SOURCE: “The Henry VI Plays: In Pursuit of the Ground,” in Susquehanna University Studies, Vol. 10, 1978, pp. 197-209.

[In the essay below, Blanpied considers Shakespeare's dramatization of history in Henry VI, perceiving in the work's three parts a series of disintegrations that shape each subsequent play and ultimately culminate in the parodic figure of Richard.]

We see the ground whereon these woes do lie,
But the true ground of all these piteous woes
We cannot without circumstance descry.

Romeo and Juliet (V. 3. 180-2)

“In the beginning,” D. H. Lawrence begins a cosmogony myth, then pauses: “—there never was any beginning, but let it pass. We’ve got to make a start somehow.”¹ Where we have got to start from is the ground, which we invent, or posit, and hope to make good on, as Shakespearean characters say, “in th’event.” Whether acknowledged or not, every reading of a text assumes a ground in one or another myth of composition. I want to make mine explicit from the start.

I think of Prospero shaking Miranda awake to go “visit Caliban, my slave, who never / Yields us kind answer,” then conjuring him forth from his hard rock and bidding him “Speak!” by a variety of abusive names: slave, tortoise, hag-seed, earth. Caliban enters, grumbling no kind answers indeed, and proceeds to prove himself still the “abhorred slave,” vile and unnurturable, who had exiled himself from Prospero's kindness by trying to rape Miranda, and so even now must be “prevented.” Thus, brought forth as the ground against which the circle of human kindredness can be closed, Caliban is dismissed to his hard rock outside Prospero's cell. Now Miranda is ready for her encounter with Ferdinand, to recognize his meaning as her future, her kind.

Prospero doesn’t invent Caliban, but he invents the relationship. Caliban is the necessary ground for Ariel's performances, which is to say for Prospero's wonderful and terrible fabrications. But in the end, once all his other shows are played out, this base fabrication must also be dissolved and acknowledged “mine.” For the language by which Caliban declares himself slave is Prospero's, and there finally are no answers which are not kind. Endowed with speech, Caliban has been forever transposed from brutishness—has been, as it were, dramatiized as ground. And once the ground has been incorporated in the drama, the drama cannot rest upon it. In the end, dismissing Caliban to “my cell,” Prospero leaves to us the vexing question as to what, if even Caliban is “mine,” could be not-mine, or other.

Clearly something must be. The fabricator could not possibly proceed without distinguishing what is his art from what is not. But in the act of discrimination he also makes what “is not,” and that act, separating form from formlessness, lays a kind of claim on him. Of course he may not acknowledge it; but Prospero, rather than denying formlessness outright, maintains it just outside, both as vexing threat to the “vanity of mine art,” and as a source of prodigious energy. In itself the ground remains inert; dramatized, it exerts a powerful disintegrative force, and will “people … This isle with Calibans” if not continuously prevented.

So much for my composition myth, my own grounds for proceeding with this essay, although I have no hopes of performing wonders. In fact I am keenly aware that like other critics I will be deploying at best a half-truth. When it comes to the history plays I know well enough that they are many things, and can be usefully approached in many ways. I am not out to dispute others' half-truths but to put forth one that interests me and that I think bears putting. Now, I believe it is clear that Shakespeare was serious about history in two ways. He was serious about the material, the subject, the themes of English history; this has been amply and persuasively demonstrated.² But Shakespeare was also serious about the epistemology of history, about the idea of the “past,” whether it can be recovered and known except as a fabrication of the knower, and whether in drama, in particular, it might somehow be imaged truly, or only as an elegant illusion of the ever-dreaming present. Can the past, like Caliban, be visited, met, and known as sufficient grounds for authentic re-creation, credible fabrications, in the present? This second way of being serious about history is not really separable from the first, but it hasn’t been much dealt with.

Maybe for good reason. Because to pursue it requires me to invoke my composition myth and imagine Shakespeare in an active and evolving relationship with the materials of his own drama. I must picture him working and reworking that material through a unique and uniquely coherent sequence of nine English history plays, in pursuit of that elusive objective, the idea of the past as truly other, not-mine: the authentic ground from which true re-creation might go forward. Of course, not being God, Shakespeare will never find the “real” ground, and his plays will remain merely plays; but since he must make a start somehow, he posits origins. The sequence of plays forms a kind of history, or life-in-time, of its own; it represents a series of heuristic encounters between “history” and “play”—or rather versions of both. In the course of this sequence the dramatist lets his plays “sink” through one false ground after another. One play under-stands the last; the “nature” or ground assumed in one is disclosed by the next as the base fabrication. In this way the idea of the past is repeatedly re-imagined through evermore comprehensive and self-knowing forms of drama.

1 HENRY VI

Left to themselves, things fall apart.

—Murphy's Fifth Law of Perversion

The sinking process can be observed most clearly in the Henry VI sequence, where the theme is disintegration; what makes these plays interesting to me is Shakespeare's willingness to let that material sound out the capacities of his art to deal with it truly. I see Part I as the enabling play, the Caliban of the histories, the necessary ground from which the “future” of the succeeding plays can be launched. I would go so far as to call it the anti-history, not because I suppose Shakespeare conceived it that way (probably quite the contrary) but because, given the imperatives of his pursuit of the ground, such a beginning turns out to have been necessary.

Let me lay down some bedrock of my own. In IV. 7, just after Talbot's death, the English messenger, Sir William Lucy, inquires into the hero's whereabouts by naming, in a speech of twelve lines, all sixteen of his titles. To which Joan de Pucelle retorts:

Here's a silly stately style indeed!
The Turk, that two and fifty kingdoms hath,
Writes not so tedious a style as this.
Him that thou magnifi’st with all these titles,
Stinking and flyblown lies here at our feet.

(72-6)

Recently Edward Berry has argued that, despite modern proclivities, there is really no place here (or throughout the play generally) for “realistic” responses, the scene and the play being too rigidly governed by its “emblematic” mode.³ Joan, he argues, misses the mark in trying to identify Talbot with his corpse, just as the Countess of Auvergne did in seeking to trap the legendary “Talbot” in the mere “writhled shrimp” of a man. The name Talbot, and the ceremonial extensions of that name which Lucy lists, refer to a reality, or “substance,” that

                    were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious lofty pitch
Your roof were not sufficient to contain’t.

(II. 3. 54-6)

It is clear that “Talbot” is too big for the stage as well as for the Countess' room, and represented in both only faute de mieux by a rather wooden figure (or “silly dwarf”) not meant in itself to be very convincing—somewhat like the mighty events the Chorus of Henry V tells us can only be very poorly represented by a few “flat unraised spirits” on this wooden O. The difference is that the Chorus there asks us to make the spirits real in our imaginations, whereas the “emblematic” mode is defiantly non-illusionist. The reality lies elsewhere; the play can only celebrate it. Lucy celebrates Talbot, magically invoking his offstage reality be chanting his names. In a way, Talbot is best represented by his absence.

But I doubt if the play ever dispenses with naturalism absolutely, or that Shakespeare, even in this earliest of plays, confines himself so rigidly to a single set of conventions. If Joan were not at least partly right there would be no play at all, but only ritual re-enactment. In a small way, what Joan's jeer does, it seems to me, is to “force a play”: rather than asserting a claim of “realism,” it detaches Lucy's speech from its anchorage in an extra-dramatic reality. If only for a moment, if only by feeding our furtive desire for a “natural” response, she allows us to hear Lucy's celebration as an effort at celebration, his speech as a “style”: a bare list of titles momentarily referring to … perhaps nothing, and certainly nothing so dramatically present as the corpse itself. Really, though, it is not Talbot but Talbot's celebrant who is trapped here; for a moment the choric Lucy is revealed as a particular character, retorting to Joan in a shrill “could curses kill” mode:

O, were mine eyeballs into bullets turned,
That I in rage might shoot them at your faces!
O that I could but call these dead to life!

(IV. 7. 79-81)

Rather than the celebrant's magical evocation by naming, this is the language of wishful magic that betrays its own impotence, and thus its user.

1 Henry VI presents us with a highly ritualized idea of the past—by which I mean that its images are deployed in what Gombrich calls a “context of action,”⁴ in this case a ceremonial or celebratory context. The play could almost be mistaken for a ritual, a patriotic pageant; it looks as if Thomas Nashe saw it like that.⁵ The broad frieze-like Morality-type characters, the declamatory style, the discrete unshaded scenes, the minimal narrative linkage, all convey a stiff non-naturalistic, non-representational idea: a monumental past, a reality elsewhere, magically evoked on this wooden O by ritual re-enactment of isolated and uniquely significant events from a kind of illo tempore: the first naming of roses, the death of Talbot, the coming of Margaret, and so on. The credibility of the drama lies in the firmness of its anchorage in that world elsewhere, outside: in the ground of the stable, original past.

Shakespeare like Prospero seems to go out of his way to establish this ground. As H. T. Price and, since then, others have made clear,⁶ the effect of primitive stiffness is the result of highly aggressive dramatic decisions: Shakespeare beats and bullies his Hall and Holinshed into these seemingly stony, opaque formations. It is as if he is determined, like Prospero, to make sure of his ground before trusting it as a spring-board into the “future” plays. Seeking re-creation, he must assume origins. But he will also be watching what happens to his “ground” as he subjects it to the pressure of his dramatizing imagination.

What happens to the monumental past as it is dramatized is articulated perfectly in the beginning of the next play. Gloucester is lamenting Henry's marriage to Margaret, but the note of bitter baffled grief is appropriate generally to Part I:

O peers of England, shameful is this league.
Fatal this marriage, cancelling your fame,
Blotting your names from books of memory.
Rasing the characters of your renown,
Defacing monuments of conquered France,
Undoing all as all had never been!

(2H6. I. 1. 96-101)

Timeless characters being unwritten, solid monuments dissolving, the whole heroic past decomposing at this very moment—and Gloucester, its celebrant, unable to do more than evoke it in its passing. As he speaks, the whole past of Part I melts into a kind of dream of the waking present. But in Part I as well, that queasy sense of instability, of dissolution of seemingly timeless forms, mocks and undermines the monumental postures from the start. Survivors helplessly invoke the vanished Henry V. Stability is always in the past, the present is always a waking up to find oneself falling through space. Messengers flood in with news of Talbot's capture, territories lost; the old men vow bloody retaliation, but the monument, “Henry V,” is gone, and all is being “undone” inexorably.

Talbot is the mainstay, not only of English fortunes in France, but of the monumental mode of the play, so if we would find the source of the general decomposition we should look to his undoing. But the fact is, Talbot is undone from the moment of his conception, the moment he is materialized from his sacramental “world elsewhere” and made to “speak” in the drama. What he bespeaks is a myth of timeless stability, an external order in which certain absolutes have been secured, not in history, but in “nature”: the rights of class, rank, and lineage; the sanctity and efficiency of oaths; the name, fame, and ideality of England. But such a myth is conceivable in drama only as the past, and knowable only in its passing; for drama itself is by its nature fluid, temporal, metamorphic, and unstable, and transpires in the present; it is always “already” in motion, consuming its grounds, unwriting its monumental characters. So no cause for dissolution is offered in the play; rather, the play itself is the cause: the generic act of dramatization, the ab-original separation of form from formlessness. Joan indeed misses the mark in calling the rotting corpse “Talbot,” but not because he is secure in a firmer reality, inaccessible to her, but because he is a ghost, a dramatic ghost. He exists in his passing; his function is to achieve apotheosis outside the play, storied in “the lither sky” (IV. 7. 21) and in the tombstone inscriptions Lucy has recited. His function is to be squandered, and the real “fraud of England” (IV. 4. 36) is the play's too-easy posture of moral indignation, its pretense of making Lucy its true spokesman. But I think it’s fair to say that Shakespeare seems more interested in the squandering than in the character himself, for once resolved into his elements of stone and air Talbot is never mentioned again.

To say that Shakespeare is interested in the squandering of Talbot simply means he is interested in the encounter between his play and its materials. In this encounter York acquires a faint but distinctive charisma which serves the same “detaching” function, vis-á-vis the play's monumental postures, as Joan's jeer. Endowed by Mortimer with a separate reality—a secret role in a private plot to reshape the future—York becomes the first character in the histories to have an interior life: a life, that is, separable not only from the public view of him, but from the prevailing rhetorical texture of the play's nearly uniform surface. Others' energies are declamatory; his are, potentially, those of secrecy, indirection, timing, and disguise, precisely the dramatic energies that mock heroic assertion.⁷ He is the double man, for now biding the hapless drift of public events, but meanwhile saying just enough to maintain his credibility as an actor: one who looks at experience as the materials of a drama, separate from himself, hence subject to his manipulation. From this special location near the center of dramatic realities York quickens our interest in the play itself, promising (it seems) to deliver over its secret, real operations. He is Talbot's true opposite, pointing forward from this fast-fading present toward a new “reality elsewhere” in the future: a future made credible, furthermore, because York begins to seem capable of transposing it from its wishful status in his head into the actual design of the forthcoming play.

Like Joan's jeer, the glimpses of York's separate reality give us a locus for those responses which the monumental style requires us to suppress; they bring the operations of the play a little closer to us, so we may see how much distance it “properly” demands for its heroic effects. There are other forms of erosion in the play, some clearly calculated, some probably inadvertent, but the general effect is of detachment from a ritualized “context of action.” Deprived of its presumed extra-dramatic grounding, the play is thrown into crisis, into what Bassanio (in another play and situation) calls a “wild of nothing”: the moment when there is no reality other than the play itself, no real past and no future other than what it can persuasively generate by speaking for itself.

Part I is the sacrificial drama; it plays through the myth of a sacramental reality “out there.” Does Shakespeare, like Gloucester, resent awaking from the dream of a heroic past, knowing the futility of trying to re-create it in the “vanity of mine art”? Such a doubt of art's power certainly sounds throughout the whole career of plays, and most eloquently in The Tempest. But Shakespeare at the beginning of his career must also have embraced with delight the opportunity to let his plays speak for themselves. Liberation from the context of action allows the playwright to address his next play much more directly to the imagination of his audience. And certainly, one of the first things to note about Part II is the far greater freedom, fluidity, and vitality of the dramatic process itself.

2 HENRY VI

Whereas in Part I the past was conceived as existing somewhere “out there,” beyond the drama—in “France”—here the past is sought in the drama, right at home, and conceived as continuous with our experience via the medium of the play itself. The experience of historical disintegration is not separate from the experience of dramatic decomposition, rather the decomposition is incorporated as design. This designed “undoing,” furthermore, derives not from abstract forces outside the play, but from the confluence of human agencies within. Or so it appears at first.

This crucial difference between Parts I and II can be illustrated in the treatment of Henry VI himself. In Part I his role is largely negative, first his youth and later his insipidity amounting to the absence of a cohering center of power after the mysterious death of Henry V. In Part II Henry VI is present from the beginning, yet he characteristically speaks and acts as if he were, or wished he were, absent. In the opening scene his ceremonial praise of Margaret is foolishly inflated, and soon he hastily leaves the stage, as if embarrassed by the vacuity of his own public presence. In other words, what in Part I is a mute structural assumption, underlying the design, in Part II is incorporated into the play's design, so that decomposition is analyzed in terms of character. This is most vividly evident in III. 1, when Henry walks out of the parliament, leaving Gloucester to his “vowèd enemies.”

My lords, what to your wisdoms seemeth best
Do or undo, as if ourself were here.

Even Margaret is astonished:

What, will your highness leave the parliament?
Ay, Margaret. My heart is drowned with grief. …

(III. 1. 195-8)

Up to this point Henry might be dismissed as the merely weak, self-pitying, but essentially innocent figure he appears to be in, say, the “bad quarto” of the play, The Contention. There he simply leaves the scene, as he says he will. But here he cannot resist a lingering portrayal of his impotence in an elaborate and grotesquely inappropriate conceit of the cow helpless to save her butcher-bound calf (210ff). The effect of course is to call our attention to the lengths to which he will go to evade direct action, to the depth of his will to passivity—a will so strong as to suggest tacit complicity in the conspiracy. For surely his performance here signals Margaret that she has leave to dispose of Gloucester, so long as it does not threaten the credibility of his own helplessness. But obviously, to dramatize one's own innocence is to acknowledge, at some level, that it has already been lost. One can only speculate as to the source and meaning of Henry's need for innocence. The point to emphasize here is that Shakespeare has made a weak character psychologically interesting, and through him has incorporated the decompositional processes of drama into the play's design. For Shakespeare makes it clear that Henry's failure to protect his Protector, and hence prevent the tide of violence unloosed by the murder, is not a matter of stars or witchcraft, but of human character.

Against the self-absenting Henry Shakespeare poses a self-inflating York, whose capabilities in Part I are here developed into a powerful shaping force. The sense of a graceful and unforced harmony of historical material and dramatic control is strongly suggested by the elegant structure of the opening scene. The flow of energy from Henry's broad public ceremony toward York's vulcanic monologue is schooled by a progressive narrowing of focus, as a succession of stage-exits by plotting and counterplotting nobles at last discloses York alone, at the center of things, free to flesh his private voice in his private plot. That plot is to play a role in others' intermediate intrigues, until in the end, the playing exhausted and Gloucester removed, York can openly claim Henry's place at the center of political power. What gives York his credibility is partly that he inherits a structure, the flow of disintegrative energy toward the center of dramatic vitality, that he can then appear to be controlling; partly it is the sheer authority of his voice, its mixture of biting self-consciousness and lurid self-inflation, its peculiar physicality, its muffled rage. In other words, York's credibility as a controlling force in the play derives from a dramatic charisma, or presence, that in turn depends upon his own sharp sense of separation from what he construes as his “real” or destined identity.

To this polarity of the pursuer and the pursued we should add Gloucester, the middle man, who through the sheer strength of his personal credibility maintains the communal values that eventually collapse in the contention of opposites. In rough outline this gives us what I would call the play's humanistic design: an attempt to contain the cultural disintegration and understand that theme as a product of fathomable human rivalries, accountable motivations, and an intelligible if fateful distribution of personal attributes.

But though it is an attractive design, I think it clearly fails to encompass a crucial dimension of the play's experience. This dimension is elusive, often written off as “texture” or “color,” and is certainly hard to describe briefly without growing aphoristic and dogmatic. I am thinking of the gathering momentum of violent energy that seems to rise almost autonomously off the body of the play's design: the obsessive self-destructiveness of Gloucester's enemies, York's maddened rage for destruction, Henry's elaborate strategies of disappearance; then the perverse rhetorical excesses of Margaret and Suffolk in Acts III and IV, followed by the explosive semi-comic fury of the Cade riot scenes. Perhaps the quality of the play's “undoing” is captured in the image of a grieving Margaret hugging Suffolk's severed head, while Henry distractedly hears news of Cade's advances (IV. 4). Cade, by the logic of the design, is York's surrogate and front-runner. But when York at last steps forth from behind his screen in Act V, to declare his “real” identity and seize his destiny—“Give place. By heaven, thou shalt rule no more / O’er him whom heaven created for thy ruler”—it is clear that he lays claim to a dramatic authority he no longer has. The play's disintegrative energies have swollen far beyond the “control” imagined in the opening scene and projected through the play's humanistic design.

The moment York ceases his “playing” and goes public he becomes uninteresting; he loses the advantage of his separate reality, and hardens into the mere postures of his bravura role. But by this time what we are seeing is no gratifying contention of opposites (as in Richard II) embracing between them the implications and meaning of a massive cultural breakdown. The contention that climaxes the design gives off none of that large intelligibility. Instead, we become aware that the main characters have dwindled to puppetry, playing out automatic and conventional roles in a little play which itself inhabits a large and ghostly drama only now beginning to suggest itself. The vaunt and swagger of York, Warwick, Somerset, and others reminds me a little of Antonio and Sebastian in The Tempest, plotting murder and unsurpation, while Prospero's large gaze reduces these hard-headed realists to puppets grasping at air. What comprehends the contention in 2 Henry VI, of course, is nothing so clear as Prospero. Rather, it is our own quickened perceptions of the greater drama that agitates but still eludes the lesser. We may say that “history” remains in abstract force, driving and controlling the characters, but still strangely shrouded, undisclosed and unincorporated by the play.

Against the emerging presence of this larger undelivered drama the humanized design of the inner play fades into a wishful dream of artistic control. Shakespeare's genius here is to allow the dream to dissolve rather than seeking ways to enhance its credibility. One can virtually feel that credibility draining toward a future authority as the sharp dramatic cunning of York, the careful weightiness of Gloucester, the absorbing issues of the play, grow strangely and swiftly distant, and now irrelevant. Shakespeare relinquishes the spurious ground of control in the play, allows it to disintegrate too; for no sooner does York make his challenge to Henry than the future is precipitated into a clarified and more naked confrontation among the new generation, Young Clifford with his programmatic passion (V.2. 50-60), Richard with his aphoristic efficiency: “Priests pray for enemies, but princes kill” (V.2. 71). What is sinister about the future here anticipated is not just the promise of new styles of savagery, but the coldness, the willingness of these agents to walk, eyes opened, into roles seemingly laid out for them by a fated future. The “historical” action thus sinks away from us into the remote fixity of chronicled events, unknown characters with no interior life, depicted in tableaus that seem to need no comment. Shakespeare, as if with a sigh, lets it go—relinquishes his artist's role of making chaos humanly intelligible, and follows it into the sodden depths of Part III.

3 HENRY VI

The issue between artists and material has not yet been truly joined. The ground—that idea of the past as other than the artist's wishful fabrication—eludes him still, and bedevils his best efforts to disclose it through the natural processes of drama. So now, in his third attempt to truly imagine the sources of historical disintegration, he foregoes the myth of drama as a “naturally” intelligible form of human experience. In order to see how inchoate experience grows into what looks, retrospectively, fated—that “fixed future” into which the characters at the end of Part II lapse so easily—Shakespeare allows his drama to “sink” through the spurious ground of its own coherence, to fall back into its elements. In Part II coherence among character, speech, scenic structure, and unfolding design was maintained by an implicit faith in the distinctive meanings of experience: Gloucester's murder would reap clear and “natural” consequences. Now it is as if that faith had been withdrawn, the drama allowed to lapse onto the hopelessly passive “structure” of its chronicle sources. What becomes clear is the essentially shapeless character of that material: as if Caliban were allowed to roam at will, no longer visited, summoned, provoked into speech. So “history” in Part III becomes a mute, inert, abandoned landscape.

Of course the “molehill” episode (II. 5)—divided between Henry's pastoral monologue and the stylized “death masque” of the fathers and sons—seems to afford a privileged view of the play from the vantage of an external ground; if Shakespeare thus makes a choral commentary on his chaotic material, how can I claim he has allowed it to sink toward the critical “wild of nothing” where it must contrive to speak for itself? I haven’t space here to do much more than contend that in fact the molehill episode projects the play's helplessness as an extreme form of its passive disintegration: Henry's wishful innocence mirroring (to borrow Ulysses's phrase) the “mere oppugnancy” of the warring sides, the static monologue mirroring the static masque, the glazed immobility of the scene as a whole answered by the equally helpless frenzy of the retreat (125ff). It is a complex scene, and not unmoving, but it conspicuously fails to achieve what it offers, a transfiguring vision, and instead manages to generate only images of its own futility.

The play falls asunder, broadly speaking, into two parts. On one hand we have the “historical” landscape—detritus of endless battles, broken oaths and reconfigured alliances, a confusion of scenes and events repeated from this or the earlier plays, but now carried out as if by a weary, perfunctory, obligation. Though there is great vehemence, it freezes us out. The opening scene gives us the gangster humor of people reduced to heads and blood, not blood as pedigree, that stubborn fiction, but lifeblood: the synecdoche collapsed to the literal: Here are my gracious lords of Wiltshire and Somerset. The bloody napkin and paper crown with which York is later taunted undergo this reduction, too, both simultaneously symbols and naked props, equally significant or insignificant. Chivalric manners are stripped from this brute war to reveal a brute play, with little energy to maintain the pretenses that our credulity or even our interest requires. The greater the fury of activity, the din of threat, defiance, appeal, the more helplessly imitative it all seems; the freedom to break and reknit oaths and loyalties becomes mere puppetry (as the scene of Warwick's French embassy illustrates). Rather than semi-autonomous mediators between us and that “past” they inhabit, the characters have become outcroppings of their context, powerless to know, let alone transfigure it. Detached, we witness with growing coldness the play's passive matter receding in ever-diminishing circles.

That is a rough caricature of half the play. On the other hand we have, of course, Richard, or more precisely the emergence of the “new” Richard, as, with his exultant cry of self-recognition, he bursts fully malformed into life (III.2). How we understand the play may depend on how we understand this emergence. Is it to be explained naturalistically, thematically, or as a revival of Shakespeare's waning interest in his material? In my view the perfunctoriness of the first half of the play is volitional; from its own “thorny woods” the play calls forth a shaping consciousness as acute and radical as the “history” has grown passive, flaccid, shapeless. That is, Richard as shaper is tempted into being, into embodiment in the play.

What he promises is nothing less than the ability to shape “history” to his own liking, in his own image: he promises, that is, what the molehill vision so signally fails to do, to completely transfigure the inert landscape of history. Richard's appearance is such a relief we are not likely, for the moment, to challenge him. Out of silence and distance he steps forward to command a corrupt and exhausted language, and to renew the credibility and vitality of drama, the potency of its emptied conventions of pretense, disguise, indirection. He can promise us this renewal because his claim is so radical: he will “make” his heaven (148, 168) rather than walk into it as York hoped to do. And unlike his father, his appetite for playmaking is unsullied by rationalizations of his motives: the prerogatives of birth, concern for England's welfare, the self-evident necessity of mythic fulfillment, insofar as they color his will at all, are more-or-less efficacious conventions, to be seized upon and used. He claims his destiny not as deserving hero, but as fabricating freak (153ff). Seeming to have created his “new” self, he will also create the future by an act of radical definition:

And this word ‘love’ which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me. I am myself alone.

(V. 6. 81-3)

In the course of the plays all “divine” or privileged meanings have been exhausted; willingly, willfully, Richard embodies their exhaustion. Nothing stands exempt from his creative powers. He looks upon the entire world as his stage, his woods, the materials of his drama. Opposing Self to World, he makes all that is not “myself” his ground. We may say that he makes the world of the Henry VI plays “mine.”

This is an outrageously hyperbolical parody of the artist, of course, claiming the power to re-create the known world of the past in his drama. But the energetic force of his posture within the play carries over to us outside the play in such a way as to credit, temporarily, the hyperbole. He rescues the play by breaking out of its diminishing circles of repetitions, redelivering it to us as a promise of a future, a promise not abstract, but anchored now, in the present moment of the play.

I’m passing over the obvious—Richard's diabolical dimension. But he gives us the enormous relief of seeming at long last to confront in bodily form the bedevilling ghost of the plays' dissociations. He for whom there is no distinction between dramatic and historical power promises to eat his “bloody supper” (V. 5. 85) wide awake, to run this nightmare comedy to its real conclusions. In the next play, then, Shakespeare can test out the terrific temptations of such a promise. For now it is enough that there will be a next play. He has not encountered the ground of his material; instead he has flushed out a deeply parodic image of himself, who has yet to be exorcised. But at least he has been located, and bodied forth.

.....

Prospero didn’t father Caliban, just their relationship. Shakespeare didn’t invent the past, but he discovers that it “exists” only in terms of relationships. A lesser dramatist might have written three plays about the reign of Henry VI just because “that’s the way it happened,” one part following another because there’s more to be said. But Shakespeare's plays are above all a sequence of relationships, and each new play is a distinctive attempt to comprehend the ground of the last. Part I grounds its faith in an extra-dramatic “past,” Part II seeks grounds in the nature of “play,” and Part III, relinquishing both kinds of faith, discloses a nightmare version of the playwright himself. Once that parody is played out, the decompositional phase of the overall sequence will give way to the generative, but the principle of relationship remains constant. To be meaningful, for its internal life to be credible, a play requires closure; but to be intelligible it must open outward to its audience. I see Shakespeare's histories as a series of closed forms spiralling outward toward the future, which inevitably is us, now: Prospero's heirs.

Notes

1. Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York, 1960), p. 63.

2. For instance, Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), especially the first chapter (“The Artist as Historian”), generally, p. 22 specifically.

3. Patterns of Decay (Charlottesville, 1975), pp. 17-20.

4. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study of the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York, 1960), pp. 110-11, 206; cf. p. 141.

5. In Pierce Penniless Thomas Nashe celebrated the spectacle of “brave Talbot … after he had lyne two hundred years in his Tombe … fresh bleeding” on the stage. The play as ritual re-enactment.

6. H. T. Price, Construction in Shakespeare (Ann Arbor, 1951); “others” would prominently include J. P. Brockbank's widely reprinted essay, “The Frame of Disorder—Henry VI,” Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 3: Early Shakespeare, eds. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London, 1961).

7. This comes close to Sigurd Burckhardt's central point in “‘I Am But the Shadow of Myself’: Ceremony and Design in 1 Henry VI,” Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, 1968).

   I have used The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage.