[In the essay below, Brownlow examines 1 Henry VI, considering both its flaws and its theatrical power.]

The series of histories comprising the three parts of Henry VI and The Life and Death of Richard III begins with the death of Henry V and deals with the loss of his French conquests and the coming of civil war during his son Henry VI's reign; it ends with Henry Tudor's invasion, his defeat of Richard III, and the inauguration of a new order under the family of Tudor. The plays cover sixty-three complicated years from 1422 to 1485, and the general theory under which the dramatist arranged his materials was familiar because it provided a well-publicised case for the Tudors' legitimacy. Edward Hall, whose The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York was in itself and through Holinshed's Chronicles Shakespeare's chief source, announces the theory in his opening sentences:

What mischief hath insurged in realms by intestine division, what depopulation hath ensued in countries by civil dissension, what detestable murder hath been committed in cities by separate factions … this noble realm of England can apparently declare and make demonstration.

… But the old divided controversy between the fore-named families of Lancaster and York, by the union of matrimony celebrate and consummate between the high and mighty prince King Henry the Seventh and the Lady Elizabeth his most worthy queen, the one being indubitate heir of the house of Lancaster, and the other of York, was suspended and appalled in the person of their most noble, puissant and mighty heir King Henry the Eight.¹

Hall's narrative unfolds the causes of dissension and the whole unhappy sequel of war and usurpation as a prelude to the Tudors' glory. He was their advocate, a humanist believing in the moral value of history, in the persuasive power of language (as his rumbling Latinisms, his elaborate, sometimes sprawling periods show), and a Protestant. He writes with a believer's enthusiasm. He took his facts and his interpretations of them from a variety of sources, but he brought the whole to a high finish, with a beginning, a middle and a splendid ending.

Richard II, so the story goes, for despotic rule, wilfulness and extravagance was deposed by his cousin Henry of Lancaster; and this usurpation, however justifiable politically, entailed an aftermath of ramifying disorders upon the usurper, his successors and subjects. These disorders appear immediately in the rebellions of Henry IV's reign, and though there seems to be a relief in the reign of his son Henry V, the strife resumes upon his early death and the succession of his infant son. Henry VI's infancy and, later on, his incapacity leave the kingdom with no effective defence against ambitious noblemen. France is lost. In exchange England receives in Margaret of Anjou termagant disorder personified. Civil war follows, with every kind of allegiance broken in a rampage of murder and feud. York, as Edward IV, usurps Lancaster. Then York, as Richard of Gloucester, usurps York. Richard III is the anti-King, deformed, a multiple homicide, fratricide and infanticide, a rough boar (his heraldic crest) rooting up the state. Finally, even as evil is revealed as absolute, a thing in itself, Providence sends Henry Tudor to defeat the tyrant and inaugurate the Tudors' peace.

This exciting plot is a variant of the grand Christian melodrama that Shakespeare drew on, consciously or unconsciously, for the plots of most of his tragedies and tragi-comedies. The story begins with an offence against sacred obligation; its middle deals with its unhappy consequences, and the end either brings about or anticipates a restoration of happiness. The tale's original is the Christian story of the world's progress from creation to apocalypse; or perhaps one should say that the Christian story is the authoritative version in our culture of a tale which, in some versions, precedes it. The difference between the Christian version and others, whether foreshadowings, analogues or derivatives, is that the former (to those who believe it) is fact, the latter are fictions. Whatever may be the attitude of the ignorant or superstitious towards fictions, they are not matters of belief, but means of expression, ways of putting experience into a narrative form.

The purpose of the Christian narrative is action, not expression; its plot is meant to glorify God and save souls. Its events happen in the real world, its personæ are persons, its hero is simultaneously God and man. One of its characters, however, never appears in proper person; this is the antagonist. He is a fallen angel, a demon, a kind of infectious moral disease, and his prophesied incarnation as the Antichrist is one of the cloudier doctrines of Christian eschatology. The unreality of the antagonist is also a feature of the story's imitations, where he is usually a symbol of something dreadful or unpopular over which the hero can triumph. The imitations have their own special problems too, especially with the hero and the people he delivers. Who is to be cast in the redeemer's role, and how is he to act? There is an obvious difference between the pre-Christian hero, a beefy strong man who kills dragons and drives off marauders, and the post-Christian hero who leads his people through a last, apocalyptic battle to a new paradise. Probably neither the hero nor the people will be able to bear the weight of glory imputed to them. Christ's purpose is the saving of individual souls, not of empires, nations, professions, trades or any other kind of social organisation. The only society he recognises is the Church. Treating a nation or a race as types of the Church Militant, like treating its enemies as Antichrist, is a dangerous superstition, a form of idolatry. (One can monitor the idolising of the secular state and its doings in the imagery of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English poetry.)

The Tudors' application of the Christian theme to recent English history is the first major case, in England, of political propaganda, requiring at some point in its invention and transmission a conspiracy to lie (unless of course Henry VII really thought he was a man sent from God which, from what we know of his character, is very unlikely). Modern historians are right to call the Tudors' version of the events that brought them the crown the ‘Tudor myth’, a myth being by definition a lie. Such a propagandist tale was bound to cause difficulties for a dramatist aiming at neither melodrama nor propaganda, but at the imitation of life and character. On the one hand the myth is a ready-made way of organising a confused mass of material; on the other hand it falsifies the material by treating people as walking allegories and events as types of the absolute.

We find it hard to read the history plays with this sense of a difference between the human material and the organising myth. This is because the ‘Tudor myth’ has had a remarkable hold on the English imagination, outlasting many other historical traditions. Some school textbooks still date the beginning of modern England by the ‘watershed’ of 1485, and almost all Shakespeare's readers assume that he and his readers agreed with government propaganda. But this is unlikely on general grounds. Even if people's knowledge of written history derived from officially sanctioned chronicles, there were some less orthodox views in circulation, and there was always the tendency of men everywhere to think for themselves, even if only to themselves. In this connection the appearance is very interesting, in James I's reign, of two works rehabilitating Richard III. The Encomium of Richard III, ‘an oppressed and defamed king’, by Sir William Cornwallis, a member of Prince Henry's household, was addressed to John Donne. The History of the Life and Reign of Richard III was by Sir George Buc, a Master of the Revels, a man who, as censor of plays, had more incentive than most for brooding on the difference between truth and fiction. He is also a good example of the persistence of loyalty across generations; for his great-grandfather, Sir John Buc, was Comptroller of the Household to King Richard III. Sir John fought at Bosworth and was beheaded at Leicester after the battle. His wife was Margaret, daughter of Henry Saville. Saville and Buc were Yorkshire families, although Buc went south under the Howards' protection after the Yorkist débâcle.²

The use of national history to express national pride, whatever the political myth of the moment, is a very different thing from its use as propaganda for the régime, and as a matter of fact Shakespeare's histories though enthusiastically English are remarkably diffident on the subject of the Tudors. For one thing he kept off the subject, ending his histories in 1485; like Sir William Cornwallis and Sir George Buc he kept dangerous matter such as the subject of his Henry VIII until the reign of James I. For another, he kept his counsel. In the opening of Edward Hall's work the marriage of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York prompts a cascade of analogues of which the first is ‘the union of the Godhead to the manhood’.³ Parody could do no better. Shakespeare nowhere approaches that sort of thing; he pays the dynasty's founders no lavish compliments, and whenever his history plays were given a topical interpretation it seems to have been a subversive one.⁴

There is one example in Henry VI of a gratuitous compliment to Henry VII:

K. Hen. VI. Come hither, England's
hope. If secret powers
Suggest but truth to my divining thoughts,
This pretty lad will prove our country's bliss.
His looks are full of peaceful majesty,
His head by nature fram’d to wear a crown,
His hand to wield a sceptre, and himself
Likely in time to bless a regal throne.

(III. Hen. VI, IV. vi. 68-74)

Henry VI's prophecy about young Henry Richmond is in Hall, but in the play it comes strangely at a time when Henry VI and his own son are enjoying a spell of prosperity. The lines are poor, even silly, and Dr Johnson, always sensitive to a false note, has a dry comment on the passage:

He was afterwards Henry VII. A man who put an end to the civil war of the two houses, but not otherwise remarkable for virtue. Shakespeare knew his trade. Henry VII was grandfather to Queen Elizabeth. …⁵

If the lines are Shakespeare's, they are evidence that thoughts of Henry VII did not heat his imagination. The histories, especially the earlier ones, have a number of such dead patches. Sometimes Shakespeare enlivened a dull part of his subject by ‘sending it up’, treating it in a burlesque manner; but sometimes, comic treatment being out of the question, he negligently cobbled together the necessary lines and left it at that.⁶

As soon as Shakespeare began to turn the Tudor story into drama, acting it out as a sequence of causes and effects embodied in characters and their motives, the shortcomings of the myth began to appear. Because the history, story or myth of English affairs from 1400 to 1485 was a ready-made fiction with heroes, villains, debates and dialectical battles, it must have translated quite easily into theatrical form; after all, allegorical moralities and typological mysteries had been the most popular theatrical genres until well into Shakespeare's lifetime. But as Thomas Nash's famous description of I Henry VI in performance tells us, the audience was more interested in character and life than in the mythical framework supporting them.⁷ The experience of the long series of plays, for author and audience, was bound to be a kind of enacted criticism of a style of drama as well as of the story it told.

.....

Whoever plotted the three parts of Henry VI, whether Shakespeare or a committee, the series was conceived as a whole. The idea probable grew out of a practical wish on the actors' parts to develop their repertory in a way to keep an audience's interest. The epilogue to Henry V, written some ten years after Henry VI, implies that the later set of histories was an addition to a cycle still in the repertory. C. B. Young's statement that with Benson's production at Stratford in 1906, ‘the whole Henry VI trilogy was acted together for the first time in recorded history’,⁸ may be literally true, but is probably untrue in the only sense that matters; for the epilogue to Henry V proves that the whole eight-play set was performed in Shakespeare's time, whether the fact was recorded or not. The planning of the first trilogy, therefore, arose out of the audience's habit of theatre-going, which encouraged the dramatist to look for a large theme, one ready to hand and capable of animating a series of plays. The original idea in fact was probably to mount a secular, up-to-date version of the mystery cycles.

The overall theme of Henry VI is the weakening of government and the rising tide of civil disorder. The first, visible cause of this large event is the youth, then the incapacity, of Henry VI, but it makes its effects through a group of subsidiary causes that recur as motifs of all three plays: dissension among quarrelling noblemen; the ambition of Richard, Duke of York, which continues in his sons; breaches of loyalty between kindred; and (not much noticed hitherto) the disorderly rule of women. These motifs are all worked into I Henry VI, sometimes quite awkwardly.

The centre of interest in that play is dissension at home and the loss of France. It opens with Henry V's funeral procession, its stately ritual interrupted by a quarrel between Gloucester and Beaufort, by messengers telling of battles lost in France through misrule at home and cowardice in the field. During the Gloucester-Beaufort quarrel, the cardinal tells the duke, ‘Thy wife is proud; she holdeth thee in awe’ (I. i. 39). Since this is the only mention of the duchess in the play it looks like an irrelevant detail; but since the duchess's attempt to domineer over her husband and the kingdom are an important theme of II Henry VI, the two lines might be an example of authorial foresight. Once one is aware of the theme of female domination one sees that, like the quarrelling kinsmen and nobles, the mention of Eleanor starts a theme; and the single element that holds these separate themes in a unity, as a cantus firmus holds the voices in vocal polyphony, is the stage presence of the dead hero-king, Henry V.

Whatever the inadequacies of I Henry VI as a finished work of art, it shows from the first scene onwards a grasp of dramatic form. An example of this, more confidently treated than other parts of the play, is the episode in the Temple garden. Although bad feeling between Somerset (a Beaufort and Lancastrian) and York causes Talbot's defeat and death in Act IV, dynastic faction is not the plays' main theme until Gloucester's death in II Henry VI. Nonetheless the civil wars are the main subject of the trilogy; faction and the loss of France are the prelude to them, and the repeated symbol of the wars, from beginning to end, is the contrast of the red rose to the white. So Shakespeare invents a trivial quarrel upon an undisclosed point of law between young noblemen in a rose garden where, at Richard Plantagenet's invitation, they take sides by choosing roses, deciding the quarrel by numbers, not by right:

Since you are tongue-tied and so loath to speak,
In dumb significants proclaim your thoughts.

(II. iv. 25-6)

For the rest of the scene, Shakespeare plays upon the portentous significance of these ‘dumb significants’, the white rose meaning among other things anger, death and fear, the red rose standing for confidence, wounds and modesty. Some of the lines have a strong, prophetic irony, like Vernon's:

Stay, lords and gentlemen, and pluck no more
Till you conclude that he upon whose side
The fewest roses are cropp’d from the tree
Shall yield the other in the right opinion.

(ll. 39-42)

Should we realise that in a sense lives are being plucked, the young Shakespeare, as usual, does not leave us to form our own conclusion:

                                                                                This brawl today,
Grown to this faction in the Temple-garden,
Shall send between the red rose and the white
A thousand souls to death and deadly night.

(ll. 124-7)

Rather poor lines, much too theatrically doom-laden in the close; but they touch on a paradoxical suggestion running all through the plays. By using the word ‘brawl’ for a quarrel which, as we have seen it, has had so much fire and grace in it, Warwick arouses in us a foreboding pity that so much spirit, passion and valour should go to destruction. The rose-symbolism contributes to this feeling because it usually suggests memories of girls and love-gardens, not a prospect of war. It is as if Chaucer's squire had suddenly turned into a hoodlum.

This scene and its successor in which the dying Mortimer bequeaths his right in the crown to Richard Plantagenet, soon to be Duke of York, proves that Henry VI was planned from the start as a tragic whole. As the roses have turned into symbols of violence, so royalty has become a curse. Being heir to the throne has ruined Mortimer, keeping him, ‘all [his] flow’ring youth’ (II. v. 56) in ‘a loathsome dungeon’. Mortimer's appeal to York's ambition, his injunction to him to be wary and politic, his own self-pity (however justified), all lay the ground for III Henry VI, introducing the ‘sense of injur’d merit’ which underlies the Yorkist cause. Young York is a flower, too, a rose, ‘sweet stem from York's great stock’ (l. 41). Mortimer's ‘fainting kiss’ (l. 40) is a quick visual emblem of the transmission of the blight from one generation to the next. This theme of some disease ruining all the accumulated wealth and promise of life brings out the true Shakespearean elegiac tone:

In prison hast thou spent a pilgrimage
And like a hermit overpass’d thy days.

(ll. 116-17)

The theme and the imagery are Shakespeare's, and they are a sign of a shift away from conventional views of the story; it is being treated as a tragedy, not as a prelude to glory.

In general the formal design-work in I Henry VI is by no means so subtle; although theatrically effective, it does not have the imaginative warmth of the York-Mortimer scenes. For instance, the first two parts of the trilogy are somewhat arbitrarily linked. I Henry VI really ends with Talbot's death, the trial and condemnation of Joan of Arc, and the subsequent peace proposals, but Shakespeare prepares for II Henry VI by including Suffolk's guilty wooing of Margaret of Anjou in Act V. Another kind of schematic planning explains otherwise puzzling scenes. After the recapture of Orleans (II. ii), a messenger invites Talbot to visit the Countess of Auvergne. He goes, but the Countess has prepared a trap for him. Talbot however is ready for her. He blows his horn, his men make a rescue and the Countess apologises:

For I am sorry that with reverence
I did not entertain thee as thou art.

(II. iii. 71-2)

Because of its lack of connection with anything else and its near buffoonery, this scene is a puzzle. If however one recognises the baleful influence of women as a running motif in Henry VI, then the scene makes sense; it is important that old Talbot, loyal to the King, to his companions and his soldiers, should be shown rising superior to the dangers signified by the Countess's invitation. Charles the Dauphin and the Earl of Suffolk both fail this test.

Although this is the meaning of the scene, it is not explicit. There is no chorus or ‘presenter’ to interpret it. We are left to reach our own conclusions from such things as the Countess's confession of irreverence or Talbot's explanation of his true identity (II. iii. 50-6, 63-6); and when we realise that the scene is an exemplum of manly valour controlling female temptations, we do so because the Joan of Arc episodes have shown that this is one of the play's themes, and also because we are so familiar with the idea that we need only a hint to recognise it. Such allegorical use of dramatic action was familiar to Shakespeare from the religious and moral drama of his youth. It is used so constantly in Henry VI, where it is the source of both plays' weaknesses and strengths, that it is probably the schematic principle according to which Shakespeare first designed the plot of the whole series.

This probably explains the slowness of post-Elizabethan readers to see any form or art at all in the plays' construction. The average reader takes up a history play as he would a history book or an historical novel, assuming that the principle of construction is the sequence of events and that the events chosen are, quite simply, the ones that are most important or provide most entertainment.

Read in expectation of character, incident and poetry, Henry VI can be a disappointment, and many a reader has turned to another play having come to the conclusion that these early histories are just ‘one thing after another’. This makes it all the more interesting that when scholars began to explain the dramatist's art its method became so obvious, once the chief principles had been grasped, as to be crude. Evidently the wrong thing had been looked for, as if people had gone to Byrd's Masses looking for good tunes. But what reading concealed, performance revealed. When Gloucester and Beaufort quarrel before the Tower and an affray breaks out between their servants, ‘blue coats’ and ‘tawny coats’, who can miss the simple visual symbolism of faction? In Act III, scene i, the servants' quarrel erupts into the parliament; and when in answer to the King's pleadings Gloucester and Beaufort agree to a peace, we are told that the truce is hypocritical. Exeter, ending the scene as chorus, is explicit:

This late dissension grown betwixt the peers
Burns under feigned ashes of forg’d love,
And will at last break out into a flame.

(III. i. 189-91)

In the next scene Joan takes Rouen by stratagem, and her signal is thus described in the stage direction: ‘Enter La Pucelle on the top, thrusting out a torch burning.’ To the modern reader, disappointed that these events are mainly narrated, not explained, it comes as a happy discovery that Joan's torch is a version of the same destructive fire of misrule and disorder named by Exeter.⁹ With her diabolic agents and unchastity, Joan embodies ruinous, burning lust and rebellion, and in the theatre these correspondences are revealed in one swift, visually significant action.

The play's action unfolds in a sequence of such ‘shows’ of which the significance is continually being pointed out. This is why these plays, even the first of them, are so effective on the stage. The dramatist brings his action to the audience with every spectacular technique of staging available to him. The symbolic ‘show and tell’ method depends, however, upon the audience's recognition of the themes, and it is surprising how much, especially in I Henry VI, is taken for granted. Motives remain a mystery, and so do the actual issues of the debates and battles. Gloucester, Beaufort and the factions in the rose garden are mindless, quarrelling automata; and where it is necessary that a motive be explained, as in Burgundy's desertion of England, the effect is unsubtle.

Yet even this incident is a striking example of the dramatist's confidence in his ability to use the stage. Burgundy has only nine lines in which to explain his conversion to the French cause; and since there is nothing in Joan's arguments that could come as a surprise to him, one concludes that he has either been an ass all along or has suddenly become one. Perhaps the scene drew groans and catcalls from its first audiences; Burgundy's first two lines, spoken aside, are certainly an invitation to some kind of derisive comment:

Either she hath bewitch’d me with her words,
Or nature makes me suddenly relent.

(III. iii. 58-9)

His second speech is also partly spoken aside, and the language is so absurd (‘… these haughty words of hers / Have batter’d me like roaring cannon-shot’) that we can be sure the audience is expected to laugh. Joan's comment on Burgundy's change of mind is ambiguous as well as spoken aside: ‘Done like a Frenchman!’ For a moment one wonders which is more French, his patriotism or his imbecility, but Joan clears the doubt in another aside: ‘Turn, and turn again.’ One can hear in the mind's ear the roar that greeted that remark.

Shakespeare is so confident of the audience's grasp of Joan's character and of the role of the French that he can take Joan right out of character in order to use her for a larger effect. He has diverted our attention from the ‘problem’ of Burgundy's motive, which may have been also a problem of his own technique, by making us laugh at the problem by means of the technique. He has used his very formal, stiff ‘show and tell’ methods for a burlesque caricature of his own limitations.

I Henry VI could be Shakespeare's first play, and in it Shakespeare's mastery of the medium and the audience, his superb confidence, are revealed simply, even barbarically, in sheer theatrical power. Because the meaning of the action, the significance of the shows and symbols, and the qualities of the characters are taken for granted, the play approaches demagoguery, being filled with common prejudices and heartlessnesses, and making its effect through continual playing on attitudes the spectators have brought into the theatre with them. The language hardly ever rises above the decorative and the rhetorical. But when it does, the tone is unmistakable, as in the Mortimer scene, or as in Talbot's

How are we park’d and bounded in a pale,
A little herd of England's timorous deer.

(IV. ii. 45-6)

The Burgundy scene shows another, equally Shakespearean quality; it is a foretaste of the virtuoso effects possible for a dramatist who is ready to expose his technique to an audience's lively sense of reality.

Notes

1. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London and New York, 1960) III, pp. 16-17.

2. C. J. Sisson (ed.), Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans (Cambridge, Mass., 1933) p. 415. Through his connection with Thomas Digges, Shakespeare could have known a distinguished Saville of his own time, the scholar and antiquary Thomas (Leslie Hotson, I, William Shakespeare [London, 1937] p. 123).

3. Bullough, op. cit., III, p. 17.

4. For King John, see below, pp. 93-4. Queen Elizabeth thought Richard II was a personal attack on her. Falstaff was interpreted as an anti-Protestant caricature (Ure, Richard II, p. lix; Thomas Fuller, Worthies [3 vols, London, 1840] II, p. 455; Church History [3 vols, London, 1837] I, p. 489).

5. Arthur Sherbo (ed.), Johnson on Shakespeare (New Haven and London, 1968) p. 607.

6. For an example of the comic style of treatment, see Richard II, v. iii; for an example of negligence, see Richard II, v. vi.

7. Thomas Nashe, Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow (Oxford, 1958) I, p. 212: ‘How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.’

8. J. Dover Wilson (ed.), III Henry VI (Cambridge, 1952) p. xliv.

9. The basic account of the form of Henry VI is Hereward T. Price, Construction in Shakespeare (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1951). A. S. Cairncross (ed.), The First Part of King Henry VI (London, 1962) pp. xli et seq. gives an excellent analysis of the first part.