SOURCE: “The First, Second, and Third Parts of King Henry the Sixth,” in William Shakespeare: The History Plays, Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 22-47.

[In the essay below, Pearlman summarizes the action, major themes, and principal characters of Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3.]

The three parts of Henry the Sixth appear in consecutive order in the great 1623 folio collection of Shakespeare's works. They are placed between The Life of Henry the Fifth and The Tragedy of Richard the Third. It is generally agreed that the three plays were written during the very first years of the 1590s. There is a small body of opinion that denies exclusive authorship of these plays to Shakespeare and argues that they result from a collaborative effort in which Shakespeare played a leading role. There is even a well-developed theory that 1 Henry VI was written after Parts 2 and 3 and is therefore what has lately come to be called a “prequel.” For present purposes, the three plays will be discussed as if they were composed in the order in which they appear in the folio and as if they are all among Shakespeare's very earliest writings.

The First Part of King Henry the Sixth begins with a procession of noblemen who have assembled to mourn the death of Henry V, hero of Agincourt and conqueror of France. The Duke of Bedford grieves for his late kinsman in words that may be imagined as the first piece of historical writing to which Shakespeare ever bent what he would later call his “rough and all-unable pen.” Shakespeare was not a prodigy and Bedford's address does not mark a turning point in the history of English literature. It is nevertheless a workmanlike piece of dramatic poetry: “Hung be the heavens with black,” Bedford says, expanding his private sorrow into a universal lament:

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

(1.1.1-7)

Bedford's rhetorical style leans heavily on abstraction and generalization. When he makes his appeal to such impersonal entities as the heavens, the day, and the comets, he fails to lend distinctiveness to his own character or particularize his grief. None of his injunctive verbs (“yield,” “brandish,” “scourge”) quite hits the mark. The notion that the stars have rebelliously agreed to the death of King Henry succeeds only in paying distant homage to a commonplace. Bedford's conclusion is anticlimactic and weak, especially the final phrase “of so much worth,” in which Shakespeare misses the chance to complete the measure with the concrete detail or vivid metaphor that might have brought both the orator and his abundant sorrow to life.

Although the verse is flat and artificial, the passage is not without resonance to audiences or readers of Shakespeare's history plays. Not even the most prescient and insightful hearer of these lines could guess that the twenty-five- or twenty-six-year-old William Shakespeare who wrote them would devote a great part of his intelligence and working life in the decade of the 1590s to the composition of a series of eight plays that pivot around the heroic life and untimely death of the King Harry who is memorialized by Bedford. Four of these plays (the so-called first tetralogy consisting of the three parts of Henry VI and their sequel Richard III) would deal with the consequences of King Henry's early death. Four others (the second tetralogy of Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V) would examine the events that culminated with the reign of the “too famous” king celebrated in Bedford's eulogy. It is pleasing though illusory to imagine that Shakespeare intuitively understood that the death of the hero king could be dramatized as the crucial event of the hundred years of English history—from the deposition of Richard of Bordeaux to the violent death at Bosworth field of Richard of Gloucester—which the poet would claim as his particular province. Nevertheless, it was with Bedford's first speech that Shakespeare initiated the epic circular journey that both begins and ends with Henry's death. In the three parts of Henry VI, Shakespeare dramatized the loss of France, the bleeding of England, and what he would later remember in the last and most eloquent chorus in Henry V as the “blasting” of the “world's best garden … which oft our stage has shown” (Epilogue, 1. 7).

Shakespeare's first history, although to modern eyes the least of his accomplishments, must have had an extraordinary impact in its own time. The popularity of The First Part of Henry the Sixth is seen not only in its amazing succession of sequels but also in contemporary testimony. Shakespeare's sometime rival Thomas Nashe used an example from this play to demonstrate that the threater has moral value and may function as “a reproof to these degenerate effeminate days of ours”: “How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding” (Salgādo, Eyewitnesses, 16). Nashe captures the immediacy and excitement of a new kind of theatrical experience for an audience that had not yet been sated with innumerable bland historical dramas.

Despite Nashe's enthusiasm 1 Henry VI seems shapeless and unfocused. The play is a hodgepodge of competing actions. The language lacks variety; long swatches consist of formal, sometimes stilted, and occasionally monotonous blank verse that do not display the rich metaphorical and imagistic complexity that becomes Shakespeare's hallmark. The characters are not effectively differentiated. Except for Talbot himself, the earls and dukes all speak in the same florid and excited idiom. Moreover, the plot lacks resolution and comes not so much to a climax as to a halt. It would be idolatrous to deny that these (and other) flaws make it difficult to give one's wholehearted support to 1 Henry VI, but they do not make it either unapproachable or unrewarding.

1 Henry VI consists of a number of separate actions that are not so much integrated as they are intertwined. The most coherent and important of these is the series of English sieges, thrusts, and counter-attacks aimed against the forces of France. Shakespeare draws with some care the contrast between English John Talbot, the commander of one side, and Joan of Arc, the inspiration of the other. A second major action is the dynastic squabble between Richard Plantagenet (later the Duke of York) and the party of the white rose, and their antagonists the Lancastrians, the party of the red rose, led in this play by the Earl of Somerset. Still a third action is the continuing antagonism between the protector Humphrey, the good Duke of Gloucester, and his uncle the ambitious clergyman (later bishop) Winchester. Finally, at the end of the play, the Earl of Suffolk emerges as a major figure when he arranges a marriage between King Henry and Margaret, the powerful queen whose furious intensity dominates so many scenes during the three subsequent plays in the first tetralogy. The play is certainly episodic, but each episode has its own rewards.

The most memorable character, to Nashe as well as to modern audiences, is the heroic Talbot, in whom is embodied the most cherished values of chivalric civilization. Against Talbot are arrayed two very powerful groups of enemies. The first consists of the forces of France, inspired and led by the witch Joan, who are eager to reclaim lands recently taken from them by the great Henry V. The second and ultimately more dangerous enemy is the inability of Talbot's fellow nobles to set aside private grudge, petty antagonism, and dynastic rivalry in order to support the grander national purpose. The combination of external wars and domestic subversion leads both to Talbot's death and to the near anarchy dramatized in the later plays.

Talbot's world, very much idealized in this play, is built on values that remind us that Shakespeare exalts a civilization that we need not sorrow to have lost. Feudal society is erected on sharp distinctions between nobility and commoners. It is marked by loyalty and fidelity to the king or leader; although betrayal is frequent, it is always greeted not only with condemnation but also with shock and surprise. Status is ascribed rather than earned—that is, dependent on birth rather than achievement. Courage and skill in battle are principal virtues. Great value is attached to political and military leadership, especially that which is revealed in oratorical performance. The giving and taking of oaths is extremely important. Those who give their bond are expected to keep it; oath breakers are, like those who show cowardice, roundly contemned and scorned. The aristocrats like Talbot who embody these virtues are accustomed to command and are consequently distinguished by their overbearing manners and extremely short tempers. They are always on the verge of emotional explosion and their swords are never far from their hands. They are sensitive to insults to their birth, status, and courage, and they routinely subordinate private and domestic relationships to public and military performance. In Shakespeare's feudal world, the roles alloted to women are clearly demarcated, and as a result the occasional woman who intrudes into the world of soldiership and government must be regarded as perverse or unnatural. Chivalric notions underlie not just this play but every one of Shakespeare's histories.

A definitive statement of these values occurs during the encounter in act 4 between Falstaff and Talbot. Falstaff has run from battle once again, and Talbot fulfills his threat to humiliate him by stripping the garter (the insignia of his knightly order) from his leg. Talbot blames Falstaff for the loss of the battle and for the deaths of twelve hundred men. He is shocked that “such cowards” are allowed “to wear / This ornament of knighthood” (4.1.28-29), and he proceeds to construct a mythic history of a favorite ideology:

When first this order was ordained, my lords,
Knights of the Garter were of noble birth,
Valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage,
Such as were grown to credit by the wars;
Not fearing death nor shrinking for distress,
But always resolute in most extremes.
But he that is not furnished in this sort
Doth but usurp the sacred name of knight,
Profaning this most honorable order,
And should (if I were worthy to be judge)
Be quite degraded, like a hedge-born swain
That doth presume to boast of gentle blood.

(33-44)

Talbot knows that true knights are both courageous and noble by nature and are most resilient when most in peril. If they betray their heritage and show cowardice, they must be, as Talbot says, “degraded”—that is, reduced in rank—to the level of a presumptuous “hedge-born swain” or homeless peasant. He also knows that the Order of the Garter was not established after a secular manner, but rather “ordained”—a carefully chosen word that is resonant with spiritual and religious significance. The implications of “ordained” are extended in the contrast between the “sacred” name of the order and its “profaning” by cowardice. Throughout Talbot's speech a holy and romanticized past contrasts with a fallen present.

It is around such notions that Shakespeare organizes the conflict between Talbot and Joan and between England and France. Talbot embodies the ideals of chivalry. When he and his six thousand troops are surrounded by twenty-three thousand Frenchmen, Talbot “enacted wonders with the sword and lance” (1.1.122), only to succumb when “a base Walloon … / Thrust [him] with a spear into the back” (137-38). Shakespeare gives credence to the myth that an individual knight armed with traditional weapons can carry the day in a field of thirty thousand soldiers, and that only a “base Walloon” would lower himself to the indignity of an attack from the rear. When captured by the French, Talbot “craved death / Rather than [be] so vile esteemed” (1.4.32-33) as to be exchanged for anyone but his social equal. When the French enemy wisely rest in safety behind their fortifications, Talbot thinks their unchivalric tactics are rude and unsportsmanlike: “Base muleteers of France! / Like peasant foot-boys do they keep the walls / And dare not take up arms like gentlemen” (3.1.68-70).

Orthodox and reverent, Talbot expresses contempt for enemies who are led by a woman and are presumed to consort with devils: “Let them practice and converse with spirits. / God is our fortress” (2.1.25-26). Talbot is most moved by the “chance” (1.4.71) death by cannon fire of Salisbury, that great “mirror of all martial men” (74). His violent longing for revenge takes the form of hyperbolical and sadistic invective perhaps characteristic of feudal aristocracy but difficult to honor today: “Pucelle or pussel [i.e., pizzle, prick], Dolphin or dogfish, / Your hearts I'll stamp out-with my horse's heels / And make a quagmire of your mangled brains” (107-9). Talbot is proud to kill five Frenchmen for every drop of blood lost by Salisbury.

Yet the same Talbot so furious in war is also capable of courtly deference to his sovereign:

          This arm that hath reclaimed
To your obedience fifty fortresses. …
Lets fall his sword before your highness' feet
And with submissive loyalty of heart
Ascribes the glory of his conquest got
First to my God and next unto your grace.

(3.4.5-6, 9-12)

While Talbot does not forget to vaunt his conquests, he can also allow his sword to fall before weak King Henry's feet and proudly acknowledge that his submission and loyalty are not of the surface but from the heart.

Opposite to Talbot in almost all respects is Joan of Arc, who is not male but mannish, demonic rather than Christian, ambitious rather than deferential, unchaste or at least the constant target of sexual innuendo, and, worst of all, unequivocally base-born. Joan embodies the polar opposite of the orderliness and orthodoxy of chivalric tradition. As a consequence, Shakespeare depicts her in extraordinarily unflattering terms. Joan's successes on the battlefield are ascribed not to military prowess but to “hellish mischief” (3.2.39). The appeal to French nationalism that attracts waffling Burgundy to her side is dismissed as mere playacting. In her last appearance, Joan first repudiates her shepherd father, then attempts to forestall her own execution by claiming to be with child by either the Dauphin, or Alencon, or Reignier. She is offered no compassion by the English or by Shakespeare and, condemned as a witch and strumpet, leaves the stage while York abuses her as a “foul accursèd minister of hell!” (5.4.93). It is an ugly scene.

Even though Joan is the antithesis of Talbot and is allowed a few temporary military successes, the play makes it clear that the real cause of the English failure is internal division. Consumed by their own ambitions, the English nobles cannot refrain from petty squabble, from name-calling and duels, or from countermining each other's achievements. The fault is not in chivalry itself, but in the failure of its nobility to live up to the ideals they profess. In the first scene of the play the noble Bedford utters a prayer that his peers will all too often ignore: “Henry the Fifth, thy ghost I invocate: / Prosper this realm, keep it from civil broils” (1.1.53-54). The King himself, exasperated but powerless to intervene between Winchester and Gloucester, recognizes that “Civil dissension is a viperous worm / That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth” (3.1.72-73). Eventually, Talbot finds himself defeated by the forces of the French while his would-be allies Somerset and York debate over who is most at fault for abandoning him. Exeter asserts that

          no simple man that sees
This jarring discord of nobility,
This shouldering of each other in the court,
This factious bandying of their favorites,
But sees it doth presage some ill event.

(4.1.187-91)

Sir William Lucy (a character who is little more than a choric voice) expands on this important lesson. “The fraud of England, not the force of France, / Hath now entrapped the noble-minded Talbot (4.4.36-37). “The vulture of sedition” (47), he concludes, has betrayed “The conquest of our scarce-cold conqueror / That ever-living man of memory, / Henry the Fifth.” (4.3.51-53). The heirs of the great Henry, whose revered memory hangs heavy over each event of this long play, have destroyed themselves with sloth and sedition.

1 Henry VI focuses on the decline of chivalric civilization and the disorder in England. Yet audiences are likely to be struck not so much by the ideological coherence of the whole as by a few memorable scenes. The most striking event in the play is the sequence of scenes in act 4 in which both Talbot and his son young John Talbot meet their deaths. The two compete in self-sacrifice and familial loyalty. Their devotion to each other is highly stylized and mannered, exemplary rather than realistic. The Talbots' mutual reverence directly contrasts with the antagonism in other aristocratic English families and with the parody of family loyalty in the nasty encounter between Joan and her peasant father. The embrace of Talbot and his equally noble son may be artificial and too highly patterned, but it is also a daring and pioneering piece of writing, if only because Shakespeare attempts to embody the theme of loyalty in a dramatic action.

For many readers the Temple Garden scene is another instance in which the young Shakespeare can be observed writing with unusual authority. In this scene Shakespeare momentarily liberates himself from too exact fidelity to the chronicles. He imagines an event (for which his sources offer no precedent or clue) in which a set of young and passionate noblemen who are engaged in legal study enlarge a disagreement over some “nice sharp quillets of the law” (2.4.17) into a conflict that threatens the entire kingdom. At first the bystanders try to neutralize the combatants Plantagenet and Somerset by making jest of their disagreements. But the conflict uncontrollably escalates and one by one the bystanders are forced to choose a side. Each party accuses the other of cowardice and fear. Plantagenet raises the stakes when he calls Somerset a “peevish boy” (76); Somerset, equally unrestrained, responds by describing Plantagenet as a “yeoman.” Insults to manhood and ancestry lead directly to “blood-drinking hate” on both sides. Warwick is left to prophesy that “this brawl today, / Grown to this faction in the Temple garden, / Shall send, between the red rose and the white, / A thousand souls to death and deadly night” (124-27). The scene is richly theatrical. The quarrel is about nothing, and the young men are filled with hot tempers and adolescent energy. Ritual plucking of roses edges the scene toward the arena of allegory, while vigorous flyting frees the language from the steady thump of iambics, and for a welcome moment drums and guns and wounds give way to a promising symbolic psychology.

In another scene that stands out (4.1), Shakespeare makes a first attempt at a practice that he raises to a fine art in later plays. He places in close juxtaposition a series of events that have a common thematic subject—in this case an exploration of feudal values. First the Governor of Paris swears an oath of fidelity to King Henry. Then Talbot strips Falstaff of the garter and comments on the history of chivalry. Just as Falstaff is banished, the news arrives that Burgundy has repudiated the oaths that have bound him to the English king. Gloucester, ever the true believer, is shocked: “Can this be so? / That in alliance, amity, and oaths / There should be found such false dissembling guile?” (4.1.61-63). Following hard upon this revelation, Vernon and Basset, servants respectively of Gloucester and Winchester, come storming onto the stage to ask that they be allowed to tilt or duel because of the insults that each feels he has suffered. The good but ineffectual king is once again shocked: “what madness rules in brainsick men / When for so slight and frivolous a cause / Such factions emulations shall arise!” (111-13). The king attempts to adjudicate the quarrel but in the process commits some grave procedural errors. The whole sequence—the taking of oaths and their repudiation, Talbot's high-minded exaltation of the theory of chivalry and its deficient application in the case of Vernon and Basset—shows Shakespeare for the first time learning to represent ideas in dramatic form. His intelligent experimentation points to better things to come.

2 HENRY VI

1 Henry VI focuses on wars of territorial conquest in France but also depicts a rivalry among the major aristocratic families that is both ferocious and unending. In 2 Henry VI, competition between England's two great aristocratic families has become the dominant concern. The pious and inattentive Lancastrian king, Henry VI, proves to be far too weak to control his aspiring wife, Margaret of Anjou, and her self-serving advisors, while Richard Plantagenet, now the Duke of York, has emerged as an ambitious politician who is unencumbered by moral scruple. The rivalry of King and Duke is continuous. The background against which the dynastic squabble is played out has also changed. The principal tension in 2 Henry VI is no longer between the English and the French but between the governing aristocratic oligarchy on the one hand and the commons on the other. Out of this conflict arises the political design and political meaning of the play.

The most memorable figures in 1 Henry VI were English John Talbot and the French witch Joan; the most memorable figure in 2 Henry VI is the Kentish rebel Jack Cade, who leads a revolt against the feudal establishment. Cade's rebellion succeeds militarily for a tense interval but collapses without leaving a permanent mark. It is a much tougher challenge to depict a domestic revolt than to mount the easy appeal to national pride that distinguishes (or disfigures) 1 Henry VI. In the first play, the English cause is unquestionably just while the French are cowards or demons. In 2 Henry VI the enemy may be impoverished, uneducated, and contemptible, but it is still English. Shakespeare pillories Cade and his followers and unequivocally supports established government, but he allows powerful popular forces a great deal of scope and play before repudiating them. He flirts with very dangerous material. It is only at the end of the play, the revolt suppressed and order restored, that an orthodox monarchist perspective is again asserted.

In 1 Henry VI the common people appear only intermittently: among those who take their turn on the stage are the gunner's boy who is responsible for the death of old Salisbury, the servants of Gloucester and Winchester who stone each other in the streets, and the French sentinels at Orleans, “poor servitors, / When others sleep upon their quiet beds, / Constrained to watch in darkness, rain, and cold” (2.1.5-7). In 2 Henry VI, Shakespeare takes a great step forward when he transforms the commons into an important constituent of the polity. (It is not always clear to whom the word “commons” refers. Sometimes Shakespeare seems to mean commons as in House of Commons—i.e., prosperous landowners, merchants, lawyers; at other times, “commons” seems to refer to butchers, clothiers, beggars, soldiers.) Shakespeare prepares his audience for Jack Cade's rebellion by representing a series of encounters between rich and poor. A few humble villagers attempt to deliver a petition to Gloucester early in the play; Horner, a tradesman, is charged with treason by his apprentice and brought before the court; Simpcox the beggar's boast that he has been miraculously healed is publicly examined; the disgraced Duchess of Gloucester is forced to walk penitentially among the “rabble”; Suffolk, banished from England at the behest of the commons, is murdered by pirates; finally, Jack Cade leads a rebellion of the poor. More than any other of Shakespeare's plays, 2 Henry VI explores the conflicts between the social classes.

Although the play represents the tension between rich and poor, it is noteworthy that neither class is monolithic in its attitude to the other. The aristocracy itself is severely divided. While there is no question but that rebellion, or even the merest trace of uppity behavior, must always be thoroughly reprehended, aristocrats disagree in major ways about the plight of the poor. On the one side is the faction that is led by Gloucester and that sometimes includes Warwick and Salisbury. This group is on the whole alert and responsive to members of the underclass. The other faction, of which Winchester, Suffolk, and Queen Margaret are the most prominent members, is largely contemptuous of the poor and indifferent to their welfare. Winchester and Gloucester are distinguished not by differences of opinion about national policy but by their capacity for human empathy.

Gloucester, the “good Duke Humphrey” of legend, is sympathetic from the very first scene, primarily because he is shocked not only by the fatal marriage between the naive King Henry and the remorseless Margaret but also by the accompanying loss to England of the French provinces of Maine and Anjou. The audience would immediately understand that he is stung not for his private interests but for what he perceives as treachery to the community of England. Gloucester laments “the common grief of all the land” (1.1.75). Cardinal Winchester responds to the loss not as a public but as a personal tragedy. The distinction between the good Duke and the imperious Cardinal is made very clear when Winchester describes Gloucester in these envious terms:

          Let not his smoothing words
Bewitch your hearts; be wise and circumspect.
What though the common people favor him,
Calling him “Humphrey, the good Duke of Gloucester,”
Clapping their hands and crying with loud voice
“Jesu maintain your royal Excellence!”
With “God preserve the good Duke Humphrey!”

(154-60)

Winchester bristles with the Tory suspicion that anyone loved by the populace must be either a hypocrite or a demagogue. His sentences succinctly establish the lines of conflict between Duke and Cardinal: Gloucester enjoys the support of the common people of whom Winchester is contemptuous. Gloucester's England comprehends all the classes while Winchester's includes only his social equals. This is no trivial distinction, but it is difficult to be certain exactly how it should be evaluated. Official Elizabethan ideology is deeply distrustful of the people, who are, in this play as in others, inconsistent, disloyal, wavering, thoughtless, emotional. Yet it is difficult to believe that Winchester's condemnation of Gloucester would not have been heard as praise by all but the most haughty ear.

It is certainly no surprise that the common people address Gloucester, not Winchester, in time of trouble. In the third scene of the play, Shakespeare allows members of one class to confront the other. Two petitioners come forward to present their grievances to Duke Humphrey. Their reverence for Gloucester confirms Winchester's worst fears. A petitioner speaks: “Marry, the Lord protect him, for [Gloucester's] a good man, Jesu bless him” (1.3.4-5). The first petitioner protests that he has been mistreated by Winchester; the second makes similar charges against Suffolk. Bad luck causes the petitions to miscarry and come into the hands of Suffolk himself. He reads them aloud: “‘Against the Duke of Suffolk, for enclosing the commons of Long Melford.’ How now, sir knave?” (19-21). The brief episode exhibits Suffolk's hostility to the commons and his indifference to legitimate grievance. It also brands him as an encloser. Enclosure—essentially the conversion of land from common to private use—was the focus of the perennial conflict between those who control and those who work the land. There had been over one hundred enclosure riots of all kinds during the reign of Elizabeth. Shakespeare's use of the word “enclosure” would certainly stimulate an awareness of contemporary grievance. Clearly the petitioners had hoped to gain the support of Gloucester against the repressive effects of Suffolk's stewardship. The distinction between the parties has been suggestively but clearly drawn.

A second instance that serves to discriminate among aristocratic attitudes occurs in the unmasking of the beggar Saunder Simpcox. Simpcox claims that he has been crippled and blind from birth and that his sight has been suddenly and miraculously restored. This scene, which is superfluous to the plot, seems to be designed for two primary purposes. The first is to demonstrate that Gloucester indeed displays the characteristics that Shakespeare found in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (the source for this episode)—“a head, to discern and dissever truth from forged and feigned hypocrisy” (Bullough, Sources, 3:128). It is also one of the many events in this play (and in others in the tetralogy) in which the question of divine meddling in human affairs is raised and pondered. But primarily the scene reflects on the relation between rich and poor, especially in its conclusion when Simpcox, exposed by Gloucester as a charlatan, is whipped until he finds his legs and jumps over a stool. Shakespeare concludes the scene by inventing a spectrum of moral responses to his exemplum:

King. O God! seest thou this, and bearest so long?
Queen. It made me laugh to see the villain run.
Gloucester. Follow the knave, and take this drab away.
Wife. Alas sir, we did it for pure need.
Glou. Let them be whipped through every market town,
Till they come to Berwick, from whence they came.

(2.1.146-50)

King Henry is characteristically pious; he appeals to the Lord and projects his own passivity onto the diety. Queen Margaret, speaking as a member of the party of Suffolk, is typically heartless and cruel. Gloucester may seem harsh by modern standards, but he stands for justice uncontaminated by the lenity that Elizabethans so feared. His command that the two perpetrators of the fraud be whipped reminds us that there is a long distance between Elizabethan justice and modern liberal sensibility. The Wife's remark is most troubling. Shakespeare, who has already added the leaping, stool, beadle, and whip to his source, also adds the deeply humanizing cry: “Alas, sir, we did it for pure need.” The line is simple but not without eloquence. “Alas” signals genuine despair; “sir” is informed with sufficient deference to reassure a worried audience that the beggars are free of social assertion; “we” indicates that the wife will not abandon her husband; “pure need” tells any sympathetic hearers that the fraud was a consequence of the absolute necessity of the need to eat. If nothing else, the Wife's line sharpens the distance between Beggar, Duke, and Queen.

The definition of Gloucester's political position in the commonwealth of England is further complicated by the events surrounding the revelation that his wife has been consorting with magicians and spirits. The penalty for the fallen Duchess (who has been entrapped by Winchester) is public humiliation; Gloucester attempts to console her:

Sweet Nell, ill can thy noble mind abrook
The abject people gazing on thy face,
With envious looks laughing at the shame,
That erst did follow thy proud chariot wheels
When thou didst ride in triumph through the streets.

(2.4.10-14)

The painful ceremony plays on the nobles' fear of exposure and their hostility to the lower classes. Here, as elsewhere, Shakespeare knows that he can draw tears from his audience by dwelling on the pathos that attends the fall of princes (or, in this case, princesses). He plucks this string shamelessly when he allows the Duchess to lament,

Methinks I should not thus be led along,
Mailed up in shame, with papers on my back,
And followed with a rabble that rejoice
To see my tears and hear my deep-fet groans. …
          … a wonder and a pointing-stock
To every idle rascal follower.

(30-33; 46-47)

On the side of the commons, hostility and vengeance; on the side of the nobility, fear of contamination and contact. It is not a pretty picture. The political meaning is clear: even the wife of the good Duke of Gloucester is not exempt from the antagonism implicit in the hierarchical system. It is remarkable that Shakespeare does not allow Gloucester to share the Duchess's antagonism to the commons, nor does he put expressions in the Duke's mouth that would apologize for the people's passion.

One of the most interesting encounters between the classes occurs when the banished Suffolk is taken by pirates. Suffolk masquerades as a commoner, but he is incapable of disguising his aristocratic personality and immediately betrays himself. He speaks to his captors in language that demonstrates that he would rather preserve his identity than his life: “Obscure and lousy swain, King Henry's blood, / The honorable blood of Lancaster, / Must not be shed by such a jaded groom” (4.1.50-52). Nor can he resist an ostentatious display of privilege; he treats Walter Whitmore, whose prisoner he is, not as an individual but as a representative of a class he despises:

Hast thou not kissed thy hand and held my stirrup? …
How often hast thou waited at my cup,
Fed from my trencher, kneeled down at the board,
When I have feasted with Queen Margaret?

(53, 56-58)

It is left to Whitmore's companion, a nameless yet eloquent (and remarkably well-informed) Lieutenant, to respond to Suffolk. Once again Shakespeare reiterates the idea that the common people are also injured when aristocrats act in their own interests and without regard for the community of England. The Lieutenant attacks Suffolk for the indulgent marriage of Henry to the French temptress, for the loss of Anjou and Maine, for the wars that monopolize the attention of Warwick and his Neville relations, and for the dissension of York and the Kentish rebels. Suffolk gives no sign that he understands the damage for which he is responsible, nor can he broaden or humanize his very narrow interpretation of the aristocratic values which paralyze him:

Suffolk's imperial tongue is stern and rough,
Used to command. …
No, rather let my head
Stoop to the block than these knees bow to any
Save to the God of heaven and to my king; …
True nobility is exempt from fear.
More can I bear than you can execute.

(122-23, 125-27, 130-31)

But Suffolk's unbending manner and imperial tongue fail to impress his captors, and moments later, his imperial head is cut off: “Great men oft die by vile bezonians, … and Suffolk dies by pirates” (135, 139). Shakespeare has made it clear that the pirates speak with the authentic voice of the entire English community and not of the commons alone. It is impossible to imagine that Suffolk's death did not cheer the audience.

When in act 4 Shakespeare at last turns to Cade's rebellion, distinctions of attitude among the nobles no longer matter. Whether or not the commons have been provoked is immaterial; their insurrection is illegitimate and purposeless. Moreover, it is placed under the control of the Duke of York, who is the enemy of the people. York had described his plan in considerable detail:

I have seduced a headstrong Kentishman,
John Cade of Ashford,
To make commotion, as full well he can,
Under the title of John Mortimer. …
This devil [Cade] here shall be my substitute; …
Say that he thrive, as 'tis great like he will;
Why, then from Ireland come I with my strength
And reap the harvest which that rascal sowed.

(3.1.356-69, 371, 379-81)

By making him a tool of York, Shakespeare eliminates the possibility that Cade can lay claim to the slightest political credibility.

Cade himself is no simple figure. In Hall's history, he is merely “a certayn young man of a goodly stature and pregnant wit” (Bullough, Sources, 3:113). Shakespeare complicates the picture. York describes Cade as both duplicitous and close-mouthed, and adds that in battle he fought so long

          that his thighs with darts
Were almost like a sharp-quilled porpentine;
And in the end being rescued, I have seen
Him caper upright like a wild Morisco,
Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells

(362-66).

These lines portray Cade as someone to be feared but not admired. He is alien after the manner of an ecstatic morris (i.e., Moorish) dancer, while his indifference to pain makes him as exotic as that oddity the porcupine. Cade may be a formidable enemy but he is not an adversary who can be respected by knight or aristocrat. In this respect he is like Joan, who is also treated as the outsider or “the Other.” Joan is a foreign and female soldier and therefore a sorceress; Cade is a weaver warrior and not quite human.

Cade's followers, on the other hand, are allowed to express their own motives. Shakespeare precedes Cade's first appearance with a brief choral introduction:

1. Rebel. I tell thee, Jack Cade the clothier means to dress the commonwealth and turn it and set a new nap upon it.
2. Rebel. So he had need, for 'tis threadbare. Well, I say it was never merry world in England since gentlemen came up.
1. Rebel. O miserable age! Virtue is not regarded in handicraftsmen.

(4.2.4-10)

The two “rebels” stand apart from the insurrection; they observe but do not participate. While they are not allowed to be perfectly logical, neither are they clowns; they are alert to inequity. They know that the commonwealth is “threadbare” and needs to be turned inside out; they know that there was once a “merry world” when Adam delved and Eve span and before the community was separated into gentle and common; they know the Biblical injunction that all work is of value, although they twist it to reflect a revolutionary intent. These are the sentiments of the leveler underground—the tavern intellectuals whose egalitarian and heterodox notions were kept in check by repressive governments until they burst out of control during the revolutionary years of the next century.

It is therefore no surprise that the attitude of the commons toward Cade is complex. Some of Cade's more egregious pretensions are regularly undermined by the statements of his more restrained followers. Much of the dialogue is in a form in which Cade makes an absurd assertion which is counterpointed by the good sense of one of his allies:

Cade. My father was a Mortimer—
Butcher. [Aside.] He was an honest man, and a good bricklayer.

(4.2.35-37).

Cade is no philosopher, but his primitive radical vision that “all the realm shall be in common” (62) must have sounded terrible to the ears of the audience. Cade imagines an egalitarian utopia when England comes under his rule:

All the realm shall be in common … there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.

(4.2.62, 66-69)

To which the Dick the Butcher replies with the immensely practical injunction that has become the play's most famous saying: “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers” (3.2.73).

The rebellion itself is portrayed as idiotic know-nothingism. The rebels murder a clerk because he knows how to read and write and hang Lord Say (historically, a detested landowner) because he can speak Latin; a soldier is beaten to death for calling Cade “Cade” and not Mortimer. Cade is made to betray his own values. Although he asks more than once that all things be held in common, he demands absolute authority for himself. Yet Cade can transcend his absurdity and rise to the occasion. His greatest moment comes just before his followers turn tail. Facing the multitude, he addresses them not, for once, as a clown, but as a dangerous and fiery leader and demagogue:

I thought ye would never have given out these arms till you had recovered your ancient freedom. But you are all recreants and dastards, and delight to live in slavery to the nobility. Let them break your backs with burdens, take your houses over your heads, ravish your wives and daughters before your faces. For me, I will make shift for one; and so God's curse light upon you all!

(4.8.24-31)

It is only by invoking the glorious memory of Henry V and by turning attention from local injustices to the prospect of renewed French wars that the aristocrats can quiet the crowds and persuade them to abandon their popular leader. Cade is forced to flee. In the last scene of act 4, he stumbles into the garden of the squire Alexander Iden. In historical fact, both Cade and Iden were Kentish gentlemen, but Shakespeare has degraded and vilified the one and idealized the other. Iden speaks in tones that have not before been heard in this play:

Lord, who would live turmoiled in the court
And may enjoy such quiet walks as these?
This small inheritance my father left me
Contenteth me, and worth a monarchy.
I seek not to wax great by others' waning,
Or gather wealth, I care not with what envy.
Sufficeth that I have maintains my state
And send the poor well pleasèd from my gate.

(4. 10. 15-22)

His soliloquy creates a world that is antithetical in almost every respect to what Shakespeare had until this moment been at such pains to delineate. The England of 2 Henry VI is packed with restless ambition and intrigue; the world of Alexander Iden is one in which a good man is content with his place. Enclosure, antagonism between the classes, hungry beggars, and popular revolt are superseded by a serene pastoralism in which the poor are “well pleased” with alms from the rich. Iden's unsullied “quiet walks” and “small inheritance” are preferable to kingship itself. The passage celebrates the classical ideal of riches left, not got with care. If simplicity and peace already flourish in Cade's utopian garden, what possible reason can there be for all this noise and commotion? Iden duels with Cade and kills him. In the scene that follows, Iden takes Cade's head to the King and is knighted and granted a bounty of one thousand marks. Shakespeare has no other means to express congratulation than by the cash and courtesies that Iden had so recently disdained. Iden's confrontation with Cade rings hollow. Shakespeare pits a clownish rebel whose every word smacks of self-betrayal against an idealized squire who speaks in the language of official political allegory. Cade and his rebels stand for a real disease and Iden for an inauthentic and inadequate remedy.

3 HENRY VI

The Third Part of Henry VI is so thick with incident and event that it is difficult to follow, remember, or summarize. Declamations, battles, reversals of fortune, betrayals, and atrocities fill a very crowded stage. The play begins at the battle of St. Albans (where 2 Henry VI had concluded). The party of York, led by the forceful Earl of Warwick, is temporarily triumphant. In order to retain the kingship during his lifetime, the captured Lancastrian sovereign Henry VI is compelled to entail the crown to Richard, Duke of York. But the solemn agreement does not outlast the first scene. Henry's Queen Margaret, protesting the disinheritance of her son, spreads her colors; almost simultaneously, York's sons argue that “for a kingdom any oath may be broken” (1.2.16). Shortly thereafter, the two sides meet at Sandal Castle and Margaret's forces are victorious. York's son Rutland, unhistorically represented as a child, is murdered; immediately after, York himself is tormented and eventually stabbed to death by Margaret and her chief confederate Clifford. The Lancastrian ascendancy lasts only until Towton (2.6.3-6), where Clifford is killed, Henry escapes to the north of England (where he is soon captured and returned to London), and Margaret takes refuge in France. Edward (York's oldest son and now the standard bearer of his line) proceeds to London “to be crowned England's royal king” (2.6.88). Warwick, still a partisan of the Yorkists, goes to the French court to arrange a marriage for his new king, only to discover that “lascivious Edward” (5.5.34) has embarrassed and betrayed him by his hasty marriage to the widow Lady Elizabeth Grey. Shamed, Warwick suddenly changes sides; he allies himself to Queen Margaret and returns to England “to seek revenge on Edward's mockery” (3.3.265). When the news comes that Warwick and Margaret are in the field, Edward's brother Clarence switches to the Lancastrian side. But the apparently inevitable encounter between the two families is forestalled when Warwick raids Edward's camp, captures the Yorkist King, and sends him as a prisoner to his brother the Archbishop. Warwick then sets out to free Henry from imprisonment in London. The news that the Edward has escaped sours the celebration of King Henry's restoration to the throne. Edward heads for York once again to “interchange my wanèd state for Henry's regal crown” (4.7.4). Yet one more time Lancastrians under Warwick and Margaret face Edward and his allies. The momentum shifts to the party of York when “perjured George” (5.5.34) changes allegiance again, this time rejoining his brothers. At Barnet, Warwick, “proud setter up and puller down of kings” (3.3.157), is killed. Soon afterwards, “misshapen Dick” (5.5.35) joins his two brothers in stabbing young Edward (the son of Henry VI and Margaret). Finally, Richard rushes off to London to kill the remaining Lancastrian, Henry VI, and the triumph of the house of York is apparently complete.

Shakespeare drew a great deal of his story from Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke. Hall's story is also long and complicated, bristling with facts, but it is not without its reflective moments. Hall offered two different explanations for Henry's inadequacies as a king. The first can be called “providential.” It affirms that the misfortunes of Henry's reign must be ascribed not to weaknesses of human personality or to the flaws of social institutions, but to divine intervention. Hall says that the tribulation of England can be attributed

only to the stroke and punishment of God, affirming [that] the kingdom, which Henry the IV his grandfather wrongfully gat, and unjustly possessed against King Richard II and his heirs, could not by very divine iustice, long continue in that injurious stock; and that therefore God by his divine providence, punished the offence of the grandfather, in the son's son.¹

In this version of history, the murder of Richard II and the usurpation of Henry IV constitute a crime against heaven that can be expiated only by a return to legitimate monarchy. Hall's phrase, which consciously echoes biblical language, that God punished “the offence of the grandfather, in the son's son” is constantly reflected in the dramatic and narrative structure of this and other plays in the cycle. Prophesies, predictions, dreams, revelations, and the assertion of God's intervention are regularly trundled forth by the actors of these secular events in order to assert eternal providence. Shakespeare is so generous about supplying such material that it has not proved difficult to interpret this play, as well as the entire sequence of eight plays from Richard II to Richard III, as an acting out of God's darker purposes.

But Hall is not tied to a single interpretation of these complex events. He offers a second explanation, equally persuasive, and given equal weight, for King Henry's “ill chance and misfortune.” Hall succinctly evaluates Henry's personal and moral characteristics:

he was a man of no great wit, such as men commonly call an innocent man, neither a fool, neither very wise, whose study always was more to excel, [rather] in Godly living and virtuous example, than in worldly regiment or temporal dominion, in so much that in comparison to the study and delectation that they had to virtue and godliness, he little regarded, but in manner despised all worldly power and temporal authority. … But his enemies ascribed all this to his coward stomach.

(Cairncross, 3 Henry VI p. 166)

Hall has no difficulty giving equal credence to the one idea—that God's hand is responsible for the punishment of England and the Henry—as the other, that the king's flaws of character (unworldliness, simplicity, cowardice) are also the cause of the trouble. Shakespeare's sources license him to explore these two different systems of interpretation and causation.

Shakespeare continually demonstrates King Henry VI is unsuited to monarchy. He is perpetually youthful and immature, dominated first by his uncles and later by his wife Margaret. He is feeble in war and always more drawn to prayer than politics. In the first two plays that bear his name, “bashful Henry” (1.1.41) had been distinctly subordinate to his obstreperous uncles. To the dangerous rebellion led by Cade, his response was merely to wring his hands. In 3 Henry VI, Shakespeare gives greater dimension to the character of the King. While he does not become more active or stronger, he does become more coherent, more sensitive, more affecting—a precursor, perhaps, of Richard II.

Henry makes his most memorable appearance at the battle of Towton. Shunted to a corner by the fierceness of the combatants, he sits and reflects on war and society while the two sides skirmish. He is withdrawn and passive, indifferent to the partisanship that drives all other characters: “Here on this molehill will I sit me down. / To whom God will, there be the victory” (2.5.14-15). He indulges in an escapist fancy in which he is a “homely swain” or shepherd who has nothing to do but count the hours until his ewes will yean and their fleece can be sheared. The delicious solitude of the rural world is contrasted to the care and corruption of the busy haunts of men:

Ah, what a life were this! how sweet, how lovely!
Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds looking on their silly sheep,
Than doth a rich embroidered canopy
To kings that fear their subjects' treachery?

(41-45)

But all the while, the audience knows that it is a sign of dereliction when kings enjoy bucolic bliss. Henry's principal vice has been what Elizabethans called “lenity”—“harmful pity” in Clifford's definition—or softness in dealing with antagonists.

To this very long, self-indulgent meditation, Shakespeare opposes a scene designed to dramatize the limitations of Henry's views. As Henry looks on, a “Son” enters with the body of a man he has killed, and as he rifles it searching for “crowns,” he discovers that he has killed his own father. He laments: “O heavy times, begetting such events” (63). But it is soon revealed that the fault is not just in the times but in Henry himself. “From London by the King was I pressed forth” (64). The King, always compassionate to suffering, understands that he must share the blame: “While lions war and battle for their dens, / Poor harmless lambs abide their enmity” (74-75). The Arcadian fantasy of shepherds and their silly sheep has been revealed to be a world where lambs lie down with lions at their peril. Shakespeare proceeds to drive home the point. “Enter a Father that hath kill'd his Son, with a body in his arms.” After the father's lament, which mirrors too exactly the son's speech that preceded it, Henry moralizes what he has just observed. He accepts personal responsibility for the destruction of English families. (He does not notice that Shakespeare replicates in the common people the exact pattern of the murdering of fathers created by dynastic rivalry.) Once again his grieving is poignant but misguided:

The red rose and the white are on his face,
The fatal colors of our striving houses.
The one his purple blood right well resembles;
The other his pale cheeks, methinks, presenteth.
Wither one rose, and let the other flourish.
If you contend, a thousand lives must wither.

(97-102)

Henry's strengths and weaknesses as a leader reveal themselves in this highly metaphorical statement. He acknowledges that the marks of civil dissension are allegorized in the faces of its victims, and he is sensitive to the suffering of his people. But neither the willingness to embrace martyrdom nor indifference to the outcome of the contention signals an effective leader. In the end, he is reduced to hopeless sentimentality: “Sad-hearted men, much overgone with care, / Here sits a king more woeful than you are” (123-24).

Eventually, Henry is stabbed to death by Richard of Gloucester, who emerges as the dominant figure in the final act of the play. Henry knows that he is about to be murdered, but he is still concerned about the people of England, and prophesies to Richard that “Men for their sons, wives for their husbands, / Orphans for their parents' timeless [i.e. untimely] death— / Shall rue the hour that ever thou wast born” (5.6.41-43). Henry dies at the moment in which his language is at its most animated.

Despite this moment of passion, the character of Henry remains relatively static through the three plays. On the other hand, Richard of Gloucester is nondescript at the outset of 3 Henry VI, but its dominant figure at last. Shakespeare seems hesitant about what to do with Richard. At first, it appears as though he will be cast as an overreacher in the Marlovian mode. When, in the first act, he urges his father York to seek the kingship, Richard speaks in the tones of Tamburlaine:

          father, do but think
How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown,
Within whose circuit is Elysium
And all that poets feign of bliss and joy.

(1.2.28-31)

In the second act, Shakespeare takes another tack. Now he casts Richard as an avenger out of a revenge play like Kyd's immensely influential Spanish Tragedy. At the battle of Towton, in the midst of the excursions, strokes, and blows of combat, young Richard arrives with a message for Warwick, the leader of the party of York, to tell him that his half-brother (actually his bastard half-brother Salisbury) has been killed by Clifford:

Thy brother's blood the thirsty earth hath drunk,
Broached with the steely point of Clifford's lance;
And in the very pangs of death he cried,
Like to a dismal clangor heard from far,
“Warwick, revenge! Brother, revenge my death!”

(2.3.15-19)

At this point in his development Richard's language is far removed from the jaunty mockery that eventually becomes his hallmark. He speaks in the popular style of the early 1590s at its windiest. His language is marred by too ample alliteration (“brother's blood,” “broach'd”), mandatory adjectives (“thirsty earth,” “steely point,” “dismal clangor”), and unfortunate vaguenesses when specificity is sorely needed (“heard from afar”). This is the kind of writing that Shakespeare would later mock by putting it in the mouths of Bottom/Pyramus and Pistol.

It is only in act 3, scene 2, that the familiar figure of Richard begins to emerge. The remarkable scene in which this occurs is comprised of two sections. In the first part, Richard's older brother Edward, now Edward IV, woos the widow Lady Elizabeth Grey. Richard and his brother George comment aside on Edward's sexual aggressiveness. After Elizabeth accepts Edward's offer of marriage, Richard remains on stage. In the course of a long soliloquy, his new character—theatrical, comic, wicked, angry, ironic—springs to life.

Edward is attractive to women and something of a philanderer (Hall says that he “loved well both to look and to feel fair damosels” [Cairncross, 3 Henry VI, 159]). Elizabeth, whose husband was slain fighting for Edward at St. Albans, approaches Edward with a suit to repossess her alienated lands. Edward hints that the lady offer her virtue in trade for her property. Richard, overlooking, makes a series of prurient comments: “I see the lady hath a thing to grant”; “Fight closer or, good faith, you'll catch a clap”; “Ay, good leave have you, / Till youth … leave you to the crutch” (3.2.12, 23, 34-35). Elizabeth does not yield easily, and Edward, smitten, asks her to be his wife. This is the worst possible outcome for Richard. He is jealous of Edward's attractiveness to women, and he knows that a fruitful marriage will imperil his chance of succeeding to the throne.

Close observation of his brother catalyzes Richard. He reacts violently to the prospect of his brother's marriage: “Ay, Edward will use women honorably. / Would he were wasted, marrow, bones and all, / That from his loins no hopeful branch may spring” (124-26). Richard reveals his ambition and admits that it is unlikely that he will become king. He only “dream[s] on sovereignty.” But when he dismisses the prospect of kingship, an alternative suddenly arises. “Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard; / What other pleasure can the world afford?” (146-47). Richard scornfully dismisses the possibility that he could succeed with women as his brother does. “I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap, / And deck my body in gay ornaments / And witch sweet ladies with my words and looks. / O miserable thought.” Hall had described Richard in most unflattering terms: “little of stature, evil featured of limbs, crook-backed, the left shoulder much higher than the right, hard favored of visage, such as in estates is called a warlike visage, and among common persons a crabbed face” (Cairncross, 3 Henry V, 174). Shakespeare, interested in the psychology of his character, transforms Richard's deformity first into self-loathing and then into motive:

Why, Love forswore me in my mother's womb; …
To shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub;
To make an envious mountain on my back …
And am I then a man to be beloved?

(3.2.153, 156-57, 163)

Richard resolves not to seek heaven in a lady's lap (in the Petrarchan language he parodies) but instead resolves, “I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown” (168).

Shakespeare then introduces still another novel element when Richard begins to draw on the familiar image of the vice of the morality plays, one of whose roles is to dissemble and pretend. “Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile, / And cry ‘Content!’ to that that grieves my heart, / And wet my cheeks with artificial tears” (182-84). Shakespeare has now provided Richard with a motive (an acute consciousness of his deformity and uniqueness), an objective (the crown), and a borrowed and transformed morality play inheritance that allows him to toy with his enemies while revealing himself to the audience. As he brings the soliloquy to a conclusion, Richard adds the modern (and anachronistic) horror of Italian intrigue: he will “set the murderous Machiavel to school” (3.2.193). Shakespeare has left the preliminary gestures toward Kyd and Marlowe far behind and created a character infinitely more complex and sinister than his predecessor playwrights could possibly imagine.

The most famous lines in 3 Henry VI occur in Richard of Gloucester's last soliloquy. Richard has stabbed King Henry, who has been “famed for mildness, peace, and prayer” (2.1.156); he turns to the audience in the speech beginning “I, that have neither pity, love, nor fear” (5.6.68) and makes the chilling assertion that

I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word “love,” which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me. I am myself alone.

(80-83)

These phrases define Richard's emerging amorality. Explicit atheism, scandalous to the orthodox among the spectators, comes to the fore in the contemptuous dismissal of “love” as an idea to which only the old-fashioned would cling. The accompanying word “divine” makes it clear that Richard repudiates not only the love of man but the love of God. Over and above his rejection of traditional religion, Richard also claims to be set apart from the larger community of men. He is “alone”—an individual, an isolate, concerned not with the public good or communal morality, but only with personal and private needs and desires. In these few vivid and condensed words of self-revelation, Richard manages to repudiate ancestral standards of both religious and social behavior.

Even more resonant is “I have no brother, I am like no brother.” All of Shakespeare's histories pay homage to dynastic and family loyalty; 3 Henry VI sometimes seems to have no other subject. Taken literally, Richard's announcement that he has no brother is of course simply untrue. Richard has three brothers: Edward, the Earl of March, succeeds his father as Duke of York and achieves the throne as Edward IV; feckless George, Duke of Clarence, wanders from the Yorkist side to the Lancastrian and back again; and Edmund of Rutland, the “innocent child” (1.3.8), is murdered by “bloody Clifford” (2), in one of the drama's more gruesome atrocities. Richard does not pretend that he has no legal or literal brother. The denial that he has a brother means that he is not tied to the community of England by fraternal or familial bonds; that there is no one, not even a brother, with whom he shares a common humanity; and finally, that he has no use for the tenderness that other human beings acknowledge toward their most intimate friends and relations. When Richard says that he has no brother, he certainly suspends his loyalty to Edward, George, and Edmund, but he also means that he no longer participates in the brotherhood of man. His literal lie reflects a deeper truth—and from this truth both the murder of his brother Clarence and the conscienceless villainy that mark his subsequent career inevitably follow.

Notes

1. Cited in The Third Part of 3 Henry VI, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross (London: Methuen, 1964), 166-67.