SOURCE: “The Dark Comedy of the Henry VI Plays,” in Thalia, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn, 1978, pp. 11-21.

[In the essay below, Watson traces the farcical, sardonic, and grotesque patterns of Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3.]

Although the three parts of Henry VI have always offered more than their fair share of grist for the mills of historical scholarship, only recently have they attracted much appreciation or critical interest as plays. After several fine productions and interpretive essays, it no longer seems necessary to excuse them as the products of composite authorship, an inchoate genre, or a young playwright's apprenticeship. This essay will explore their theatricality, concentrating upon those scenes which are essentially comic or whose ironic, macabre, or grotesque tone places them very near the comic. As the comedy in the first tetralogy progressively darkens from the laughter of derision in Part 1 to the macabre violence of Richard III, its place in each play expands from pervasive but limited farce and mockery to grotesque villainy and satanic horror. Often grim, sometimes savage, this farcical humor, I believe, is central to an understanding of the plays, not merely because it creates effective theatre but also because it deliberately and aggressively challenges the audience's assumptions about the relationship of politics and morality.¹

I

In Thomas Nashe's words, 1 Henry VI is the tragedy of “brave Talbot (the terror of the French)” whose “bones” are “new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least, (at several times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.”² But the play is more than that: Talbot's “tragedy” is but a moment in a play otherwise filled with derisive laughter, knockabout farce, disorder that is more comic than tragic, irony that is more sardonic than sympathetic. Talbot, a monumental and thoroughly admirable epic hero, dies before the end of Act IV, and his pathetic though somewhat stagy death is followed by the undeniably comic humiliation of Joan La Pucelle (V.4) and the ominous ironies of Suffolk's plotting to rule Henry VI and England through Margaret of Anjou (V.5.) Joan's condemnation is but the last scene in a sequence of alternations of victory and defeat in the wars, and the play's final scene extends a related pattern of false reconciliations between the English and the French and especially among factions within the English nobility, a pattern whose ironies are comic in their evocation of knowing superiority in the audience rather than active sympathy for the characters.

In the first scene of 1 Henry VI we are introduced to a fallen world, fallen heroically and historically more than morally and theologically, by the lamentations of Henry V's brothers and uncles over his death. Three messengers announce progressively more disastrous defeats for the English in France; even the brave Talbot has been taken prisoner. The Bastard of Orleans in the next scene introduces a “holy maid” with visionary powers to accelerate this process of driving “the English forth the bounds of France” (I.2.51-54).³ The “overtones of the comic occur when she first appears,” writes Ernest W. Talbot of Joan. “The love rhetoric of Charles is amusing in its absurdity. It also agrees with a comic conception that will place Charles and Joan in situations reminiscent of the braggart and the prostitute, as well as the ugly, rustic, brawling wench.”⁴ There is never any real tension between Pucelle and Puzzel; from the beginning Joan's claim to heavenly assistance and holy chastity is undermined by the amorous dalliance, bawdy innuendo, and double-entendre. Although the comedy of Joan La Pucelle reaches its culmination in the total unmasking of the play's penultimate scene, it is openly derisive comedy all along.

Even if we set apart twentieth-century admiration for Joan of Arc, we are likely at first to think the laughter at her expense rather cheaply extracted through chauvinistic characterization. The matter, however, is more complex, for if Joan is exposed and led off to execution, Talbot, the last loyal soldier, is dead as well, and the English have sacrificed their national unity while losing their French provinces. Even this incongruity, followed by the ironic gap between Suffolk's loyal rhetoric and ambitious intentions in the last scene, cannot completely contain the comic process involved in the La Pucelle part of the play.

Part of the comedy of the Joan plot comes from simple dramatic recognition of incongruity through the superior knowledge provided by irony. This superiority, augmented by nationalistic bias, produces derisive laughter, the kind of laughter most often defined by Elizabethan rhetoricians and psychologists.⁵

The comedy of La Pucelle begins and ends with it; what complicates the audience's response in between is the internalization of derision within the play. If we share in the English lords' mockery of Joan, her exultation over her victories and scoffing over Talbot's corpse are, if not painful, at least unpleasant, and unpleasant in proportion to the audience's identification with the English forces. One such scene occurs after Joan's capture of Rouen through the stratagem of disguising herself and her men as peasants selling corn. She and the French lords stand on the walls of Rouen, illustrating theatrically their superiority; on the stage the dying Bedford is “brought in sick to a chair”:

Pucelle. Good morrow, gallants!
What ye corn for bread?
I think the Duke of Burgundy will fast
Before he' ll buy again at such a rate.
'Twas full of darnel; do you like the taste?
Burgundy. Scoff on, vile fiend and shameless courtesan!
I trust ere long to choke thee with thine own
And make thee curse the harvest of that corn.
Dauphin. Your grace may starve perhaps before that time.
Bedford. O, let no words, but deeds, revenge this treason!
Pucelle. What will you do, good graybeard?
Break a lance,
And run atilt at death within a chair?

III.2.41-51

It is not easy to know how to respond to the cruel humor here or later to that of Pucelle's response to Lucy's request for Talbot's body:

I think this upstart is old Talbot's ghost,
He speaks with such a proud commanding spirit.
For God's sake, let him have him; to keep them here,
They would but stink and putrefy the air.

IV.7.87-90

Lucy's rhetoric of titles is sarcastically mocked as a “silly stately style” (72), and the Dauphin's conclusion—“All will be ours, now blody Talbot's slain” (96)—is unfortunately and correctly prophetic. That York's and Somerset's unchivalric refusals to send Talbot reinforcements are more responsible for his death than Pucelle's prowess or magic further complicates the scene. The English have embarked, as Gareth Lloyd Evans says, upon a sea of “national decadence,”⁶ and the French derision is justified; even the “barbs” of Joan's “searching indictment of English hypocrisy (V.4.36ff),” as J. P. Brockbank points out, cannot “be removed by the spectacle of her converse with evil spirits.”⁷ The English finally must share in the derision, and the audience's superiority is taken away. The heroism of the Talbots is at least partially cancelled by the final scenes which promise the ascendancy of Suffolk; there, Brockbank explains, in a “parody” of the “absurdities of political romance” in the “style of a professional philanderer,” the “treacheries exercised in the politics of flirtation are as sinister as they are amusing—the betrayal of trust must have evil consequences in the harsh chronicle setting.”⁸ The wry mockery of La Pucelle contributes to the sardonic irony of the last scene by telling truths about the faded martial glory and chivalry of the English. With Suffolk and Margaret returns the comic combination of lovemaking, politics, and warfare which characterized the first scene between Charles and Joan; only the irony has darkened. Margaret promises to succeed Joan as the scourge of England, and Henry VI's cuckolding will be an ironic counterpoint to Joan's promiscuity; the force of Talbot has given way to the fraud of France and the descent into effeminacy, cunning, and decadence is accelerating.

The ironic pattern of false reconciliations adds to the savage farce of politics. The war with France is made more difficult by the factionalism within the English nobility, Henry VI's uncles and great-uncles. The third scene of the play introduces the bitter feud between Gloucester and Winchester in a way which can only look like farce on the stage. Gloucester's men in blue coats give Winchester's men in tawny coats a beating which is interrupted by the Mayor of London and his officers and then begins again. Again the tone is derisive, most of the insults coming from Gloucester, who is far from the wise counsellor, judge, and Christian humanist of Part 2. If Winchester comes off the worse in this flyting, it is because of the anti-papal nature of Gloucester's diatribe and the Mayor's comment that “This cardinal's more haughty than the devil” (85). The skirmishes of the men are farcical, and the exchange of insults simple, bad-natured, and coarse. When again in III. 1. the two exchange defiant insults and puns and their serving-men again “skirmish” three separate times in this scene, the farce deepens, for not even Henry VI himself can stop these irreverent and violent factions:

King. We charge you, an allegiance to ourself,
To hold your slaught' ring hands and keep the peace.
Pray, uncle Gloucester, mitigate this strife.
First Servingman. Nay, if we be forbidden stones, we'll fall to it with our teeth.
Second Servingman. Do what ye dare, we are as resolute.
Skirmish again.

III.1.86-92

Even the King cannot control this anarchy, and their “resolute” animosity and “bloody pates” mock any pretense to order. After peace has finally been restored, and several servingmen head for the surgeon's, and one to “see what physic the tavern affords” (149), the King creates the potential for more havoc by making Plantaganet Duke of York. The reconciliation of Gloucester and Winchester is only a show, and each has a one-line aside to underscore the insincerity of their intentions to remain at peace. The choric Exeter ends the scene with a prophecy of more “base and envious discord” (III.1.190-92).

In IV.1. Vernon and Basset crave combat in the factional dispute over the proper color of roses to wear as badges. Henry attempts to resolve the quarrel by putting on a red rose and making York regent of France; the “solution” provides another false reconciliation and aggravates the division. Warwick sarcastically remarks that Henry “Prettily, methought, did play the orator” (175), York rankles, and Exeter ends the scene with another choric soliloquy prophesying “More rancorous spite, more furious raging broils” (185). Finally, the last two scenes present an obviously phony reconciliation between the English and the French—no one intends to keep the “solemn peace” concluded—and an ominous agreement among the English lords to Henry's marriage to Margaret of Anjou. The pattern which started with the farcical flyting of Gloucester and Winchester and the fisticuffs, rock-throwing, and bloody pates of the blue coats and tawny coats has darkened into the tragic probability of civil war and the ironic machinations of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, member of neither family yet ambitious to rule all through an adulterous liaison:

Margaret shall now be queen and rule the king;
But I will rule both her, the king, and realm.

V.5. 107-8

These scenes drain the dignity and significance of diplomacy from the ritual of politics and present a king totally manipulable, almost ludicrously unaware of the insincerity of his counsellors—no one but he believes in the reconciliations—and naively and ironically responsible for aggravating the factionalism which will ruin his kingdom. The audience is kept aware of every motive through the asides and Exeter's soliloquies; for everyone but Henry, all intentions have a remarkable clarity. The irony is what makes these false reconciliations dramatic. C. L. Barber makes a distinction useful to our consideration of this pattern:

The Renaissance. … was a moment when educated men were modifying a ceremonial conception of human life to create a historical conception. The ceremonial view, which assumed that names and meanings are fixed and final, expressed experience as pageant and ritual—pageant where the right names could be changed in the right, the proper way. The historical view expresses life as drama. People in drama are not identical with their names, for they gain and lose their names, their status and meaning—and not by settled ritual: the gaining and losing of names, of meaning, is beyond the control of any set ritual experience.⁹

1 Henry VI becomes dramatic by emptying ritual of meaning, by clearly revealing the gap between professed intention and true motive; Henry himself naively believes in the capacity of ritual to order the world and abuses its power to confer name and status by making Plantaganet Duke of York and later regent of France.

The audience is left feeling uncomfortably superior to the naive Henry VI, a position in accord with the general reduction of the heroic to rock-throwing servingmen, braggart noblemen, empty ritual, and amatory politics. The sense of Henry's imperceptiveness is cumulative and also leads from comedy to a darker irony at the end. As with Joan La Pucelle, the audience feels superiority, not sympathy; and this feeling belongs essentially to comedy rather than tragedy. The world of 1 Henry VI is an inverted world, and Henry acts as if it were not.

David Bevington examines one aspect of this inversion, the dominance of masculine principles by feminine ones, and finds Henry himself wilfilly submitting “uproariously to the Amazonian disgrace with which the play ends.”¹⁰ This dominance forms a clearly comic pattern; indeed, this is one way Sidney defines comedy in his Defense of Poesy:

So in Hercules, painted with his great beard, and furious countenance, in a womans attyre, spinning, at Omphales commaundement, it breeds both delight and laughter: for the representing of so straunge a power in Love, procureth delight, and the scornfulnesse of the action, stirreth laughter.¹¹

Shakespeare's comedy is not so farcical but the principles are the same, as the Venus and Mars and Helen and Paris allusions of the play suggest. Joan La Pucelle, as Bevington says:

is not interested in sex for its own sake; she yields her body for power. This discrepancy between appearance and intention is treated by Shakespeare as a comic discrepancy, and produces an emphasis on salacious double entendres throughout her conversations. The pun is not simply an undignified form of wit intended to provoke coarse laughter, but a thematic device. In virtually every instance, the point is that sexual war is replacing military war.¹²

Only Talbot is really exempt from feminine dominance; even Winchester is accused of being “froward by nature. … Lascivious, wanton” (III.1.18-19). Margaret captivates Suffolk while confessing her helplessness, “Tush, women have been captivate ere now” (V.3.107); she will make the best out of a situation which she has not chosen. That she clearly recognizes the nature of Suffolk's wooing and his intentions shows her his equal if not better in wit and craft; the mere presence of her beauty confuses Suffolk into betraying his better instincts as a loyal husband, and the proposed marriage results in Henry's taxing “the people. … a tenth” to fetch her and her worthless titles.

The ironies of 1 Henry VI turn sardonic again in the last act, yet the memory of the brave Talbots and the comic relish of Joan's exposure and condemnation provide enough true heroic idealism and sheer comic laughter to mitigate the darkness somewhat. The undeniably traditional comic gambits of unmasking—stripping the cowardly Falstaff's garter, as well as exposing Joan's imitation of the Virgin Mary—and of the trickster tricked—the Countess of Auvergne and Joan—evoke the traditional responses of superiority and varying degrees of derision. Nevertheless, in the end the audience is left feeling superior to the imperceptive (and now wilful) king and sympathetic to no one but the dead Talbots. The sequence of false reconciliations threatens to make Henry VI into a comic butt, yet his unintentional mistakes in setting up his enemy, the Duke of York, and his unconscionable tax on the people actively involve him in the sardonic muddle of errors which will lead to the savagery of the Wars of the Roses and to Cade's rebellion in Part 2. All that, however, is to come, and to point in the direction of the escalation of violence in the remainder of the first tetralogy should not blind us to the lighter atmosphere of Part 1.

II

The general comic patterns of Part 1 are intensified in Part 2: what begins in physical farce and uncomplicated laughter darkens into some sour and even more savage ironies. Like I Henry VI, the second part has a clearly admirable character, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, who, though still at odds with the Bishop of Winchester, is no longer Part 1's master of insults and leader of rock-throwing, head-thumping serving men. Now the Christian humanist, loyal, wise, and beloved by the people, Gloucester resists the ambitious scheming of the new Machiavels.¹³ The people optimistically petition him and react furiously to his death (III.2). Like Talbot's, his absence from the play leaves a vacuum which is filled with anarchy and violence. Lord Say, his would-be humanist successor, can do nothing with Cade and his rebels; however eloquently he reasons with them, like Bérenger in Ionesco's Tueur sans gages, he is doomed.¹⁴ Shakespeare, it would seem, has deliberately gone back to the Tyler rebellion of 1381 in fashioning Cade's attack on literacy, the very core of humanism in Tudor England.

In Part 2 the scenes in which Peter and Horner, Saunder Simpcox, and Jack Cade appear are clearly comic in some way; of the three, only the Simpcox scene does not turn sardonic and grotesque, and even this scene has several ambivalent resonances. It illustrates Gloucester wisely and goodnaturedly handling the charlatan Simpcox and thereby usefully serving his king. It provides the audience a few good laughs, but it also gains their sympathy for Gloucester who is to be killed in the next act. More important than the unmasking of Simpcox itself are the responses of the little audience of Gloucester's shrewd exposure. The mayor and his brethren cry “A miracle!” The beadle “with whips” beats Simpcox over the head and chases him offstage. Henry VI's response is totally absurd: “O God, see'st thou this, and bearest so long?” (153). Margaret completes this range of purely comic responses: “It made me laugh to see the villain run” (154). But then Simpcox's wife foreshadows the Cade rebellion, which however anarchic has some basis in social discontent, “Alas, sir, we did it for pure need” (156). Gloucester wants them “whipped through every market town / Till they come to Berwick, from whence they came” (157-58), a rather severe punishment. The scene now turns rather sour, as the animosity of Gloucester towards Winchester and Suffolk flares up again:

Cardinal. Duke Humphrey has done a miracle today.
Suffolk. True—made the lame to leap and fly away.
Gloucester. But you have done more miracles than I:
You made in a day, my lord, whole towns to fly.

159-62

Buckingham at this point arrives with the Cardinal's revenge for this insult—news of Eleanor's traffic with spirits and “conspiracy” against “King Henry's life and death” (173).

The Peter Thump-Thomas Horner scenes work very much in the same manner. The combat of the prentice and the armorer is set up in I.3, and promises to be a farce. Peter's confusion of “usurer” and “usurper” deliberately combines simple comic wit and thematic relevance; the whole matter is indeed rather clear when reduced to such a verbal mistake:

Queen. What say' st thou? did the Duke of York say he was rightful heir to the crown?
Peter. That my master was? No, for sooth; my master said that he was, and that the king was an usurer.

29-32

(Henry has, we might recall from Part 1, taxed the commons a tenth.) The entire ceremony of politics is thus diminished to an armorer's ability to confer name and status.

When the two combatants return to fight it out in Henry's hall of justice, the audience is led to expect great fun. The farce begins with the quite drunk Horner and his neighbors entering at one door and Peter and the quite drunk prentices at the other, both warriors equipped with staffs and sandbags. Peter makes his last testament verbally, giving away his hammer, apron, and money. The fight begins, and the farce is over: Peter kills his master! It is indeed “a grim comedy,” as Clifford Leech says. “Moreover,” he continues, “the formal combat between the armourer and his man is a parody of chivalric encounter: in a way remarkably sophisticated for this early drama, it implies a critical attitude towards the warring nobles whose quarrels are grotesquely mirrored in this fight between two simple men, one terrified, one drunk.”¹⁵ Again, Henry VI's response seems comically incongrous:

Go, take hence that traitor from our sight;
For by his death we do perceive his guilt:
And God in justice hath revealed to us
The truth and innocence of this poor fellow,
Which he had thought to have murdered wrongfully.

101-105

In both scenes, the King's “pious credulity” adds to his characterization; we are also reminded that Suffolk's little scheme has worked: “With comic irony,” Talbert says, “Suffolk finds [in I.3] that the petition of a whole township is against himself for enclosing the commons, but he seizes upon Peter's petition as matter that can be used against York.” If the “scene undoubtedly provided an amusing interlude for Elizabethans,”¹⁶ as he claims, their amusement must have been mixed with this sardonic irony, for Horner, a simple man unwittingly involved in Suffolk's machinations, is dead, the English king ludicrously serious in his obliviousness to the situation, and the values of politics and chivalry grotesquely diminished.

The Cade scenes similarly begin in a mixture of nonsense, sensible social comment, and laughable farce and end by turning savagely brutal. James Sandoe produced 2 Henry VI for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1954 and wrote about his audience: “Their response to the Cade scenes was distinct: they began by laughing as we all expected but thereafter the ferocity of Cade and the little sprawl of mob caught their fun in the throat and turned it sour, especially as the second scene culminated in the harrowing of the wretched Lord Say and his haling offstage to be brought back (a head on a pike) an instant later, the mob growling and giggling madly. … The Simpcox sequence allows them one or two clear laughs, but Cade only lets them begin so, then bottles them up in horror.”¹⁷ The ridiculous genealogy, the mock-nobility, the bombastic heroism are at first amusing, and Dick the Butcher's running commentary adds to the laughs, but Cade's rebellion, whatever its virtues of reform, turns vicious and indiscriminately savage as the Clerk is led off to be hanged for his literacy. The sequence leads to the macabre butchery of Lord Say and his son-in-law, Sir James Cromer, whose heads are brought on stage to the shout of Cade's men, “O Brave!”, and to Cade's mockery:

But is not this braver? Let them kiss one another, for they loved well when they were alive. Now part them again, lest they consult about the giving up of some more towns in France. Soldiers, defer the spoil of the city until night: for with these borne before us, instead of maces, will we ride through the streets; and at every corner have them kiss. Away!

IV.7.131-38

We also should recall that York has encouraged all this anarchy, just as Suffolk had used the Peter-Horner combat to get at York, and before we generalize about Shakespeare's conservatism we should recall also that the Commons at Bury St. Edmunds had forced Henry VI to banish Suffolk for conspiring in Gloucester's death.

The three comic sequences of Peter and Horner, Saunder Simpcox, and Jack Cade each begin in farce and end in grotesqueness of one sort or another. Their place in determining the general tone of the play can hardly be underestimated, yet even so the nastiness of the play's comedy is not confined to these scenes. In I.3. the king and his counsellors dispute the “regentship” of France—Somerset or York—and suddenly turn on Gloucester who wants Henry and not Margaret to decide the issue. Suffolk, Winchester, Somerset, and Buckingham insult both Humphrey and Eleanor, and Margaret gives Eleanor “a box on the ear.” The trivial violence here is grotesque in its gratuitousness and malice and prompts the usual threat of revenge. Though Eleanor loses in her struggle for power, so does Margaret suffer for her liaison with Suffolk. In IV.4. with her husband, Buckingham, and Say pondering the rebellion of Cade, Margaret laments Suffolk's death, carrying his head about the stage. The juxtaposition is macabre, not pathetic, no matter what we think of the parting scene (III.2.). Sandoe was puzzled, “All sorts of special doubts crowd in, notably as to the handling of the scene in which the Queen fondles Suffolk's severed head (wrapped in red taffeta). I don't know, still, how far it's effective and tonight's audience didn't teach me much.”¹⁸ Indeed, how are we to react? What effect is wanted? The response is made more problematic by the scenes on either side: Jack Cade's putting on the dead Sir Humphrey Stafford's armor and promising to drag the Staffords' bodies “at my horses' heels till I do come to London” (IV.3) and Cade's ordering the death of a soldier for crying “Jack Cade” instead of “Lord Mortimer” (IV.5).

Finally, in York Shakespeare presents a touch of that gleeful mockery which he later makes so integral a part of Richard Crookback's character. The Cardinal, Somerset, Suffolk, and Margaret get rid of Gloucester for him and make him regent of Ireland; they are almost as naive as Henry VI was in Part 1. York is exultant:

Well, nobles, well: 'tis politicly done,
To send me packing with a host of men
'Twas men I lacked, and you will give them me:
I take it kindly: yet be well assured
You put sharp weapons in a madman's hands.

III.1.341-47

The next thirty-five lines outline in detail his instigation of the Cade rebellion in an unambivalently joyful, machiavellion tone.

The dominant atmosphere of 2 Henry VI is darker, more savage, more grotesque than that of 1 Henry VI; we have passed far beyond the sardonic. John Russell Brown objected to John Barton's and Peter Hall's production of a shortened version of the first tetralogy at Stratford in 1964 because they had conceived of the plays as forming “a relentless horror comic.”¹⁹ But that aspect of the tetralogy seems the ruling conception in 2 Henry VI. In the first part Shakespeare leaves us uncertain about how to respond to the sardonic ironies of a world of fallen glory; in the second he explores that insecurity by asking us to respond to a grotesque combination of the comic and savage.

III

If the influence of Marlowe is apparent in many of these scenes from both of the first two parts, the grotesque is yet more complicated than in the Marlovian Schadenfreude, the “delight in someone else's misfortune which is central to derisive laughter.”²⁰ In Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Jew of Malta, and Massacre at Paris, there are no characters who approach Talbot, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, or Lord Say in their positive virtues, and the mixture of mockery and savagery occurs in a locale distinct from England and less immediate in its historical basis. The victims of The Guise and the virgins of Damascus are only sketches; Gloucester is killed by English lords not by a Tamburlaine or Barabbas; Lord Say is paralyzed before the English social reformer-anarchist, Jack Cade. The scenes of humorous farce turning perversely cruel are more extensive and carefully elaborated than any of Marlowe's; they seem to be deliberately calculated to force upon the audience something very near what Eliot called Marlowe's “savage comic humour”²¹ while taking away some of the defense mechanisms against horror and atrocity which lessen the farcical cruelty in Marlowe's plays.

This grotesque comedy is further escalated in 3 Henry VI. Sir Barry Jackson, in attempting to produce the second and third parts of Henry VI at Birmingham in 1952, found that the line “between the risible and the serious is of such infinitesimal breadth that the reaction of the audience can never be foretold.”²² These kinds of difficulty begin with the first scene in Part 3: in the first few lines the York family exults in their victories at St. Alban's, the father boasting, Edward waving his bloody sword, and Richard crying

Speak thou for me, and tell them what I did.
[Throws down the Duke of Somerset's head]

I.1.16

His bouncing this severed head onto the floorboards of any stage is as likely to elicit laughter as it is shock. It would seem equally difficult later not to enjoy the mockery of the captured and soon-to-be-executed York who Queen Margaret places on a molehill, crowns with a paper coronet, and taunts; or not to relish the savage sarcasm of the three York sons' stichomythic mock-shriving of the dead Clifford; or not to smile at the asides of Richard and Clarence when brother Edward is trying to seduce Lady Grey in the most coarse, bawdy, and clumsy manner. It is, to be sure, grisly comedy and goes beyond anything in the first two parts of Henry VI.

Several patterns emerge from the grim scenes in Part 3, the most obvious of which is the ritualization of the grotesque. In Part 1, the repetition of scenes of false reconciliation reveals an ironic discrepany between appearances and intention which makes politics a farce; in Part 2 the ritual trial by combat leads from the farcical drunkenness and sandbags-and-staffs to Horner's death, and Cade the mock-king dons Stafford's armor and leads a procession through London with the severed heads of Say and Cromer kissing at every corner. Ritual and ceremony become dramatic, it would seem, only when broken, challenged, violated, mocked, and misapplied. The first scene opens with a deliberate mockery of ceremony: York installs himself on the throne, and Henry VI and his counsellors enter in what becomes almost the role of suppliants. Sheer power makes this usurpation possible; Richard asserts the authority of force in a comically sarcastic boast: “Sound drums and trumpet, and the king will fly” (I.1.118). Even Henry sees his powerlessness here, and his concern for the sanctity of ceremony thereby appears rather comically delicate:

Far be the thought of this from Henry's heart,
To make a shambles of the parliament house.

70-71

The private quarrel between Henry and Margaret, husband and wife more than king and queen, dramatizes by contrast just how thoroughly the foregoing scene of compromise (and false reconciliation) has inverted the ideals of chivalry, loyalty, royalty, and fatherhood.

This usurpation of ceremony prepares the audience's emotional expectations for Margaret's revenge at Wakefield. Brockbank, whose analysis of this scene is very suggestive, says that “the paper crowning (I.iv), mutilates the idols of Knighthood, Kingship, Womanhood and Fatherhood.” By “making a ritual of the atrocity,” Shakespeare “imitates the history” of the chroniclers and intensifies the venomous comedy of their accounts.²³ Margaret, who even in Part 1 defended herself with a witty “quid for quo” (V.3.109), exults in her vengeance with a savage sarcasm. The blasphemous analogy of York's paper crown to Christ's crown of thorns suggests the tone of the queen's sardonic taunting. John Russell Brown's description of Dame Peggy Ashcroft's performance in this scene (Stratford, 1964) defines its effectiveness:

The cruel humour of the lines was played close to hysteria: ‘I prithee grieve to make me merry.’ (line 86) was an almost necessary request to excuse Margaret's impulse towards helpless laughter, a physical and emotional relief and a breakdown of control. Margaret was constantly changing her stance and position as if instinctively; her taunts were controlled and insistent so that only her body, moving repeatedly, could show the inward instability. As York replied in pain and passion, Margaret was silent, after one last, and now forced, laugh. When she stabbed him it was with a quick movement, and then she wept. And then the tears stopped with a wild, painful cry. In this scene the violent was emphasized as much as anywhere, but there was also rhetorical and musical control and a daring, emotional performance.²⁴

This interpretation of the scene rings true: Margaret's passion has pushed her beyond suffering into that Ovidian hysteria which also characterizes Titus Andronicus. Only, the ritualization of this excess makes it dramatically grotesque rather than theatrically shocking, as a comparison with the crude and perverse wit of Marlowe demonstrates:

Lord High Admiral. O let me pray before I dye.
Gonzaga. Then pray unto our ladye, kisse this crosse.
          Stab him

(lines 305-6; cf. 345-7, 358-64)²⁵

The Massacre at Paris is a crude, mangled fragment, but one can find much the same sort of theatrical, dance-of-death, comic humor in the other plays.

The ritual of the atrocity makes Shakespeare's scene more effectively grotesque; carefully orchestrated, the excessive cruelty becomes not merely perversely comic but also ceremonious and revolting. The ambivalence of response is conditioned by the odd mixture of stylized rhetoric and colloquial insult, of ceremony and brutality, of humor and horror. The Yorks have their turn again at Towton, and again a ritual is blasphemously parodied; the dead Clifford is offered confession for his sins.

Richard. Clifford, ask mercy and obtain no grace.
Edward. Clifford, repent in bootless penitence.
Warwick. Clifford, devise excuses for thy faults.
Clarence. While we devise fell tortures for thy faults.

II.6.68-71

To borrow Brockbank's phrase, this is a “sophisticated savagery.”²⁶ The heartless indifference allows the brutality to be treated as matter for the play of ironic wit and elegant sarcasm; murder and blasphemy are stylized. The laughter which should act as a kind of relief or defense mechanism turns into revulsion and horror, yet the iconoclasm and energy exert a fascination if not an attraction which intensifies the ambivalence of response.²⁷

One might object to this sort of analysis by pointing to the comic horror as conventional and cite the Herods of the mysteries, the Vices of the moralities, the titanic monster-heroes of Marlowe, the scurrilous Marcolfs and Scogins of farce and jest book. But to see one or all of these characters or personifications in the Yorks and Lancasters is not to dismiss the disturbing quality of the grotesque scenes. Shakespeare closes the aesthetic distance by drawing upon these conventions for the history play and by making rituals out of the mockery of people and politics. The derision is placed within the play, and the audience finds itself not only laughing at the characters who deserve scorn but laughing with deriders on stage who mock them. Edward's wooing of Lady Grey is another example. Richard and Clarence, apparently out of earshot of the conversation, comment upon their brother's crudeness and bluntness. For them the scene is a parodic mime of the ritualistic gestures of courtship; for us it is that and more—a ritualized bargaining to exchange Lady Grey's sons and lands for her chastity. The irony of Edward's having to seize her property and threaten her sons' lives to have anything to negotiate with deepens the sardonic tone, while Richard and Clarence encourage us to laugh. The brothers use the imagery with which they had mocked the dead Clifford—

Richard. [Aside to Clarence]
The ghostly father now hath done his shrift.
Clarence. [Aside to Richard]
When he was made a shriver, ’twas for shift.

III.2.107-08

—thus linking the anti-Lancaster sarcasm with their scorn for their own brother.

In the next scene another amatory ritual is underway in the King of France's palace with Warwick wooing Lady bona for Edward and Margaret pleading for Henry's right. Although there are neither grimaces nor guffaws here (unless a smile of knowing superiority at Margaret's “Henry, sole possessor of my love”), the mockery of the whole business of politics as a muddle of errors is clearly intended. The Post's message breaks into this ritual of diplomacy and causes Warwick's complete reversal; Edward has duped him.

From this chaos of the political jungle emerges the grand manipulatory of all appearances, the Protean Richard Crookback. Already characterized by his military brutality, sarcastic wit, and physical deformity, in III.2 of Part 3 he picks up the gleeful mockery of his Marlovian and Machiavellian father and combines it with the wry Satanism of the morality Vice. The audience's participation in the sardonic relish of a Richard Crookback has not always been sufficiently examined; here again, the Marlovian parentage is worth commenting upon. Clifford Leech points out that Tamburlaine's rhetoric of assertion and brutality is often comic in a painful way: “The residual gap, between what even this man is and what he says and does, is enormous, terrifying, absurd.”²⁸ So too with Barabbas and even Faustus. If Richard's aspirations sound Marlovian in their overblown rhetoric, this Shakespearean chameleon is more changeable than Marlowe's overreachers, and the effect, even in 3 Henry VI, of his ruthless viciousness and comic diabolism is more complex than that of Marlowe's heroes because of his multi-faceted self-consciousness.

However, one must not succumb to the temptation to conflate the last two acts of 3 Henry VI, with Richard III. The whirligig of battles and betrayals allows Richard little room to exercise his virtuosity. He runs from Warwick (IV.3), rescues brother Edward (IV.5), stabs young Prince Edward (V.5), and kills Henry VI (V.6). Although he occasionally adds a sardonic remark, an aside about his ambition to reign, and a final declaration of his resolve, none of these actions demonstrates very fully the demonic humor of Richard III. The only real subtlety in 3 Henry VI lies in Richard's ignoring Edward's offer of amnesty to young Prince Edward. The obstacles in his path to the throne have begun to fall—though plenty are left for Richard III—but what happens in the last two acts of 3 Henry VI is not much like what happens in Richard III.²⁹ Of the fifteen scenes of Acts IV and V most are outside of London; three are set in the royal palace in London: the first has Edward king (IV.1), the second Henry (IV.4), and the third is the final scene (V.7) with Edward again king. Except for Richard's murders of young Edward and Henry VI, there is little violence—Warwick is wounded offstage though he dies onstage—yet the sense of the confusion of the battlefield is strong between IV.2 and V.6. Everyone is conferring or scurrying off somewhere, and without a climactic battle like St. Alban's what stands out theatrically is Warwick's uncrowning of Edward and Edward's uncrowning of Henry (IV.3 and 8), Henry's prophecy of Richmond's glory and his self-justification in terms of pity, mildness, and mercy (IV.6 and 8), Montgomery's throwing down his gauntlet to all Lancastrians—a ludicrous chivalric gesture at this point in the anarchy (IV.7), Warwick's dying speech and Margaret's lamentation (V.2 and 4), and Richard's murders (V.5 and 6). Except for Montgomery's absurd heroics, perhaps, none of these scenes is humorous; except for Richard's stabbings, none is horrible. Yet the very busy-ness of the last two acts makes them a dramatic embodiment of the anarchy of the War of the Roses. Nothing is very fully developed; yet the uncrownings, Montgomery's inappropriate gauntlet, Henry's making Clarence and Warwick his “protectors” (IV.6), and the irony of the ceremonious final scene continue the mockery and parody of ritual and contrast with the absence of ceremony in the battlefield scenes.

In the midst of all this chaos Henry VI gains some sort of stature, but his devout piety and resignation to the powerlessness of his own unkingly character—however sincere—are not wholly admirable. Much has been written about the lyrical and pastoral Henry, yet in the theatre he almost disappears until his encounter with Richard in V.6. As the play's only sympathetic character, he does illuminate the issues involved: like Gloucester in Part 2, he is well-intentioned, virtuous, humanistic, religious—and ineffective. In the last half of Part 3, Shakespeare has dropped the comic qualities of his role—his marital difficulties with Margaret, his contributions to his own ruin, his ludicrously naïve responses to events. He has taken on the choric commentary and prophecy of the chronicle narrator which had been assigned to Exeter in Part 2. Through this very detachment and resignation, however, the demonic savagery of Richard is emphasized by contrast; his withdrawal into unworldliness repeats the pattern of the futility and destruction of the good seen in the similarly isolated figures of Talbot and Gloucester, while Richard is the culmination of the patterns of triumphant villainy seen in Suffolk and York and of demonic anarchy seen in Joan La Pucelle and Jack Cade.

The escalation of grotesque violence within the Henry VI plays is dramatized most effectively and clearly by the comic scenes. If there is an undeniable pathos and horror in the murders of the young prince and the weak king at the end of 3 Henry VI, the Machiavellian Richard's invitation to the audience to share in his knowing superiority is uncomfortably appealing. Indeed, what place do “pity, love, and fear” have in the farce of politics? The gap between appearance and intention widens with each play, until in the final scene of 3 Henry VI sharing the irony with Richard the ruthless comedian becomes irresistible. For the reader or audience of the other Henry VI plays, the scene grotesquely repeats the ironies of mocking exultations over defeated enemies, temporary triumphs and hopes of stability, and false reconciliations. Shakespeare has temporarily silenced our moral judgment; we laugh with rather than at the evil and deformed.³⁰

IV

Several patterns we have seen in the first three plays are repeated and given a different twist in Richard III, and most of these variations result from Richard's comic dialectic with the audience. Most prominent is what I have called the internalization of derisive laughter; like Joan and Cade, Suffolk and York, and like Margaret in the Paper Crown scene, Richard exults in the power he has over his enemies. The scorn and superiority which usually belong primarily to the audience alone must, therefore, be shared (or withheld) from the public mocker of human weakness or powerlessness. Nicholas Brooke describes the “special emphasis” of this relationship quite well: Richard “alone has any direct contact with the audience at all. … Everyone else is distanced from the audience, is in a sense taking part in a play within a play of which Richard is the presenter. We are forced to know them as actors acting just as, when Richard joins them, he is (more obviously) an actor acting.” We have a “double view of what is happening,” and the critical detachment limits the possibility of sympathy for his victims.³¹ From the opening speech of the play, Richard makes us collaborators in his conspiracy against everyone within the play, and since his victims are without conscience or without political savvy, we enjoy his comic exposure of their mental and moral weaknesses and “rejoice in their stultification.”³²

The special relationship of Richard to the audience and to the other characters allows him to manipulate freely the comic techniques we have seen in the Henry VI plays. He manages the ironies of the already phony reconciliation of the Woodvilles and the Hastings-Buckingham faction by breaking the ceremony around Edward's sickbed (II.1), only one instance of his constant unmaskings. Lady Anne's ritual lamentations are crudely but effectively silenced and revealed as empty words; the knighting of all these “sly, insinuating Jacks” (I.3.53) is called the ruse it is; his asides puncture the ritual of sorrow in which the Queen, the Duchess of York, and Margaret indulge. On the other hand, he usurps the trappings of ceremony without believing in them and without filling them with any substance: the condemnation of Hastings, the appearance between the reverend fathers, the blasphemous parody of the Election Scene, even the denial of the earldom promised Buckingham—these and other mockeries of ritual illustrate Richard's sure sense that he who controls ceremony controls the state. Again, as in the Henry VI plays, the ceremonial view of the world becomes historical and thus dramatic through parody and mockery. The tour-de-force of Anne's wooing demonstrates that whoever controls the ritual—the ritual of courtship and betrothal here displacing the ritual of funeral procession and lamentation—can assign roles and make people play them. The deflating mockery of Richard's “Was ever any woman in this humor wooed? / Was ever any woman in this humor won?” (I.2.227-8) can be measured against Joan's mockery of Burgundy after she has talked him into joining the French: “Done like a Frenchman: turn and turn again!” (Part 1: III.3.85). The dramatic structure is the same, but Shakespeare has greatly complicated the irony.

To use A. P. Rossiter's phrase, at some point probably even “the Elizabethan spectator began to back out.”³³ The separation of aesthetic and intellectual interests from moral instincts becomes uncomfortable—no matter how enjoyable the pleasures of the grotesque—long before the murder of the little princes. The audience “backs out” of the conspiracy, yet to describe its response in this way does not defuse the anxiety (or even guilt) created by its sharing in Richard's diabolism. Several aspects of the play counter Richard's ruthlessness: the pattern of curses and prophecies concerning the retributive justice of God's Providence, the natural nemesis involved in the self-consuming nature of evil, and the appearance of the Godly King to replace the Devil-King on the English throne. Each helps the audience to see the events of the play from a perspective different from and alien to Richard's, but none can totally free the spectator from the tension of incompatible responses prompted by the grotesque comedy centered around Richard's violence. The retribution Margaret and the Duchess of York call for is defined by the unattractive rhetoric of their ritualized curses and is personalized into a rather mechanical desire for vengeance: for Margaret, Providence means that God will wipe all Yorks off the face of England; for the Duchess it means all Lancasters and her own Richard. The pattern of natural nemesis certainly exists within the play, yet even so the self-destructiveness of evil fails to satisfy us aesthetically. We would perhaps have preferred to see the creative good struggling with the destructive evil, but the evil defeats itself almost before the good appears.

This brings us to Henry VII and the Tudor myth. Richmond's appearance in his own terms makes the first tetralogy a kind of Divine Comedy in which everything is set right again, yet some recent critics of the play have refused to be convinced. As the scourge of England, Richard plays into the scheme of Divine Providence; such is the old argument of Tudor propaganda, and it is marvellously ironic: all the evil the Devil can do is turned to good. The final act of Richard III, however, remains the one event of British history which Shakespeare could not alter, reorganize or ignore, the terminus ad quem fixed for all time. That Henry Richmond is treated almost emblematically makes the conviction behind the ending suspect. Michael Manheim says of the first tetralogy that the Henry VI plays “feed an audience state of intense frustration, and relief from the frustration is nowhere to be found, unless it be in the catharsis successful dramatic experience provides.”³⁴ The same is true of Richard III and is true of the darker kind of comedy which Clifford Leech describes as “ruthless” and I have called “grotesque.” Leech writes that in contrast to the “smaller kind of comedy that leaves us feeling fortified and near to society's heart,” there is “a more ambitious kind of comedy which refuses us the purge.” He uses Volpone and The Alchemist, Measure for Measure, Chekhov's plays and Ibsen's Wild Duck as examples: “In such comedies, and surely they are the most ambitious, there is no catharsis: at their endings we look about in uncertainty, we see that there have been no scapegoats to take away our guilt.”³⁵

No catharsis to take away our guilt, our anxiety: the grotesque comedy of the first tetralogy is radically aggressive. The whole fabric of Renaissance humanism is under challenge: concern with the ease in which man's weakness can be exploited and with the moral casualties which result threatens the belief the humanists had in their programs to create the virtuous through education; questioning the providential view of history suggests the need to jettison almost every sixteenth-century chronicle; dramatizing the irrelevance of ethics in politics makes much of the political theory obsolete. If man has power to shape his own laws, a Richard III stands these notions on their head: in his own way he believes in the nobility of merit over birth and in the humanist motto of Giannozo Manetti: agere et intelligere, to know how and to be able to govern the world which was made for man. The proportion of the comic and the horror-ful, of laughter and tears, and, to use Ruskin's terms for the grotesque, of the ludicrous and the fearsome, of the sportive and the terrible, depends upon individual perception and response. For the orthodox Elizabethan, perhaps the return of Henry Richmond, the order reimposed by the Tudors, and the self-destructiveness of evil would have accommodated the guilt of his brotherhood with Richard and the anxiety of the farcical jungle of political history in which the most vicious seem to prosper. For others the unrelenting comic horror of the first tetralogy intensifies the anxiety that they live in an irrational, incomprehensible, absurd, and terrible universe. The first tetralogy is neither the Homilies nor Hall, nor is it Camus or Beckett.

In The Grotesque in Art and Literature Wolfgang Kayser reaches “a final interpretation of the grotesque: an attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world.”³⁶ The demonic once invoked, however, is not so easily subdued; we can laugh at it, accept the invitation to laugh with it, and cringe when it turns and laughs at us. Each of these experiences of the comic and the grotesque is likely to prove unpleasant. By exorcising the demons which the orthodox and complacent suppress, Shakespeare increases the discomfort that is not so easily laughed away. This ambivalence in response to the plays' dark comedy is, I think, a measure of the achievement of the first tetralogy.

Notes

1. The traditional critical view has been that the first tetralogy reflects Shakespeare's adherence to the Tudor myth and his fear of disorder. Shakespeare's political conservatism still explains these plays for many readers, including Alvin Kernan, who writes about them as “rituals of the conservative view of history and the ethic of order, counselling obedience and submission to the old ways and showing the dreadful consequences of rebellion and usurpation.” In The Revels History of Drama in English. Volume III: 1576-1613 (London: Metheun, 1975), p. 264.

2. Pierce Pennilesse, His Supplication to the Divell (London, 1592), p. 87.

3. All references are to the Arden editions of the Henry VI plays, edited by Andrew S. Cairncross.

4. Elizabethan Drama and Shakespeare's Early Plays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), p. 183. Talbert's chapter on the Henry VI plays is the best treatment of their comic elements.

5. See, for example, Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetoricke (London, 1553), p. 135-36, and Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586), pp. 82-83.

6. Shakespeare I: 1564-1592 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1975), pp. 37-39.

7. “The Frame of Disorder: Henry VI,” in Early Shakespeare, ed. J. R. Brown and B. Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 3 (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), p. 80.

8. Ibid., pp. 80-81.

9. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 193.

10. “The Domineering Female in 1Henry VI,” Shakespeare Studies, 2 (1967), p. 57.

11. Prose Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1917-24), III, p. 40.

12. Bevington, p. 53.

13. See Michael Manheim, The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespeare History Play (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973), pp. 90-92. Manheim speculates that “to the theatre audience of the 1590s the image of the humanist is that of a loser in politics.”

14. In James Anderson's 1864 production for the tercentenary, the same actor played both roles—Humphrey and Say—graphically illustrating the paralysis which followed ineffectiveness. This emphasis was not, however, mentioned by the reviewer in The Athenaeum, 30 April 1864. Reprinted in Eyewitnessess to Shakespeare, ed. Gamini Salgado (Susses: Sussex University Press, 1975).

15. William Shakespeare: The Cronicles (London: The British Council, 1962), p. 17.

16. Talbert, pp. 190, 194.

17. “King Henry VI, Part 2: Notes During Production,” Theatre Annual, 13 (1955), pp. 45-46.

18. Ibid.

19. “Three Kinds of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Survey, 18 (1965), p. 149.

20. The definition is Erich Segal's, from his essay, “Marlowe's Schadenfreude: Barabbas as Comic Hero,” in Veins of Humor, ed. Harry Levin, Harvard English Studies, 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 75.

21. “Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe,” in his The Sacred Wood (London: Metheun, 1920), p. 92.

22. “On Producing Henry VI,” Shakespeare Survey, 6 (1953), pp. 49-52.

23. Brockbank, p. 95.

24. Brown, p. 152.

25. The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), pp. 454-55.

26. Brockbank, p. 98.

27. Recent interest in the aesthetics of the grotesque is relevant here. For the rhetorical uses of the grotesque to disturb and disorient the reader, see Philip Thomson, The Grotesque, The Critical Idiom, 24 (London: Metheun, 1972), pp. 58ff. For an approach to the psychology of aesthetic response, see Michael Steig, “Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 29 (1970), pp. 253-60. Also Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). Muriel C. Bradbrook sees Marlowe's combination of the comic and the terrible as a variation within the “eldritch” tradition and links Marlowe's grotesque (she doesn't use the term, however) with medieval mystery and morality plays, poems like Jacob's Well, Tudor jest books, and anti-Catholic prose. In “Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the Eldritch Tradition,” Essays on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Drama, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia, MO.: University of Missouri Press, 1962), pp. 83-90.

28. “When Writing Becomes Absurd,” in his The Dramatist's Experience (London: Routledge Kegan, 1970), p. 65.

29. On the last act the comments of J. P. Brockbank are brief but suggestive. See his “Shakespeare: His Histories, English and Roman,” in English Drama to 1710, ed. Christopher Ricks, Sphere History of Literature in the English Language, Volume 3 (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1971), p. 173.

30. Cf Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 90. ff.

31. Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London: Metheun, 1968), pp. 57-58. See also A. P. Rossiter's essay on Richard III in Angel with Horns, ed. Graham Storey (London: Longmans, 1961).

32. Rossiter, pp. 15-16.

33. Ibid., p. 16.

34. Manheim, p. 115.

35. “Catharsis in English Renaissance Drama,” in The Dramatist's Experience, pp. 142-43.

36. The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 188. First published in 1957.