SOURCE: “Suffolk and Margaret: A Study of Some Sections of Shakespeare's Henry VI,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3, Summer, 1974, pp. 310-22.

[In the essay below, Williams probes Shakespeare's presentation of an unhistorical love affair between Queen Margaret of Anjou and the Earl of Suffolk as the dramatist's first attempt at staging romantic relationships with tragic consequences.]

The illicit love affair which Shakespeare gave to Queen Margaret and the Earl (afterward Duke) of Suffolk in 1 and 2 Henry VI is unhistorical. At a time when Shakespeare for his dramatic purposes was ruthlessly simplifying and trimming history, he chose to invent this tragic and, to most people, disagreeable love story, basing his invention only on some hints in Hall's Chronicle. There appears to have been no demanding reason, dramatically, for this invention, even though it does link together Parts 1 and 2 to a degree which makes them seem one play. Some other situation, vouched for by history, could have done this equally well. When Shakespeare omitted or cut material from a source he was using, the dramatic purpose of the omission or cutting down is usually clear to us. But when he enlarged or invented on the basis of a hint and if there is no conspicuous dramatic need for the innovation, then one may be allowed to suspect a particular interest on Shakespeare's part in this addition to the story.

Let us look closely at the relationship between Princess Margaret, later Queen of England, and Suffolk as given by Shakespeare. In 1 Henry VI, V. iii., the French are defeated and Joan la Pucelle is taken prisoner by the Duke of York. Margaret becomes, unhistorically, Suffolk's prisoner. Before he knows who she is, he is impressed by her beauty. He enters, dragging her by the hand, “Be what thou wilt, thou art my prisoner” (l. 45).¹ She has clearly been protesting her importance. He pauses to look at her:

O fairest beauty, do not fear, nor fly,
For I will touch thee but with reverent hands:
I kiss these fingers for eternal peace
And lay them gently on thy tender side.
Who art thou? Say, that I may honour thee.

(ll. 46-50)

She gives him her name and rank and he replies with his. Then follows a curious Wooing Scene in which Suffolk fights a delaying action while he works a plan to win her for himself:

Be not offended, nature's miracle,
Thou art allotted to be ta'en by me.

(ll. 54-55)

Then, seeing a disdainful look on her face (we must remember that this is the future “she-wolf of France”), he says, “Go, and be free again, as Suffolk's friend” (l. 59). As she turns to go he stops her:

O stay. … I have no power to let her pass;
My hand would free her but my heart says no.

(ll. 60-61)

He is daunted by her “gorgeous beauty” and dares not speak. He thinks of calling for pen and paper and putting his love in writing, but is ashamed of his weakness. She now offers a ransom but he turns aside, muttering his perplexity and trying to find a way out of his difficulty. The difficulty is, of course, that he is already married.

Fond man, remember that thou hast a wife;
Then how can Margaret be thy paramour?

(ll. 81-82)

He continues these asides for nine consecutive speeches, which are interspersed with her comments which express a growing puzzlement and the thought that he must be mad. Losing patience she shouts at him:

Hear ye, Captain—are you not at leisure?

(l. 97)

He has now conceived the idea of marrying her to his king, and he turns to speak directly to her. But she now speaks aside, giving him what she calls “quid for quo.” He makes the offer and almost a serious and revealing gaffe:

I'll undertake to make thee Henry's queen,
To put a golden sceptre in thy hand
And set a precious crown upon thy head,
If thou wilt condescend to be my—
Mar. What?
Suf. His love.

(ll. 117-21)

He has retrieved the situation superficially, but his speech continues to reveal the confusion in his mind. When she protests her unworthiness to be Henry's wife he replies,

No, gentle madam, I unworthy am
To woo so fair a dame to be his wife
And have no portion in the choice myself.

(ll. 123-25)

She is content with this ambiguous offer. Up to this point everything is unhistorical except the fact that Suffolk is married, that he did suggest the marriage of Henry and Margaret, and that Margaret was impressive in beauty and personality. Hall said, “This woman excelled all other, as well in beautie and favor, as in wit and pollicie, and was of stomack and corage, more like to a man, then a woman.”² One gets the impression that she understands what Suffolk hopes to gain by the arrangement and there is no sign of confusion in her mind. Her father, Reignier, quickly agrees and makes a hard bargain which Suffolk undertakes will be accepted. As they part, Reignier embraces Suffolk and Margaret says,

Farewell, my lord. Good wishes, praise and prayers
Shall Suffolk ever have of Margaret.

(ll. 173-74)

He does not want to let her go and asks whether she has any message for the King. She answers modestly but he presses her: “No loving token for his majesty?” (l. 181). She answers,

Yes, my good lord, a pure unspotted heart,
Never yet taint of love, I send the king.
Suf. And this withal. [Kisses her]
Mar. That for thyself. I will not so presume
To send such peevish token to a king.

(ll. 182-86)

All this is done and said in the presence of her father. They understand each other already. When Margaret and Reignier have gone out, Suffolk soliloquizes. He wants her for himself but he is horrified at what this may involve:

O wert thou for myself! But Suffolk, stay;
Thou mayst not wander in that labyrinth;
There minotaurs and ugly treasons lurk.

(ll. 187-89)

Even if he is able to avoid the dangers, she may be Ariadne to his Theseus, a not entirely happy story. He decides to praise her virtues and natural graces to Henry in such a manner as will “bereave him of his wits with wonder.” We do not hear Suffolk praising Margaret to the King, for when Act V, scene v, begins Suffolk has ended his account of Margaret's charms and Henry is suitably impressed. He is easily induced by Suffolk to break off his betrothal to the Earl of Armagnac's daughter, in spite of the protests of Gloucester and Exeter. Henry asks Suffolk to return at once to France to bring back Margaret. Part 1 ends with Suffolk's comment:

Thus Suffolk hath prevail'd; and thus he goes
As did the youthful Paris once to Greece,
With hope to find the like event in love,
But prosper better than the Trojan did.
Margaret shall now be queen, and rule the king:
But I will rule both her, the king and realm.

(V. v. 103-8)

The comparison with Paris is apt, for he intends to steal a king's wife. He realizes the dangers implied in the comparison but hopes to be luckier in the end than Paris was. We remember the disasters brought upon Troy by Paris's exploit, and we are prepared for similar results in England. The last line of the soliloquy is an echo of Hall: Suffolk “by the meanes of the Quene, was shortely erected to the estate and degree of a Duke, and ruled the Kyng at his pleasure.”³ Again, before dying, Suffolk will compare himself to heroes of antiquity (2 Henry VI, IV.i.), with no sign of irony on Shakespeare's part but rather the hint that we should take him seriously. Similarly, Margaret compares herself to Dido (III.ii.115-18), and Suffolk's farewell speech (end of III.ii.) has echoes of the exiled Ovid's complaint to his wife.⁴ Shakespeare put this pair of lovers in famous company.

2 Henry VI begins with Suffolk presenting Margaret to the King. It appears that he has actually married her on Henry's behalf, and this is historical. History also records that Suffolk's wife went with him to France, and she would have kept a watchful eye on the proceedings, but in Shakespeare Suffolk goes untrammeled. What is unhistorical and invented by Shakespeare is for Margaret to praise Suffolk as her champion in the lists during these preliminary wedding celebrations (see below). All that Hall had to say is, “There wer triumphaunt Justes, costly feastes, and delicate banquettes.”⁵ The King is overwhelmed by Margaret's beauty and “her grace in speech.” He creates Suffolk Duke and leaves the stage with him and Margaret, leaving Gloucester to fulminate against the alliance.

In Act I, scene iii, the Queen and Suffolk are walking in the palace grounds—clearly confirmed now in their intimacy—when they meet some petitioners, one of whom takes Suffolk to be Gloucester, the Lord Protector. The petitions anger both the Queen and Suffolk, and Margaret complains about her treatment at Court. She is annoyed that her husband is “a pupil still,” and she compares him unfavorably with Suffolk:

I tell thee, Pole, when in the city Tours
Thou ran'st a tilt in honour of my love,
And stol'st away the ladies' hearts of France,
I thought King Henry had resembled thee
In courage, courtship and proportion;
But all his mind is bent to holiness,
To number Ave-Maries on his beads …

(ll. 50-56)

Suffolk tries to content her with a promise:

Madam, be patient: as I was the cause
Your Highness came to England, so will I
In England work your Grace's full content.

(ll. 65-67)

Their association is partly one of political ambition, but it is important to remember that he fell in love with her before he knew who she was and certainly before he conceived the plan of marrying her to his king.

Suffolk is already setting traps for Margaret's enemies, notably the Gloucesters. The spirit's answers in the séance contrived by Suffolk are Shakespeare's inventions and the unhistorical prophecy, “By water shall he die and take his end” (I.iv.32), is remembered by Suffolk on the day of his death. In the play Margaret's great rival is Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester, and this again is unhistorical for Eleanor's humiliation took place four years before Margaret came to England. Shakespeare brought it forward so that the struggle for control of the King and of England should fall chiefly between Suffolk and Margaret on the one hand and Gloucester and his wife on the other. A brilliant invention on Shakespeare's part is the dropping of the fan by Margaret and the box she administers to Eleanor's ear in the pretense that she took her for a servant. Eleanor's answer sends shivers down one's back:

                    … proud Frenchwoman,
Could I come near your beauty with my nails,
I'd set my ten commandments in your face.

(I.iii.140-42)

In Act II, scene i, Suffolk, in close attendance on Henry and Margaret, feels confident enough to taunt Gloucester, and in Act III, scene i, he arrests Gloucester on a trumped-up charge of treason. Beaufort, York, and Suffolk decide on Gloucester's death in the presence of Margaret and by the next scene Gloucester is dead, strangled by Suffolk's murderers. He has been laid in a bed to counterfeit a natural death. The King knows that it is murder, but Margaret defends Suffolk and puts on an act of ill-treated martyrdom. Warwick enters to announce that the commons have heard a report that Gloucester has been murdered by Suffolk and Beaufort and that they demand to know the truth. Warwick indicates the evidence of murder in the dead Gloucester's appearance, and a shouting match between Warwick and Suffolk leads to the drawing of weapons.

At the demand of the commons, Henry banishes Suffolk. Margaret pleads for him in vain, and they are left alone on the stage to curse their enemies and bewail their coming separation. She weeps over his clutched hand and then kisses it:

O, could this kiss be printed in thy hand,
That thou might'st think upon these by the seal
Through whom a thousand sighs are breath'd for thee.

(III.ii.342-44)

(This is the first occurrence of the seal-mouth image which runs through Shakespeare's work.) They embrace and kiss, “Loather a hundred times to part than die” (l. 354). For Suffolk the banishment is from her, not from England:

'Tis not the land I care for, wert thou thence:
A wilderness is populous enough
So Suffolk had thy heavenly company.

(ll. 358-60)

He asks her to let him stay with her, even at the risk of death:

If I depart from thee I cannot live;
And in thy sight to die, what were it else
But like a pleasant slumber in thy lap?
Here could I breathe my soul into the air,
As mild and gentle as the cradle-babe
Dying with mother's dug between its lips;
Where, from thy sight, I should be raging mad,
And cry out for thee to close up mine eyes,
To have thee with thy lips to stop my mouth.
So shouldst thou either turn my flying soul
Or I should breathe it so into thy body
And then it liv'd in sweet Elysium …

(ll. 387-98)

But they must part; she in the hope of meeting again, he full of foreboding of death:

Mar. Though parting be a fretful corrosive,
It is applied to a deathful wound.
To France, sweet Suffolk! Let me hear from thee,
For whereso'er thou art in this world's globe
I'll have an Iris that shall find thee out.
Away!
Suf. I go.
Mar. And take my heart with thee. [She kisses him.]
Suf. A jewel lock'd into the woefull'st cask
That ever did contain a thing of worth.
Even as a splitted bark so sunder we:
This way fall I to death.
Mar. This way for me.

(ll. 402-12)

So ends Act III, scene ii. Almost immediately, in Act IV, scene i, comes Suffolk's end. In a sea battle on his way to France, Suffolk has been taken prisoner with two other gentlemen. Hall tells us that his head was struck off on the side of a cock boat; head and body were left on the shore to be picked up by Suffolk's chaplain, who took the body to Wingfield College for burial. Shakespeare's invented version is very different. According to him, the two gentlemen promise to pay for their freedom but Suffolk has been allotted to Walter Whitmore—a character unknown to history but invented by Shakespeare to carry out the similarly invented prophecy that Suffolk will die by water, Walter being pronounced as water. Whitmore has lost an eye in the affray and is determined to kill Suffolk in dogged retribution. Suffolk recognizes the Captain⁶ as one who has served at Court, and he trusts that this will save him. But the proud and contemptuous way in which he reminds the Captain of his former servile state hardens the latter's heart against him. In return, the Captain bitterly and offensively recounts the memory of what he has observed at Court. He lays the losses in France, the troubles at home, and the death of Gloucester squarely at Suffolk's door. Punning on Suffolk's family name, Pole (pronounced pool), he cries out,

                    Poole! Sir Poole! Lord!
Ay, kennel, puddle, sink, whose filth and dirt(7)
Troubles the silver spring where England drinks.
Now will I dam up this thy yawning mouth,
For swallowing the treasure of the realm.
Thy lips that kiss'd the Queen shall sweep the ground. …

(IV.i.69-74)

To Shakespeare's mind, the physical degree to which the love of Margaret and Suffolk had gone must have been common knowledge at Court. Whitmore has mockingly referred to Suffolk as the “forlorn swain” (l. 65), the abandoned lover of the Queen, for that is surely the intention of this cruel joke. Suffolk at first pleads the Queen's commission, but then his pride supervenes and he decides to die bravely, without any further attempt to soften his captors:

Come soldiers, show what cruelty you can,
That this my death may never be forgot.
Great men oft die by vile besonians:
A Roman soldier and banditto slave
Murder'd sweet Tully; Brutus' bastard hand
Stabb'd Julius Caesar; savage islanders
Pompey the Great; and Suffolk dies by pirates.

(ll. 132-38)

He is removed for execution and a moment later Whitmore carries the severed head and body onto the stage, saying,

There let his head and lifeless body lie,
Until the Queen his mistress bury it.

(ll. 142-43)

The horrified Gentleman cries out,

O barbarous and bloody spectacle!
His body will I bear unto the King:
If he revenge it not, yet will his friends;
So will the Queen, that living held him dear.

(ll. 144-47)

But we are not told who took the head to the Queen. A little later, in Act IV, scene iv, we see Margaret in King Henry's presence, holding Suffolk's head to her breast. Grief has made her reckless in shamelessly acknowledging her love.

Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind,
And makes it fearful and degenerate;
Think therefore on revenge, and cease to weep.
But who can cease to weep and look on this?
Here may his head lie on my throbbing breast,
But where's the body that I should embrace?

(ll. 1-6)

It is not long since she held the living head of her departing lover to her breast. While the King discusses the Jack Cade rebellion with his lords, Margaret continues her lament:

Ah! barbarous villains, hath this lovely face
Rul'd like a wandering planet over me,
And could it not enforce them to relent
That were unworthy to behold the same?

(ll. 15-18)

The King turns to her:

How now, madam?
Still lamenting and mourning for Suffolk's death?
I fear me, love, if that I had been dead,
Thou wouldst not have mourn'd so much for me.

Even in this situation she is quick-witted enough to reply, with ready and triumphant hypocrisy, “My love, I should not mourn but die for thee” (ll. 21-24). The rebels are reported to be drawing near and Margaret says that if Suffolk were alive, “the Kentish rebels would be soon appeased.” The King calls to her, “Come, Margaret; God, our hope, will succour us.” As she goes out, still nursing the head, she replies, “My hope is gone, now Suffolk is deceas'd” (ll. 54-55).

So ends the story of Suffolk and Margaret, but there is yet another, more oblique reference to this love in the suggestion, in 3 Henry VI (II.ii.131ff.), that the Prince of Wales is its fruit. The spirited young prince stands up to Warwick:

If that be right which Warwick says is right,
There is no wrong, but everything is right.

Warwick comments,

Whoever got thee, there thy mother stands.

Ten lines later Edward, soon to be Edward IV, attacks Margaret as a “shameless callet.”

Helen of Greece was fairer far than thou,
Although thy husband may be Menelaus;
And ne'er was Agamemnon's brother wrong'd
By that false woman as this king by thee.

We remember Suffolk's description of himself going to France to bring Margaret to England, “As did the youthful Paris once to Greece” (1 Henry VI, V.v.104). Critics and commentators appear to have ignored the paternity of Edward, Prince of Wales, as implied by these speeches and therefore as it appeared to Shakespeare.

This then is the tragic tale of adulterous love which Shakespeare based upon the merest hints in history. Hall once referred to Suffolk as “the Quenes dearlynge” and stated that the Queen “entierly loved the Duke,”⁸ but even here darling could mean favorite (there is a reference to the Queen's “minions”) and the entire love is not necessarily sexual. Holinshed, whose Chronicle Shakespeare closely followed, omitted these hints of an affection but stressed the close association of Suffolk and Margaret in the control of the country. In tracing the disruption of England under Henry VI, Holinshed wrote, “Richard, duke of Yorke, … perceiving the king to be no ruler, but the whole burthen of the realme to rest in direction of the queene, & the duke of Suffolke, began secretile to allure his friends of the nobilitie.”⁹ When the commons began openly to accuse Suffolk of being the cause of the many ills afflicting England, Holinshed said, “The queene hereat, doubting not onelie the dukes destruction, but also hir owne confusion, caused the parlement, before begun at the Blackfriers, to be adjourned to Leicester; thinking there, by force and rigor of law, to suppresse and subdue all the malice and evill will conceived against the duke & hir.”¹⁰ Shakespeare is justified by the Chronicles for holding this disastrous association of Suffolk and Margaret, as much as the weakness of the King, responsible for the fearful events which the tetralogy relates. He went yet further. But for this love, to Shakespeare's mind, the French provinces would not have been lost, the good Duke of Gloucester would not have been murdered, the crown would not have passed to the house of York, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, might never have had the opportunities for the slaughter which brought him to the throne as Richard III. When later, in Richard III, we watch the aging Margaret lurking in the background to observe the terrible consequences of her association with Suffolk and of her husband's holy weakness, we should remember this, her only love. It is Shakespeare's first essay in tragic, destructive love, and there is something grand in this shameless affection between two passionate, ruthless, and physically splendid lovers. That it is neither historically nor dramatically called for may be the reason why Shakespeare partly concealed it by dividing it between two plays. Of course, it does tie Parts 1 and 2 together in the most exciting way, since we see Suffolk's statement of his intentions in the last lines of Part 1 being put into operation at the very beginning of Part 2. Put wholly into one play, however, this stated purpose and its carrying out could steal the show and make a mock of history. But spoken in their entirety, as they probably were in the original productions, the Suffolk-Margaret scenes would hold their own against the historical material, and the more intimate and continuous association of the lovers on the stage, even in the presence of other characters, would give flesh to Shakespeare's view of this segment of English history.

Recent productions of Henry VI, concentrating on the Wars of the Roses rather than on the human interest and relationships of Shakespeare's play and making the weakness of the King and the ruthless covetousness of the barons the cause of all, have cut the three great scenes—the courtship, the farewell, and the death of Suffolk—so that the love story almost disappears from the play and the nursing of Suffolk's severed head by Margaret almost becomes a shocking irrelevance. Critics and commentators too have played it down, embarrassed perhaps that a queen of England should have behaved thus and that Shakespeare should have invented such a tasteless story. Other meaningless excisions in recent productions—the omission of the Countess-Talbot and Pucelle-Burgundy scenes in 1 Henry VI at Stratford—have robbed that play of passages of high and complex human interest and made such productions heavy with history, shorn of those parts of these plays which perhaps most interested their author, partly because he invented them.

Suffolk's brave death and the effects his deeds had, in Shakespeare's view, on English history, raise him to tragic level. His comparison of his own death with those of Tully, Julius Caesar, and Pompey is not there to be laughed at; neither is his own likening of himself to Paris and of Margaret to Helen, nor the associations with Dido and Aeneas and Ovid and his wife. And one is inevitably reminded of Lancelot and Guinevere.¹¹ The disastrous consequences of this love were made by Shakespeare to seem similar to those of the other adulterous love upon Troy, which Shakespeare was to set forth in Troilus and Cressida. It is a love as splendidly physical but as morally and politically reprehensible as that of Antony and Cleopatra, while Margaret in her ferocity is an earlier Lady Macbeth. For Margaret, Suffolk is the only love, the rest is bitterness. For Suffolk, the world was well lost in her service and its memory enables him to die nobly and proudly. Margaret's nursing of the hewn-off head is a tribute unique in love stories. His loss and the fuller realization of the unheroic qualities of her husband turn her into the doomed and desperate warrior queen, not to be released by death but to live on into Richard III—a malevolent ghost haunting Richard, commenting on the fateful developments, and cursing her enemies. The attitude of conventional morality to this love is expressed not in Henry's peevish comments but in the Lieutenant's condemnation,¹² and here the rough English view triumphs in dooming Suffolk unceremoniously to death. So respectable Romans must have thought of Antony and Cleopatra. But Margaret's exit with the head could be almost as strange and awe-inspiring as the madness of Lady Macbeth if the full text were performed to sustain it.

The historical part of the Suffolk story, as it was presented by the Tudor historians,¹³ was sufficiently well known to be used as a moral example in A Myrroure for Magistrates (1559), “How Lorde William Delapole Duke of Suffolke was worthily punyshed for abusing his Kyng and causing the destruction of good Duke Humfrey.” But there is no mention of love here either. How effective Shakespeare's distortions of and additions to history were may be judged from Drayton's Englands Heroicall Epistles (1598). Drayton pretended to depend upon “Chronicle Historie” in compiling these imaginary verse letters between famous English lovers, and on the title page he directed his readers to observe his pertinent annotations. But he had only Shakespeare's authority for a famous love between Queen Margaret and Suffolk, and much of what Drayton gave as historical fact is Shakespearean invention. In the Epistle from “Elinor Cobham to Duke Humphrey,” we are told, “Poole needs must have his Darling made a Queene” (l. 80).¹⁴ (Does the use of the word darling here suggest that Drayton too had read Hall before writing these Epistles?) “The Argument” of the exchange of letters between Suffolk and Margaret begins:

This Duke of Suffolke, William, to advance
A Lady, long belov'd of him in France,
His Mistris, Margaret, that Duke Rayners Child,
Himselfe who of Jerusalem instyl'd
The King: this Poole, his Darling to preferre,
Betwixt young Henry, nam'd the sixt, and her,
Concludes a Marriage. …

(p. 230)

Margaret's letter is written after Suffolk's banishment, and she expresses her sense of personal and political deprivation. She warns Suffolk of the dangers of the sea:

I pray thee, Poole, have care how thou do'st passe,
Never the Sea yet halfe so dang'rous was;
And one fore-told, by Water thou should'st die. …

(p. 242; ll. 139-41)

Drayton solemnly annotated this as though it came from the Chronicles. “The Witch of Eye received answere from her Spirit, That the Duke of Suffolke should take heed of Water: Which the Queene fore-warnes him of, as remembring the Witches Prophesie; which afterwards came to passe” (p. 246). We know, of course, that Shakespeare was the only source of this prophecy.

But if the Chronicles are silent, apart from the merest hints, in the matter of the love of Margaret and Suffolk, there is another source to suggest an authentic love affair between them. Suffolk has been revealed as a courtly poet, and poems previously attributed to Charles D'Orléans are now generally accepted as by Suffolk.¹⁵ One of these at least, “Praise of a Flower,” is taken as having been addressed to Queen Margaret (Marguerite). It begins,

Myn hert ys set, and all myn hole entent,
To serve this flour in my most humble wyse
As faythfully as can be thought or ment,
Wyth-out feynyng or slouthe in my servyse;
For wytt the wele, yt ys a paradyse
To se this floure when yt begyn to sprede,
Wyth colours fressh ennewyd, white and rede.(16)

Another poem is a conventional complaint against fortune, but yet another (p. 189) is entitled “Lettyr” and begins,

Myn hertys Ioy, and all myn hole plesaunce,
Whom that I serve and shall do faythfully.

In spite of the “wyth-out feynyng,” “Praise of a Flower” might be dismissed as a courtly exercise in the manner of medieval gallantry, but this last little poem has a ring of sincerity which might well have come from Suffolk's banishment:

I wryte to yow no more for lak of space,
But I beseche the only trinite
Yow kepe and save be support of hys grace,
And be your sheld from all adversyte.
Go lytill byll, and say thou were wyth me
Of verey trouth, as thou canst wele remembre,
At myn upryst, the fyft day of Decembre.(17)

Had Drayton actually seen any of Suffolk's poems? I almost think he had when I read in Margaret's Epistle,

My Daisie flower, which erst perfum'd the ayre,
Which for my favour Princes dayn'd to weare …

(p. 241; ll. 89-90)

But the play on Daisy-Marguerite-Margaret is perhaps too obvious to require knowledge of Suffolk's poem. Drayton noted, “The Daisie in French is called Margarite, which was Queene Margarets Badge; wherewithall the Nobilitie and Chivalrie of the Land, at her first Arrivall, were so delighted, that they wore it in their Hats, in token of Honour” (pp. 244-45).

It may be equally idle to speculate whether Shakespeare might have read or heard of Suffolk's poems for, even if he had, this would not lessen the range and significance of his inventions in setting forth this story and in linking it with the struggle for power. In Suffolk and Margaret, Shakespeare was already reaching out toward his great tragic relationships, not with full confidence yet but with astonishing boldness for an early play with which he was hoping to establish himself in the world of the theater. And he did this with more poetry, insight, and power than his Henry VI is usually credited with.

Notes

1. The First Part of King Henry VI, Arden edition, ed. A. S. Cairncross (London, 1962). All quotations are from this edition unless otherwise noted.

2. Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (London, 1550), fol. cxlviii^v.

3. Hall, fol. cxlix-cl. The last line of Suffolk's speech resembles the younger Mortimer's plea to Queen Isabella in Marlowe's Edward II, “Be ruled by me, and we will rule the realme …” (Edward II, V. ii. 5, ed. W. M. Merchant, New Mermaid, Benn, London, 1967, l. 2147). But both these lines are traceable to the Chronicles, and the relationship between Queen Isabella and Mortimer is similar to that between Margaret and Suffolk. Both women become warrior queens; Isabella before, Margaret after her lover's death. Mortimer's severed head is brought onto the stage, but immediately after Isabella's exit at the end of the play. Shakespeare went much further in intensifying the passion between the lovers and in the invention of the prolonged farewell and the pathetic and grotesque hugging of Suffolk's head by Margaret. The adulterous affair is more dramatically justifiable but less interesting in Marlowe's play than in Shakespeare's, but the question of influence awaits agreement on the relative dating of the two plays.

4. The Second Part of King Henry VI, Arden edition, ed. A. S. Cairncross (London, 1957), p. 96. Further quotations from the play are from this edition unless otherwise noted.

5. Hall, fol. cxlviii.

6. Referred to as “Lieutenant” in FF.

7. There have been several attempts to clear up some confusion in these two lines. This is substantially the First Folio version. For others, see Arden edition, ed. Cairncross, p. 104.

8. Hall, fol. clviii.

9. Raphael Holinshed, … The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (London, 1587), III, 627.

10. Holinshed, III, 631.

11. Arden edition, ed. Cairncross, p. liv.

12. IV. i. 69-102.

13. Modern historians have found him a worthier person.

14. Michael Drayton, Works, ed. William Hebel (Oxford, 1931-41), II, 217. All quotations are taken from this edition.

15. See H. N. MacCracken, “An English Friend of Charles of Orléans,” PMLA, XXVI, new ser., XIX (1911), 142-80.

16. Quotations from R. H. Robbins, Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (Oxford, 1952), p. 186.

17. Robbins, p. 190.