SOURCE: “I Henry VI” and “2 & 3 Henry VI,” in These Valiant Dead: Renewing the Past in Shakespeare's Histories, University of Iowa Press, 1991, pp. 1-30.

[In the essays below, Jones presents an overview of the three parts of Henry VI, particularly emphasizing Shakespeare's use of history in the plays.]

The first play of the first tetralogy begins with the most plaintive and extended lament for a lost leader that we will encounter through the entire series of English history plays. Bedford's opening lines intensify the solemnity of Henry V's funeral procession by sounding the enormity of both the loss and its consequences:

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry's death—
King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long!
England ne’er lost a king of so much worth.

For fifty-six lines, ruffled only by a brief but ominous flurry between Winchester and Gloucester, the bereaved lords dwell on the virtues of the deceased (“his deeds exceed all speech”), the grim finality of his passing (“Henry is dead and never shall revive”), and England's abject helplessness without him (“arms avail not, now that Henry's dead”).

The bleak negatives that cloud the prospect of an England without Henry are, for all their funeral-baked hyperboles, perfectly valid.¹ There will be a “change of times and states” undoing all that Henry had so gloriously accomplished. And, in dramatic rather than historical terms, this play will dwindle to a pathetically ironic and inconclusive ending (suited to the emasculated England Bedford foresees in lines 48-51) that subverts the heroic tragedy of Talbot's death, just as Bedford's soaring eulogy to Henry V's ghost is abruptly undercut in this opening scene by messengers coming in with the first waves of the bad news that will flood the entire tetralogy. “Lost” is the appropriate keynote for the leaderless world that Henry's death leaves to its factious devices here.

But the devastation of England without its hero king is tempered, particularly in this first play, by the positive potential for sustaining and reviving his grand heritage that is kept in view. Even in the sequels, as the nation's self-inflicted wounds fester under the malignant shadow of Richard Gloucester, the dramatized rupture between the grim present and its better past is never so radically unsettling as it will prove to be in Richard II. And Part One illustrates more positively than any other play until Henry V's own (and more simply than that later play) how the leader of the past can survive as a vital presence in those who properly emulate (and thus renew) him in the present. Such a possibility directly counters and complicates what would otherwise stand simply as the most tautological platitude uttered at Henry's funeral: “Henry is dead and never shall revive” (18).²

The idea that England's heroic historical heritage can live anew in the present is first voiced early in the play by the awed enemy. The French, having just boasted fatuously of their newfound ascendancy over the “famished English,” are comically reduced by the ensuing rout and, as Alençon's haughty ridicule converts to wondering admiration, he evokes for the first time the storied epoch of Edward III that will serve so often through both tetralogies as an emblem of England's past glory:

Froissart, a countryman of ours, records
England all Olivers and Rowlands bred
During the time Edward the Third did reign.
More truly now may this be verified,
For none but Samsons and Goliases
It sendeth forth to skirmish.

(I, ii, 29-34)

This identification of past and present English prowess in such mythical terms is, as I will argue later, noteworthy in itself. But it is not for a facile Frenchman to uphold alone the tradition of English valor at its proper worth. That, of course, is first and foremost the role of Talbot, who keeps the heroic spirit of Henry V alive in this play. Were others to share that enterprise with him, as the entire play makes clear, the great leader would not be “lost” at all but would “revive” indeed. Fittingly, the opening scene divides its focus between the dead and living heroes, turning from the lament for Henry to news of Talbot's (for once unfortunate) exploits in France. As a loyal soldier and servant of the crown, Talbot cannot of course replace the king himself, but he can and does maintain the heroic heritage of that king, and his current deeds (“where valiant Talbot above human thought / Enacted wonders with his sword and lance”) are accorded from the beginning something akin to the superhuman stature Henry's mourners recall in the victor of Agnicourt:

His brandished sword did blind men with his beams;
His arms spread wider than a dragon's wings;
His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire,
More dazzled and drove back his enemies
Than midday sun fierce bent against their faces.

(I, i, 121-122, 10-14)

In his first actual appearance, Talbot virtually enacts the process of renewing in his own person the valiant dead who precede him. While he is surveying the besieged Orléans from a turret with the earl of Salisbury, the latter is shot, and Talbot effectively assumes the spirit of the dying hero as he eulogizes him:

Speak, Salisbury; at least if thou canst speak.
How far’st thou, mirror of all martial men?
In thirteen battles Salisbury o’ercame;
Henry the Fifth he first trained to the wars.
Whilst any trump did sound or drum struck up
His sword did ne’er leave striking in the field.
Yet liv’st thou, Salisbury?
He beckons with his hand and smiles on me,
As who should say, “When I am dead and gone,
Remember to avenge me on the French.”
Plantagenet, I will, and like thee,
Play on the lute, beholding the towns burn.
Wretched shall France be only in my name.
Frenchmen, I’ll be a Salisbury to you.

(I, iv, 73-106)

The exemplary “mirror of all martial men” who first tutored Henry V himself in the art of war will continue, now that he and Henry are both dead, to inspire others as he is reflected in Talbot. Retaining his own potent heroic identity (“Wretched shall France be only in my name”), Talbot will also keep Salisbury's alive by emulating him (“Frenchmen, I’ll be a Salisbury to you”). Thus, Salisbury's affectionate greeting as they first entered—“Talbot, my life, my joy, again returned?”—will prove true in this extended sense. In the ensuing scenes, after a temporary setback at the bewitched hands of Joan de Pucelle, Talbot carries out his vow to the letter. His “name only” does send the French scurrying (II, i, 77), and as he enters the reconquered Orléans, he ensures that Salisbury will continue to live (along with Talbot himself) as a “mirror of all martial men” for future ages:

Bring forth the body of old Salisbury
And here advance it in the market place,
The middle center of this cursèd town.
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 happened in revenge of him,
Within their chiefest temple I’ll erect
A tomb, wherein his corpse shall be interred;
Upon the which, that every one may read,
Shall be engraved the sack of Orleans,
The treacherous manner of his mournful death,
And what a terror he had been to France.

(II, ii, 4-17)

Through such means history's valiant dead are not lost, but live in memory for the present and for “hereafter ages.”

I may seem to juggle terms and blur distinctions here, since “old Salisbury” is not strictly a “historical” figure for Talbot in the same sense that Edward III was or that both Salisbury and Talbot himself are for Shakespeare's audience. He is, rather, an older colleague whom Talbot succeeds, much as one generation succeeds another. For Talbot, however, and for the use of the historic past that he illustrates here, that is a distinction without a difference. Salisbury, like Talbot himself, serves as an inspirational mirror in life and, remembered as Talbot remembers him (“Now, Salisbury, for thee …” [II, i, 35]), continues as such to his immediate successors and “hereafter ages” alike. Thus Talbot, assaulting Rouen, calls on the recently dead Henry V and the long dead Richard I as equally living presences along with the young king he now serves:

And I, as sure as English Henry lives
And as his father here was conqueror,
As sure as in this late betrayèd town
Great Coeur-de-lion's heart was burièd,
So sure I swear to get the town or die.

(III, ii, 80-84)

And the ailing Bedford, in the same scene, looks farther back in British lore for a precedent that will sustain his gallant refusal to leave the field, just as his living example will “revive” the hearts of the soldiers who have ever taken him as their “mirror”:

Burgundy: Courageous Bedford,
let us now persuade you.
Bedford: Not to be gone from hence;
for once I read
That stout Pendragon in his litter sick
Came to the field and vanquishèd his foes.
Methinks I should revive the soldiers' hearts,
Because I ever found them as myself.

(93-98)

The gallant old man dies but his spirit remains “undaunted” (99), and Talbot characteristically insists that he be remembered:

But yet, before we go, let’s not forget
The noble Duke of Bedford, late deceased,
But see his exequies fulfilled in Roan.
A braver soldier never couchèd lance,
A gentler heart did never sway in court.

(131-135)

“Let’s not forget.” That is the impulse through which the heroic past lives on in the present. And though both Bedford and Talbot sound muted de casibus notes here (“What is the trust or strength of foolish man?”; “But kings and mightiest potentates must die, / For that’s the end of human misery” [112, 136-137]), and thereby slightly modify the primary strain of “noble deeds as valor's monuments” (120), it is the latter that rings out here for us above all.

In the scenes given to Talbot's heroic death, in fact, renewal through generational succession and through the longer reach of historic fame are brought into conflict, and the latter supersedes the former at the insistence of young John Talbot, whose gallant refusal to abandon his father we are asked to applaud. Looking toward his own regeneration in the future exploits of his son, Talbot realizes that the boy's intended initiation to arms outside the walls of Bordeaux will in fact be a hopeless catastrophe:

O young John Talbot, I did send for thee
To tutor thee in stratagems of war,
That Talbot's name might be in thee revived
When sapless age and weak unable limbs
Should bring thy father to his drooping chair.
But O malignant and ill-boding stars!
Now thou art come unto a feast of death,
A terrible and unavoided danger.
Therefore, dear boy, mount on my swiftest horse,
And I’ll direct thee how thou shalt escape
By sudden flight. Come, dally not, be gone.

(IV, v, 1-11; emphasis added)

But the boy, against all the urgings of his father in a debate that stretches through two scenes, opts for “mortality / Rather than life preserved with infamy” (IV, v, 32-33). In the brief time of the battle itself, young John's heroics do reinvigorate his father:

When from the Dauphin's crest thy sword struck fire,
It warmed thy father's heart with proud desire
Of bold-faced victory. Then leaden age,
Quickened with youthful spleen and warlike rage,
Beat down Alençon, Orleans, Burgundy,
And from the pride of Gallia rescued thee.

(IV, vi, 10-15)

But in the longer reach of history, by dying so gloriously, young John surmounts death and gains, with his father, the immortality of “bright fame”:

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

(IV, vii, 18-22)

With the counterpoint that is already his hallmark, Shakespeare allows Joan a nasty deflation of the grand list of names Lucy then rehearses over the fallen hero and his son:

Here’s a silly stately style indeed!
Him that thou magnifi’st with all these titles,
Stinking and flyblown lies here at our feet.

(IV, vii, 72-76)

Lucy, however, has the last (and, for our topic, most significant) word on the subject: “I’ll bear them hence; but from their ashes shall be reared / A phoenix that shall make all France afeard” (92-93). More important than the fact that this prophecy is not fulfilled in this play or its sequels (though, in violation of historical chronology, Henry V provides its ultimate dramatic fulfillment), or that it may still be left open-ended for the Elizabethan audience, is the play's confident affirmation of this potential for renewal. Whoever he may be and whenever he appears, the “future” English hero will be the reincarnation of these fifteenth-century heirs to “the time Edward the Third did reign” and so on back to “stout Pendragon.” Whatever “change of times and states” may transpire, the play, like Talbot himself, affirms this fundamental continuity between past and present which can be realized in the person of any hero who revives the spirit of his predecessors and thereby identifies himself with them.³

If Talbot is by all odds the play's most positive force, he is, however, by no means the dominant force in the play. He may triumph over death, but his death is caused by those Englishmen who are opposed to him in every essential respect and who, as the Salisburys and Bedfords and Talbots die out, gain ever more perilous ascendancy. From the first scene on, this play is built simply and solidly on the absolute contrast between Talbot and the host of wrangling lords who bring on England's woes (the Woes of the Roses). It would distort the play in behalf of my subject to argue that the very heart of this contrast lay in the opposed parties' respective attitudes toward the past. More fundamental to it, as any audience must realize, is the factionalism based on willful self-interest that is the very opposite of Talbot's single-minded service to his king and his country. It takes no greater personage than the first messenger in the first scene to point directly at the root of all this play's evil in an English court that should know and do better:

Amongst the soldiers this is mutterèd,
That here you maintain several factions,
And whilst a field should be dispatched and fought
You are disputing of your generals.

(70-73)

And Exeter, evidently having nothing else to do in the play, steps forth periodically as chorus to drive home the already obvious point about such “factious bandying” (IV, i, 190) and the ashes in which it smolders, so very different from those that will spawn Talbot's phoenix:

This late dissension grown betwixt the peers
Burns under feignèd ashes of forged love
And will at last break out into a flame.
As fest’red members rot but by degree
Till bones and flesh and sinews fall away,
So will this base and envious discord breed.

(III, i, 188-193)

The fundamental cause of this dissension is the primacy of self-centered “will” above all else, not a misguided attitude toward (or use of) the past, and all those who are guided by this basic motive see (as Richard Plantagenet does) “growing time” ripening according to their will (II, iv, 99), whereas we see plainly, with Exeter, that the times are festering (rather than ripening) from the disease of dissension.

Nonetheless, in the stark opposition between Talbot's better way and the factionalists' worse, as we move back and forth between his exploits in France and their turmoil in England, the radically different uses of memory and history are a prominent and symptomatic feature of the contrast. When the two major parties-to-be first square off in the Temple Garden and choose those “dumb significants” of their antagonism, the essentially meaningless white and red roses, the priority of will over any legal basis in historical fact is openly asserted by the lords on both sides, who show an arrogant and aristocratic disdain for such inkhorn scholarship:

Suffolk: Faith, I have been
a truant in the law
And never yet could frame my will to it,
And therefore frame the law unto my will.
Somerset: Judge you, my Lord of Warwick,
then between us.
Warwick: Between two hawks, which
flies the higher pitch,
Between two dogs, which hath the deeper mouth,
Between two blades, which bears the better temper,
Between two horses, which doth bear him best,
Between two girls, which hath the merriest eye,
I have perhaps some shallow spirit of judgment;
But in these nice sharp quillets of the law,
Good faith, I am no wiser than a daw.

(II, iv, 7-18)

But once they have already lined up against one another on the basis of conflicting and unspecified “truths” that each side claims to be self-evident (20-24), these same lords use historical “facts” readily enough as weapons to hurl at one another rather than as a means to resolve the rights or wrongs of the case:

Warwick: Now, by God's
will, thou wrong’st him, Somerset.
His grandfather was Lionel Duke of Clarence,
Third son to the third Edward, King of England.
Spring crestless yeoman from so deep a root?
Richard: He bears him on the place's
privilege,
Or durst not for his craven heart say thus.
Somerset: By him that made me, I’ll
maintain my words
On any plot of ground in Christendom.
Was not thy father, Richard Earl of Cambridge,
For treason executed in our late king's days?
And by his treason stand’st not thou attainted,
Corrupted, and exempt from ancient gentry?
His trespass yet lives guilty in thy blood,
And till thou be restored thou art a yeoman.
Richard: My father was attachèd,
not attained,
Condemned to die for treason, but no traitor;
And that I’ll prove on better men than Somerset,
Were growing time once ripened to my will.
For your partaker Pole, and you yourself,
I’ll note you in my book of memory
To scourge you for this apprehension.
Look to it well and say you are well warned.

(82-103)

The threatening context in which he uses the term here suggests what function Richard's “book of memory” serves first and foremost.

Note that the “third Edward, King of England” becomes, in such a dispute, no more than the deep root of a genealogical tree rather than the famous ruler of that time when “England all Olivers and Rowlands bred,” as he is remembered in France, where Talbot wages the good fight, or of that time “when first this order [of the Garter] was ordained” and “knights of the Garter were of noble birth, / Valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage,” as Talbot himself will recall it (IV, i, 33-35). The issue here, as the play emphasizes it, is not so much which faction may be right in its historical arguments, and certainly not that genealogy and legal history are pernicious studies in and of themselves. The clear point, rather (and it scarcely simplifies this play, as it would most of Shakespeare's, to speak of its “point” in this regard), is that the factionalists use their history and their memories willfully, destructively, and hence wrongly, whereas Talbot uses his historical precedents positively as models for heroic action.

As is this play's way, the point is amplified through successive scenes. Richard visits his dying uncle Mortimer to complain, in a pun that is glaringly obvious to everyone in the theater except himself, of his “dis-ease” (II, v, 44). Mortimer is a ruined relic of the past that Richard probes here, and the young aspirant's faith that “growing time” will ripen to his will might be daunted by the gloomy spectacle of his uncle's “decaying age” (1). Instead, of course, he eagerly seizes the heritage Mortimer proffers him as a prop and stimulant for his ever-dominant will:

And therefore haste I to the parliament,
Either to be restorèd to my blood
Or make my will th’advantage of my good.

(127-129)

Mortimer is the first actual “historian” in the histories, and his anti-Lancastrian review of the succession from Edward III through Henry VI, correct enough in its essential facts despite its clear bias (and Shakespeare's relatively inconsequential confusion of Mortimers), is allowed to stand uncontested by any Lancastrian counterpart or rebuttal in the play. But that does not mean we line up here with Richard, even though he shares his private thoughts with us more consistently than does any other character. Those private thoughts, like Winchester's at the end of the first scene, expose Richard's selfish and dangerous ambition to us rather than engage us in his point of view.⁴ The play is simply less interested in the constitutional issues of the Yorkist-Lancastrian conflict than it is in the motives, attitudes, and actions of the contestants on either side. To be on a “side” first and foremost, and thereby to foment factional strife, is the great wrong here, by contrast with Talbot's simple loyalty to king, country, and the heroic heritage he upholds. The significant contrast between Talbot's remembrance of the past and Mortimer's (or Richard's via Mortimer) is the use each makes of his greater and lesser forebears. Edward III and Henry V, whose times and deeds shine with heroic precedents for Talbot, shrink in Mortimer's account to the same stature as their disappointing successors, Richard II and Henry VI. Their accomplishments mean nothing. They “count” only insofar as their standing on the genealogical chart proves the speaker's claim to the throne.

The foreseeable consequences of rampant self-interest that may use history for its own purposes (but is scarcely inspired by it) are “so plain” that the choral Exeter wishes himself dead before they can come to pass (III, i, 199-200). The immediate result is the downfall of Talbot, and, with no survivors to remember and replace him as he “renewed” Salisbury, the ruin of the realm follows. As Talbot falls, so does the remembrance of the valiant dead that he embodied. Lucy, frustrated by those “great commanders” York and Somerset, whose mutual antagonism betrays Talbot “to loss,” sums up the whole sorry story and its larger implications:

Thus, while the vulture of sedition
Feeds in the bosom of such great commanders,
Sleeping neglection doth betray to loss
The conquest of our scarce-cold conqueror,
That ever-living man of memory,
Henry the Fifth. Whiles they each other cross,
Lives, honors, lands, and all hurry to loss.

(IV, iii, 47-53)

The play's priorities—its sense of the truly crucial rights and wrongs—are perfectly clear here as elsewhere. Whatever the constitutional legitimacy of the Lancastrian rulership, Henry V's heroic heritage is above all to be remembered, preserved, and renewed, not neglected “to loss.” Only thus can the historical hero be “that ever-living man of memory,” or be so to any good purpose. Likewise, in his own degree, with Talbot. But “sleeping neglection” not only causes his downfall; it quashes out any recollection of him thereafter. The play, of course, memorializes and thus renews him in his own spirit, as Nashe testifies:

How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.⁵

In this way, in representational art if not in historical deed, Shakespeare's “tragedian” becomes the phoenix Lucy foresaw. But in the play, after Lucy's eulogy, Talbot is totally forgotten. Though we should be reminded of him by such dramatic devices as the sharp contrast between Joan's death and his (she denies her father and dies wretchedly; he embraces his son and dies heroically), no one onstage remembers him or utters his name. In such “sleeping neglection” of the heritage that might redeem its England, the play “ends” (rather than concludes) with a pointed anticipation of even worse troubles to come.⁶

This dismal prospect, however, still remains unclouded by factors that will complicate the represented “change of times and states” in later histories. If all the play's plain signs (buttressed by our historical foreknowledge) validate the various prophecies of disaster beyond any shadow of doubt, there is nothing in the nature of things as we see it here suggesting that it had to be so, that it could not have been otherwise. Nothing more substantial, that is, than Joan's theory, summoned in support of her own cause, that “glory is like a circle in the water, / Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself / Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught. / With Henry's death the English circle ends” (I, ii, 133-136). From the opening scene on, everything in the presentation indicates that the contentious lords who burst the circle of England's glory both can and should know and do otherwise, and that no fundamental evolution from a better heroic past to a lesser pedestrian present need take place. Both Talbot and his erring opposites are presented in exemplary colors that imply the full potential in them (as in the audience that watches and should learn from them) for realizing the better way and its happier consequences. In this way, 1 Henry VI not only shows us (in Talbot) the proper way of using history but is inspirational history, awakening remembrance of the valiant dead with the clear-eyed confidence of Talbot himself.⁷

Nor is the presentation of this inspirational model colored with any suggestion of fictionalization or idealization that would either distance the hero from the actual world of the audience or question the authenticity of his historical image as we see it here. Lucy's speech looks out from the play to the world of the audience with the full implication that the “phoenix” who will revive Talbot may (and can) appear there, suggesting perfect continuity between the dramatized past and the spectators' present. And however good Talbot is, there is no hint in the play that he is too good to be true. Quite the opposite. The countess of Auvergne does think, on first view, that the “real” Talbot she sees scarcely matches the storied hero of whom she has heard:

                                        Is this the scourge of France?
Is this the Talbot, so much feared abroad
That with his name the mothers still their babes?
I see report is fabulous and false.
I thought I should have seen some Hercules,
A second Hector, for his grim aspect
And large proportion of his strong-knit limbs.
Alas, this is a child, a silly dwarf.
It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp
Should strike such terror to his enemies.

(II, iii, 16-24)

But, as she realizes when Talbot adroitly supplements his “shadow” with the “substance” of his soldiers and thereby foils her hope to become a second Tomyris by trapping him, the countess is sorely mistaken:

Victorious Talbot, pardon my abuse.
I find thou art no less than fame hath bruited,
And more than may be gathered by thy shape.

(67-69)

If any disparity exists between the Talbot we see onstage and the “real” Talbot, the last line here suggests that it must be in the latter's favor. But such questions are scarcely essential. This first in Shakespeare's series of histories renews Talbot's fame with every implication that its hero, if “lost” to those factionalists who neglected him and his better way to their country's detriment, now lives anew both in the play and (potentially) in any auditor who will properly emulate him.⁸

.....

The lament opening 1 Henry VI was for the lost leader and the foreseen “change of times and states” in an England bereft of him. But there had been no thought then that all that Henry had been and done might itself vanish. Rather, he would shine as “a far more glorious star … / Than Julius Caesar” (55-56). As we have seen, however, Lucy later deplores the “sleeping neglection” that threatens to cancel out the conquests of this “ever-living man of memory” (IV, iii, 49-51). And as Part Two opens with a nuptial scene that is at least as ominous as the funeral with which Part One began, Gloucester warns his fellow (but scarcely collegial) peers that the past itself and not just its hero king is in danger of dying:

What? Did my brother Henry spend his youth,
His valor, 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 shall these labors and these honors die?
Shall Henry's conquest, Bedford's vigilance,
Your deeds of war, and all our counsel die?
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!

(76-101)

The eradicating process Gloucester envisions as the result of Henry's foolish marriage to the dowerless Margaret is, of course, the exact inverse of Talbot's efforts at heroic renewal. Against such blotting, rasing, and defacing, Talbot's erection of a monument to Salisbury in the marketplace of Orléans, where he had revived Salisbury's spirit through his own conquest, stands as a positive (and literal) model.

Gloucester's “passionate discourse” is, given his honest but splenetic temper, characteristically hyperbolic. The very existence of the play in which he voices them proves that his fears of being blotted, along with the other sharers in Henry V's glory, “from books of memory” will not ultimately be realized. And we will see more clearly the limited significance given here to such “undoing” of the past when we explore the dramatization of that process in Richard II. Nonetheless, Gloucester's outburst offers an appropriate keynote for the second and third parts of Henry VI, where not only are recent English accomplishments undone but virtually no positive memory of the English past survives. These are history plays about a nation that has little sense (and makes no good use) of its own history.

Like Gloucester, I am indulging in hyperbole for the sake of emphasis here. It should be recalled, in behalf of responsible accuracy, that York enlists the support of the Nevils (Warwick and Salisbury) by rehearsing his historical claim in such intricate detail that few modern audiences are likely to exclaim, with Warwick, “What plain proceedings is more plain than this?” (II, ii, 10-58). I can reiterate the point already made about the Yorkist recourse to genealogy in Part One—that it reduces heroes and goats alike to flat factors in the reckoning (“Edward the Black Prince died before his father / And left behind him Richard, his only son”). The difference is that this is the only sort of recollection of England's famous fourteenth-century victors in this play and its sequel. Neither the Black Prince nor his “mountain sire” (nor such an earlier figure as Richard Cordelion) is evoked to celebrate his heritage or inspire emulation. With minimal exceptions (to be noted shortly) in the case of Henry V, no such use of England's past glory is made whatsoever through these two long plays.

Moreover, even more pointedly than in Part One, the recourse to legal history itself proves superficial rather than fundamental, a matter of political tactics that shows no true regard for the constitutional past. York makes less and less of it, even as a selling point, as he pursues his claim, relying more both privately and publicly on the Tamburlainian ground of his merit and Henry's weakness:

Nor shall proud Lancaster usurp my right,
Nor hold the sceptre in his childish fist,
Nor wear the diadem upon his head,
Whose churchlike humors fits not for a crown.

(2, I, i, 242-245)

                                                            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.

(2, V, i, 93-105)

It had been clear, of course, from York's first utterance of his aspirations in Part One that personal will surmounted whatever historical “right” might be used to support it. And his priorities in this regard are shared by all alike in Parts Two and Three. Young Clifford's disregard for constitutional issues is exceptional only for its outright candor: “King Henry, be thy title right or wrong, / Lord Clifford vows to fight in thy defense” (3, I, i, 159-160). Oxford, who offers the only substantial historical justification of the Lancastrian claim in the entire trilogy (3, III, iii, 81-87), steps out from behind it when pressed and reveals the true basis of his partisanship:

Call him [Edward] my king by whose injurious doom
My elder brother, the Lord Aubrey Vere,
Was done to death? and more than so, my father,
Even in the downfall of his mellowed years,
When nature brought him to the door of death?
No, Warwick, no! While life upholds this arm,
This arm upholds the house of Lancaster.

(101-107)

And Warwick, whose allegiance to York may appear more a matter of constitutional principle than is that of any other major figure on either side (see 2, II, ii, 53-62), subordinates that principle to his personal honor (or pride) as soon as he feels the latter to be injured by his presumably rightful monarch:

Had he [Edward] none else to make a stale but me?
Then none but I shall turn his jest to sorrow.
I was the chief that raised him to the crown
And I’ll be chief to bring him down again;
Not that I pity Henry's misery,
But seek revenge on Edward's mockery.

(3, III, iii, 260-265)

His last line here expresses what has become the dominant motive on both sides—revenge. To the extent that historical right to the throne is debated at all in the “Bloody Parliament” scene which opens Part Three, the nod surely is given to York, both by Henry's concession (“I know not what to say; my title's weak” [134]) and by the apparently just-minded Exeter's defection (“His [York's] is the right, and therefore pardon me” [148]). But Exeter, an anomaly of impartiality in this sharply divided world, points out why neither constitutionality nor any gesture of compromise can possibly sway the hard-core Lancastrians: “They seek revenge and therefore will not yield” (190).

Revenge, of course, implies the implacable memory that fuels it, and to a large extent it would be fair to say that revenge replaces heroic renewal here as the primary use of the past to “inspire” present action. As early as the second act of Part One, Richard Plantagenet had given notice of the prominence that this intensely personalized “book of memory” (as distinct from the public and celebrative “books of memory” Gloucester sees being erased) assumes in the world he helps to shake apart:

For your partaker Pole, and you [Somerset] yourself,
I’ll note you in my book of memory
To scourge you for this apprehension.
Look to it well and say you are well warned.

(II, iv, 100-103)

And “Bloody Clifford” becomes the embodiment of this common motive, dedicating himself over his fallen father to the single-minded cause of vengeance:

                                                            Even at this sight
My heart is turned to stone; and while ’tis mine,
It shall be stony. York not our old men spares;
No more will I their babes. Tears virginal
Shall be to me even as the dew to fire;
And beauty, that the tyrant oft reclaims,
Shall to my flaming wrath be oil and flax.
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.

(2, V, ii, 49-60)

As “good” as his word, he slaughters the pathetic young Rutland in pursuit of the only cause he cares for:

Clifford: Thy father slew
my father. Therefore die.
Rutland: Di faciant laudis summa
sit ista tuae!

(3, I, iii, 47-48)

Both as he makes his vow and as he fulfills it, Clifford stands as an antitype—or at the very best as a savage degeneration—of the ideal Talbot had upheld in his remembrance of the fallen Salisbury. Heroic renewal is degraded into destructive vengeance, and Rutland's Ovidian prayer, echoing Clifford's own relegation of his “fame” to such heartless “cruelty,” may call to mind the different intention realized in Talbot's monument to Salisbury.⁹ Likewise, the prophecy York hurls at his captors, even as it echoes Lucy's prophecy over the dead Talbots, emphasizes the turn from heroic renewal to personal revenge: “My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth / A bird that will revenge upon you all” (3, I, iv, 35-36).

But to say that revenge replaces renewal as memory's motive (or as the focus of memory) is still to miss an important part of the distinction between Talbot's heroic ideal and the presented behavior of those who succeed and forget him. Despite revenge's ubiquity in Parts Two and Three, remembrance plays a relatively minor role in its execution. True, Clifford's memory of his father's blood stops the passage where Rutland's pleading words should enter (3, I, iii, 21-22). But here, and even more exclusively in most instances, the revenger's focus is forward, on the object of his hatred, not backward, memorializing its cause. As York and his ashy phoenix imply, revenge's cycle does foster a destructive kind of continuity (York kills Clifford; Clifford's son kills York and York's son; York's other sons kill young Clifford). But its thrust, as we see it here, is ever onward. When the ominous bird of York's prophecy takes its final flight in Richard III, the primary pattern of retribution will be highlighted through recollections of the dreadful past—the awful history that takes its inexorable toll on that play's present. In these two plays, however, where that “history” is itself taking place, vengeance scarcely keeps the past alive even in the minds of those who pursue it. Here, rather than serving as a vehicle to carry the remembered past into the present, personal revenge tends to stifle whatever recourse to history might otherwise make its claim on these contentious lords' allegiance. Warwick's reversal at the French court is symptomatic in this respect.

Though the memory of such a recent hero as Talbot and all recollections of earlier English valor are blotted, rased, and defaced from the vengeful and ambitious minds that dominate here, Henry V's heritage cannot be totally ignored by those who squabble over his leavings. Still, it is surprising how little positive use even the Lancastrians make of “that ever-living man of memory.” True, Henry is repeatedly recalled by way of blaming his singularly unambitious and charitable son for not being like him. But the focus here is always reproach for what has been lost, never encouragement to emulation, as we see when the dying Clifford switches the blame from father to son in the application of his sunny simile:

O Phoebus, hadst thou never given consent
That Phaeton should check thy fiery steeds,
Thy burning car never had scorched the earth!
And, Henry, hadst thou swayed as kings should do,
Or as thy father and his father did,
Giving no ground unto the house of York,
They never then had sprung like summer flies.

(3, II, vi, 11-17)

Even when Clifford does exhort his reluctant leader to be made of sterner stuff and cites Henry IV and Henry V in the process, he cites them only as the winners of all that Henry VI is giving away, not as role models. Rather, in keeping with his own ferocious spirit, Clifford holds up the lion, the forest bear, the lurking serpent, and all such “unreasonable creatures” for poor Henry to imitate in defense of his son's birthright: “Make them your precedent” (3, II, ii, 9-42). Henry is provoked into responding with the tetralogy's most radical statement on the whole question of heritage: “I’ll leave my son my virtuous deeds behind, / And would my father had left me no more” (49-50). But the potentially positive alternative to inherited martial heroics that glimmers briefly in these lines is subverted, as in Henry's other saintly moments, by clear indications that he is shrinking (half-petulantly here) from his proper responsibility:

For all the rest is held at such a rate
As brings a thousandfold more care to keep
Than in possession any jot of pleasure.

(51-53)

Only twice in the long course of these two plays is Henry V recalled in something like the terms of renewal and inspiration that informed Talbot's heroic ideal, and in both instances irony crowds in from the prevailing context. Toward the end of Part Three, Oxford sees the lineaments of the hero king reborn in his grandson, the Lancastrian Prince Edward:

O brave young prince, thy famous grandfather
Doth live again in thee. Long mayst thou live
To bear his image and renew his glories.

(V, iv, 52-54)

But Oxford's bright hope only sets up the cruel reversal of the very next scene in which Edward of York, finding the captured young prince's likeness in his railing mother rather than his famous grandfather, leads his eager brothers' murderous assault on the boy. And toward the end of Part Two, Clifford Senior had used the name of “Henry Fifth that made all France to quake” to rally Cade's mob back into obedience to the hero's hapless heir. It takes no keener observer than Cade himself, however, to estimate accurately the inspirational force at work here: “Was ever feather so lightly blown to and fro as this multitude?” (IV, viii, 15-54).

Even Cade shows some deference to “Henry the Fifth (in whose time boys went to span-counter for French crowns)” (IV, ii, 145-146). But far from showing what would be, in these plays, a rare susceptibility to the call of heroic history, the mob in general and Cade in particular parody the disregard for history's authority that pervades the nobility, just as they parody other failings in their “betters.” Their larger hostility to learning of any kind, which prompts them to execute everyone who can read and write, caricatures the aristocratic disdain for “nice sharp quillets of the law” that surfaced in Part One's seminal Temple Garden scene. And they threaten to carry out literally the “undoing” of all “books of memory” that Gloucester had so dreaded: “Away, burn all the records of the realm! My mouth shall be the parliament of England” (IV, vii, 11-13). Cade's proclamation is only a blunt extension of York's assertion of will over law or Clifford's avowed disregard for the “right or wrong” of the Lancastrian title he supports. Though Cade does not quite achieve his ultimate solution, he and his “men of Kent” manage to “undo” history in their execution of the learned Lord Say, who appeals to them through the hopeful authority of recorded history:

Hear me but speak, and bear me where’er you will.
Kent, in the Commentaries Caesar writ,
Is termed the civil’st place of all this isle.
Sweet is the country, because full of riches;
The people liberal, valiant, active, wealthy,
Which makes me hope you are not void of pity.

(IV, vii, 53-58)

Cade blots out such hope and effectually contradicts the history on which it is based by beheading Lord Say “an it be but for pleading so well for his life” (98-99).

Given the current state of the government against which they rebel, the mob's grievances are not without their telling points. But whatever truth leaks through their complaint that “the king's council are no good workmen” (IV, ii, 12-13) scarcely sustains their “larger” vision of England's past, present, and future. Concerns that will be given serious consideration in later history plays are reduced here to comic absurdity as Cade and his followers voice them. One such concern is the nostalgic sense of a better past, of a world transformed from what it once was and still ought to be, that will figure so prominently in Richard II. The mob's appeal to “ancient freedom,” to a “merry world” before “gentlemen came up” (IV, viii, 25; ii, 7-8), has nothing of history or memory about it, of course. It flows, rather, with the same impulse that would obliterate all actual history and any record thereof in quest of an Edenic Utopia wherein “all the realm shall be in common” (IV, ii, 62). But if this impulse to cancel “all as all had never been” reflects grotesquely the “sleeping neglection” that blots all recollection of England's heroic heritage among the factious nobles, the mob's sense of a world (or an England) transformed for the worse finds no echo in any higher consciousness in these two plays. Everyone can see that Henry VI falls woefully short of his father, and we watch a process of obvious deterioration as even the familial ties that bound “bloody Clifford” to his father break down and Richard of Gloucester slouches closer to the controlling center of the stage. But, in the general paucity of retrospect, no one seriously recalls a better English past now lost. The only loss widely lamented is that of the lands Henry V had won in France.¹⁰

The other major concern of the second tetralogy that is comically adumbrated through Cade here is the fictive reconstruction of history. When William Stafford accuses Cade of learning from the duke of York the genealogy by which he dubs himself Lord Mortimer, Cade sardonically remarks aside, “He lies, for I invented it myself” (IV, ii, 142-143). But if this cynicism comically reflects the superficiality of York's own recourse to his historical “right,” or the callous lies with which his foes recast honest Gloucester's career as they accuse him before the king (III, i), it does not play into any larger consideration of the fictive reconstruction of history. Rather, the very transparency of Cade's lies or the retrospective falsehood of those who attack Gloucester sets off the implied truth of the few other historical accounts here (e.g., York's recital of his birthright, or even the pirate lieutenant's accusatory review of Suffolk's destructive career in 2, IV, i) which may be openly partisan but are not called into question factually as revisionism will be in later plays.

Again, the more significant fact about historical retrospect in these plays, rather than any particular cast given its few occurrences, is its relative absence. Prophecy and anticipation abound, as in the “hardly attained and hardly understood” oracles conjured up by the hapless duchess of Gloucester (2, I, iv), or Gloucester's more lucid forevision of England's troubles at his downfall (2, III, i), or Elizabeth's false hopes for “Edward's offspring in … [her] womb” (3, IV, iv, 18), or Henry's canny truths foretold about those future mighty opposites, Henry Richmond (3, IV, vi) and Richard Gloucester (3, V, vi), or Richard's own villainous plans (3, III, ii; V, vi). Such forevision, true and false, is a more telling presence here than remembrance of things past. Gloucester's image of a nation “undoing all as all had never been” is only an exaggeration of the essential truth about his England's neglect of its history. In the context of Part One, where Talbot had given such prominence to the idea of heroic renewal, its absence here seems a severe loss. In their own right, however, Parts Two and Three do not call pointed attention to the loss of the past. They simply show us an England with little or no sense of its own heritage. One curious symptom of this national oblivion is the persistent recourse to classical and mythical models. With no evident consciousness of the Black Prince or Cordelion, no Arthur or “stout Pendragon” to inspire them, these embattled Englishmen call on the whole lexicon of the ancients to characterize themselves. Margaret styles herself a Dido to Suffolk's bewitching Ascanius (2, III, ii, 114-118), and Suffolk places his death in line with Tully's, Caesar's, and Pompey's (2, IV, i, 136-139). Young Clifford will unite in himself that incongruous pair, Medea and Aeneas (2, V, ii, 58-65). Examples are ubiquitous, and none more wonderful, surely, than that of Henry sending Warwick off as his “Hector and … [his] Troy's true hope” while he remains in London with his “loving citizens” like “modest Dian circled with her nymphs” (3, IV, viii, 19-25). Such allusive fertility makes the lack of reference to English prototypes all the more remarkable.

Loss or simple lack, the neglect of their past is surely one among the failings of these nobles, who are “no good workmen” indeed. In a rare retrospect, Edward signals the end of Part Three by reviewing his bloody path to “England's royal throne,” falsely interpreting this extirpation of Lancastrians as his “footstool of security” (3, V, vii, 1-14) and smugly oblivious of the deadly intentions Richard mutters aside to us. Even less than his ambitious father does Richard care for history and its claims, which oppress him as a “thorny wood” through which he will “hew … [his] way out with a bloody axe” (3, III, ii, 174-181). In his stance toward history and its authority, as in so many other respects, Richard is the nadir toward which this self-destructive English polity has been plummeting.

Notes

1. On the heroic style of this speech and the Henry VI trilogy, see James C. Bulman, The Heroic Idiom of Shakespearean Tragedy (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1985), 26-50.

2. Any argument about this play and the Henry VI trilogy (or first tetralogy) must have constant reference to two fine studies: Edward I. Berry, Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), and David Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: “Henry VI” and Its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). My major disagreement with both, implicit in this last paragraph, may not be susceptible to absolute demonstration one way or the other. Both of them (Riggs with reference to the humanistic tradition of heroic achievement he traces through Tamburlaine to these plays) see the deterioration of England's polity through the trilogy as a matter of historical process that seems, as they describe it, to have a momentum carrying the characters along with it. Without denying the clear sense of progressive decay and its momentum, my argument posits the continued possibility of better or worse choices, particularly with respect to emulation of historic models and a positive regard for the past's relationship to the present. About the portrayed results, of course, there can be no disagreement, however the causes are interpreted and weighted.

3. David Kastan sees Talbot's death as signalling the failure of heroic exemplary history: Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982), 18-21. I accept Lucy's insistence on the failure of those who should support Talbot and live up to the ideal, rather than the failure of the ideal itself, as the play's primary emphasis here (IV, iii, 47-52).

4. For a more extended argument about the varying effects of soliloquies on an audience's point of view, see my Engagement with Knavery: Point of View in “Richard III,” “The Jew of Malta,” “Volpone,” and “The Revenger's Tragedy” (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 10-11.

5. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. McKerrow, 1: 212.

6. On the characteristic inconclusiveness of the histories, see David Scott Kastan, “The Shapes of Time: Form and Value in the Shakespearean History Play,” CompD 7 (1973-74): 259-277, and Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time. Among the histories, however, 1 Henry VI's inconclusive ending is especially notable.

7. Here my view is clearly at odds with Berry's “inexorable law” of disintegration (Patterns of Decay, 52) and Riggs on “the dramatist's continuing discovery of an historical process that followed naturally from the extension of heroic ideals into Tudor politics” (Shakespeare's Heroical Histories, 129), although these particular phrases are applied to Parts 2 and 3. And my understanding of Talbot is much more in the spirit of Nashe than of John W. Blanpied, Time and the Artist in Shakespeare's English Histories (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983). Blanpied has Talbot metatheatrically exposed through the very flatness of his characterization as “the kind of hero you can only celebrate in memoriam” and “something of an embarrassment” onstage (29).

8. My phrasing here leaves out of account the degree to which lineage, or parentage, figured in the traditional idea of heroic renewal on which Shakespeare drew. See Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories, 24, 27, 62-92. Sigurd Burckhardt argues that Talbot and Shakespeare reach beyond the play's customary ceremonial style in the scene with the countess toward a more viable kind of style and action: “‘I Am But Shadow of Myself’: Ceremony and Design in 1 Henry VI,” MLQ 28 (1967): 139-158. James A. Ridell, in “Talbot and the Countess of Auvergne,” SQ 28 (1977): 51-57, “corrects” Burckhardt, but in a way that ignores the more interesting reach of Burckhardt's argument.

9. Though I feel compelled here to register my personal reservations about the distinction in kind between Clifford's bloody revenge and Talbot's “bloody massacre” (1HVI, II, ii, 18), the plays surely intend the distinction between such personal revenge and battle against the national enemy to be clear and certain, even when Talbot speaks of “revenge” in the latter case (11). Berry notes Clifford's echoes and violations of Talbot's model as signals of the “new world” emerging at the end of 2 Henry VI (Patterns of Decay, 50-51). I would reserve the term new world, suggesting a fundamental change in the condition of things, for Richard II, where it is used in the play (IV, i, 78), and would speak here rather of deterioration which is not ultimately incurable or irreversible.

10. Margaret's lament for “former golden days” now lost refers to the sorry turn in her personal fortunes, not to a past when things were generally better, as Gaunt's and York's laments in Richard II will do.