder of Gloucester (III.ii.270-276), and the pirates (“paltry, servile, abject drudges”) who execute him shortly thereafter (IV.i.29-138). In so far as these contexts tend to deny the would-be hero his normal theater of operations—the battlefield and the tournament—the play as a whole may be said to embody “historical assessment” with a vengeance and, indeed, to mark a radical departure from the literary antecedents with which this study has been so much concerned. But there is a marked shift in emphasis within the play itself, one which serves to reopen the entire question of Suffolk's and York's value in a more hospitable setting.

The murder of Gloucester, which comes midway through the play, represents the most severe possible judgment on the ambitious nobles, and particularly Suffolk. At the same time, however, this event removes from the scene the one figure who embodies a thoroughgoing criticism of their personal aspirations. Instead of proceeding directly to their appointed miserable ends, therefore, both York and Suffolk enjoy a renewed vitality in the latter half of the play, as the social commentary, without Gloucester to interpret it, recedes into the background, and impinges less directly on the values of the two aristocrats. In effect, Shakespeare provides each of them with a new idiom and a new vision of nobility. The courtier, at his final parting with Margaret (III.ii), suddenly becomes an idealized and gracious amorist who measures the necessity of death against the permanence of love. York, the scheming Machiavel of the first three acts, reappears in the fifth as a visible embodiment of heroic authority, urging his claim to the throne on that basis. The impact of these scenes depends, of course, on the fact that they are set in an ambience so utterly different from that of 1 Henry VI. They take place not on a battlefield but in the court, where Suffolk and York already stand judged as instances of “foul ambition.” As a result, both characters now appear from a double perspective. The social stereotypes (corrupt courtier, rebellious baron) have been assimilated to more sympathetic theatrical roles, and, as the rhetorical elaboration unfolds, those roles enlarge the stereotypes into examples of personal ambition that cannot be adequately judged within a social order that is itself deeply compromised. Neither of these characters, in the hierarchical metaphor, “knows his place,” and as a result each becomes a far more interesting and problematic case than such professional caterpillars as Winchester and Buckingham. So Clifford's first response to York in act five is one of puzzled amazement: “To Bedlam with him! Is the man grown mad!” (V.i.131). The dramatist has discovered, however distantly, a radical form of tragic irony: when heroic and aristocratic values are transferred from the purely martial world of Talbot and Joan into a court where the nobility are “brave halfe paces between a throne and a people,” they may appear as inherently anarchic even though they are still admirable in themselves. It is Shakespeare's tentative acknowledgment of this predicament with respect to Suffolk and, more especially, York that makes them truly represent the crisis of the aristocracy in 2 Henry VI.

This transition from a drama of mordant social commentary to a more idealized and sympathetic portrayal of heroic aspiration poses some large problems of interpretation. The easiest way of dealing with them is to postulate that Shakespeare began by experimenting with a form like Rossiter's “morality of state,” but found that it involved rejecting an old ideal without adequately providing for a new one, and so returned to the conventional formulas of heroical-historical drama in the closing acts. I do not offer this hypothesis because I think that the transition is clumsy or fortuitous. Quite the contrary: in using an analysis of courtly intrigues and political failures to define the conditions that permit—perhaps even necessitate—the rise of a new “Prince,” Shakespeare was only discovering for himself the underlying configurations of Il Principe. But it should be quite clear that the critique of Suffolk and York that is sustained by Gloucester never begins to generate a vision of the aristocratic life which convincingly supplants their own. Hence, after Gloucester's death, the reassertion of order and stability, such as it is, can only be accomplished by one of them. That is the crucial difference between 2 Henry VI and Richard II, a play which it closely resembles in many respects. In 2 Henry VI, the analysis of decay in the state is still predicated on the conception of the body politic and the ideal ruler that is common to all heroical-historical drama: the warrior prince leading his feudal ranks in wars of conquest. Richard II also shows what happens when aristocratic caterpillars corrupt the royal court and threaten the anointed body of the king; but in the later play the caterpillars are seen within the whole “garden” of the state, a type of Eden that evolves according to its own higher moral laws, while the “body” of the king, like the body of Christ, figures the health of the entire commonweal. As long as it remained uninformed by such a sacramental conception of politics and kingship, the social ethos of 2 Henry VI was bound finally to accommodate the same contentious aristocrats whom it set out to criticize. The only real gain (if one can call it that) lay in the dramatist's perception, which was to carry over into 3 Henry VI and Richard III, that the whole humanistic ideal of the hero king necessarily contained the seeds of its own deterioration.

This interdependence between the play's ethical criticism and its heroic themes is firmly established in the opening scene, which seems to me one of the finest in the play. It begins with the ceremonial addresses of Suffolk and Margaret, which usher in the style of courtly posturing and decadent “magnificence” that was adumbrated at the close of 1 Henry VI:

Queen. Great King of England,
and my gracious lord,
The mutual conference that my mind hath had
By day, by night, waking, and in my dreams,
In courtly company, or at my beads,
With you mine alderliefest sovereign,
Makes me the bolder to salute my king
With ruder terms, such as my wit affords,
And over joy of heart doth minister.

(I.i.24-31)

As soon as the royal couple and their favorite depart, Gloucester duly measures the ugly substance that this Petrarchan shadow conceals against the great achievements of the era that has just passed:

Brave peers of England, pillars of the state,
To you Duke Humphrey must unload his grief—
Your grief, the common grief of all the land.
What! did my brother Henry spend his youth,
His valour, coin, and people, in the wars?
Did he so often lodge in open field,
In winter's cold, and summer's parching heat,
To conquer France, his true inheritance?
And did my brother Bedford toil his wits,
To keep by policy what Henry got?
Or hath mine uncle Beaufort and myself,
With all the learned Council of the realm,
Studied so long, sat in the Council House
Early and late, debating to and fro
How France and Frenchmen might be kept in awe?
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 conquer’d France,
Undoing all, as all had never been!

(I.i.74-83; 87-91; 97-102)

Gloucester is a type of the Renaissance governor whom humanists like Ascham and Eloyt saw as supplanting such medieval chevaliers as Talbot, and his tone here is hardly bellicose. It would be impossible to find, among the earlier histories, a more balanced portrayal of the ideal ruler through humanistic topics. The emphasis falls on fortitude (“Did he so often lodge in open field / In winter's cold and summer's parching heat”) and prudence (“And did my brother Bedford toil his wits, / To keep by policy what Henry got”). Both these virtues are put in the service of Henry's patrimony, “his true inheritance.” By exemplifying them, Henry's peers all achieved an honored place in the registers of fame. Gloucester is ideally suited to witness the decay of this high tradition in the ambience of Henry's court, but, as the survivor, along with Salisbury and Beaufort, of a departed order, he is powerless to do anything about it. In this scene, as elsewhere, he shows his frustration and impotence by abrupt fits of choler and sadness, which are relieved only by unexplained silences and departures.

Hence it is York who, at the conclusion of the scene, ventures to translate Gloucester's themes into action, although he does so in a radically new context.

Anjou and Maine are given to the French;
Paris is lost; the state of Normandy
Stands on a tickle point now they are gone;
Suffolk concluded on the articles,
The peers agreed, and Henry was well pleas’d
To change two dukedoms for a duke's fair daughter.
I cannot blame them all: what is’t to them?
’Tis thine they give away, and not their own.
A day will come when York shall claim his own;
And therefore I will take the Nevils' parts
And make a show of love to proud Duke Humphrey,
And when I spy advantage, claim the crown,
For that’s the golden mark I seek to hit.
Nor shall proud Lancaster usurp my right,
Nor hold the sceptre in his childish fist,
Nor wear the diadem upon his head,
Whose church-like humour fits not for a crown.
Then, York, be still awhile, till time do serve:
Watch thou, and wake when others be asleep,
To pry into the secrets of the state;
Till Henry surfeit in the joys of love,
With his new bride and England's dear-bought queen,
And Humphrey with the peers be fall’n at jars:
Then will I raise aloft the milk-white rose,
With whose sweet smell the air shall be perfum’d,
And in my standard bear the arms of York,
To grapple with the house of Lancaster;
And force perforce I’ll make him yield the crown,
Whose bookish rule hath pulled fair England down.

(I.i.215-222; 240-260)

The tone and imagery of this passage, which recall Marlowe's Machiavellian Duke of Guise, could hardly be farther from Gloucester's. This flippant, mercantile appraisal of “his own” inheritance makes it clear that York is alive to the ancestral values of 1 Henry VI only in a very limited way. Nevertheless, it should already be apparent that York is not, finally, going to be the mere villain of the piece, for he is only measuring himself against the humanistic standards that Gloucester has just invoked. Like the Henry of noble memory, York is ready to “grapple” in the field while others surfeit in the joys of love; like Bedford, York will use his wits “To pry into the secrets of the state,” and like all the learned Council of the realm he will watch and wake “when others be asleep.” If their aim was to secure Henry's true inheritance, York would only “claim his own”; if they erected characters of renown, York will “raise aloft the milk-white rose.”

This transition from Gloucester's high-minded critique of Henry's court to York's half ironic reassertion of the topoi on which he bases that critique foreshadows the basic design of the entire play. As the portrayal of social corruption broadens and unfolds, Margaret, Suffolk, and their new allies continue to beguile Henry with games of courtly makebelieve, and Gloucester continues to expose their foul practices wherever he can. His effectiveness, however, is always limited by his reliance on purely judicial procedures (he assures his wife that he “must offend” before he can “be attainted” [II.iv.59]), and he is finally sacrificed to his own faith in legal rectitude.

By the beginning of the fourth act the homiletic moral, “Virtue is chok’d with foul Ambition” (III.i.143), has virtually been played out: it is concluded by the expulsion of Suffolk and the eschatological horrors of Winchester's demise. It is just at this point that York, who has been mostly in the wings up to now, determines to raise aloft the milk-white rose and purge Henry's court of its corrupted elements. For York alone, of all the decadent aristocrats, has still managed to preserve some semblance of the antique pattern of heroical worth that was established by Henry V. Hence he alone can raise himself from the status of a symptom of courtly viciousness in the earlier acts to that of a judgment on it in the later ones.

York's reappearance in the fifth act occasions Shakespeare's second experiment in reformulating the idiom and topics of Tamburlaine. At first sight, the result may appear to be rather less controlled and successful than the portrayal of Joan in 1 Henry VI.

Ah! sancta majestas, who’d not buy thee dear?
Let them obey that knows not how to rule;
This hand was made to handle nought but gold:
I cannot give due action to my words,
Except a sword or sceptre balance it.
King did I call thee? No, thou art not king;
Not fit to govern and rule multitudes,
Which dar’st not, no, nor canst not rule a traitor.
That head of thine doth not become a crown;
Thy hand is made to grasp a palmer's staff,
And not to grace an awful princely sceptre.
That gold must round engirt these brows of mine,
Whose smile and frown, like to Achilles' spear,
Is able with the change to kill and cure.
Here is a hand to hold a sceptre up,
And with the same to act controlling laws.
Give place: by heaven, thou shalt rule no more
O’er him whom heaven created for thy ruler.

(V.i.5-9; 93-105)

In the pure Marlovian version the heroic exemplar urges his right to rule, as here, without reference to parentage or ancestry; and it is no accident that York does not once mention his hereditary claims in this final act. It is rather the controlling image of the awful “brows” dispensing life and death that figures, as it does in 1 Tamburlaine, the transmutation of virtù into a natural right to rule.⁹

[Mena.] Pale of complexion,
wrought in him with passion,
Thirsting with sovereignty, with love of arms,
His lofty brows in folds do figure death,
And in their smoothness amity and life.

(1 Tamb., II.i.19-22)

Insofar as Shakespeare has ventured to reproduce the effect of Marlowe's verse here, he comes out a clear second best. The aptness of the formulas, in the later play, lies rather in the implied suggestion that York himself does not measure up to the original ideal. A phrase such as “who’d not buy thee dear,” which recalls the commercial imagery of York's first soliloquy, reminds us that his sense of his own worth is limited by his preoccupation with material rewards, and that he cannot imagine what the real cost of his actions will be. The charge that Henry “dar’st not, no, nor canst not rule a traitor,” with its heavy unconscious irony, only serves to focus the confusions that arise when what is almost entirely a literary conception of sovereignty is invoked within an established political system. Such confusions can be clarified but they can hardly be resolved here: so long as traitors even less admirable than York are free to wreak havoc on Henry's kingdom, he is free to argue that his apparent lawlessness amounts to a superior definition of nobility.

York's ambivalent status as both remedy and cause of the decay in Henry's court is epitomized by the connection between his lofty aspirations and the peasants' revolt engineered during his absence in act four. While he is in Ireland, Jack Cade and his followers also weigh the claims of noblesse de robe and noblesse d’épée, and reach similar conclusions:

Bev. O miserable age! Virtue
is not regarded in handicraftsmen.
Hol. The nobility think scorn to
go in leather aprons.
Bev. Nay, more; the King's Council
are no good workmen.
Hol. True; and yet it is said, “Labour
in thy vocation”: which is as much to say as, “Let the magistrates
be labouring men”; and therefore should we be magistrates.
Bev. Thou hast hit it; for there’s
no better sign of a brave mind than a hard hand.

(IV.ii.10-20)

The relevance of this burlesque to the main plot is assured by its place within York's own strategy. York is Jack Cade's silent partner, and he begins his own campaign only after Cade's revolt is under way. Cade himself ensures that the connection is not forgotten by imitating his patron's claims to royal ancestry (IV.ii.37-50), his intention to purge Henry's court of “false caterpillars” (IV.iv.36; see also IV.ii.61-67; IV.vii.28-30), his detestation of all things French (IV.ii.159-165), his admiring recollection of Henry V (IV.ii.149-152), his distaste for “bookish rule” (IV.ii.81-104), his insistence on martial eminence as requisite for aristocratic station (IV.vii.76), and his easy association of martial bravery and material prosperity (IV.ii.61-72). These details are set, moreover, within a continuous parody of the conventional formulas for heroic self-assertion. As in the comedy of 1 Henry VI, the favorite joke consists in puncturing the would-be hero's set speeches by irreverent asides that specify social realities:

Cade. My father was a Mortimer,—
But. [Aside.] He was an honest man, and a good bricklayer.
Cade. My mother a Plantagenet,—
But. [Aside.] I knew her well; she was a midwife.
Cade. My wife descended of the Lacies,—
But. [Aside.] She was, indeed, a pedlar's daughter, and sold many laces.

(IV.ii.37-44)

by outlandish attempts at magnificence:

[Cade.] Wither, garden; and
be henceforth a burying-place to all that do dwell in this house, because
the unconquer’d soul of Cade is fled.

(IV.x.62-64)

and by reductive detail:

Cade. Iden, farewell; and
be proud of thy victory. Tell Kent from me, she hath lost her best man, and
exhort all the world to be cowards …

(IV.x.71-73)

The vitality of these scenes, as with any exercise in mock-heroic, stems from their bringing widely disparate elements into a momentary comic equilibrium; and it is to Shakespeare's purpose that two of those elements—Richard Plantagenet, lineal heir to the House of York, and Jack Cade, clotheir of Kent—are set in the most improbable proximity to one another. When Stafford's brother exclaims “Jack Cade, the Duke of York hath taught you this” (IV.ii.147), one may take his words in the broadest sense. York sets Cade an example, or, in theatrical terms, teaches him a part; and Cade plays it to the hilt, not wisely but too well. Measuring Cade's performance in act four against his patron's in act five, one learns to judge York's ideals by their consequences within the social order. The point is not simply that the audience now sees the meaning of the accusation that York is “treasonable”; it has also been made clear that in a body politic where the specialty of rule is constantly violated, York's claims to sovereignty assume a special validity. When he exclaims

King did I call thee? No, thou art not king;
Nor fit to govern and rule multitudes,
Which dar’st not, no, nor canst not rule a traitor.

(V.i.93-95)

he stands exposed as both the cause and the remedy of the condition he describes. If the paradox is not a facile one, that is in part because it is rooted in the whole series of ironic parallels and contrasts between York and Cade: York is disruptive and ambitious—but by Cade's standards he is not anarchic; his hereditary claim to the throne is so distant as to make his motives suspect, but it is hardly an outright fraud; he acquiesces in the murder of Humphrey and demands the imprisonment of Margaret's new favorite, Somerset, but he does not advocate the wholesale execution of “scholars, lawyers, courtiers, gentlemen,” and other “false caterpillars” (IV.iv.35-36). In effect he epitomizes the ambiguous place of heroic virtue in a court that is weak and corrupt, has forfeited its claims to authority, but still believes in order.

Shakespeare's success with Jack Cade, Suffolk, and York indicates that he continued to rely on the popular historical drama for his significant character roles. If York represents another imitation of Tamburlaine, his protégé descends from “such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,” the would-be soldiers of the subplot such as Hempstring and Halterstick in Horestes, or Strumbo and Trompart in Locrine. The parting of Margaret and Suffolk quickly develops its own special idiom, but it is controlled by the conventional formulas of curse, lament, and complaint to fortune appropriate to a Mirror-like tragedy of thwarted ambition. All of these rhetorical materials are, of course, refashioned to suit Shakespeare's picture of Henry's court; but they were nevertheless ready at hand to illustrate why the fragmentation of that court was a more complicated event than the ethical categories of the opening scenes would suggest. Such a tradition can also be limiting; in this case it was perhaps less helpful with Gloucester than with the other principals. He stands for political rectitude, but he cannot compete imaginatively with Suffolk and York. When he next appears, it will be as a prophet, John of Gaunt, who stands outside the arena of political life.

In the last play of the trilogy, the heroic example shifts violently towards the anarchic. Two of its principal spokesmen, Young Clifford and York's son Richard, are in fact already audible by the close of 2 Henry VI. Here is Young Clifford speaking over the body of his father:

Henceforth I will not have to do with pity:
Meet I an infant of the house of York,
Into as many gobbets will I cut it
As wild Medea young Absyrtus did:
In cruelty will I seek out my fame.

(V.ii.56-60)

Henceforth the emphasis will fall upon the destructiveness of uncontrolled heroic wrath, and Seneca will join Marlowe as a presiding inspiration.

3 HENRY VI

Civil war was not a popular theme in the Elizabethan playhouse. Despite the timeliness of the subject and the playwrights' eagerness to advertise their moral utility, the conjunction of a God-ordained English magistrate, a treasonable usurper, and a populace in arms carried political overtones that were altogether too uncomfortable for the popular companies to manage. The legal difficulties of the Lord Chamberlain's Men over the despotism scenes in Richard II are too well known to rehearse here; and Queen Elizabeth's celebrated remark on that occasion can be taken as a firm royal endorsement to the hundred and sixty-odd “Documents of Control” reprinted by E. K. Chambers.¹⁰ Small wonder that most playwrights elected to circumvent by as wide a margin as possible the nightmares of deposition and murder that comprised so much of English history in the fifteenth century. Entries in the Annals of English Drama for the years 1580-1590 show about fifteen histories set in classical times or exotic locales; of these, twelve depict wars of conquest, two deal with civil wars, but in a setting (Republican Rome) where no sanctity was attached to hereditary succession, and one, The Battle of Alcazar, can only be described as an uncontrolled melange of Senecan tragedy, Marlovian ambition, and warmed-over moral commonplaces. Along with these titles there are two English histories, The Famous Victories of Henry V and Edward III, which treat wars of conquest, and one two-part play of uncertain date, The Troublesome Reign of King John, which does not treat a domestic rebellion.¹¹

This rough tabulation will serve to recall that Shakespeare's decision to dramatize the latter part of Henry's reign, a decision which he probably reached sometime in or before 1590, must have led him to take a fresh look at the theater of the 1580's. Any recension of the events that followed the battle of St. Albans would presumably have had to include the outright murder not only of King Henry VI, but also of his son Prince Edward, the “legitimate” pretender York, and his youngest son, the Earl of Rutland. Such materials plainly demanded a less equivocal attitude towards heroic violence than the playwright had hitherto displayed: for it would have been utterly unthinkable to endow the “agents” that stood behind these legendary atrocities with orthodox humanistic ideals. In 1 Henry VI Shakespeare had contrasted a civilized and purified picture of martial fortitude to its base counterpart, the fake unnatural valor of Joan La Pucelle. 2 Henry VI takes a more ambivalent view of the aspiring mind; but in so far as York's ambitions are supported by his royal ancestry and martial pre-eminence, and by the manifest weaknesses of Henry's court, his role can still be formulated in terms of humanistic values common to the popular drama and Elizabethan politics.¹² Moreover, once civil war erupts on the battlefield itself, Shakespeare is careful to scale down the proportions of York's aggression. His climactic encounter is not with the king, but with the king's champion Clifford, and both of these parties respectfully place their dispute within the decorum of a chivalric trial by combat:

Clif. What seest thou in me,
York? Why dost thou pause?
York. With thy brave bearing should
I be in love,
But that thou art so fast mine enemy.
Clif. Nor should thy prowess want
praise and esteem,
But that ’tis shown ignobly and in treason.
York. So let it help me now against
thy sword
As I in justice and true right express it.
Clif. My soul and body on the action
both!
York. A dreadful lay! Address thee
instantly.
Clif. La fin couronne les oeuvres.
                    [They fight, and Clifford
falls and dies.]
York. Thus war hath given thee peace,
for thou art still.
Peace with his soul, heaven, if it be thy will!

(2 Henry VI, V.ii.19-30)

The very different image of heroic character that is to predominate in 3 Henry VI is already apparent in the first few lines of the play, which, like the second scene of Macbeth, probe the uncertain boundaries that divide acts of war from crimes of blood. York's stirring account of his army's victory over Clifford, Stafford, and the “great Lord of Northumberland, / Whose war-like ears could never brook retreat” (I.i.4-5) finds its gruesome sequel in the reports of his assembled family. Edward announces that “Lord Stafford's father, Duke of Buckingham, / Is either slain or wounded dangerous” and invites his father to “behold his blood” (10-11; 13). His brother Falconbridge adds to this “the Earl of Wiltshire's blood” (14). Richard rounds off the demonstration by throwing down the Duke of Somerset's head, and concluding “Thus do I hope to shake King Henry's head” (20). Such relish of violence and bloodshed places York's struggle to attain his “right” in rather a new perspective. His wish to “raise aloft the milk-white rose” (2 Henry VI, I.ii.255) now appears as an unrelenting compulsion to slaughter all the House of Lancaster. Hence, one is not surprised to discover later in this scene that the Lancastrians themselves now act from motives of revenge rather than the feudal loyalties displayed in the last act of 2 Henry VI. There is to be no more talk of “praise and esteem,” or of “justice and true right.” When Young Clifford meets York, and is himself challenged to personal combat, Northumberland advises him that “It is war's prize to take all vantages; / And ten to one is no impeach of valor” (I.iv.59-60). Not surprisingly, the play's chief oratorical forms are the vituperatio and the lament. Within these set speech types the formulaic virtues of a noble ancestry, strength and beauty, courage and wisdom are continually “reversed,” in keeping with the regular procedures of rhetorical invective, into their opposites: congenital viciousness, deformity and ugliness, brutality and cunning.

If the play as a whole is to be seen as anything more than a nihilistic bloodbath of tragedy and revenge, it is necessary to keep in mind the vision of aristocratic ideals and public order that makes the implicit contrast to these “reversals.” For the transition from 2 Henry VI to 3 Henry VI marks the dramatist's continuing discovery of an historical process that followed naturally from the extension of heroic ideals into Tudor politics. An analysis of aristocratic corruption portends the rise of a new “prince,” one who still identifies himself with the traditional values of hereditary nobility, strength, and courage, although he presses his claims with an unexampled show of ruthlessness and cunning. He offers the hope of a return to a nobler age; but the very act of violence that brings about his accession foreshadows the utter dissolution of all aristocratic values and social obligations until, finally, the torrent of revenge and civil war gives rise to a new Machiavel, and a last parody of heroic virtù. In Richard II and Julius Caesar the entire conception receives its mature expression. There the workings of retribution and expiation finally permit one to infer some principle of order beyond the mere anarchy of civil war. But the characters of 3 Henry VI inhabit a less hopeful world. Except for the momentary flicker of King Henry's prophecy over young Harry Richmond, there is only the ceaseless deterioration of aristocratic idealism into uncontrolled violence and brutality. Although its end cannot be foreseen, its source can be discovered in that original encounter between York and Old Clifford.

When Warwick, early in the first scene, remarks to Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Young Clifford, “You forget / That we are those which chas’d you from the field / And slew your fathers” (I.i.89-91), it is clear from the preceding dialogue that he merely intends to remind them that they are no longer in any position to enforce Henry's title to the crown. Their reply, however, puts a radically different construction on his allusion:

Nor. Yes, Warwick, I remember
it to my grief;
And, by his soul, thou and thy house shall rue it.
West. Plantagenet, of thee and these
thy sons,
Thy kinsmen and thy friends, I’ll have more lives
Than drops of blood were in my father's veins.
Clif. Urge it no more; lest that,
instead of words,
I send thee, Warwick, such a messenger
As shall revenge his death before I stir.

(I.i.93-100)

With these words, the battle of St. Albans is transformed, ex post facto, from the open, chivalric test enacted by York and Old Clifford into a personal tragedy involving the violation of family pieties. Indeed, the political origins of this conflict—the deposition and murder of Richard II, the weakness of the Lancastrian title, the attainder of York's father for treason—are scarcely mentioned after the brief debate in the opening scene that is defiantly sidetracked by the three aggrieved sons. Even the gentle king passes quickly over the public allegiance that is properly due to him, and seeks to arouse more visceral sentiments:

Earl of Northumberland, he slew thy father,
And thine, Lord Clifford; and you both have vow’d revenge
On him, his sons, his favourites, and his friends.

(I.i.54-56)

When Henry does allow himself to be persuaded, for moral as well as practical reasons, to reach a compromise, he is at once deserted not only by his followers, but also by his queen, who seeks nothing less than “utter ruin of the House of York” (I.i.261). The subsequent murder of York at the hands of Clifford and Margaret duly ensures that his three sons also will act in a spirit of filial revenge. The aggrieved children, like Pyrrhus in Seneca's Troades and in Ovid,¹³ find that the death of their heroic fathers demands to be remembered as a crime of violence; and in keeping with the time-honored logic of revenge, their filial passions enjoin them to seek retribution in kind. The premise at work here is succinctly formulated by Young Clifford at the close of 2 Henry VI: “York not our old men spares, / No more will I their babes” (V.ii.51-52); similarly, to pursue the classical instance, the son of Achilles determines to become the murderer of Astyanax.

The playwright's mastery of these unfamiliar materials is apparent from the consistency with which he places the breakdown of personal ideals in their apposite historical contexts. If 3 Henry VI does not degenerate into a pseudopolitical revenge tragedy like The Battle of Alcazar, it is because all of its important characters have, in effect, a double role. Each is conceived both as a member of an aggrieved family and as a participant in a complex political struggle. York is a legitimate claimant to the throne, but he is also the father of young Rutland; Clifford is champion of the royalist cause but also, like Northumberland, Oxford (see III.iii.101-107), and Westmoreland, he is son to a slain father; Warwick is a “Proud setter up and puller down of kings” (III.iii.157), but he is also son to the “stabb’d” Old Salisbury (II.vi.30) and brother to younger Salisbury,¹⁴ who dies in battle crying “Warwick, revenge! Brother, revenge my death!” (II.iii.19); Margaret is the Yorkist queen, but she is also mother of the disinherited Prince Henry, and the outraged wife of his “unnatural” father King Henry (I.i.225); finally, the three sons of York achieve sovereignty and impose order at the end, but the deeds by which they acquire and maintain the crown are those of avenging sons and unnatural brothers. As in 2 Henry VI, only on a universal scale, the public status and obligations of these characters are measured against the increasingly dubious claims of their personal ideals. Familial honor, hitherto a counterweight to uncontrolled ambition and reckless personal ideals, now becomes the source of new atrocities. The sundering of honor and politics is nowhere more apparent than in this play, where every attempt to invoke a political compromise is frustrated by the demand for personal revenge, until one finally arrives at the hollow pretense of “country's peace and brothers' loves” (V.vii.36) that concludes the action even as it foreshadows the frauds and fratricides of Richard III.

It is the repentant “Son that hath kill’d his father” (II.v.54 S.D.) and “Father that hath kill’d his son” (II.v.78 S.D.) who epitomize the chaos that results when personal revenges are projected into the arena of history. Here the public role of each figure (the Son was “press’d forth” by the king, the Father fights on the Yorkist side) fades into utter insignificance before the magnitude of the family tragedy. And, at the same time, the futility of seeking retribution for the “crimes” of war is implicit in the very situation: these bereaved mothers will “ne’er be satisfied” (II.v.106). For the participants, deeds of violence committed in battle are finally anonymous—indeed, they are the more tragic for being so. Both parties “knew not what they did.” The ultimate result of such “Erroneous, mutinous, and unnatural” quarrels (90) is not the satisfaction of accomplished revenge, but the discovery of utter bereavement. “I’ll bear thee hence,” says the lamenting Son, “where I may weep my fill” (113); and the Father adds,

                                                             … let them fight that will,
For I have murder’d where I should not kill.

(121-122)

The tragic perception of the Son and Father depends, of course, upon the unique irony of their situation. Had father met father, the episode might have become a simple restatement of the main plot, in which the sons find their revenges by destroying one another. Hence, the spirit of lucidity in which they can acknowledge that a father and a son have been “murder’d” (not simply “kill’d”), and still forswear war for lamentation, necessarily is unavailable to the principal antagonists in this conflict. For Clifford and Margaret, Richard and his brothers, a public act of violence against any member of the family can only be construed as a personal crime, to be revenged by what Othello would call an “honorable murder.” Richard speaks for all of them when he urges his brothers to forgo the “passion” of lament for the consolatio of revenge (II.i.79-88).

To arrive at a more detailed estimate of the play's politics, one must again turn to its dramatic format and rhetorical designs. As an historical revenge play, 3 Henry VI finds its operative conceptions of human character in the set topics of rhetorical invective. York's great vituperatio of Margaret (I.iv.111-168), the Lancastrian queen who has learned to play the Amazon, enumerates the significant “topics” of revenge drama by reversing all the set commonplaces of demonstrative oratory. The despised “She-wolf of France” whose father is “not so wealthy as an English yeoman” (I.iv.111, 123), has exchanged her feminine bona animi, modesty and “government” (132), for the impudent ferocity of an “Amazonian trull” (114). Her grotesque display of “courage” can only be understood as an inexplicable deviation from nature, a relinquishment of human identity for the unchanging “vizard” (116) of the actor.

’Tis beauty that doth oft make women proud;
But God he knows thy share thereof is small.
’Tis virtue that does make them most admir’d;
The contrary doth make thee wonder’d at.
’Tis government that makes them seem divine;
The want thereof makes thee abominable.
Thou art as opposite to every good
As the Antipodes are unto us,
Or as the south to the Septentrion.

(128-136)

The descriptive figures amplify this reversal of the civilized into the barbarous through stock epithets like the “outdoing” comparison to “tigers of Hyrcania” (155), and the celebrated “tiger's heart wrapp’d in a woman's hide” (137). Elsewhere in the play, these formulas for an unnatural revenge are reproduced in a wide variety of situations, usually in tiny pieces of invective interspersed throughout the dialogue, and occasionally in longer set speeches, but almost always with reference to Clifford or Richard. Local instances would include epithets like “cruel child-killer,” “crook-back,” and “foul misshapen stigmatic” (II.ii.112, 96, 136), as well as more extended figures such as Rutland's comparison of Clifford to a “pent-up lion” (I.iii.12-15) or Henry's picture of Richard as an “indigest, deformed lump” (V.vi.51), and lengthy pieces of invective such as Margaret's portrayal of Richard and his brothers as “bloody cannibals,” “butchers,” and “deathsmen” (V.v.59, 61, 65). All these examples (and more could be cited) point back to the elementary definitions of humanity invoked in York's address to Margaret. Together they present a composite image of the revenging son who determines to reproduce the original “crime” by destroying still another family: the playwright has come full circle from the idealistic wish of Old York and Young Talbot simply to “die in pride.” His leading characters have become, in effect, the base, unnatural monsters that the Herculean hero originally set out to destroy.

The conception is not entirely original with 3 Henry VI. The overarching transition from lofty epic deeds to downright savagery and murder is adumbrated in the Induction scene of The Spanish Tragedy, where the fallen courtier Don Andrea is transported away from the field of battle, past the Elysian abode of “wounded Hector” and “Achilles' Myrmidons,” via Hades to the earthly theater of Revenge.¹⁵ And the same contrast is treated more extensively, if less coherently, in Peele's Battle of Alcazar. Within this broad framework Clifford and Queen Margaret would resemble the paragons of Senecan cruelty, Atreus and Medea, each of whom satisfies a passion for revenge by tormenting an afflicted father with the death of his only child. The Senecan analogy is made explicit when Clifford vows to emulate “wild Medea” at the close of 2 Henry VI (V.ii.59). Other allusions, of a fairly specific nature, can occasionally be heard as well. The napkin dipped in Rutland's blood, which Margaret uses to torment York in Liv, was perhaps inspired by The Spanish Tragedy, while several lines in that scene suggest the influence of Kyd's Soliman and Perseda.¹⁶ Like all these plays, 3 Henry VI uses the materials of Senecan revenge tragedy to create an ambience in which the heroic pursuit of honor is released from the pieties that ordinarily regulate even bloodshed and violence. In so far as the play that results is one where dukes, princes, and kings are slaughtered without regard to their high political status, it is apparent that the logic of the revenge play is being used as a kind of general metaphor for civil war, and the individual miscreants are, accordingly, judged with far greater severity in this play than in the more psychological dramas of Seneca and Kyd.

The revenge-play format, however, is only a part of the total design of 3 Henry VI, which, like The Jew of Malta, moves through its isolated revenges to wholesale aggressions on the very fabric of society. Emerging from an environment in which the lex talionis enjoins men to violate all moral and political obligations, the youngest son of York determines to disregard the very fraternal ties that hold together his own house. His decision to act as “myself alone” is paralleled partly by Edward's self-regarding exercise of his royal prerogatives and partly by Clarence's temporary abjuration of his two brothers. But it was inevitable, given the Tudor myth about Richard, that he should exemplify the final declension from revenger to Machiavel. The two types were commonly associated by such moralists as Gentillet, who portrays the legendary Italian “delectation, pleasure, and contentment” in revenge that is exacted “after some strange and barbarous fashion.”¹⁷ For a dramatist writing in 1590, the Machiavel and revenger of the popular stage would already have intersected in The Jew of Malta. So far as one can judge from the corrupt text in which that play survives, Marlowe's hero represents a transmutation of Kyd's impassioned revengers along lines that suggest, in some respects, Shakespeare's subsequent treatment of Richard III.¹⁸ For both Barabas and Richard are, at bottom, social and moral outcasts whose malice towards the individuals who have injured them evolves into an anarchic revolt against all those who are of “better person” than themselves. The crucial point of resemblance is evident in Barabas' soliloquy after his brethren have left him to meditate upon his afflictions.

[2nd Jew.] Farewell, Barabas.
                                        Exeunt.
Bar. Ay, fare you well,
See the simplicity of these base slaves,
Who—for the villains have no wit themselves—
Think me to be a senseless lump of clay
That will with every water wash to dirt.
No, Barabas is born to better chance
And framed of finer mold than common men
That measure nought but by the present time.
A reaching thought will search his deepest wits
And cast with cunning for the time to come.

(Jew, I.ii.214-223)

The Shakespearian sequel to this comes in the third act of 3 Henry VI, as Richard's brothers bid him farewell:

[King Ed.] Lords, use her
honourably.
                    Exeunt all but Richard.
Rich. Ay, Edward will use women honourably.
Would he were wasted, marrow, bones, and all. …

(III.ii.123-125)

For the next seventy lines this “valiant crook-back prodigy” (I.iv.75) unfolds his elaborate meditation on the ambitions of nature's outcast. Like Barabas, he owes his aggressiveness in part to an inbred “deformity” that excludes him from any conventional place in human society, coupled with his unique talents for succeeding on his own terms. For Marlowe's hero, this role proves something of a dead end. After completing his devilish revenges on Ferneze's son Lodowick, Barabas simply continues to devise schemes to outwit and exploit his Christian antagonists. Almost apologetically, Barabas soliloquizes, “I must confess we come not to be kings” (I.i.127), as if he were explaining why his Machiavellian talents must be confined to the limited possibilities offered by the corrupt citizenry of Malta. Richard, however, emerges from a world of heroic ambition, and he can see beyond the possibilities of ceaseless revenge to the “golden time” (III.ii.127) of personal sovereignty, when the “misshap’d trunk that bears this head” will “Be round impaled with a glorious crown” (III.ii.170-171). Accordingly, his soliloquy concludes with a final allusion to Marlowe's hyperbole, refashioned to suit the worthy examples set for himself by this heroic Machiavel:

I’ll drown more sailors than the Mermaid shall;
I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut! were it further off, I’ll pluck it down.

(III.ii.186-195)

The rhetorical frame is still that of Tamburlaine. Richard will “outdo” the beauty of the Mermaid, the eloquence of Nestor, the prudence of Ulysses, and the deadly might of the basilisk. If the joke is obvious enough, it should also be clear that Shakespeare's mock-heroics have come of age. This is neither a country girl dabbling in witchcraft and sham heroics nor a clothier of Kent leading a peasants' revolt. Richard speaks as a Renaissance prince, and he chooses his examples with a due sense of decorum: Proteus was a god of epic tradition; Nestor, Ulysses, and Sinon decided the most important battle of legendary history; and Machiavelli had undertaken to explain the revolutions of fortune, in antiquity and in the present, through a dispassionate analysis of power politics. Richard's aspiration to outdo the celebrated Greeks and their modern apologist gives a final, ironic turn of the screw to the humanistic pursuit of fame and honor. Perhaps the emulation of Hector and Hercules, Aeneas and Achilles, which has by now made anarchy out of the social and political order, was ill conceived from the start. For if one judges by the criterion of practical efficacy, such fame as these worthies achieved may amount to no more than a mere escutcheon, a dubious memorial to their grinning honor. Hence Richard can turn the very formulas of rhetorical invective to his own advantage, arguing that it is precisely those qualities which make a man despicable in the world of copybook humanism that best qualify him for an earthly crown. Beneath the parody, there are only two features of Marlowe's original conception that remain intact: the drive towards absolute preeminence, and the ability to kill without remorse.

Even Sir Walter Raleigh, whose History of the World (1612) is a monument to the enduring hold of providential configurations on the Elizabethan imagination, would, one supposes, have had difficulty discerning the hand of the Almighty in this terrifying exposure of secular values. 3 Henry VI pictures human history as the visible effect of uncontrolled revenge and cynical Machiavellian ambition, a final anarchic distortion of heroic ideals. And alongside that picture, as if in some final effort to counter the moral bankruptcy of these “honorable murders” by invoking Elizabethan convictions about the sacramental nature of kingship and the role of Providence in human affairs, Shakespeare intermittently draws our attention to the choric figure of the “gentle king.” I have left Henry to the end, because he poses a melancholy counterstatement to the themes I have been pursuing. His character is a projection of orthodox pieties about politics and history as they appear when divorced from any power to put them into effect. And he discovers, beneath the erratic reversals of 3 Henry VI, an invitation to meditate on the fragility of his ideals before the repeated incursions of “sour Adversity” (III.i.24). When the exiled king re-enters “disguised with a prayer book” (III.i.12 S.D.) after the Battle of Towton, it is only to learn that the sacred oath of allegiance rendered unto a king is without meaning for the “simple men” (82) who take it. Later, before the battle of Coventry, Henry is further instructed in the relation between moral virtue and political power:

Exe. The doubt is that he
will seduce the rest.
K. Hen. That’s not my fear;
my meed hath got me fame:
I have not stopp’d mine ears to their demands,
Nor posted off their suits with slow delays;
My pity hath been balm to heal their wounds,
My mildness hath allay’d their swelling griefs,
My mercy dried their water-flowing tears;
I have not been desirous of their wealth,
Nor much oppress’d them with great subsidies,
Nor forward of revenge, though they much err’d.
Then why should they love Edward more than me?
No, Exeter, these graces challenge grace;
And, when the lion fawns upon the lamb,
The lamb will never cease to follow him.
                    Shout within, “A York!
A York!”

(IV.viii.37-50)

In the face of these grim realities Henry is intermittently drawn towards a retreat from the history that circumscribes his existence. The tragedy of the nameless Father and Son is counterpointed by his picture of a timeless pastoral idyll in which he would “be no better than a homely swain” (II.v.22). Later he resolves that he will “conquer Fortune's spite / By living low where Fortune cannot hurt me” and urges the Protectorship on Warwick, who is “fortunate” in all his deeds (IV.vi.19-20, 25). As even Warwick falls before the rising Yorkists, Henry can only retreat further from his own history, first into “patience,” finally into the receding vistas of prophecy. In a gracious gesture towards the Tudor myth, Shakespeare has him bless young Henry Richmond (IV.vi.67-76). But Henry's last glimpse into the future takes place under less promising auspices:

[Hen.] And if the rest be
true which I have heard,
Thou cam’st—
Rich. I’ll hear no more: die,
prophet, in thy speech.
                                        Stabs him.
For this, amongst the rest, was I ordain’d.

(V.vi.55-58)

This final, symbolic encounter surely intimates that Henry's benign vision of Richmond's “peaceful majesty” must be deferred to a world radically different from that of Henry VI.

Notes

1. The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. Edmond Malone (London, 1970), VI, 383 (“A. Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI”)—hereafter cited as “Malone.” Among the criticism on 1 Henry VI, I have also made use of David Bevington's introduction to the text edited by himself for the Pelican Shakespeare (Baltimore, 1966). Lawrence Ryan's edition for the Signet Shakespeare (New York, 1967) appeared after this study was well underway, but I was pleased to find that our interpretations of 1 Henry VI are alike on many points.

2. Baltimore, 1940; Durham, N.C., 1960. Also see Curtis Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton, 1960).

3. The association of the Vice, glamorous “new customs,” and Roman Catholic ritual and ornament is a common theme in moral interludes through the 1550's and 1560's; among extant texts it occurs as late as Ulpian Fulwell's Like Will to Like (1568), which was reissued in 1587.

4. See Rossiter's persuasive arguments in his introduction to Woodstock, pp. 47-72. There are scenes at court in The Famous Victories of Henry V and A Looking Glass for London and England, but these are not on the scale of those in 2 Henry VI.

5. A. B. Grosart, ed., The Works of Fulke Greville (Blackburn, Lancashire, 1870), IV, 189 (“The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney”).

6. Arthur Sherbo, ed., Johnson on Shakespeare, in the Yale edition of the Works, VIII (1968), 612.

7. See The Crisis of the Aristocracy, especially pp. 21-64, 164-188, 199-272, 385-504.

8. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, ed. Robert Bowers (Gainesville, Fla., 1962), p. 46.

9. Compare 1 Tamburlaine, II.v.60-64, III.ii.71-75.

10. The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), IV, 259-345 (Appendix D).

11. E. A. J. Honigman would move the date of Shakespeare's King John back to 1590-91. See the introduction to his edition of King John (London, 1954), pp. xliii-lix.

12. Throughout the sixteenth century, as Stone makes clear, “The object of rebellion was to free the king from evil advisers” (p. 267), not “usurpation” per se. York observes this convention when he demands the removal of Somerset; then he violates it in the assertion of his “right” to the crown.

13. Shakespeare's familiarity with the lament of Hecuba in book XIII of the Metamorphoses is well known. See Baldwin, Small Latine, II, 193-194. It is less certain that he knew the Troades, but see John W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (London, 1893), p. 79, and K. Koeppel, “Shakespeares Richard III und Senecas Troades,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, XLVII (1911), 188-190.

14. Cairncross' note at II.iii.15 explains that this anonymous “brother” must be Young Salisbury.

15. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), I.i.48-49.

16. See Cairncross' introduction, pp. xvi-xvii, and his notes at I.iv.84, 152; and The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards, II.v. 51-52 and note.

17. A Discourse upon the Meanes of Wel Governing, trans. Simon Patericke (London, 1602), STC 11743, sig. Q5^r.

18. The title page of the Quarto states that The True Tragedy “was sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembroke his servants.” If, as Chambers suggests (William Shakespeare [Oxford, 1930], I, 49-50), Pembroke's company was an offshoot of an “amalgamation” of Strange's Men and the Admiral's Men, Shakespeare would probably have had a working acquaintance with the mutations of revenge tragedy discussed below in connection with 3 Henry VI: The Spanish Tragedy and The Jew of Malta were both in Strange's repertory by 1592, at the latest. If he indeed acted in those plays, and others which are “recalled” in Henry VI, there would appear to be a fairly obvious explanation for the profusion of verbal parallels that has prompted so much speculation about the authorship of the trilogy. Here, as elsewhere, hard evidence is lacking.