SOURCE: Turner, Robert Y. “Characterization in Shakespeare's Early History Plays.” ELH 31, no. 3 (September 1964): 241-58.

[In the following essay, Turner argues that because of his relative inexperience as a playwright, Shakespeare created characters in Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 that are “flat” depictions of morality figures who show no remorse for their actions.]

The major figures in the Henry VI plays undergo no moral change of character. Even at the moment of death when they face an eternity of punishment, they feel no regrets and make no judgment on a life of misdeeds as, for example, Richard II does before he is murdered. In carrying out their actions, they experience no hesitations or fear, struggle with no conflicting paths of action as Macbeth was to face, and sense no discrepancy between motive and duty as Hamlet was to feel. When their plans fail, they utter no second thoughts about them. York and Somerset never speak of their failure to aid Talbot, nor the Duchess of Glouchester about her conjuring, nor Margaret and Suffolk about the murder of Duke Humphrey, nor Jack Cade about his rebellion, nor York about his disloyalty, nor Warwick and Clarence about their contradictory loyalties. If they speak at all of their failures, they are bitter not against themselves but against enemies or circumstances. The fact that these characters remain unregenerate in the face of death gains significance when we notice how many there are: Joan La Pucelle, Cardinal Beaufort, Suffolk, Somerset, Jack Cade, Richard of York, Clifford, Young Clifford, and Warwick. In Richard III, presumably written to follow the Henry VI plays and form a tetralogy, all the characters who face death undergo a moment of self-awareness, and all except Richard regret their behavior: Clarence, Edward IV, Hastings, Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, Anne, and Buckingham. No doubt Shakespeare rejected any change of heart in the earlier plays to show the disasters consequent upon political misdeeds, but to include a final moment of remorse is not to modify seriously this political lesson. Some additional explanation seems called for to clarify the change in characterization. It could be that early in his career Shakespeare saw from a Calvinist point of view mankind hardened in sin and suddenly abandoned this view before writing Richard III.¹ No doubt some refined statement of didactic purpose can justify his change, but I prefer to examine it in relation to the techniques of characterization a young playwright found available in the early 1590's.

Characters in these early histories seem flat, types lying somewhere between the moral abstractions of the Tudor interludes and the “rounded” figures of Shakespeare's mature plays. Having neither the definiteness of the one nor the immediate appeal of the other, they are easily attributable to a very young playwright and have stimulated little attention even among those who write most sensitively about the Henry VI plays.² If we concentrate upon these characters as “static” rather than as “flat,” they become easier to relate to the dramatic practices of the period and appear to result from a particular moment in the rapid rise of professional drama. In the 1580's the habits of writing morality plays were still influential, and the commitment to literal drama was somewhat less than total. As I see it, these characters were shaped both by conventions of the morality tradition and by demands of the literal historical events. To suggest that Shakespeare was influenced in part by outside pressures is not to deny his creativity, for in this period of fast change, playwrights must have watched one another closely, especially those beginning their careers. To see how Shakespeare faced problems of characterization common to fellow playwrights, how he used his native tradition in the Henry VI plays and modified it in Richard III, is to be specific about his creativity.

I.

Causation presents the major problem for dramatizing change of character. The playwright must show, to make the dramatic experience credible, why a character changes. In the Henry VI plays characters remain morally static because motive, or internal cause, is character itself. In order for character to undergo change, the motive must somehow be differentiated from character. Shakespeare at the outset of his career identified motive with character because he shared with his contemporaries a distrust of the particular event in all its idiosyncratic untidy individuality. Sir Philip Sidney in his speculation upon the nature of poetry compared it with history and philosophy and favored poetry more than either because it “coupleth the generall notion with the particuler example.”

… the Historian wanting the precept, is so tyed, not to what shoulde bee, but to what is, to the particuler truth of things, and not to the general reason for things, that hys example draweth no necessary consequence and therefore a lesse fruitfull doctrine.³

In Sidney's view the particular event must possess general significance. But in choosing to dramatize history, Shakespeare committed himself to presenting specific events with at least some degree of verisimilitude. A. P. Rossiter noticed how Shakespeare rearranged the chronology of events to bring out their moral pattern.⁴ It might also be mentioned that characterization reenforces his didactic purpose. Nathaniel Woodes, faced with this problem some twenty years earlier, tells how he characterized Francis Spira in putting on stage the story of his lapse from Protestantism back to Catholicism:

And here our Author thought it meet the true name to omit,
And at this time imagine him Philologus to be
First, for because a Comedy will hardly him permit
The vices of one private man to touch particularly:
Again, how shall it stir them more, who shall it hear or see;
For if this worldling had been nam'd, we would straight deem in mind,
That all by him then spoken were, ourselves we would not find.(5)

By changing the specific to the generic name, Woodes assumed that the audience's response to drama was deductive, that they saw their lives subsumed under the general pattern of events on stage. Therefore, he removed the specific attributes and smoothed away the irregularities from his literal historical story. Edward Hall's history shared something of Woodes' uneasiness with literal events, but he preserved the accidental and untidy happenings and provided general explanations to show their significance. Aside from bolstering events by moral lessons, he would often preface a career by a character sketch. Before narrating Queen Margaret's actions, he said of her:

… The Quene his wife, was a woman of greate witte, and yet of no greater witte, then of haute stomacke, desirous of glory, and covetous of honor, and of reason, pollicye, counsaill, and other giftes and talentes of nature belongyng to a man, full and flowying: of witte and wilinesse she lacked nothyng, nor of diligence, studie, and businesse, she was no unexperte: but yet she had one poynt of a very woman: for often tyme, when she was vehement and fully bente in a matter, she was sodainly like a wethercocke, mutable, and turnyng.⁶

Her consequent behavior comes as no surprise to the reader because it illustrates this amusing sketch of her character. Whereas Woodes typified the specific event to embody moral patterns, Hall preserved the specific event and made it the illustration of a general category. Behavior illustrates character, or to put it another way, the cause of behavior is character itself. To say that Margaret's mannishness causes her to dominate her husband is to say her action illustrates her character. Therefore, the historical characters are fixed, encased in Hall's interpretation of them.

Shakespeare followed Hall by thinking of character as a general category to be illustrated by behavior. In 1 Henry VI he translated this relationship directly onto the stage, first by a description of character and then by a presentation of the character in action. Before Talbot appears, a messenger describes his valor in battle with the French. When he enters in scene four, he first describes to Salisbury his imprisonment and ferocity toward the French, a speech which reexpresses the bravery described by the messenger. Suddenly Salisbury is shot, and Talbot begins to act, thereby illustrating his warriorship. Likewise, La Pucelle is described by the Bastard of Orleans before she enters. When she appears, her first speeches describe herself to the Dauphin, and then she demonstrates her rhetorical and physical powers. As the Dauphin becomes acquainted with her, so does the audience. To introduce Richard of York, the third major character, Shakespeare disrupted the pattern slightly. When we first meet Richard, he is engaged in an argument in the Temple Garden, and we are unsure of his importance until the following scene in which an interview with Mortimer plants firmly in his mind his claim to the throne and gives him the motive—or characteristic—of ambition. Two other characters who appear frequently in Part One, Gloucester and Winchester, are less central to the major events. Their behavior is confined to quarreling with each other, behavior which appears in the opening scene and recurs intermittently throughout the drama. In Act Five Shakespeare tried to integrate the introductory description with action by choosing the moment when Suffolk first meets Margaret to present them first to the audience. As Suffolk presents himself to Margaret, he describes himself to the audience; as he describes Margaret's impact upon himself and learns her identity, he, again, describes her to the audience. Although Margaret's behavior is of no consequence for the remainder of the play, Suffolk's subsequent actions illustrate this initial moment of enchantment. At the same time Suffolk spies Margaret, Joan La Pucelle is captured and led off the stage; the juxtaposition suggests that La Pucelle's super-natural powers to scourge the English passes to the other French woman.⁷ Suffolk's behavior in forwarding Margaret's marriage with Henry VI to the detriment of England seems to proceed from something stronger than love; dazzled by her, he enraptures Henry VI with his description, and when he adds the motive of ambition in the final lines of the play to account for his behavior, we can see this too as part of the spell Margaret's beauty has cast over him.

The presence of anecdotal episodes in 1 and 2 Henry VI betrays Shakespeare's thinking on the relation of character to action. Talbot's visit with the Countess of Auvergne and Duke Humphrey's exposure of Simpcox's pretenses are episodes which stand outside the main line of action, neither arising from what precedes them nor leading to further events. As independent units, they vivify the characters of Talbot and Humphrey, showing the prudent soldiership of the one and the wisdom of the other. So far as we know, Shakespeare invented the episode of the Countess of Auvergne, and he went outside his main source to find the exposure of Simpcox.⁸ These efforts suggest that he saw character as a concept distinct from action and in need of illustration by action; he therefore searched for proper anecdotes to vivify it.

By the time he composed 2 Henry VI, Shakespeare must have sensed that the static presentation of character by statement was redundant and abandoned the awkward pause in action. The opening scene presents nearly all the important characters except Jack Cade, and they are fixed by epithets which recur throughout the drama to define them. Salisbury points to Buckingham and Somerset as they leave the stage and says, “Pride went before, ambition follows him” (I.i.179).⁹ He repeats and adds to these attributions when he says, “The pride of Suffolk and the Cardinal, / With Somerset's and Buckingham's ambition” (I.i.202-203). Beaufort is called elsewhere in this scene, “haughty Cardinal” (I.i.173), and later in the play is described as “imperious churchman” (I.iii.69), “ambitious churchman” (II.i.174), “impious Beaufort” (II.ii.53). York speaks of “Beaufort's pride, [and] Somerset's ambition” (II.ii.70). And earlier Warwick refers to Suffolk as “Image of Pride” (I.iii.176). When Dame Eleanor is banished, Suffolk pronounces upon her, “Thus Eleanor's pride dies in her youngest days” (II.ii.46). Humphrey, by contrast is known as the “good Duke” (II.ii.73; III.i.204; III.ii.247) except by his enemies. Cardinal Beaufort says scornfully in the opening scene that the commoners have given this epithet to him. These adjectives suggest that moral qualities form the core of the characters' behavior and keep the audience's attention directed to the general meaning behind the literal surface.

In 3 Henry VI Shakespeare reused the extended passages of description to establish character, but he integrated them more successfully with the movement of events than he did in Part One. In the later play self-presentation occurs when the action itself demands revelation of character and does not usually precede the character's first appearance. Without introductory description Richard of Gloucester opposes his enemies with exceptional ferocity throughout the first two acts. Once Edward IV becomes king, he gives the occasion for Richard to present himself in soliloquy and reveal his ambition for the crown. Henry VI, who mentions Richard's unnatural birth before he is murdered, stimulates Richard to characterize himself in a second soliloquy. He describes his difference from other men and submits to the guidance of hell. Thus the supernatural power of scourging the English, which passed from La Pucelle to Margaret, now passes to Richard, Margaret having been immobilized by defeat. Shakespeare deepened in the course of events Richard's ferocity first by ambition and then by hellishness, additions which keep within the outlines of Richard's initial behavior. Similarly he deepened Edward IV's character by the lust which Lady Grey's charm brings out, but this addition does not contradict his earlier character; Edward IV's imprudent marriage brings out Warwick's pride and power as he changes allegiance but not his character; likewise, the incipient battle between Warwick and Edward generates Clarence's feeling of kinship and consequent change of allegiance but not of character. These artful additions to character contrast strongly with the single consistency of character in 1 Henry VI; Talbot enacts in every episode his bravery and patriotism. This contrast does not indicate that Shakespeare's thinking about the relation of character and behavior was changing; it shows his increasing skill in adjusting the fixed moral qualities to the demands of the literal story.

The static historical characters have an obvious but limited kinship with the figures of the morality plays. Nicholas Newfangle, for example, at the outset of Like Will to Like (1562-68) presents himself to the audience by a monologue, engages in a brief discussion with Lucifer to establish his character, and then begins to illustrate it by dialogue with the Collier and Tom Tosspot. But before the action can get underway, Tom Tosspot interrupts to present himself too by a monologue. Besides the similarity with 1 Henry VI in the way they are presented, the characters resemble each other in their motivations. The quality which names the morality character also causes his behavior. If we ask why Tom Tosspot drinks, we must answer, “Because he is a carouser.” Why does Nicholas Newfangle behave so jauntily? Because he takes pride in newfangled fashions. Why does he tempt others to join Lucifer? Because he is Vice. Likewise, to ask why Fastolfe runs from battle, we must say, “Because he is a coward.” Why does Duke Humphrey resist the temptations of the Duchess of Gloucester? Because he is a good man, less concerned with his own welfare than with the well-being of the commonwealth. The historical characters, of course, have specific rather than general names, and this difference is less trivial than it seems, for the specifically named character's behavior need not embody as lucidly his moral quality as the morality character's behavior must show forth his name. Talbot, always brave and patriotic, nevertheless in the final episode shows a father's feeling for his son's life, a sentiment which does not negate his basic quality but cannot be totally encompassed by it. Margaret is proud and mannish; yet her love for Suffolk cannot be subsumed readily under these two qualities. Duke Humphrey is good and wise; nevertheless, Shakespeare added a touch of choler to individualize him. Although moral characteristics form the core of the historical figures, they need not encompass behavior as the characteristic must do which names a morality figure. By refusing to generalize the name as Woodes did in writing The Conflict of Conscience, Shakespeare enjoyed a larger range of behavior for dramatizing his characters and showed a greater respect for the irregularities of literal history.

II.

If we think that Shakespeare's assumptions about the relation of character and behavior are inadequately revealed in the ways he introduced characters and inserted anecdotes, we can discover them also in the way his characters talk. The dominant pattern of dialogue, the movement of dialogue, and the style of individual speeches are appropriate to characters who are moral categories. The dialogues in the Henry VI plays at the moments of high dramatic intensity usually take one pattern, that of attack and counterattack. In 2 Henry VI, for example, at the opening characters quarrel over Suffolk's giving away Anjou and Maine for the hand of Margaret; at the turning point mid-way in the play Duke Humphrey quarrels with his accusers about his rulership as Protector; at the conclusion York reveals his claim to the throne and generates a quarrel between those who support him and those who support Henry VI. And minor quarrels occur between these high points. In Act One Somerset and York attack each other over the regency of France; in Act Three they split over the leadership of forces against the Irish rebels; in Act Four Sir Humphrey Stafford denounces and is denounced by Jack Cade. Some arguments are created merely to generate steam and lead to nothing. In the hawking scene, Act Two, the Cardinal and Duke Humphrey quarrel to the point of a duel, but this unhistorical challenge can never be brought to action because both of them face death in other ways; Shakespeare stopped it by introducing Simpcox. He repeated this abortive quarrelling in Act Three when Suffolk and Warwick become so heated that they leave the stage to duel, only to be interrupted by Salisbury's sudden appearance with commoners to demand banishment or death for Suffolk. These dialogues follow naturally from static characters who bring their attitudes ready-formed to any gathering. They are limited to asserting their positions. They defend themselves and accuse their opponents without undergoing self-discovery or persuading anyone to their side. The only relationship seems to be attack or defense. Even Henry VI and Duke Humphrey, who are selfless in their exercise of power, are forced to defend themselves and accuse their enemies. In the quarrels these characters talk at one another and do not listen or respond with sympathy or embarrassment.

Since two opposing sides to an issue can be quickly stated and easily exhausted, topic follows topic in rapid succession. The quarrel lacks the force of dialectic growth but moves in a see-saw manner that leads nowhere and must be pushed along by outside stimuli. Shakespeare solved this problem by abrupt entrances and exits. Usually a messenger with news terminates a spate of quarreling and sets the characters on another issue. In 2 Henry VI, Act Five, York enters with his army and makes a speech; Buckingham enters to confront him with a message from the King; their discussion ends when the King interrupts with attendants; Alexander Iden interrupts their discussion; the Queen enters with Somerset, and their appearance generates York's outburst against Henry VI. York's sons enter to support him; Clifford and Young Clifford enter to support the King; Warwick and Salisbury enter to support York; and the scene climaxes with vows of war. Shakespeare could have brought both sides onto stage at the outset and developed the opposition gradually by revelations and responses. Rather than concentrate upon the sustained interchange among several dominant characters as they generate their own ideas and respond emotionally to each other, he built the scene by a progression of entrances. The characters are too thin, too restricted by their moral qualities to sustain a discussion. Other scenes reveal a similar development by outside stimulation. The opening of the play, for example, is moved along by exits rather than entrances. The gradual departure of characters spurs on the dialogue by removing restraints from the possible topics for discussion. Once the King and Queen depart, Duke Humphrey can complain about the arrangement for her dowry; once Gloucester departs, the Cardinal can describe him as dangerous; once the Cardinal departs, Buckingham and Somerset can declare their suspicions of the Cardinal's ambitions, and so on until only York holds the stage to deliver a soliloquy on his ambition for the crown.

Dialectical dialogue, on the other hand, needs no outside stimulus because the characters have sufficient complexity to respond variously to their interlocutors. Brutus and Cassius in Act Four of Julius Caesar range over the topic of friendship and loyalty for a hundred and fifty lines because Shakespeare established through preceding episodes their pride, interdependence, illusions, and self-awareness. They bring to their discussion complex points of view which generate a variety of relevant reactions to each other's comments. However, York and Somerset, who think strictly according to their moral characteristics, ambition on the one hand and pride on the other, react either in anger or sorrow when they are thwarted or in pleasure or complacency when they triumph. Their dialogue must be thin because they have no reserve of interests to draw on. When their speeches are lengthy, they embody the rhetorical principle of copia, that is, copious from the reexpression of the same idea in several ways, not from inner and unexpected responses. Thin dialogue, then, arises from characters who are moral categories, or to put the point another way, the thin dialogue preserves the general moral significance of character.

In spite of this limitation Thomas Nashe gave contemporary testimony that Talbot was an impressive character for Elizabethan playgoers. Probably they responded to him not merely because he was heroic but because Shakespeare added to his dialogue a special vigor to intensify his behavior. In fact, most of the major characters in the early history plays, including the progeny of Taburlaine, impress us with a similar vigor. Even the women, Zenocrate, Zabina, Locrine's Queen Estrild, Constance and Queen Elinor (from The Troublesome Reign of King John), and Queen Margaret share this masculine vigor of speech. Talbot's style is marked both by energeia and enargeia. Energeia imparts movement to descriptive or narrative passages. When describing his shame at being the prisoner of the French, Talbot makes no introspective statement of his emotion but says:

Then broke I from the officers that led me,
And with my nails digg'd stones out of the ground
To hurl at the beholders of my shame.

(I. iv. 44-46)

And in his grief over Salisbury's death he utters this vow:

Frenchmen, I'll be a Salisbury to you.
Pucelle or puzzel, dolphin or dogfish,
Your hearts I'll stamp out with my horse's heels,
And make a quagmire of your mingled brains.

(I. iv. 106-109)

These passages show not only energeia but enargeia, which Madeleine Doran says were not often distinguished by Renaissance poets.¹⁰Enargeia imparts to language a quality that goes beyond mere clarity to force itself on the attention, a quality more positive than clearness. Usually accompanying these qualities of diction is the syntax of command, wish, or rhetorical question which keeps the voice at a high pitch of excitement and prevents it from falling to a rest at the end of statements. Margaret's complaints to Suffolk about the disappointments of the English court (2 H. VI, I. iii) or her anger at Henry VI for suspecting Suffolk as Duke Humphrey's murderer (2 H. VI, III. ii) are speeches composed almost entirely of these syntactic forms. It is easy to pass off this heightened style as rant, but it should be understood as Shakespeare's means of adapting static moral figures to a world of literal events. Energeia and enargeia are essential coloring laid onto the surface of these simple, flat characters to “humanize” and help them move about in an historical atmosphere. For the same reason, whenever characters make speeches of special dramatic significance, their style embodies the principle of copia. Duke Humphrey's answer to his accusers (2 H. VI, III. ii), or Gloucester's soliloquy stating his ambition (3 H. VI, III. ii) reexpress in a variety of ways the same ideas so that the speeches are ornamented purposely out of proportion to what they mean. Shakespeare fashioned his characters with an extravagance that disappeared from his later plays. Undoubtedly he was putting to practice the principles of rhetoric he learned in his schooling, a practice he never abandoned but trimmed with economy in his mature years. Their lavish display in the early plays may be attributed to youthful exuberance, but they may be as well a solution to the problem of harmonizing static moral characters with literal history.

III.

To consider plausible the proposition that characters in the Henry VI plays are static because their behavior illustrates moral qualities, we should see what aesthetic pressures hindered Shakespeare from dramatizing moral change of character. Morality plays, written between 1500 and 1560, show that illustrative behavior does not necessarily exclude moral change, for the central character changes from innocence to sin to penitence while interacting with characters whose behavior illustrate their moral qualities. The aesthetic pressures, then, operated in no systematic way to discourage change or encourage static characters. One such pressure was dramatic credibility which resides in the expectations of the audience. Certainly no dramatist can afford to neglect verisimilitude if he wishes to be at all persuasive, and I think it goes without saying that Shakespeare had a didactic purpose in choosing to dramatize the events of civil war. Some playwrights are powerful enough to reshape the standards of plausibility, but Shakespeare adopted those of fellow playwrights in composing his early plays. The specific problem of credibility in dramatizing change of character arises from causation, and given the evidence of extant drama in the 1580's, we can surmise that playwrights felt uneasy about motives, that is internal causes, in dramatizing change. They limited themselves to causes external to character and dramatized changes by rhetorical persuasion or changes by love. The rhetorician and the loved one give plausibility to change because they are visible, existing outside the changing character. But moral change of character demands something more, a self-awareness or introspection—or motive—which evidently playwrights felt hesitant to dramatize.

Their hesitation resulted probably from the sharpening differences between Tudor interludes and literal dramas. The literal story usually observes distinctions between particular and general, and, more relevant to characterization, insists upon a firm distinction between the external and internal, which are differences neglected in the morality plays. In this world abstractions such as Truth, Conscience, Folly, Faith, and Charity share the same status outside the central figure representing mankind even though Conscience and, say, Truth have a different locus in “actual” existence. Without this restricting distinction between the external and internal, the playwright could present internal change as a vivid external event. When Wantonness, for example, tempts Youth, the audience witnesses their dialogue and sees Youth choose Wantonness for companionship; Youth responds to an outside force and enacts his change objectively by companionship. Playwrights, when they turned to literal stories, were reluctant to abandon this clarity of presenting the psychological event and combined the two, from about 1550 to about 1580, in plays which can be classified as “hybrids.”¹¹ In these hybrids abstractions take their place beside literal characters to dramatize their emotions as well as to motivate them. John Phillip in his version of the Griselda story, The Play of Patient and Meek Grissel (c. 1558-1561), conceived of vice as a character, Politik Persuasion, to tempt Gautier into testing Grissel, and to dramatize her suffering, he characterized Reason and Sobriety to sympathize with her as well as Patience and Constancie to accompany her.

In the 1580's the distinction between internal and external events grew sharper, but personified causes lingered in other forms. Often they were disguised as gods. Love in the form of Cupid or Venus or both controls behavior in Gismond of Salerne (1566), Sapho and Phao (1582-1584), Gallathea (1584-1588) Love's Metamorphosis (1588-1590), Dido Queen of Carthage (1587-1593). In some plays the personifications interact with the literal characters; in others they are exiled to framing episodes which precede events in the literal stories. Revenge watches the happenings of The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1584-1589) and assures the audience that he controls Hieronimo's behavior. Love and Fortune assert their control over events in The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (1582); Death, Love, and Fortune occupy the framing story of Soliman and Perseda (c. 1589-1592). The planets exercise similar control over the changing character of Pandora in The Woman in the Moon (1590-1595), and the plot to The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins (c. 1585) suggests a similar control by moral abstractions over subsequent events. Other framing stories, those prefacing The Old Wives Tale (c. 1588-1594), The Taming of a Shrew (and The Shrew) (c. 1588-1593), and James IV (c. 1590-1591) do not show causes for behavior in the encompassed stories, but they suggest the fiction of what follows and therefore reduce the claims of verisimilitude. Both Kate, the shrew, and James IV undergo conversions; the changes of character in Peele's comedy, designed to parody old-fashioned romantic adventure plays, were caused by magic. This impulse to show forth the causes of behavior died out in the 1590's presumably as audiences grew to accept literal stories as literal and motives as internal. These frameworks, then, frequent only in the 1580's, represent the last claims of a fading standard of credibility made customary by morality plays. Three plays on the professional stage in the 1590's used the framing story: the didactic framework of Yarington's Two Lamentable Tragedies (1595-1598) makes respectable the bloody events of the play itself; Histriomastix (1599) was probably written in the 1580's and doctored by Marston for performance by a revived company of child actors; and Dekker's Old Fortunatus (1599) intended the framework to be, so it seems, a quaint appendage to the wondrous events.

The ease with which the central figures in the moralities change is due to their lack of specific characteristics. They respond to external figures, who are vivid because of their single characteristics, but have themselves no distinguishing quality, apart from the attributes of youth or age, except the power to choose companions. Through their company they acquire temporary characteristics which can be terminated by withdrawal. When playwrights turned to more specific and secular subjects in the 1550's and 1560's, the easily changing figure of humanity was replaced by figures with limited characteristics similar to the abstract personifications. Tom Tosspot, Cuthbert Cultpurse, Moros, or Poor Renter take on specific attributes and lose their moral flexibility. Lyly's Alexander, Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Shakespeare's Talbot, Joan, Richard of York, Duke Humphrey are descendants of these characters.¹² Several characters in the Henry VI plays fall in love or change allegiance, but these changes cannot be described as moral changes. In 1 Henry VI Burgundy joins Joan's forces, and Suffolk falls in love with Margaret, but in both cases supernatural powers help seduce them. The Dauphin urges Joan, “Speak, Pucelle, and enchant him with thy words.” Before Burgundy succumbs, he says:

Either she hath bewitch'd me with her words,
Or nature makes me suddenly relent.

(III. iii. 58-59)

Shakespeare did not resort to external causes in the guise of supernatural promptings to account for Clarence's changes in 3 Henry VI, but changing sides did not involve, so far as we know, a change within. Shakespeare kept him a shadowy figure without distinctive characteristics other than, perhaps, inconstancy itself to help make his changes acceptable. He departs from Edward IV in disgust over his imprudent marriage to Lady Grey, and joins Warwick at least in part for the marriage of his daughter. His abandonment of Warwick and return to Edward IV is presented abruptly. As he states it, kinship wins over other allegiances, but Shakespeare gave him no soliloquy to reveal the force of this natural bond. His actions remain historical occurrences without becoming dramatically plausible events. More successful is Warwick's change of allegiance, not so much a moral change as an emotional reaction to Edward IV's marriage. The sudden and embarrassing disclosure of this news brings about his abrupt turn.

To introduce moral change into the literal stories, playwrights needed to break the circuit between character and action as category and illustration. A character, then, cannot exercise total control over his behavior; his motives must in some way be distinguished from himself so that his character can be divided against itself. Iago speaks of “blood and baseness of our natures” which can lead man to “most preposterous conclusions.” “Reason,” he says, can balance his “raging motions” to control himself. In this picture of the inner man, self-control becomes a virtue to be desired. Brutus, Hamlet, and Lear find stoicism relevant to their predicaments, but this doctrine could have no bearing on the characters in the Henry VI plays, whether Shakespeare was aware of it at this time or not. Given the condition of the self divided against itself, man can reflect upon himself and judge his own behavior. And it is toward this condition that Shakespeare began to move in Richard III.

The characters in this play show the first stages in the change of Shakespeare's thought by regretting their past behavior when they face death. Clarence, Edward IV, Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, Hastings, Anne, and Buckingham, as has been noticed, form a list too long to suggest that Shakespeare unthinkingly made the characters in one play unrepentant and in another repentant. The new conception of character appears most clearly in Richard III's soliloquy before Bosworth Field; here the old and the new method stand side by side. The ghosts of Richard's murdered victims visit both him and Richmond in their dreams, externalizing in the manner of the morality play internal experience. They act as conscience, pronouncing guilt upon Richard III and assuring Richmond of his righteous rebellion. Shakespeare wrote as a supplement to this dream his first introspective soliloquy. To create a sense of self-reflection, he gave Richard two voices so that he literally debates with himself, questioning and answering whether he loves himself or condemns himself:

Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why,
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore?

(V.iii. 184-187)

There is nothing to approximate this soliloquy in the Henry VI plays. York, for example, in 2 Henry VI, simply asserts his motive of ambition and then describes his plan of action. Henry VI's soliloquy during the Battle of Towton-Saxton, 3 Henry VI, comes closest to Richard's because he wishes to be a shepherd rather than a king, but his speech is a ritualized statement, not an inward struggle or a judgment upon himself, and it illustrates Henry VI's character as a helpless, meditative man inadequate to the demands of leadership the commonwealth makes upon him.

Throughout Richard III before the introspective soliloquy Shakespeare characterized Richard along conventional lines, even reviving the device of self-presentation to introduce him: “I am determined to prove a villain.” His subsequent behavior bears out this statement with the regularity of illustration. But the soliloquy before Bosworth Field gives notice that Richard's character must be composed of more than villainy, although nothing comes of this divided character in the remainder of the play. We may infer that Richard's doubt about himself is reflected in his poor, negative oration to his soldiers and his failure in battle, but Shakespeare avoided giving him a final death speech. No doubt he was torn between his initial conception of Richard's villainy, which could not permit any but an unregenerate death speech, and his portrayal of Richard divided against himself, too complex a character to permit an unreflective death speech without regrets, such as Young Clifford's or Warwick's in 3 Henry VI.

With the other characters, however, Shakespeare dramatized again and again the moment of repentance before death. If a character becomes aware that his behavior has been sinful, somehow he differentiates himself from his past actions so that it cannot totally illustrate his character. Shakespeare, as fascinated as he was with this moment of reflection, was unable to dramatize it with much more than the character's flat statement of recognition, and he took care to provide an external embodiment of conscience to stimulate this recognition. In some cases the cause is Margaret, inserted without any basis in historical fact, who suggests the force of Destiny. She does not stand outside the play as Revenge does in the framing episodes of The Spanish Tragedy, but her curses take effect with the same power as Revenge's predictions to the Ghost of Andrea. When Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, and Hastings face death, they recall Margaret's curses. But when Clarence regrets his deeds, his introspection is stimulated by a dream similar to Richard's. And when Buckingham and Anne die, they recall their own curses and oaths and see them as the force which condemns themselves. It would be a simplification to suggest that Shakespeare abruptly abandoned his early conception of character as the embodiment of vices or virtues. In his tentative movement to break through the close relation of character and action, he provided in the fashion of his time external causes for introspection in the form of curses, oaths, dreams, or ghosts. But eventually these embodiments become as unnecessary as the causes operating from framing episodes because both supplement motives in the literal stories and do not replace them. It was only a matter of time before a character's revelation of inner causes was sufficient to motivate him with dramatic credibility. The speeches of regret are Shakespeare's first steps in changing his personae from moral categories to flexible characters with internal motives capable of acting in a literal world of historical events.

Notes

1. Mr. David Bevington suggests this influence to account for the increasingly frequent static characters in the morality plays after 1560. From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 152, 162.

2. Mr. E. M. W. Tillyard says, speaking of the characters in 1 Henry VI, “The characters are well thought out and consistent but they are correct pieces in a game moved by an external hand rather than self-moving. Yet they come to life now and then and, in promise, are quite up to what we have any right to expect from Shakespeare in his youth.” Shakespeare's History Plays (Collier Books, New York, 1962), p. 188. Most of his other remarks about the characters in all three of the Henry VI plays concern their political significance. See pp. 200, 212, 214, 240-241. Mr. H. T. Price concentrates upon structure, Construction in Shakespeare, Univ. of Mich. Contributions in Modern Philology, No. 17 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1951). Mr. Andrew S. Cairncross, more attentive to literary matters in the introduction to his edition of 1 Henry VI than in the introduction to 2 Henry VI, discusses such topics as order, unity, time, design, originality, pageantry, style, and imagery but not characterization. The First Part of King Henry VI, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1962), and The Second Part of King Henry VI, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1957). See also J. P. Brockbank, “The Frame of Disorder: Henry VI,” Early Shakespeare, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 3 (London, 1961), 73-100, and M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (London, 1961), pp. 166, 181, 192, 198, 199.

3. This quotation is taken from The Great Critics, eds. J. H. Smith and E. W. Parks (New York, 1939), p. 201.

4. Woodstock A Moral History (London, 1946), pp. 69-70.

5. This quotation is taken from Dodsley's Select Collection of Old English Plays, 4th Rev. Ed., ed. W. C. Hazlitt (London, 1874), VI, 33.

6. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, III (London, 1960), 105-106.

7. Tillyard, p. 194.

8. See J. Dover Wilson's discussion of the Countess's episode, The First Part of King Henry VI (Cambridge, 1952), pp. xix-xx, 142; also Bullough, p. 27. Wilson asserts that Grafton is the source of the Simpcox episode. The Second Part of King Henry VI (Cambridge, 1952), p. 137; Andrew S. Cairncross sees Foxe as the source, The Second Part of King Henry VI, p. 37. Bullough reprints Foxe's account, pp. 126-128.

9. Shakespeare's texts quoted in this paper come from the edition by William Allan Neilson and C. J. Hill (Cambridge, Mass., 1942). I assume that 1 Henry VI was written in the same order as it appears in the trilogy. Among those who have recently offered this opinion are: E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, Leo Kirschbaum, “The Authorship of 1 Henry VI,” PMLA, LXVII (1952), Peter Alexander, Shakespeare's Life and Art, The Gotham Library (New York, 1961), Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, Andrew S. Cairncross in his edition of The First Part of Henry VI, and J. P. Brockbank, “The Frame of Disorder: Henry VI,” in Early Shakespeare, p. 72.

10. Endeavors of Art (Madison, Wisc., 1954), p. 242.

11. This is Bernard Spivack's term. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York, 1958), pp. 253-254.

12. G. K. Hunter explains Alexander's character as the static embodiment of magnanimity, John Lyly The Humanist as Courtier (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 161-166. Irving Ribner has observed the static nature of characters in Tamburlaine in “The Idea of History in Marlowe's Tamburlaine,” ELH XX (1953), 251-266. In this suggestive paper he notes the classical idea of substance and accident shaping Marlowe's characters. See also The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, 1957), pp. 24-25.