SOURCE: “Stagecraft and Imagery in Shakespeare's Henry VI,” in Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 23, 1993, pp. 65-79.

[In the essay below, Dessen argues for the integrity of the Henry VI plays based upon the possibilities offered by theatrical interpretation.]

When dealing with Shakespeare's Henry VI on the page or on the stage, a critic, an editor, or a director immediately confronts the question of the integrity of the three plays as they have survived in the two quartos (among the earliest of Shakespeare's works to appear in print) and the First Folio (where Part One first appears). Since the eighteenth century, scholars and theatrical professionals have shown little confidence in or enthusiasm for these histories as intact entities, worthy of analysis as discrete units, but rather have either lumped them together as one item that can be dealt with summarily or raided them so as to appropriate detachable elements that suit the interpreter's agendas. For example, directors often graft Richard of Gloucester's speeches from Part Three on to Richard III (the Olivier movie is the best known but by no means the only instance); several recent scholars have written tellingly about Joan de Pucelle;¹ and other distinctive parts have been singled out for attention or analysis, with one line (‘The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers’, 2 Henry VI, IV. 2. 70)² achieving a cult status. Admittedly, starting in the 1960s and 1970s a few academic critics have argued forcefully on behalf of thematic or imagist integrity;³ at least two directors (Terry Hands, Jane Howell) have treated the scripts with respect. But for the most part both scholars and theatrical professionals (weaned on standards and assumptions derived from subsequent plays in the canon) have only intermittent interest in this trilogy other than as context for Richard III.

The reasons for such neglect or atomization are no secret. For the academic critic, the interpretative tools that for generations have worked well for later Shakespeare plays, whether for analysis of ‘character’, imagery, or structure, do not provide satisfying results when applied to Henry VI. As to the latter, the Elizabethan fondness for episodic structure or multiple unity here collides with a post-Elizabethan prizing of concentration and subordination of elements (as seen also in comparable discomfort among critics with the rebel scenes in 2 Henry IV or the Aumerle rebellion in Richard II). Despite a long series of apologias (starting in the early 1950s with H. T. Price),⁴ interpreters have therefore sensed formlessness rather than coherence in this trilogy (a problem only ‘solved’ with the emergence of Richard of Gloucester as a focal figure).

Such an introduction, as a reader of scholarly essays will recognize, is a prelude to The Answer, a formulation that will set the record straight now and forever so that The Problem will no longer bother future readers. Sadly (for I would be delighted to set things aright), such is not the case, for I lack the insights that would enable me to descend from Mount Sinai to deliver the reader of these plays to the promised land. Rather, I offer a paradox linked to a closed loop, a version of the infamous hermeneutic circle. Thus, perhaps more than with any other group of Shakespeare plays, the key to each of the three parts of Henry VI as a discrete unit, a play with its own distinctive shape and rationale (regardless of the interpretation eventually to be drawn from that shape and rationale), lies in the play as an onstage event, the play as seen-heard rather than the play-as-read (and few will quarrel with the limitations of this trilogy as plays-to-be-read). Such a claim, in turn, usually leads to a paeon on behalf of performance-oriented interpretation. That approach, however (although now much in fashion), is keyed to often unexamined assumptions drawn from twentieth-century theatre, whereas the rationale behind Elizabethan staging (especially in the early 1590s when that rationale was still taking shape) can be different, in ways both subtle and obvious, from what we take for granted today. In my terms, Shakespeare, his fellow players, and his playgoers shared a theatrical vocabulary accessible, even obvious, then but easily blurred or eclipsed today.

Paradoxically, one consequence of this situation is that the staging of these three plays in our theatres rather than helping to bridge this gap in our understanding can instead widen it (so as to become part of the problem rather than part of the solution). When treating these plays as playscripts to be enacted by modern actors before today's audiences, theatrical professionals inevitably make many adjustments that in turn eliminate or blur elements important for the original strategy. My point is not to fault actors and directors (who to survive must take into account the theatrical vocabulary they share with their paying customers and whose negative attitude towards these plays has been heavily conditioned by critics, scholars, and editors) but rather to lament that what can be a valuable tool for investigating other scripts (seeing the play-on-the-page come to life on the stage) is often denied the would-be interpreter of Henry VI.

Two recent and highly visible productions can serve as instructive paradigms. Both Michael Bogdanov (English Shakespeare Company 1987-88) and Adrian Noble (Royal Shakespeare Company 1988-89) elected to present the first tetralogy to their audiences by condensing four plays into three, with Richard III standing alone and the three parts of Henry VI compressed into two plays (the ESC's plays were entitled The House of Lancaster and The House of York, the RSC's Henry VI and The Rise of Edward IV). The choices necessitated when setting up such compressed versions of event-filled history plays can then be instructive (e.g., what is deemed essential versus what is treated as disposable), especially in the context of the commercial and artistic success of the RSC's 1977-78 Terry Hands Henry VI trilogy (played ‘warts and all’ with few cuts) and the significant achievement of Jane Howell's first tetralogy for the BBC's ‘The Shakespeare Plays’ (one of the strongest items in that series). The plays are do-able, as demonstrated by Hands (along with Alan Howard, Helen Mirren, Emrys James, Peter McEnery, Julian Glover, and others),⁵ Howell, and Pat Patton (whose Part Three in 1977 was one of the strongest shows I have seen in fifteen years of playgoing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival).

As experienced directors, both Bogdanov and Noble were much concerned with the commercial as well as the artistic advantages of presenting three rather than four plays, so the choice to streamline the received script came easily. Some of Noble's rationale is set forth in the preface to the printed edition of his script where he describes himself as continuing a process started by Shakespeare. For example, Shakespeare saw ‘the dramatic advantages of shape and focus achieved by running several events into one’, a process, Noble observes, ‘which we have taken further’. In his conclusion, moreover, he notes: ‘We all had to learn to value narrative over “character moments” and to value storytelling over psychology.’⁶ Clearly, a different rationale is at work behind these plays, one that demands some adjustments from both the modern theatrical professional and the playgoer. Moreover, any compression of three event-filled plays into two is going to necessitate major omissions and adjustments (‘running several events into one’).

Both adaptations of the Henry VI material, in turn, followed the same general pattern. The material from Part One was allotted roughly ninety minutes so as to be completed by the first interval; the second half of the first play then contained the first three acts of Part Two; the last two acts of Part Two and the first two acts of Part Three (with much restitching of elements) occupied the pre-interval section of play number two; the remaining three acts of Part Three then finished the job.

Given such a master plan, certain problems emerge, problems that, in turn, can provide some insights into distinctive features of the three plays. First, the structural integrity of Shakespeare's Part Two was undermined. For example, the prophecies of Act I Scene 4 were not fulfilled. Both directors cut the references to Walter-water; indeed, Noble cut the entire scene (IV. 1), so that even though Suffolk's head did appear in Margaret's hands, the playgoer has no clue as to how he died (the plot summary in the programme informed the reader that Suffolk ‘is murdered aboard ship as he leaves England’). Somerset, moreover, died in the next play (with no reference to castles or ale-house signs). The kind of implicit structure provided by the working out of prophecies or riddles (best seen in Macbeth) was therefore gone.

The same was true for the genesis of the Cade rebellion. Noble provided a powerful image to open Edward IV, with the Cade supporters rising from grated traps and filling the stage, but this subterranean emergence meant something very different at the outset of a new play as opposed to being experienced in Act IV Scene 2 of a continuum. Similarly, Bogdanov began his second play with a train station scene to show York's return from Ireland (V. 1), then switched to a Cade meeting hall rally (IV. 2). Gone therefore from both productions was any link between this new force unleashed upon England and the deaths of Gloucester, the Cardinal, and Suffolk or the earlier machinations of York; gone as well was any analogy to Julius Caesar where again a major political murder at the centre of the play comparable to the assassination of Gloucester opens the way to violence and war. To look closely at such compressions is therefore to bring into focus Shakespeare's sense of structure or cause and effect.

Both the RSC and ESC versions economized upon battle scenes in the second play so as to combine the first battle of St Albans (that ends Shakespeare's Part Two) with the battles that begin Part Three (and this alteration necessitated a host of other significant changes).⁷ The most telling consequence of this compression was that a high percentage of the violence in Shakespeare's Parts Two and Three was now concentrated in the ninety-minute segment that begins the second play, for this stretch contained all the violence of Part Two (e.g., the Cade scenes, done by Noble with many onstage decapitations and a host of severed heads on poles, York versus Clifford, Richard versus Somerset) and then most of the violence in Part Three (the battles of Acts I and II, the murders of Rutland and York, the death of young Clifford). At the interval of Noble's production, one observer (who did not know Shakespeare's script) asked me: ‘What are we watching—a Renaissance Full Metal Jacket?’ Controlled use of onstage violence in the original scripts has (in this segment) yielded to theatrical overkill.

Of the many changes and elisions I shall consider several small choices that had a disproportionately large impact. Thus, Bogdanov pared down considerably the ‘common man’ scenes from the first two acts of Part Two (although, unlike Noble, he did retain the Simpcox episode), so that Peter and his master Horner disappeared from view. No charge of treason was therefore brought against York by means of Horner's reported comments, so that, in turn, no particular reason remained for choosing Somerset over York as Regent of France (Gloucester recommends to the king that Somerset get the regency ‘because in York this breeds suspicion’ (I. 3. 203-04)). Bogdanov's King Henry, moreover, not Gloucester, provided ‘this doom’ (l. 202). Although on the surface only an innocuous series of cuts and changes, such giving of the decision to Henry had a significant effect upon the portrayal of three major figures. First, Henry appears much more decisive as a politician than is the case anywhere else, a shift that sets up a very different progression to his one strong moment when, after recovering from his swoon at the news of Gloucester's death, he banishes Suffolk in Act III Scene 2. Secondly, Gloucester loses one of his two highly visible judgements (the other coming with Simpcox) and hence some of his special stature, a diminution that contributed to one of the weak spots in this production. Thirdly, an insight into the danger posed by York is eliminated, as was also true in some other cuts made by Bogdanov (most notably the elimination of York's speech that ends Act I Scene 1 and the paring down of Gloucester's final speech in Act III Scene 1, including his reference to ‘dogged York, that reaches at the moon, b Whose overweening arm I have plucked back’ (ll. 158-59)). Having Henry deliver the ‘doom’ therefore has a significant impact upon three of the key figures in this play and upon the dynamics of Part Two as a whole.

Comparable small but telling changes can be noted in Noble's production. In both Shakespeare's Part Three (IV. 8. 38-50) and Noble's adaptation, Henry VI has a speech in which he naïvely concludes that, because he has been mild and merciful, the people will support him rather than Edward in the coming conflict. In Noble's version, Henry exits after this speech (so some playgoers were surprised to see him turn up in prison a few scenes later); in Shakespeare's scene, however, he is immediately confronted and arrested by the Yorkists (whom the people have supported) so that the speech serves as the first half of a one-two punch, with the second element, the deflation, gone from Noble's version. Similarly, in Shakespeare's Part Three, a Henry VI anxious to relinquish kingly power gives over his political authority to both Warwick and Clarence (IV. 6), but in Noble's version only Warwick is so designated. Shortly thereafter (V. 1) Clarence arrives at Coventry (where his brothers are besieging Warwick) and decides to change sides, forsaking Warwick in favour of the Yorkist cause. Does it not make a difference to our understanding why Clarence makes this switch whether he is or is not a sharer in kingly power? At the least, a figure who has left his brothers in order to gain half a kingdom (however provisionally) is not faced with the same choice as a figure who has played second fiddle to an older brother and now is to be second again to Warwick (as in Noble's stripped down version).

Such choices and resulting problems are (perhaps) inevitable given the squeezing of three plays into two, but that three-into-two choice is itself a product of a series of assumptions (both aesthetic and commercial) about the dramaturgy and coherence of these early Shakespeare plays. What if, in contrast, these histories do have a distinctive theatrical shape or logic (as suggested above in my account of the prophecies and the role of Gloucester's assassination in Part Two), albeit one not as accessible today as that found in later comparable plays?

To pursue such a defence of the integrity of these plays I will focus upon a few distinctive and revealing configurations. My emphasis will be upon scenes and images that, although easily blurred for a reader today, would be hard for a playgoer in the 1590s to miss; that depend more upon visual-theatrical than upon poetic-verbal effects (or are underdeveloped in poetic-verbal terms); and that were omitted or blurred significantly in the RSC and ESC productions (and, in a few instances, were realized meaningfully in other productions).

Let me start with one of the least discussed moments in the most maligned of the three plays, 1 Henry VI. At the nadir of her fortunes, just before her capture by York, Joan de Pucelle appeals for help to a group of onstage ‘Fiends’ (V. 3. 7. s.d.), but in response these fiends, according to the Folio stage directions, ‘walk, and speak not’, ‘hang their heads’, ‘shake their heads’, and finally ‘depart’ (s.ds at ll. 12, 17, 19, 23). This exchange has not fared well on the page or on the stage, for to deal with this script is inevitably to run foul of this scene and this appeal-rejection that in several ways tests the reflexes of today's interpreters. The Folio's call for fiends and for specific reactions is unusually clear (and presumably would have posed few problems in the 1590s for playgoers attuned to Doctor Faustus), but Elizabethan onstage presentation of the supernatural repeatedly strains ‘our’ paradigms of credibility (and canons of taste), with this moment a particular challenge.

Directors have therefore tinkered with the Folio signals. In Howell's rendition for television, Joan speaks her lines while staring at the camera so that no supernatural entities are in sight to walk, refuse to speak, hang their heads, and eventually depart. In Noble's rendition, various onstage corpses from the previous battle rose as if animated to provide an onstage audience but without the reactions to Joan's pleas specified in the Folio. In the Hands production, amid the onstage cannons that dominated the battlefield set, Joan offered herself to the fiends who appeared suddenly ‘looking like gas-masked soldiers from the French trenches of the First World War’.⁸ Bogdanov cut the fiends and altered the text, so that, alone on stage and looking at the audience, his Joan directed her appeal not to any diabolic entities but rather to the Virgin Mary, a change that eliminated any infernal climax for this sequence.⁹ In contrast, in his 1975 Oregon Shakespeare Festival production, Will Huddleston introduced his fiends earlier (thinly disguised as Joan's followers, later her torturers) and then did stage the rejection; at the close of the play, moreover, the fiends make a final appearance above (with midnight tolling in the background) to snarl at the playgoers.

Even to a casual reader the interaction between Joan and the fiends leaps off the page in vivid (and, to many, offensive) fashion: a good example of what I term theatrical italics. To explore the potential in this moment, consider Joan and her devils not as a one-shot effect but as the climactic example of a larger progression of images and moments that starts in Act II From her first appearance Joan has claimed supernatural powers (see I. 2. 72-92), a claim tested in the first meeting between Joan and Talbot that results in a stand-off; still, Joan scorns his strength (I. 5. 15) and leads her troops to victory at Orleans. Moments later, Talbot, aided by Bedford and Burgundy, scales the walls and regains the town, so that a united English force wins back what had just been lost. The three leaders working together therefore accomplish what Talbot, facing Joan alone, could not.

Shakespeare then provides a gloss on both this victory and the larger problem of unity-disunity by means of Talbot's interview with the Countess of Auvergne. Her trap for Talbot fails, as he points out, because she has only caught ‘Talbot's shadow’, not his substance. The set of terms is repeated throughout the remainder of the scene (e.g., ‘No, no, I am but shadow of myself. b You are deceived, my substance is not here’) and is explained by the appearance of his soldiers, at which point he observes:

Are you now persuaded
That Talbot is but a shadow of himself?
These are his substance, sinews, arms, and strength,
With which he yoketh your rebellious necks.

(II. 3. 45)

The individual standing alone, no matter how heroic (one thinks of Coriolanus), is but a shadow without the substance of his supporters, his army, his country.¹⁰

This play, however (as two generations of critics have reminded us), is about division, not unity, a division that has already been displayed in the split between Winchester and Gloucester and that widens in the Temple Garden scene (immediately following Talbot's lecture to the countess), with its symbolic plucking of red and white roses. The figures who had joined Talbot in the victory at Orleans, moreover, soon disappear (Bedford dies, Burgundy changes sides). Factionalism thrives, to the extent that the division between York and Somerset (unhistorically) undoes Talbot himself who, in the terms of Act II Scene 3, is denied his substance and must face death (along with his son) as a shadow of his heroic self. Sir William Lucy's listing of Talbot's titles (IV. 7. 60-71) can then be mocked by Joan as ‘a silly stately style indeed’, for ‘him that thou magnifi’st with all these titles, b Stinking and flyblown lies here at our feet’ (ll. 72, 75-76).

Joan's scene with her devils follows less than a hundred lines after her exchange with Lucy. With the French forces fleeing the conquering York, all Joan can do is call upon her ‘speedy helpers’ or ‘familiar spirits’ to help with their ‘accustomed diligence’, but neither the offer of her blood, with which she has fed them in the past, a member lopped off, her body, or even her soul will gain the needed support. She therefore concludes:

My ancient incantations are too weak,
And hell too strong for me to buckle with.
Now, France, thy glory droopeth to the dust.

(V. 3. 1)

No one makes grandiose claims for the imagery of this sprawling play. But a verbal patterning involving shadow and substance is clearly set forth in Act II and echoed thereafter (see Alencon's speech, V. 4. 133-37); moreover, Talbot eventually falls (and France ultimately is lost to England) because of divisions whereby ‘substance’ is denied and the hero must stand alone as shadow of himself. In her scene with the fiends, Joan too is deserted, denied by those who formerly supported her. Like Talbot, her heroic status cannot exist alone, so she becomes a mere shepherd's daughter, not the figure who raised the siege at Orleans and was a match for Talbot in battle. The denial by the fiends is here equivalent to the squabble between York and Somerset that undoes Talbot, a link that can be reinforced through the staging. For example, what if the fiends' scripted reactions to Joan's offer echo similar walking apart, hanging and shaking of heads, and departures by York and Somerset in Act IV Scene 3 and Act IV Scene 4 in response to Lucy's pleas on behalf of Talbot? If so, the playgoer would see two or three parallel failures by first Lucy and then Joan, rejections that visibly set up the deaths of the two previously unbeatable or ‘heroic’ figures. Just as Lucy fails to get the necessary support, a failure that means Talbot must give way to the new factions, so Joan fails to get the support that she too desperately needs and must give way to the third Frenchwoman, Margaret (who appears immediately upon Joan's exit with York). However interpreted in theological or political terms, these highly visible fiends can function as part of an ongoing pattern of images or configurations linked to the central themes of the play.

Of the three plays, Part One has been the most disparaged, but in both the Bogdanov and Noble three-into-two adjustments Part Two suffered the greatest damage because its elements were split into two separate plays. As noted earlier, such a split calls attention to the different kinds of through-lines or pay-offs set up in earlier scenes and realized later (as is most obvious with the prophecies). Other cuts and changes made by the two directors call attention to comparable links and images. For example, Noble manufactured a fresh image in Act IV Scene 2, for his Cade not only knighted himself (ll. 107-08) but also knighted Dick the Butcher, underscoring even further the indictment of titles and hierarchy. As part of his streamlining of Act V of Part Two, however, Noble cut Henry VI's knighting of Alexander Iden (V. 1. 78); in the first play he had also cut Henry's grant of a dukedom to a kneeling Suffolk as a reward for bringing Margaret as bride (Part Two, I. 1. 61-63). Shakespeare's own sequence of giving new titles to kneeling figures was therefore gone, with two instances of number two in the series but no number one and no number three.

All three plays but particularly Part Two gain much of their distinctive shape from such visible repetitions, but with many of these elements eliminated, transposed, or located in two different plays (and hence two different evenings) much of that rationale was gone. For example, Gloucester tells his wife that ‘I must offend before I be attainted’, for his foes, no matter how powerful, ‘could not procure me any scathe b So long as I am loyal, true, and crimeless’ (II. 4. 59, 62-63). Two acts later, Lord Say tells the king and Buckingham: ‘The trust I have is in mine innocence, b And therefore am I bold and resolute’ (IV. 4. 59-60). At their next appearances, however, both figures are accused and swiftly convicted by their enemies and are murdered shortly thereafter (with Gloucester's body and Say's head subsequently brought onstage). If such elements, however, are pared down or cut completely and placed in two separate plays, no such analogy or structural link is available (whatever interpretative spin one chooses to place upon it).

Part Three suffered the least from adaptation and compression, for several clearly linked moments were retained and were in the same play. Thus, in Shakespeare's Act I the Lancastrians led by young Clifford kill a Yorkist child (Rutland) and the symbol of the Yorkist cause (Richard); in Act V, the Lancastrians do the same: the three brothers kill Prince Edward, and in the following scene Richard of Gloucester murders Henry VI in the Tower. In Patton's Oregon production a highly visible detail added to this patterning, for Margaret's taunting of York with the napkin bearing Rutland's blood left blood on Richard's face. Such a bloody face was then seen again on the father contemplating the son he has killed (II. 5) and most tellingly on Margaret herself after she had kissed her murdered son Edward (V. 5).

The streamlining occasioned by making three plays into two, however, did take its toll. Indeed, what may seem to the adapter redundancies and hence cuttable episodes looked at another way can add up to a distinctive feature of this play. For example, in his speech to his captors in Act III Scene I (pared down in both versions) Henry VI first raises questions about oaths and obedience but then laments the frailty of human nature:

Look, as I blow this feather from my face
And as the air blows it to me again,
Obeying with my wind when I do blow
And yielding to another when it blows,
Commanded always by the greater gust—
Such is the lightness of you common men.
But do not break your oaths

(III. 1. 84)

Many disparate episodes in the next two acts provide demonstrations of this thesis: that, regardless of their pretensions about oaths and principles, feather-like men and women are ‘commanded always by the greater gust’. In the next scene (III. 2) that greater gust is King Edward's lust for the beautiful widow that takes precedence over political allegiances, most notably his bond with Warwick; that turnabout is quickly paralleled in Warwick's rapid switch in reaction to this disgrace in which he tells his hated enemy Queen Margaret ‘let former grudges pass, b And henceforth I am thy true servitor’ and she responds: ‘Warwick, these words have turned my hate to love, b And I forgive and quite forget old faults' (III. 3. 195-201). The most obvious example comes when Clarence, who marches in ready to fight against his own brothers on behalf of Warwick, with little ado throws his red rose at his former ally and rejoins the Yorkists (eliciting Richard's delicious line: ‘Welcome, good Clarence. This is brotherlike’ (V. 1. 105)).

Easily lost in this sequence of events, however, is Act IV Scene 7, a scene omitted from the two streamlined versions (and also from Patton's Oregon production) but one of the gems of Howell's rendition. Here Edward gains access to the city of York by vowing that he has come as duke, not as a would-be king (‘I challenge nothing but my dukedom, b As being well content with that alone’ (ll. 23-24)), but the arrival and threatened departure of Sir John Montgomery (‘Then fare you well, for I will hence again. b I came to serve a king and not a duke’ (ll. 48-49)) puts Edward on the spot (in a manner that closely parallels the dilemma faced by Edward's father in Act I Scene 2: whether to keep his bargain with Henry VI or seek the crown now). In the spirit of ‘like father, like son’ Edward quickly caves in to the urgings of Richard and Hastings, so that, in Howell's rendition, with drums sounding in the background, the Mayor (rather than a soldier) shakily reads the proclamation of Edward's kingship and Montgomery, visibly itching for action, stands by impatiently, snatches away the paper, and offers his open challenge to single combat. The rapidity of Edward's switch in his professed intentions yields both dark comedy and a telling insight into the value of oaths and protestations in this political jungle.

In the spirit of Henry's speech on ‘the greater gust’, the sequence of turnabouts by key figures such as Edward, Warwick, and Clarence heightens the uncertainties and lack of any firm principles or beliefs in this Darwinian society and, if played in full, helps to explain the rise of Gloucester and the genesis of Richard III and Richard III (the first, longest, and most famous of Gloucester's speeches is positioned just after Edward's decision to marry his widow in Act III Scene 2). The streamlined versions tell the same story (often with considerable panache), but the repeated betrayals or apostasies (like the recapitulation in Act V of the brutal killings of Act I) are the bones and sinews from which this play takes its distinctive shape. To cut the Countess of Auvergne, Peter-Horner, and Sir John Montgomery is to economize on time and personnel so as to enhance the narrative pace, but the price-tag involves the elimination of paradigms that, if attended to, can call attention to central themes and images. Whether with shadow-substance in Part One, the many analogous situations in Part Two, or the action following Henry's feather speech in Part Three, the repetitions, even apparent redundancies (according to today's sensibilities), are the essence of the plays.¹¹

In calling attention to such losses, my goal is to bring into focus a broader and deeper interpretative problem. The stage directions for the fiends' reactions to Joan's pleas are unusually explicit, but the absence of any comparable signals for the reactions of York and Somerset to Lucy's pleas for help makes any claims about linkage between the two moments conjectural. Such lack of specific signals, however, is the norm in the extant playscripts, for in most cases clear indications of stage business or properties have not survived. Such gaps in our knowledge of what may have been obvious in the 1590s are compounded by the changes in theatrical vocabulary between then and now, for inevitably our inferences about how an Elizabethan company would have staged X are heavily conditioned by how we would stage X.

As a particularly useful example, consider the moment in Part Three when Edward IV, having been surprised and captured by Warwick and Clarence, is carried onstage ‘in his gown, sitting in a chair’ (IV. 3. 27. s. d.). In the Howell television rendition, Edward is bound to his chair so that the image for the spectator is that of a prisoner (comparable to Gloucester in the blinding scene of King Lear). Howell's choice makes immediate sense to a viewer today, but it may also blur a distinctive effect keyed to the original stage conventions.

For what we today do not recognize is that, in the age of Shakespeare, bringing a figure onstage in a chair was the primary way of signalling ‘enter sick’ or ‘as if sick’. To cite only a few of the many examples, in Westward Ho Mistress Tenterhood, pretending to be sick, calls for ‘a chaire, a chaire’; a companion says ‘shees sicke and taken with an Agony’. In Othello, after ‘finding’ the wounded Cassio, Iago cries ‘O for a chair b To bear him easily hence’ (V. 1. 82-83) and mentions the chair twice more (ll. 96, 98); when the chair arrives, he adds: ‘Some good man bear him carefully from hence. b I’ll fetch the general's surgeon’ (ll. 99-100) and ‘O, bear him out o’th’ air’ (l. 104); the 1622 Quarto (but not the Folio) then directs Cassio in the next scene to be brought in ‘in a Chaire’ (N1^r). Elsewhere in Shakespeare's plays, chairs are specified for sick and dying figures in 1 Henry VI (II. 5. o. s. d., III. 2. 40. s. d.), 2 Henry VI (II. 1. 66. s. d.), and King Lear (IV. 7. 20. s. d., TLN 2771). Examples are also plentiful in the plays of Fletcher and Brome and can be found as well in Peele, Chapman, Dekker, Heywood, Marston, Massinger, Markham, Haughton, and Ford and in many anonymous plays.¹²

To return to the scene in Part Three, when Edward is carried onstage ‘in his gown, sitting in a chair’, the initial signal for the original spectator would have been that this figure is entering ‘sick’ or ‘as sick’. In this instance, however, the signals would be misleading, for Edward is embarrassed and vulnerable but not sick. But keep in mind that this play starts and ends with throne scenes, with that royal seat a symbol of the disorder in a kingdom in which three different figures are seen sitting upon the English throne. Indeed, in the opening scene the titular king, Henry VI, comes onstage to discover Richard of York seated upon his throne, an initial usurpation that typifies what is to follow. The presence of a king (or pseudo-king) brought onstage in what appears initially to be a sick-chair is therefore more than a momentary trick played upon the spectator. Rather, that initial confusion of throne-chair and sick-chair calls attention to an important set of associations that links disease to kings and power-brokers, associations reinforced by the unkinging, rekinging, and unkinging of Henry VI in the last three acts. Memories of both the opening confusion about the throne and the momentary sick-chair image of Act IV Scene 3 should then inform the final moments, where the surface order assumed by Edward (‘Now am I seated as my soul delights, b Having my country's peace and brothers' loves' (V 7. 35-36)) is undercut by a continuing sense of the kingdom's diseases, as typified in Richard's asides (e.g., ‘I’ll blast his harvest’ (l. 21)). The momentary effect with Edward in his chair therefore reinforces a potentially meaningful iterative pattern that links disease imagery to the throne and to the larger political concerns of the play.

Nor is this sick chair-royal chair image limited to Part Three. Squabbles in the presence of Henry and his throne are a major symptom of what is wrong in Part One, so that in Howell's production Exeter delivers his choric speech on ‘this base and envious discord’ (and recalls the prophecy ‘that Henry born at Monmouth should win all b And Henry born at Windsor should lose all’) while pointing to the empty throne (III. 1. 186-200). The scenes that precede and follow this chaotic activity around the boy-king seated on his throne are instructive. First, Shakespeare presents the plucking of red and white roses by Suffolk and York in the Temple Garden scene (II. 4), a symbolic beginning to the divisions to come. Moments later, Mortimer, who is ‘brought in a chair’ by his jailers (II. 5. o. s. d.), provides a long disquisition to Richard about the Yorkist claim to the throne. This claim, passed from this dying figure to the up-and-coming Richard, is linked visually to a figure in a sick-chair. Mortimer's ominous laying on of hands (see lines 37-38) is immediately followed by our first view of the young Henry VI, presumably on his throne, who is unable to control the squabble between Gloucester and Winchester or the fight, offstage and then onstage, between their servingmen. The one action this vulnerable king does take, however, is to restore Richard to his dukedom, so that the figure bequeathed a claim to the throne in the previous scene by a figure in a sick-chair is now given status and power by a demonstrably weak occupant of the royal seat. This sequence is then extended in the next scene where, during the loss and recapture of Rouen, the dying Bedford is ‘brought in sick in a chair’ (III. 2. 40. s. d.) to witness Falstaff's cowardice and then the English victory. At the climax of this action, ‘Bedford dies and is carried in by two in his chair’ (l. 114. s. d.).

Throughout the play, Henry's ‘throne scenes’ act out his inability to control internal divisions and, hence, England's diseases, but his first appearance in Act III Scene 1, sandwiched between scenes displaying figures dying in their sick-chairs, neatly sums up the problems linked both to the Yorkists' claim to the throne (symbolized by Mortimer) and the dying off of that loyal older generation devoted to the good of the country rather than factional interests (symbolized by Bedford). As with Joan's fiends and Talbot's shadow versus substance, much of the theatrical coherence of this episodic play arises from such linked images and configurations. If the final scene also has an onstage throne (as in Part Three), Suffolk's convincing the king to take Margaret as his bride (made ominous by Suffolk's closing reference to Paris and the implicit analogy between Margaret-Helen and England-Troy) enacts a climactic link between the royal chair and potential diseases to come. Again, even in this early play, a set of associations made accessible by conventional theatrical practice (enter sick) can be used to italicize important meanings and effects.

In Part Two, such chair-throne patterning is present but less emphatic, for Shakespeare uses violent deaths and the Cade rebellion to highlight the kingdom's diseases. The dead or dying Gloucester and Winchester are displayed onstage but (apparently) in sick-beds rather than sick-chairs. The impostor Simpcox, however, enters ‘between two in a chair’ (II. 1. 66. s. d.) in front of a weak king who, early in the same scene, is unable to control the quarrel between Gloucester and Winchester. Humphrey's uncovering of Simpcox's fraud acts out his important role in keeping some semblance of order in England, but, owing to Elinor's disgrace and his own naïvete, Humphrey's position is soon undermined. Simpcox in his chair therefore prepares us for a hapless Henry on his throne who is unable to protect Humphrey or Lord Say (the latter linked to the palsy and ‘full of sickness and diseases’ (IV. 7. 81, 85)); this king is therefore vulnerable to an obvious fraud (Cade) in Act IV and defenceless against a formidable opponent (York) in Act V (so, as a result, Henry finds York seated on his throne in the first scene of Part Three). When the inevitable confrontation does come, York's critique pinpoints the vulnerability of Henry as possessor of the royal seat, for he begins ‘No! thou art not king’, then cites the attributes of kingship (‘That head of thine doth not become a crown; b Thy hand is made to grasp a palmer's staff b And not to grace an awful princely sceptre’), and concludes: ‘Give place. By heaven, thou shalt rule no more b O’er him whom heaven created for thy ruler’ (V. 1. 93, 96-98, 104-05). As in the other two plays, such powerful accusations are enhanced by a subliminal memory of the purportedly lame Simpcox exposed as a fraud and forced to ‘give place’ from his chair (and leap over a stool) by the beadle. The whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, but first an interpreter must have all the parts and some sense of how they might work.

The productions cited in this essay provided a great deal of narrative excitement so as to engage and entertain playgoers (and television viewers) unfamiliar with the scripts. The many cuts and transpositions (along with the telescoping of disparate figures into one to economize on personnel) could be seen as the price-tag for mounting Henry VI at all (although the 1977-78 Hands trilogy provides testimony that three-into-two is not the only available route). In singling out some representative choices, my purpose therefore has not been to mount an indictment of the director-as-vandal. Rather, I have sought to bring into focus both the assets and liabilities of such modern onstage interpretations as a tool for understanding the original dramaturgy, theatrical vocabulary, and potential meanings. For the theatrical historicist, the changes made by Bogdanov and Noble can be especially revealing when the original onstage logic (whether linked to analogical thinking, distinctive images, or signifiers in a lost vocabulary) is no longer seen or appreciated, so that directoral adjustments serve as signposts that point to differing notions of how a play works or how that play is (or should be) put together. Such signposts can be particularly revealing in productions of Henry VI where the overall shape (or sense of organization) may be more in tune with Spenser's The Faerie Queene or Sidney's Arcadia than with Henry V or Hamlet.

The changes made by Bogdanov and Noble can therefore serve as a useful window into an Elizabethan theatrical logic (linked to a 1590s sense of analogy, imagery, and onstage story-telling) that is difficult (at times impossible) to recapture today. Some directoral decisions or adjustments can produce considerable theatrical excitement (and in this area I have not done justice to any of the productions). Other changes, however, fail to achieve the intended goal (a graceful elision of three long, ungainly plays) but rather constitute radical surgery or, for a different metaphor, provide not an adaptation but a translation into a new and different theatrical language. Both Talbot's lecture on shadow versus substance and Henry VI's lament about the feather commanded by the greater gust should serve as chastening thoughts for interpreters of this trilogy on the stage or on the page.

Notes

1. See Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 51-96; Gabriele Bernhard Jackson, ‘Topical Ideology: Witches, Amazons, and Shakespeare's Joan of Arc’, English Literary Renaissance, 18 (1988), 40-65; Nancy A. Gutierrez, ‘Gender and Value in 1 Henry VI: The Role of Joan de Pucelle’, Theatre Journal, 42 (1990), 183-93. For a recent provocative interpretation of one episode in 2 Henry VI, see Craig A. Bernthal, ‘Treason in the Family: The Trial of Thumpe V. Horner’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991), 44-54.

2. Citations from Shakespeare are from The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, general ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).

3. See in particular J. P. Brockbank, ‘The Frame of Disorder: Henry VI’, in Early Shakespeare, ed. by J. R. Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3 (1961), 72-99; David Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: ‘Henry VI’ and its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); and Edward Berry, Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975).

4. Hereward T. Price, ‘Construction in Shakespeare’, University of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology, 17 (1951), 1-42 (pp. 24-37).

5. For accounts of this production see Homer D. Swander, ‘The Rediscovery of Henry VI’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 29 (1978), 146-63; David Daniell, ‘Opening up the text: Shakespeare's Henry VI plays in performance’, Themes in Drama, 1 (1979), 247-77; G. K. Hunter, ‘The Royal Shakespeare Company Plays Henry VI’, Renaissance Drama, 9 (1978), 91-108.

6. The Plantagenets (London and Boston: Faber, 1989), pp. vii, xiv.

7. For example, owing to the transposition of elements young Clifford presented his angry speeches from the beginning of Part Three (e.g., I. 1. 159-60) before the death of his father at the end of Part Two, the event that occasioned his pronouncement that ‘my heart is turned to stone’ (V. 2. 50). Some of the elements from Part Two, V. 1 were retained, but moving and reshaping them eliminated the climactic position of the first confrontation between the parties of York and Lancaster (and one potentially telling element, the choice by Salisbury not to kneel to Henry VI, was gone). To the degree that the sequence of elements is an integral part of theatrical ‘meaning’ and effect, the treatment of the end of Part Two and the beginning of Part Three by both Bogdanov and Noble was a translation rather than an interpretation.

8. Daniell, ‘Opening up the text’, p. 257.

9. Bogdanov did some radical surgery here by transposing the beginning of Act V> Scene 3 to Act V Scene 4 so that one sustained sequence involving Joan followed the Suffolk-Margaret part of Act V Scene 3. The juxtaposition of the two French women remained, but the value of that link was changed (e.g., Joan's capture by York was not immediately followed by Suffolk's capture of Margaret). Bogdanov also cut Joan's shepherd father. His Joan, moreover, had her own distinctive music, but without the Folio fiends as a final comment this production offered no clear signal as to whether that music (and the auspices for her final moments) was holy or witchly. Here, as elsewhere, Bogdanov provided an engaging story, but the original punchline as set up in the Folio had been drastically changed.

10. For treatments of Act II Scene 3, see especially Daniel C. Gerould, ‘Principles of Dramatic Structure in Henry VI’, Educational Theatre Journal, 20 (1968), 376-88 (pp. 379-80); Berry, Patterns of Decay, pp. 1-28; James A. Riddell, ‘Talbot and the Countess of Auvergne’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 28 (1977), 51-57; Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Political Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 1-8.

11. As shrewd, experienced directors, both Bogdanov and Noble were well aware of the opportunities for strong visual links between episodes. For example, Noble had Margery Jourdain's death at the stake (in his first play) repeat the fate of Joan (events divided between Shakespeare's Parts One and Two); also in his first play, the first meeting of Margaret and Suffolk (just before the interval) was echoed in the plays final moments when Margaret cradled Suffolk's severed head. Twice, moreover, Noble found strong images (albeit in two different plays) to convey the price-tag for the power associated with the throne. First, the dead Mortimer (at the end of Shakespeare's Part One, II. 5) descended in his cage-prison, an object then replaced with Henry VI's golden throne (a disturbing and effective juxtaposition). Then, at the end of the second play the body of the murdered Henry VI descended in a similar fashion, to be replaced by a throne inhabited by Edward. In both instances, the image of a body under the throne was strong and meaningful.

12. Thomas Dekker, Westward Ho, V.1. 196-201 in The Dramatic Works, ed. by Fredson Bowers, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953-61), II, 379 (for another example from the Dekker canon, see 1, 374). For examples roughly contemporary with Henry VI, see George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar, ed. by W. E. Greg, Malone Society (Oxford, 1906), l. 1302; Peele, Edward I, ed. by W. W. Greg, Malone Society (Oxford, 1911), ll. 48-49 and Locrine, ed. by Ronald B. McKerrow, Malone Society (Oxford, 1908), l. 33. For a further sampling of the evidence, see The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. by Arnold Glover and A. R. Waller, 10 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905-12), 1, 374, 378; IV, 76; VI, 254; IX, 375; Richard Brome, The Dramatic Works, 3 vols (London: Pearson, 1873), 1, 218, 257; II, 127 (The Queen and Concubine); III, 180, 263, 546; George Chapman, The Gentleman Usher, ed. by John Hazel Smith (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), IV, 3. o. s. d., V. 4. 39. s. d,; Thomas Heywood, The Dramatic Works, 6 vols (London: Pearson, 1874), 1, 155; Philip Massinger, The Plays and Poems, ed. by Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), III, 461; Gervaise Markham and William Sampson, Herod and Antipater (1622), H3^r, 12^v; William Haughton, Englishmen for My Money, ed. by W. W. Greg, Malone Society (Oxford, 1913), l. 2434; A Yorkshire Tragedy, ed. by Sylvia D. Feldman, Malone Society (Oxford, 1973), l. 720. Sick-chairs are also to be found in plays as diverse as Marston's Sophonisba, Middleton's Hengist King of Kent, Jonson's The Magnetic Lady, Ford's The Broken Heart, May's The Old Couple, Drue's The Duchess of Suffolk, A Warning For Fair Women, The Second Maiden's Tragedy, The Soddered Citizen, and The Telltale.