SOURCE: “Ironic Lapses: Plotting in Henry VI,” in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 5, No. 1, April, 1972, pp. 27-49.

[In the essay below, Billings links the historical failures of the characters in Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 to Shakespeare's theme of a decline in heroic virtues and ideals, and examines the structural role of heroic irony in the plays.]

Henry VI ironically adapts the conventions of heroic drama to the matter of the Lancastrian losses, first of France and secondly of England. So dominant are the irony and the heroic conventions that the Tudor propaganda of Hall's Union and Holinshed's Chronicles¹ is obscured by the characters' sense of heroic duties and by the frequent frustration both of heroic intent and fulfilment of duty. Although the Tudor historians and Shakespeare show that civil dissensions weakened England and contributed to the losing of France, Hall, and Holinshed after him less insistently, assigns blame to human folly and weakness. In Shakespeare's trilogy, however, English reverses are most often the result of a failure in the heroic stance. Where the historians sometimes considered misfortune or simple lack of foresight the cause of adversities, Shakespeare presents the failures as the results of unmanly mildness, amorous entanglement, dishonorable choices of the lesser glory, or cowardice. Neither a politics without valor nor a valor without political nobility has a chance of lasting success in the world of Henry VI, in which most of the characters act out flawed versions of the heroic ideal.

In part the differences between the chronicle sources and the historical trilogy come from the narrower range of the three plays—from the death of Henry V in 1422 to the murder of Henry VI in 1473, a half-century in which no single hero or saint or villain dominated. Ironic defeat of expectation rather than triumph was more natural for treating this time. Despite Henry VI's prophecy over the future Henry VII, there was little opportunity for Shakespeare to take the longer view and to show dramatically that disorder and intrigue had some good ultimate end.² Having no single dominant figure around whom to build the trilogy, Shakespeare yet had the Elizabethan dramatic method of presenting a conflict rather than a single protagonist, with episodic scenes alternating among several groups of characters. In this way he could equal Hall's narrative long view with an ironic distance created by contrasts between the parties to contention. Further, the meanings of most of these actions could be indicated by implicit contrast with a heroic ideal, so that the episodic actions could be seen as consistently relevant to a single broad context of values.

The conventions of heroic drama had already been used in plays dealing with civil as well as foreign war. Lodge's The Wounds of Civil War (1589), Peele's The Battle of Alcazar (1589), and The Troublesome raigne of John, King of England (printed 1591) deal mainly with civil war;³ the first two are quite clearly influenced by the language and grand dauntlessness found in Marlowe's drama of heroic conquest, Tamburlaine. Even while the trilogy was in progress, probably in 1591 and 1592, Locrine, a historical-heroical tragedy also influenced by Tamburlaine, was very likely being composed in its first version.⁴Locrine also featured a civil war and, like The Troublesome raigne, dramatized the repulse of invaders. The heroic drama presented Herculean protagonists with a martial code set in contrast both with conventional morality and with characters motivated by considerations other than the irascible passions and the glories of power.⁵ From a conventional point of view, such a code and such characters are ambiguous, according to their service of established goods.⁶ The ambiguity gave the playwrights an opportunity of dramatizing what may happen in war—the defeat of the good and the triumph of the unrighteous. Peele did try to slant The Battle of Alcazar so that the usurper is cowardly and treacherous as well as ambitious, while the true heir of Morocco is godly as well as wise and courageous; but the Christians in the battle, King Sebastian and Stukely, happen to be on the usurper's side and are slain despite their bravery and good intentions. In Lodge's The Wounds of Civil War both Sulla and Marius are heroic but destructive of the state. In the anonymous The Troublesome raigne, the Bastard Falconbridge, though inspired by the glory of his own Plantagenet heritage, is irreverently alert to his Plantagenet king's weaknesses. Locrine sins against the moral as well as the heroic code by serving his lust for his concubine rather than his duty to his wife, her family, and the kingdom; yet he fights to the death against those he has outraged, and never repents his wrongdoing. Even in these dramatic discrepancies between heroic virtù and conventional rules of conduct, there are ironies directed against the simple equations of political success with moral worth and of political failure with moral turpitude. The man of war may not achieve political order, and the man who forsakes the code of war and honor may lose his political power as Locrine does.

Shakespeare in Henry VI likewise rejects this simple correlation of political with moral qualities, so that no political prediction can be made from moral virtues. The well-meaning King Henry quite lacks virtù and love of glory, admits the weakness of his dynastic claim, and finally leaves the defense of England and the Lancastrian cause to his wife. His prime adversary, the Duke of York, is valiant in war but deceptive and intriguing in peace; yet he is defeated in war by his own excess of valor rather than by his dishonorable share in intrigues. Talbot, the only major character of unstained virtue, both military and patriotic, is stripped of all but his honor in a defeat caused by his own countrymen's failure to rescue him. The defeat of the well-meaning, the flawed, and the stainless never alone becomes the unifying purpose of the action. These repeated defeats instead contribute to a unifying political purpose, to show that two categories of value, the heroic and the conventional, are necessary to the ordering of the realm. The purpose is not simply to show a frame of disorder,⁷ but a disorder that pits two incomplete kinds of ability against each other.

The heroic play contributed to the situations and characterizations of Henry VI as well as to the theme. The plots of heroic plays normally turn upon an emulous rivalry between the central figure and one or more adversaries. Properly the rivalry is to be resolved by one or more battles. Failure to do battle at an early opportunity is, of course, a lapse from the heroic. Heroic figures are mainly moved by irascible passions rather than righteousness, and in some heroic plays like Tamburlaine and Locrine there is tension not only between the heroic rage and unwarlike values but also between irascible and concupiscent passions. Love and mercy would also keep a man from going to war and thus from his manly glory. Tamburlaine resists but Locrine yields to softness of heart for weeping, lovely women. When circumstances prevent conflict, the hero must keep up the struggle with words and dauntless attitudes. In any case the heroic struggle should be open and conducted against armed adversaries without underhanded efforts to lessen the risk. Locrine and the usurping Moor in Alcazar underhandedly betray loyal comrades in arms, unlike Tamburlaine, who openly turned against Cosroe and met him in the field to fight for the crown of Persia. Both Sulla and Marius kill unarmed political enemies (who meet death unflinchingly and with reproofs) until Sulla is so moved by one honorable suicide of an enemy that he gives up his power and his authority. This interpretation of Sulla's act is, by the way, Lodge's own rather than one of the views he found in Appian or Plutarch.⁸ In The Troublesome raigne, King John's supposed murder of the youthful Prince Arthur provokes the nobles into a rebellion. Not only dishonorable shedding of blood but non-combat, an unheroic failure to fight, had appeared in heroic drama before Henry VI. Marlowe treats Mycetes' cowardice comically in I Tamburlaine, but in II Tamburlaine the effeminacy of the conqueror's son in abstaining from battle gives occasion for a grim and shocking lesson in heroic conduct. Likewise the Bastard Falconbridge's intimidations of his weakly half-brother and blustering Lord of Austria stress the heroic obligation to fight or threaten at every provocation to honor.

Henry VI in every part is complicated by manifold rivalries and by varied forms of the heroic situations already suggested. Talbot tirelessly struggles against Joan of Arc; the Duke of York against King Henry; the Duke of York and afterward his sons Edward and Richard against Queen Margaret and her son Prince Edward. In addition to these central rivalries, which all eventuate in battles, there are unheroic failures to do battle or to face the rival openly; these lapses nonetheless alter the balance of power between the main contestants. The animosity between Somerset and York in Part I never produces an armed struggle in that play, but leaves Talbot fatally weak against Joan and the French power. The long wrangling between the Cardinal-Bishop of Winchester and the Duke of Gloucester is ended underhandedly by political maneuvering and murder. King Henry is left without the latter's support in the battle against the Duke of York, and one has the impression that Henry's defeat is promoted by his earlier loss of the Duke of Gloucester. In Part III Shakespeare uses a more schematic method: promise-breaking repeatedly breaks an uneasy peace and alters the military situation; there being no absolute loyalties, there can be no solidarity in any heroic triumph. Until the last promise-breaker and the last man with a private grievance be dead, military victory is likely to be followed by a breach of loyalty and a new cause of warfare. In Part III, then, Shakespeare does not dramatize the corrupting of heroic endeavor by unheroic maneuver; he dramatizes the decline of heroic honor into a self-regarding dream of private satisfactions. Throughout the trilogy, too, there are tensions between concupiscence and irascibility. Concupiscence is, of course, another self-regarding motive. Talbot resists the lures of the (unhistorical) Countess of Auvergne, while his French enemies are seduced by Joan, and his sovereign, Henry, is ensnared by the beauties of Margaret of Anjou. In Part II, Margaret's vanity and ambition to be first lady of the court prompt her to conspire against the Duke of Gloucester; and her desire for a gallant, decisive lover and ally overrides the evident worthlessness of Suffolk (and, after him, Somerset) in command. In Part III, King Edward's lust for the chaste Lady Grey prompts him to take the more convenient course of marrying her rather than the Lady Bona, to whom he had made overtures. Her brother, the King of France, and Edward's emissary, Warwick, are quite naturally angered by such trifling with their honors and turn against the English king. In heroic encounters, in faulty, dishonorable, or lascivious motives, the trilogy seems repeatedly to echo the situations of heroic drama.

The ironies created by Shakespeare's construction, however, set up situations of considerable moral complexity. It is not possible to assign a constant value to one kind of behavior or to one character, for value is affected by dramatic context. For example, in heroic drama circumstances such as bodily weakness or captivity might prevent the required passage of arms, as a mortal wound keeps Stukely in The Battle of Alcazar from continuing in battle, or as enslavement forces the kings drawing Tamburlaine's chariot to content themselves with invective. In I Henry VI it is apparently a point of honor for Talbot to have wrenched up cobblestones to throw at his French captors, and so also it must have seemed a matter of honor for the servants of Winchester and Gloucester to continue their masters' quarrel with stones after being forbidden to bear weapons. Although both Talbot and the servants show a manly firmness of will, the soldier has been engaged in a nobler struggle than the street-brawling servants. In a way the servants parody Talbot as well as their masters. Likewise the future Duke of York, supporting his dying uncle, Mortimer, and resolving to carry on the dynastic claims of the family, acts out both a heroic duty and a parody; for while York may resemble the young Locrine receiving the dying Brutus' benediction and testament, he also resembles the defeated Talbot embracing his dying son, who has with his father secured the family's claim to a deathless glory. It is hard to see how the heir of York and Mortimer could have relinquished the ancestral claim without also relinquishing honor and an absolute fidelity to family; yet it is also clear that he is not prepared to be as magnanimous as the Talbots. Political circumstances prevent his open declaring of a claim to the throne. The need to be secret until he has the power to strike is in fact what compromises his honor until the last act of II Henry VI. He must engage in unworthy intrigues. Yet again, however, his motives and dramatic circumstances distinguish him from other intriguers. Unlike them, for example, he is angered by the loss of French territories because he is ambitious to rule, not simply because he wants more sway at court. His secret intriguing is improved also by the greater complexity of the situation in II Henry VI than in some other heroic plays. No naive single combats like that by which Alphonsus of Aragon regains his patrimony would have served to wrest political and military power from a court composed of several factions. In III Henry VI, too, the moral judgments are not simple. Queen Margaret, who had seemed unheroic as well as unwomanly in taunting the captive York with the blood of his son, comes later to seem, by contrast with King Edward IV and Richard of Gloucester, a genuinely heroic figure still inspired by resolution and loyalty to her own son. Finally, King Henry VI himself has no constant value in the trilogy, even though Shakespeare gives him a consistent character. His amiability and moral purity appear to best advantage when he justly appreciates a temperament different from his own. In Part I he gives the heroic Talbot due praise and friendly audience. In Part III he fearlessly but without rancor anatomizes the villainous Richard of Gloucester, who has Henry at his mercy. But when his moral purity leads him to overrate a Somerset's or a Winchester's good intentions, or when his amiability prompts him to shrink from unavoidable conflicts with his queen's strong will, he appears weak and almost complicit with disorder.

To show that this trilogy is indeed a “frame of disorder” unified by consistent relationship to heroic conventions, we may first consider what, in three specific instances, Shakespeare has done with his sources. The foregoing examples have illustrated general resemblances, and although Hall and Holinshed do suggest the general outlines of Henry's, Talbot's, Margaret's, and Richard of Gloucester's characters, the historians do not suggest the content of scenes involving these and other characters. Comparison of scenes with both historical sources and heroical analogues will more clearly show that the heroical patterns modified the handling of history. Because the order of composing the three parts remains uncertain, we need not assume that considering scenes from Parts I, II, and III respectively shows any trend or development of Shakespeare's imagination. (This incidentally is the moment to say that all of the arguments against Shakespeare's authorship of the trilogy prove only that the author was not very careful of details, that the author did not write consistently in the style of Shakespeare's more mature historical plays, and that Greene was a rival of the actor William Shakespeare.⁹ This evidence does not overturn the fact that Shakespeare's associates included the trilogy in the Folio, or the fact that from 1593 or 1594 to 1600 Shakespeare—not Greene, Nashe, Peele, Marlowe or any other possible author—was so deeply interested in English history that he wrote six plays on the matter of England; no other dramatist seems to have cared so much for the subject.¹⁰ Whatever other play or plays may have been written before 1593 about the life and times of Henry VI, it seems reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare did his own reading in the chronicles and was responsible for the rehandling of history in Henry VI.)

Rather than choosing passages that best support a thesis, we may look at scenes important to the action of the plays. A little past the midpoint of each part, Shakespeare sets a scene of consultation that decisively changes the course of events. As the balance of forces is changed in the scenes, so expectations are defeated. The question to be asked is, Are these scenes to be understood as simply an effort to dramatize history, or also as ironic dramatizing in terms of heroic conventions? In I Henry VI, III.iii, Joan la Pucelle persuades Burgundy to join the French. The pivotal scene in II Henry VI is III.i, in which the accusers of the Duke of Gloucester decide to murder him and also to send York to put down an Irish uprising, so that King Henry loses his strongest loyal ally while his most dangerous enemy gains an army. In Part III, both III.ii and III.iii are decisive, for in the former King Edward persuades himself to marry Lady Elizabeth instead of Lady Bona, and in III.iii, King Lewis is prompted by Edward's default to ally himself with Queen Margaret's party. I shall consider each of these pivotal scenes, except for the scene of self-persuasion (Part III, III.ii).

The Duke of Burgundy's withdrawal from the English cause followed a very gradual disaffection, according to Hall.¹¹ Joan had been condemned and executed some four years before Burgundy's final break, and so she had no historical part in persuading him. The Duke's main grievances were King Henry's claim to full authority in France and the Duke of Bedford's refusal to grant the city of Orleans to Burgundy. He was persuaded finally to make peace with the French at the Council of Arras in 1435, after the English representatives had failed to reach an agreement with the French. Hall ascribes two main motives to the Duke: jealousy vis-à-vis Bedford, and a belief that his interests were French as well as Burgundian:

But when it happened, contrary to his expectacion, that the kyng of Englande, by the right course of inheritaunce, tooke vpon hym the whole rule and gouernaunce, within the realme of Fraunce … & that the duke iudged, that he was not had in great confidence, nor in perfite truste, as he thought, because the Duke of Bedforde, would not suffre the toune of Orleaunce, to be rendered to hym (as you before haue heard): He therfore imagined, & determined with hymself, to returne into the pathe again, from the whiche he had straied and erred, and to take part, and ioyne with his awne bloud and nacion …

provided that the return should seem not to be of his own choosing.¹²

In I Henry VI Shakespeare makes Burgundy's defection occur on the battlefield at the instigation of la Pucelle. Immediately after an English success at Rouen, while the armies still are marching from the field, Joan detains Burgundy and offers arguments roughly the same as those which Hall had ascribed to the Duke himself:¹³

Who join'st thou with but with a lordly nation
That will not trust thee but for profit's sake?
When Talbot hath set footing once in France,
And fashion'd thee that instrument of ill,
Who then but English Henry will be lord,
And thou be thrust out like a fugitive?

(III.iii.62-67)

There follows an anachronistic reference to another grievance, the English release of Burgundy's enemy, the Duke of Orleans, which occurred later, in retaliation for Burgundy's defection. Then Joan echoes Hall's metaphor of straying from the path: “Come, come return; return, thou wandering lord” (76). Until this moment, there have been no hints of ill will between Burgundy and the English, and no mention of a Duke of Orleans. As for Bedford, Shakespeare had already dramatized his death in III.ii to make way for Talbot's pre-eminence. So far Shakespeare's handling of history only accentuates the suddenness of Burgundy's change and further builds up Joan's role in opposition to Talbot's. But her speech has earlier included a topic, the devastation of France, which was the motive not of Burgundy but of Pope Eugenius, who sought to initiate peace conferences. It is this topic that first weakens the Duke, and Shakespeare has expressed it in imagery of his own:

look on fertile France,
And see the cities and the towns defac'd
By wasting ruin of the cruel foe;
As looks the mother on her lowly babe
When death doth close his tender dying eyes,
See, see, the pining malady of France;
Behold the wounds, the most unnatural wounds
Which thou thyself hast given her woeful breast.
O, turn thy edged sword another way;
Strike those that hurt, and hurt not those that help!
One drop of blood drawn from thy country's bosom
Should grieve thee more than streams of foreign gore.
Return thee therefore with a flood of tears,
And wash away thy country's stained spots.
Burgundy. [Aside.] Either she hath bewitch'd me with her words,
Or nature makes me suddenly relent.

(III.iii.44-59)

La Pucelle's later contempt for his relenting (“turn and turn again”) shows that we, too, may consider it dishonorable. Further, the very images of Joan's exhortation, mother, babe, flood of tears, have already been treated with the scorn that the heroic resolve feels for melting moods. Bedford's lament for Henry V uses the same imagery:

Posterity, await for wretched years,
When at their mothers' moist eyes babes shall suck,
Our isle be made a nourish of salt tears. …

(I.i.48-50)

And in the same scene he rejects such talk:

Away with these disgraceful wailing robes!
Wounds will I lend the French instead of eyes,
To weep their intermissive miseries.

(I.i.86-88)

Burgundy has not rejected such persuasion as unmanly. The scene is one in which a heroic resolve clearly seems required and then fails to appear. Shakespeare's adaptations of history not only magnify Joan's role but are shaped ironically to prove Burgundy no true hero, or just possibly a victim of bewitchment.

Persuasion may give a man of war and honor a chance to make a heroic choice only when he may gain a greater glory by changing his course, as Theridamas does when he forsakes the Persian king to follow Tamburlaine's far stronger leadership. Sebastian of Portugal is persuaded to fight at Alcazar by his hope of establishing the Christian faith in Africa. But in such cases weeping nations are not to be convincing topics. Although the historical Duke Philip of Burgundy prospered after breaking with England, Shakespeare shows that he was undone morally, as Talbot was never directly undone, by a woman's persuasions.

A woman has undue influence also in the pivotal scene of II Henry VI, in which the Duke of Gloucester is doomed while the Duke of York gains the army his ambition will require to gain its ends. The woman is Queen Margaret, to whom Hall does ascribe a commanding role in bringing down Gloucester. Although Shakespeare does not widely depart from the chronology and relationships of history, he not only compresses events but emphasizes York's complicity in all of them. The events were these.¹⁴ At the instigation of the Queen, Gloucester was removed from the protectorship in the twenty-fifth year of Henry's reign and was made the victim of various accusations in council; in the same year, the Duke was made to answer formal charges before a Parliament at Bury, but was murdered before a verdict could be rendered. Within a year afterward, the Cardinal-Bishop of Winchester died. The Duke of York began to feel out support for his own claim to the throne. During the next two years, the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth, the Duke of York put down a rebellion in Ireland, but the Duke of Somerset was totally unsuccessful in his efforts to keep Normandy out of French control. Margaret was behind the intrigues against Gloucester, and presumably consented to the later appointments of Somerset and York.

Shakespeare's scene, III.i, rearranges some of these events and omits York's solicitation of support, which has already been dramatized in II.ii. The loss of Normandy is announced near the beginning of the scene, the condemnation of Gloucester takes up the middle portion, and the announcement of an Irish rebellion comes near the end. The discovery of the murdered Gloucester opens the following scene, III.ii. The early discrediting of Somerset is less important than the introduction of York as a main participant in the Queen's intrigue against Gloucester. Hall does not give the Duke of York such a role, and indeed his narrative suggests that York did not begin to aspire to the throne until he had seen “the destruccion of the good duke of Gloucester, and exaltacion and advauncement of this glorious man [the vainly-ambitious Suffolk]” (p. 210). Shakespeare has made York a less patriotic figure, whose solicitations of the Nevilles in II.ii anticipate that the fall of Gloucester will clear the way for a Yorkist triumph.

He has also made King Henry a more deplorable, less manly figure by introducing him into this scene, apparently to show that Gloucester's doom is made possible by Henry's ineffectual resistance. Apparently ignorant of the plan to bring charges against his uncle, Henry at first only protests that Gloucester must be innocent as “the sucking lamb or harmless dove” (III.i.71). He scarcely objects while accusations are made in quasi-allegorical, emblematic terms, and then weakly proposes to withdraw. His state of mind is expressed in images like those of Joan's false persuasion and Bedford's ignominious grief:

                              my heart is drown'd with grief,
Whose flood begins to flow within mine eyes,
My body round engirt with misery.
.....And as the dam runs lowing up and down,
Looking the way her harmless young one went,
And can do nought but wail her darling's loss;
Even so myself bewails good Gloucester's case
With sad unhelpful tears, and with dimm'd eyes
Look after him, and cannot do him good;
So mighty are his vowed enemies.

(III.i.198-200, 214-20)

Here again is weeping that swamps the active principle, and maternal grief; because the imagery of this scene has been predominantly composed of animal emblems, the mother here is a cow.

Henry's weakness and the conspirators' duplicity are dishonorable; only York's furious ambition emerges in the closing soliloquy as the one heroic possibility of the scene. The opening words of the speech are a call to valorous purpose:

Now, York, or never, steel thy fearful thoughts,
And change misdoubt to resolution:
Be that thou hop'st to be, or what thou art
Resign to death; it is not worth th' enjoying.

(III.i.331-34)

But although this resembles Bedford's own resolve in Part I, York speaks of himself here as having a brain busier “than the labouring spider” (339) and as being a “starved snake” (343) foolishly revived by the Queen's party. And when he considers his new army “sharp weapons in a madman's hands” (347), the image suggests Bedlam rather than the maddened Ajax Telemonius, to whom he alludes two acts later (V.i.26 f.). Only with the imagery of storm and sun does York return to metaphors for power and glory worthy of a hero:

I will stir up in England some black storm
Shall blow ten thousand souls to heaven, or hell;
And this fell tempest shall not cease to rage
Until the golden circuit on my head,
Like to the glorious sun's transparent beams,
Do calm the fury of this mad-bred flaw.

(III.i.349-54)

Because one cannot speak sardonically of oneself as snake and madman without ironic contrast with the vaunting speech about oneself as tempest and golden-crowned king, York's soliloquy must be perceived as an imperfectly-heroic set speech of review and planning.

We must also give some attention to the fall of Gloucester, whom Shakespeare has gone to some trouble to establish, in Part II, as the good governor of himself and of the state.¹⁵ Despite his antagonism to Winchester, he has never been a participant in heroic or honorable combat but has instead sought the honor of himself and the state through legitimate political means. He corresponds most closely to those senators in The Wounds of Civil War who like Antonius insist that their service is alone lawful and beneficial to the state, and who morally defy their armed accusers and destroyers:

Can then your eyes with thundering threats of rage,
Cast furious gleames of anger vpon age?
Can then your harts with furies mount so hie,
As they should harme the Romane Anthonie?
I farre more kinde than sensles tree haue lent
A kindly sap to our declining state,
And like a carefull shepheard have foreseene
The heauie dangers of this Citie Rome
And made the citizens the happie flocke
Whom I haue fed with counsailes and aduice.

(1855-64)

This portrayal of his own good qualities does not arouse pity alone because it is part of an accusation against his destroyers' tyranny. The effect is a kind of heroical pathos, created by the clash between heroic ambition and political nobility. Gloucester exhibits the same kind of resolution and defiance:

And if my death might make this island happy,
And prove the period of their tyranny,
I would expend it with all willingness.
.....Beaufort's red sparkling eyes blab his heart's malice,
And Suffolk's cloudy brow his stormy hate;
Sharp Buckingham unburthens with his tongue
The envious load that lies upon his heart;
And dogged York, that reaches at the moon,
Whose overweening arm I have pluck'd back,
By false accuse doth level at my life.

(III.i.148-50, 154-60)

In The Wounds of Civil War the effect of heroical pathos from the dying or doomed senators is to limit the claims of heroical ambition. In this scene in II Henry VI, Gloucester's defiant self-vindication not only contrasts with Henry's timorous reproaches but also shows that legitimate authority may have more magnanimity than ambition can.

The heroic motive in Part II must work within a political context even more sharply defined than that of Part I. While a Tamburlaine need not concern himself with his title to a crown, the heroic ambition of a York must be supported by a legitimate claim as well as by a glorious vision of royal estate. York has already recited his genealogy in this play, but he has not yet had occasion to demonstrate the kind of political righteousness Gloucester has shown.

Neither does York conclude with this anticipation of the sun-like crown, but goes on instead to describe his plan to use Jack Cade as a catspaw. Certainly the audience must be forewarned that Cade is an imposter, and that York has instigated his uprising. There is no reason, however, that this information must come at the end of a set speech in which York reviews his situation and incites himself to plan and to take future action. This placement of this exposition—the only matter in this soliloquy that is firmly grounded in the historical source—strengthens the effect of a heroic resolve much modified by cunning and malice. Shakespeare's compression of events has presented Henry's default, Gloucester's fall, and Margaret's conspiracy as the ignoble conditions of success for York's long-standing and deep-laid plot, and has presented York as consciously turning these conditions to his own advantage. Intrigue, not martial confrontation, is York's strategy. The release of resentments as well as ambition of glory is his motive.

We may contrast this moment with the occasions on which other heroes turn upon an ally or upon an unoffending kingdom to gain power. In every case—in I Tamburlaine, in Locrine, in The Battle of Alcazar—the hero leads in his own person, not by a substitute. In every hero—Tamburlaine, Humber (the invader of Locrine's kingdom), and Sebastian—the motive of glory is uppermost. Tamburlaine persuades himself and his followers to turn upon Cosroe by dwelling upon the splendor of kingship. Humber, determined to possess a land he finds rich and lovely, anticipates with bloody-minded longings the joys of war in that land:

Me thinkes I see both armies in the field:
The broken launces clime the cristall skies;
Some headless lie, some breathless on the ground,
And euery place is straw'd with carcasses.
Behold! the grasse hath lost his pleasant greene,
The sweetest sight that euer might be seene.

(Locrine, III.ii.16-21)

Sebastian has less bloodthirsty sentiments but more ambitions:

And thrive it so with thee as thou doest meane,
And meane thou so as thou doest wish to thrive,
And if our Christ for whom in chiefe we fight,
Heereby to inlarge the bounds of christendome,
Favor this warre, and as I do not doubt,
Send victorie to light upon my crest,
Brave Moore I will advance thy kingly sonne,
And with a diademe of pearle and golde,
Adorne thy temples and inrich thy head.

(The Battle of Alcazar, 914-22)

It is not amiss for a hero to think of suffering and treachery, but he must not be moved by anything less than a glory for which he personally would lead his armies in battle. York's speech just sufficiently resembles these other models that his lapses from them might well have been felt as unwitting irony.

In III Henry VI one pivotal scene, III.iii, may seem quite without mean-mindedness and irony, for Warwick and King Lewis seem moved by honor to drop their alliance with King Edward in order to support the creditable cause of Queen Margaret and Prince Edward. Shakespeare has created an imaginary encounter between Warwick and Margaret at the French court, and the meeting gives opportunity for the rival Yorkist and Lancastrian claims to be debated before a royal, though French, audience; before the debate is ended, news of Edward's sudden marriage to Lady Grey piques Warwick into forsaking Edward, and provokes the Lady Bona to move her brother Lewis to join Margaret. Historically, Warwick's and Lewis' reactions to Edward's marriage were much less prompt. Warwick left France highly rewarded, says Hall, “& for the great & noble corage that was in him, he obteyned such fauor of the kynge, the quene and the nobles of Fraunce that when [five years later] he fled out of England, he was there honorably receiued …”; the Earl did not reveal his resentment upon his return to England in 1465.¹⁶ Moreover, he kept his rebellion native until it had been defeated at Losecoat Field in 1470; at that time he withdrew to France, and formed his alliance with Lewis and Margaret. In Shakespeare's play, Warwick's motive is after all personal pique, as his closing soliloquy makes clear:

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

(III.iii.260-65)

With the absence of praise for Henry and with the lack of private reference here to his earlier public expression of concern for the “strength and safety of our country” (211), Warwick's motives even in the foregoing dialogue come in this soliloquy to seem clearly less than grand. Shakespeare has created a scene in which the likeliest figure to make the required heroic response to Edward's fickle concupiscence does not fully do so.

Certainly the scene is sufficiently formal in execution and weighty enough in manner to call forth ambitious hopes and grand attitudes. Shakespeare sets up a formal balance of characters—three French (Lewis, Bona, and the mute figure, Bourbon); three Lancastrian English (Margaret, Prince Edward, and Oxford); and the pivot, Warwick. Before Warwick enters, there is some discussion whether sitting or standing is more suitable to honor, just as there is some discussion of sitting and standing in I Tamburlaine when the evenly-balanced Scythian and Turkish royal parties meet. After Lewis and Margaret are seated side by side, their respective parties presumably being grouped on either hand, Margaret broaches her weighty mission in heavily end-stopped verses. Warwick's entry breaks the symmetry, for while Margaret rises, Lewis descends to meet his guest and may be thought to draw Bona and Bourbon after him. Warwick's mission, the proposed marriage, is also a matter of importance, which soon requires that he debate still another grave question, Edward's right to rule. And yet through all these formalities and verbal contentions run the retrospective note, sometimes elegaic, sometimes captious, that suggests that heroic endeavor lies in the past, not the future. “I was, I must confess,” remembers Margaret, “Great Albion's Queen in former golden days” (III.iii.7). Oxford recalls

                              great John of Gaunt,
Which did subdue the greatest part of Spain;
And after John of Gaunt, Henry the Fourth,
Whose wisdom was a mirror to the wisest;
And after that wise prince, Henry the Fifth,
Who by his prowess conquered all France:
From these our Henry lineally descends.

(III.iii.81-87)

About Henry little can be said, and Oxford does not improve upon his own silence. But he does recall his own father's death by order of Edward, “Even in the downfall of his mellow'd years” (104), while Warwick remembers times when a gentler passion overtook Edward:

          this his love was an eternal plant,
Whereof the root was fix'd in Virtue's ground,
The leaves and fruit maintain'd with Beauty's sun,
Exempt from envy, but not from disdain,
Unless the Lady Bona quite his pain.

(III.iii.124-28)

When we recall that Edward subsequently accepted Lady Grey without a wince, we may conclude that all this imagery of nobility, virtue, and splendor seems to refer to what never was or to what never may be recovered.

The retrospective note is not that of The Mirror for Magistrates, in which the dead with hindsight analyze their errors. There is hardly any moral self-recrimination in this scene, except for Warwick's recital of Edward's offenses against himself, offenses we have never heard of before (186-88). The tone is that of the dying Brutus in Locrine recalling his conquests before handing on the sovereignty to his son; or perhaps Warwick's allegorical talk about Edward's love could resemble not only a sonnet-conceit but also Tamburlaine's allegorical description of the assault of Zenocrate's tears upon his irascible spirit; but here the review of the past is not completed by a prospective view of things to be won. The golden age is chiefly to be remembered, not realized.

In these pivotal scenes of heroic irony, Shakespeare alters the interpretation as well as the facts recorded in his sources. A mere desire to compress material does not wholly account for what was done with the facts. Had Shakespeare merely wanted to follow the historical view of Burgundy, it would have been easy to have a French lord rather than Joan appeal to Burgundy's pride—rather than to his pity. Had Shakespeare wanted only to present Gloucester's fall from power, he could have kept York out of the proceedings and could instead have had Queen Margaret name York in absentia as the commander in Ireland. If Shakespeare had thought merely to dramatize the disaffection and the new purpose of Warwick, he could have composed quite a different scene in which Warwick, returned from France, persuades the Duke of Clarence to Queen Margaret's cause. But what the dramatist seems to have wanted were opportunities to dramatize failure, perfidy, and even anger as imperfect approximations to or fallings-away from a heroic code.

None of these pivotal scenes is a battle scene, and therefore it may be argued that we have been looking in the wrong place for signs of the true heroic spirit. Because Shakespeare seems never to have had misgivings about the value and necessity of foreign war, we may consider how he handles combat in the trilogy. The heroic figure and his code expressed themselves most fully and properly in scenes of flyting and swordplay, and in those scenes of triumph or death that called for set speeches. We shall find, however, that even these do not have their full value in these plays.

Heroic set speeches of the defeated or the dying were a way of reiterating their tireless valor, their grandeur of ambitions, and their singleness of mind. There were two or three common topics for such speeches in Elizabethan drama. One theme was, If I fall, let the world fall with me. In this vein is Humber's speech cursing the universe that gave him birth, and another example is the Moor's very similar itemizing and blasting of all the causes of his being, in The Battle of Alcazar:

Where shall I finde some unfrequented place,
Some uncouth walke where I may curse my fill,
My starres, my dam, my planets and my nurse,
The fire, the aire, the water, and the earth,
All causes that have thus conspirde in one,
To nourish and preserve me to this shame. …

(1268-73)

Nothing of the sort happens, of course, in The Battle of Alcazar or in Locrine. This is simply a way of saying that he wishes not to have lived to have been so disgraced by defeat. Another topic might have said the same thing, but not with suggestive cosmic references. This theme is also worked by Theridamas, Techelles, and Usumcasane in their lamentations of Tamburlaine's imminent death. Another, second topic merely varies the first: If I fall, let heaven or earth (or both) drop down upon my enemy. So the captive Bajazeth wishes night and the terrors of the earth and skies to overtake Tamburlaine, and the three captive kings who pull the chariot in II Tamburlaine invoke heavenly and infernal powers upon their conqueror. Again, although neither heaven nor hell is moved, these speeches not only show the unbroken spirits of the defeated but also measure the kind of force needed to overcome the victor. A third theme of speeches on the occasion of death or defeat has a better chance of being borne out by events: If I fall, let my heirs take up my fight. Tamburlaine after reconciling himself to his own death bequeaths his fiery spirit and his search for new dominion to his sons. Brutus bestows his rule and his kingly duties upon his son, Locrine. Abdelmelec, dying at the outset of battle, resigns his soul to God and the struggle for Morocco to his heirs. In such moments as these, handing on the cause not only reiterates the great and unbowed spirit of the fallen leader but also provides a way of emphasizing the primacy of honor over milder passions, such as grief or fear. “Let not thy love exceed thine honour” (Part II, V.iii.199), Tamburlaine warns his grieving son.

In I Henry VI there are certainly speeches in both the heaven-invoking and the heir-inciting manners, but Shakespeare seems to withhold the dramatic endorsement that gives a set speech full emphasis. In scene one, instead of letting the lamentations of Gloucester and Bedford and Exeter move unbrokenly into self-incitement to pursue the French conquests of the dead Henry V, Shakespeare provides first a quarrel and then a series of three messengers with bad news from France. The lamentations therefore seem somehow improper in retrospect. The practice that eventually becomes almost a convention emerges here, so that the audience may well feel from the beginning a distrust of fine language and rhetorical ornament whenever it is not seconded by timely and effectual action. Of course it would in real life be unfair to fault Gloucester and the others for mourning instead of attending to the bad news they could not know was coming; but in drama we look to the stage-effect, which is that of men quite unready at first to deal with challenge and defeat. Moreover, the finest hero of this play, Talbot, never orates when occasion is about to call him to act. He generally speaks a plain idiom of command. The scenes of his last battle, at Bordeaux, and of his death (I Henry VI, IV.v and vi) are times for his son to give effective though finally unavailing support, and for the father to rescue the son. These scenes are composed in couplets with some stichomythia, but are not otherwise greatly ornamented. In place of Marlovian and Spenserian imagery in the opening scene, there is only the single image of Young Talbot as Icarus in a sea of blood to remind us of other aspirations. Talbot seldom suggests that the stars are somehow involved with his fate. Once he blames them, but later he quite sensibly blames York, the English Regent of France, for failing to supply aid. It is Talbot's way to keep to the facts that define his valor, so that in dying with the body of his son in his arms he may claim that their valor is proven and will outlast death.

It is true that Talbot delivers a short eulogy over the mortally wounded Salisbury, and vows revenge on his behalf, and further, that the vow is embellished with one of the grislier stock images of heroic determination: “Your hearts I'll stamp out with my horse' heels / And make a quagmire of your mingled brains” (I Henry VI, I.iv.107-08). It is also true, however, that this warlike revenge is at once frustrated by the loss of Orleans, and that Talbot momentarily wishes to be dead like Salisbury. The regaining of Orleans is businesslike and embellished mainly by the use of scaling-ladders rather than metaphors, amplifications, allusions, or other figures. The victorious Talbot, satisfied that sufficient French dead have paid for Salisbury's death, chooses to mark his revenge concretely with a tomb, “that hereafter ages may behold / What ruin happen'd in revenge of him” (I Henry VI, II.ii.11-12). In this play effective action rather than words is the mark of a hero in the presence of death; and without action, no words will suffice.

In the next two parts of the trilogy the set speeches by the defeated and by their allies have been much more elaborated. As in Part I, these speeches in II and III Henry VI lack full dramatic endorsement: no one seconds them; events immediately following contradict them; and most importantly the speeches do not support fully the heroic image that should be proper to the speaker.

Although Henry's regretful longing in Part III to be a shepherd is the most obvious instance of lapse from the stance proper to a hero during a battle, Warwick's death-speech also relinquishes the power he has fought for:

Lo now my glory smear'd in dust and blood!
.....Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?
And live we how we can, yet die we must.

(V.ii.23, 27-28)

Among heroic figures in Elizabethan drama, only Sulla before this had abruptly repudiated the earthly glory he had fought for. Heroic plays and heroes—even Talbot—ignore the ironic possibility of an eternity inhospitable to the claims of earthly greatness. York's long and formal invective against those who have slain his youthful son does not precisely condemn the mutable world, but it does dwell on the vileness of those who have won, Queen Margaret and Lord Clifford:

There, take the crown, and with the crown my curse;
And in thy need such comfort come to thee
As now I reap at thy too cruel hand!
Hard-hearted Clifford, take me from the world:
My soul to heaven, my blood upon your heads!

(I.iv.164-68)

When Clifford's turn comes to die, he makes no complaint against his fate, but even gives over his grief at the waste of all his valor and strength in behalf of Lancaster:

And, Henry, hadst thou sway'd as kings should do,
.....I, and ten thousand in this luckless realm
Had left no mourning widows for our death;
And thou this day hadst kept thy chair in peace.
.....Bootless are plaints, and cureless are my wounds;
No way to fly, nor strength to hold our flight:
The foe is merciless and will not pity;
For at their hands I have deserv'd no pity.

(II.vi.14, 18-20, 23-26)

This admirable analysis of the reasons for Henry's and Clifford's present woes tacitly renounces the cause—Lancastrian supremacy and personal revenge—for which Clifford had fought against and murdered the Duke of York. The dying lord does not leave his curse to his enemies or his cause to his allies: “Come, York [Edward] and Richard, Warwick and the rest; / I stabb'd your fathers' bosoms: split my breast” (III Henry VI, II.vi.29-30). So they do, but they do not discover Clifford until he is dead and must content themselves with ignominious abuse of a corpse. In various ways, York's, Clifford's, and Warwick's speeches—for which neither Hall nor Holinshed gives any hints—show Shakespeare departing from the usual formulas for the valedictories of heroes. While a Talbot may find his valor affirmed by his and his son's deaths, the participants in civil war find nothing in their time of dying to affirm the glories of their causes. For the audience, too, nothing ever seems secured by victory in the Henry VI plays.

Although Talbot secures his fame, he is not vindicated by an English triumph, and York's victory over Joan la Pucelle in Part I soon is followed by an unreliable peace. Although both York and Lancaster win victories, each victory is followed by reversal, and at no time does a success exterminate all those who intend to bring down the victors. Battle-scenes do not receive full endorsement because no heroic triumph or heroic death is a decisive resolution. What each victory requires is political wisdom, supported by power gained in battle, to assure the continuance of rule.

The structures created by heroic irony may now be summarized. The three parts of the trilogy are not identical in patterns of action. Each has a pivotal action near the center, and each ends with a choice or a resolve that proposes some new action that unsettles the resolution achieved in the last few scenes. In I Henry VI, Henry's choice of Margaret and the conclusion of a false peace with France clearly undo the strong alliance Gloucester has worked for and undo the military rule for which Talbot has fought. The pivotal action in Part I, as we have seen, prepares by an unheroic choice for Talbot's defeat. The choice of a woman for beauty alone may be censured as unheroic, like the peace, but both are also impolitic granting of concessions and trust for nothing in return. Neither may the concept of noble generosity be invoked to defend these actions, for they involve ungenerous, unjust, and dishonorable treatment of others. Henry's marriage to Margaret breaks arrangements made through Gloucester with the Duke of Armagnac. The peace with France dishonors all who have fought for nothing less than totally securing the English claims in France. Politics in this trilogy must be squared with the just demands of honor, if the political order is to endure.

The central scene of II Henry VI is likewise decisive in preparing for the last act, and is likewise an instance of ignoble behavior that is not balanced by a heroic triumph at the end of the play. Although a pitched battle occurs in Act V, and although that battle is fought by evenly-matched forces, the Yorkist victory is left inconclusive by the escape of the King and Queen and by York's decision to follow Henry to London and to negotiate with him there. The normal end of heroic encounter is, of course, decisive victory. Further, Clifford has left the battlefield vowing cruel revenge for the death of his father. It may be argued that Shakespeare is only following history: the historical York did not at first seek to kill Henry or to exterminate the Lancastrian party. But there is no need to end a play with a battle and then so carefully to signal its incomplete success, unless the dramatist desires not only fidelity of treatment but heroical irony. We are headed into Part III by the ending of II Henry VI, with a strong suggestion that military success at St. Albans is only temporary.

In Part III, Warwick's shift to the Lancastrian cause at a time when it seems defeated helps prepare for the renewal of civil war, but helps also to prepare for the scene of Warwick's death in defeat. His renunciation, as we have seen, is not a heroic gesture. The scene of Edward's wooing of Lady Grey (III Henry VI, III.ii) also reverses relationships and prepares for the closing scenes. At the end of III.ii, we find that Edward's success in wooing has provoked Richard of Gloucester to begin conspiring, out of sexual envy, against his royal brother. At the end of Part III, while Edward rejoices in having a male heir by Lady Grey, Richard in asides renews his cruel resolve to kill his brothers and their posterity if murder is necessary to win the crown. Here again, lapses from heroic loyalty and firmness lead to an inconclusive resolution at the end, rather than the heroic triumphs that the characters' ambitions would require. It is true, however, that the respective conclusions of the three parts of the trilogy are not similar in situation, just as the pivotal scenes are not closely similar in kind. Shakespeare was accommodating his plots to varied historical material, and so did not follow one structural pattern in every part of the trilogy.

Indeed English chronicle-history plays had no form of their own, and their purposes did not require a distinctive generic structure. F. P. Wilson's recent consideration of this matter showed that, although there are various types of history plays, they do not, as a group distinct from comedy and tragedy, have an identifying generic feature.¹⁷ Neither would it be quite satisfactory to say, with Lily B. Campbell, that Elizabethan historical plays, especially those that are too serious to be comedies and yet not clearly tragic, all have the single purpose of accomplishing the moral ends of history;¹⁸ for as plays rather than historical narratives they must also have accomplished some purposes peculiar to drama. One type of chronicle-history, the contention-play, represented by The Wounds of Civil War, seems to have grown structurally from the device in moral plays of alternating scenes featuring one group of characters with scenes featuring another group.¹⁹ But unlike moral dramas, contention-plays pitted characters and factions that were not necessarily moral opposites; Sulla and Marius are equally irascible, equally able in war and politics, and Lodge's play dramatizes their terrible struggle and the eventual success of Sulla's faction. At least Parts II and III were also perceived as contention-plays with interest focused upon the struggle of antagonists rather than the fortunes of a single hero, for the titles of the bad quartos of these two plays include not only “contention” but also subtitle reference to various persons both primary and secondary in the struggle. If we take moral drama and The Wounds of Civil War as models, we may say that contention plays showed the triumphs of first one party and then those of the other. Yet the three parts of Henry VI do not respectively follow this model in the same way. Not only does Shakespeare provide more rivalries in Parts I and II than the contentions between the principal antagonists; he also distributes the clashes differently in Part II, say, than he does in Part III. In II Henry VI, verbal clashes between Gloucester and Winchester punctuate their political rivalry until Gloucester's fall and death; then begins the open struggle between Lancaster and York—first with a Lancastrian victory over the pseudo-Mortimer, Jack Cade, and then immediately after with York's closing (but not decisive) victory over Henry's forces. In III Henry VI, however, the action is largely a series of battles separated by interludes of political intrigue, and the Yorkist triumphs alternate with Yorkist defeats throughout the play.²⁰I Henry VI, as we have already remarked, has manifold rivalries, and may also be considered a contention-play. Here the primary contention of French against English (or Joan against Talbot), continues throughout the play against a background of secondary struggles—some political and some military—among the English. Unlike Part II, the first play is organized by a heroic contention continuing throughout the action; unlike Part III, it contrasts the main heroic contention with less worthy domestic clashes. But Shakespeare's varied handling of the contention-pattern is not controlled by the facts of history. He has been found here to compress and rearrange historical facts, such as Joan's and Burgundy's careers, York's relationship to Gloucester, and Warwick's reaction to King Edward's marriage, in order to heighten and even to create antagonisms contrary to fact. Likewise he brought Talbot and Joan together at Bordeaux, conflated two battles at St. Albans, and conferred on Richard of Gloucester the double motive of sexual envy and Machiavellism—all for the sake of emphasizing contention despite the facts of the chronicle sources. He may well have thought the contention-pattern most natural for the plot of plays dealing with civil and foreign war, but he did not let the facts control the shaping of the action.

And he may well have found the contention-pattern the readiest framework to support his heroical irony, for the very nature of such plotting allowed the contenders, especially in the field, to be tacitly measured against the stature of Tamburlaine, Sulla, and other heroes of drama. Further, he introduced scenes and situations that were conventional in heroic drama of the time, with the result that lapses from heroic conduct might be more clearly perceived. Far from writing simply a kind of moral-historical drama in which the right line of conduct might have led to the salvation of England,²¹ Shakespeare has written a trilogy in which the right and effective course, embracing a heroic code as well as political wisdom, occurs to almost no one but Talbot and is not practicable by anyone but he. Finally, Shakespeare introduced into each of his varied contention-plots a pivotal scene or scenes that emphasized his heroical irony by showing the noble or the great undermined by the mean, the ignoble, and unheroic.

Notes

1. The main sources of the trilogy were probably the accounts of the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV in Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548-52) and Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (1587). Shakespeare may have used Grafton's Chronicle at Large in place of or in supplement to Hall. But because Grafton closely follows Hall, it is not necessary for my purposes to include him in comparing sources with Shakespeare's scenes. See: Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), III, 25, 90-91, 158.

2. See Bullough's rejoinder in Narrative and Dramatic Sources (III, 36-37) to Tillyard. Virgil K. Whitaker shows that Shakespeare, though aware of Providence in historical causation, was also conventionally alert to the effects of Fortune and human character; see Shakespeare's Use of Learning (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1953), pp. 57-59.

3. Thomas Lodge, The Wounds of Civil War, ed. John Dover Wilson and W. W. Greg, Malone Society Reprint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910); George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar, ed. John Yoklavich, The Life and Works, Vol. II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); The Troublesome raigne of John, King of England, ed. Charles Praetorius (London: C. Praetorius, 1888); Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. Una Ellis-Fermor (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1930).

4. Tragedy of Locrine, in The Shakespeare Aprocrypha, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918). Evidence that the author of Selimus revised and borrowed from Locrine has been presented by Baldwin Maxwell, Studies in the Shakespeare Apocrypha (New York: King's Crown Press, Columbia University, 1956), pp. 47-51, 61-62. Maxwell also suggests that this reviser may have added two scenes, IV.ii and iv; I would further suggest that the two scenes replaced scenes in which Corineus discovers Locrine's adultery and Locrine kills Corineus.

5. Eugene Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, and Dryden (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), chs. 1 and 2. On the code of martial honor, see Curtis B. Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 102-35. Castiglione's disputants were unable to decide whether conquest or peaceable, just rule were more honorable (The Book of the Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby, 1561, Book IV). For discussion of the Herculean type in drama as exemplar in humanist historiography and in plays of the late 1580's and early 1590's, see David Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: “Henry VI” and Its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), ch. 1, esp. pp. 9-10, and ch. 3, esp. pp. 72-74.

6. Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor, pp. 91-93.

7. The phrase, of course, is J. P. Brockbank's; see his “The Frame of Disorder: ‘Henry VI’” in Early Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), pp. 73-99. For explication of various motifs in the trilogy see Ernest W. Talbert, Elizabethan Drama and Shakespeare's Early Plays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963). For a claim that the trilogy is thematically unified but not constructed on any single conventional pattern of play see Hereward Price, Construction in Shakespeare, University of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology, No. 17 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1961).

8. Appian, Civil Wars, trans. Horace White (London: W. Heinemann; New York: The Macmillan Co., 1913), I, xii, 6; Plutarch, Lives, trans. Thomas North (London: D. Nutt, 1895), III, 298. Evidence for Lodge's use of Appian is given by Nathaniel B. Paradise, Thomas Lodge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), pp. 137-39. Some details, however, such as Scipio's prophecy about Marius (The Wounds of Civil War, 137-40), the names of the Asian heroes vanquished by Sulla (1070-76), and Sulla's rally speech to his men (341-62) are not in Appian but in Plutarch's Lives (III, 165, 287-300, 298).

9. See John Dover Wilson, ed., “Introduction,” I Henry VI (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. xi-xii, xxi-1; “Introduction,” II Henry VI (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. xix-lii. Wilson's belief that Shakespeare revised other men's work and brought it to completion amounts to a belief that Shakespeare revised almost as carelessly as the others had written.

10. One cannot consider Robert Wilson, credited with at least partial authorship of sixteen plays on English history, for none of these has survived.

11. Hall, Union, pp. 173 f., 176-77. Holinshed, Chronicles, III, 181, 183. Holinshed simply adapts Hall's phrasings here.

12. Hall, Union, pp. 176-77.

13. Editions of I, II, and III Henry VI, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross, New Arden Edition (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1957-62). All quotations are from this edition.

14. Hall, Union, pp. 208-11, 213-16. Holinshed, Chronicles, III, 210-12, 215-17. Neither writer names York among the peers who accused Gloucester.

15. Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories, pp. 115, 119 f., likewise finds this role imposed upon Gloucester.

16. Quotation from Hall, Union, p. 264. Hall further says that Queen Carlotta, wife to King Lewis, promoted the match between Edward and Bona, and refused overtures from Margaret; Margaret was not at court at this time. For Holinshed's version, see Chronicles, III, 283-85, 288-94.

17. Frank P. Wilson, “The English History Play,” in Shakespearian and Other Studies, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 1-53.

18. Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1947), pp. 15-17. This view was followed by Irving Ribner in The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), esp. ch. 2.

19. David M. Bevington, From “Mankind” to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).

20. Cairncross, “Introduction,” III Henry VI, pp. lix-li.

21. Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, p. 101; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1945), pp. 160-63.