[In the following essay, Dean suggests that Shakespeare used “romance” or partly fictional history as a source for Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3.]

An earlier age was of the opinion that Shakespeare's inspiration needed no prompting from sources. Our own is, it sometimes seems, intent on denying him any originality in its quest for his literary debts—and this from the very beginning of his career. The earliest comedy, The Comedy of Errors, and the earliest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, are seen to be related respectively to Plautus (via Lyly) and to Seneca (via Kyd)—classical and native models coexisting to produce a new kind of drama. As regards the first historical trilogy, however, a remarkable unanimity of opinion denies the existence of any dramatic precedents. Since 1953, when F. P. Wilson proposed, “though I am frightened at my own temerity in saying so, that for all we know there were no popular plays on English history before the Armada and that Shakespeare may have been the first to write one,”¹ scholarship has had little more to say on the point. Neither Geoffrey Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare² nor Kenneth Muir's The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays³ considers comment necessary.

The explanation for this lies, perhaps, in an unconscious equation of “history” with “chronicle history.” In 1590-91, when the Henry VI plays were written,⁴ the only extant play which we should now describe as a “chronicle history” was The Famous Victories of Henry V (1583-88), which is hardly a respectable pedigree. There were, however, a number of plays of the type now usually called “pseudo” or “romance” histories, which incorporate historical personages within a wholly imaginary, usually comic, framework. Plays of this type which could have been available to Shakespeare in 1590-91 are Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay⁵ and James IV,⁶ the anonymous George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (sometimes ascribed to Greene),⁷ and the anonymous Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester.⁸ There are in addition plays such as Lyly's Campaspe (1580-84), borderline not because of its date but because it dramatizes classical material (yet still in ways highly relevant to the “romance” history tradition), John a Kent and John a Cumber (of uncertain date⁹ and containing no historical characters, but only by our definition of “historical,”¹⁰) Jack Straw (entered in the Stationers' Register in 1593 but probably written earlier and printed by Bullough as an analogue to 2 Henry VI), and Peele's Edward I (probably exactly contemporary with the trilogy).

I

Criticism has not treated “romance” histories kindly. Typical pronouncements are that, in contrast to the “dramatizations of serious history”¹¹ by “chronicle” histories, “romance” histories “must not be confused with the true history play” since they treat “romantic themes which have no relation to the serious purposes of history.”¹² Again, it is said that they contain “hardly any thought about history at all.”¹³ The italicized words should be pondered. What would constitute non-serious history, or a false history-play? Does “thought about history” necessarily entail the explicit formulation of principles? I suggest that the comments I have quoted make two unwarrantable assumptions: one, that the only criteria for assessing plays including historical characters are those derivable from the works of historiographers like Hall, Holinshed, or the compilers of The Mirror for Magistrates; and, two, that consequently only “chronicle” history-plays need be taken seriously, either intrinsically or as possible influences upon Shakespeare.

Against these beliefs I oppose the opinion that many of the most puzzling features of the Henry VI plays are most easily explained by supposing Shakespeare's acquaintance with, and indebtedness to, “romance” history. Among these features are precisely those which he did not find in the chronicles: in Part I, II.ii (the “Countess” scene, whose affinities with a similar scene in the part-Shakespearean Edward III are significant),¹⁴ II.iv (the Temple Garden scene), V.iii (Joan's scene with the devils, and the wooing of Suffolk and Margaret); in Part II, the necromancy practiced by Eleanor, Margery Jourdain, and Roger Bolingbroke (I.ii, iv), the Simpcox episode (II.i), and the Cade scenes (IV.ii, vi-viii, x). These are episodes which, if the Henry VI plays were built around a double plot like the Henry IV plays, might well form a subplot (the Cade sequence comes closest to doing so). They do anticipate the Henry IV plays in being no mere divertissements but in amplifying, in other modes, themes crucial to the political concerns of the main plot—thus constituting a critique (ironical, grotesque, farcical by turns) of that plot. This kind of sophistication is not present in The Comedy of Errors, where the theme of mistaken identity is treated farcically throughout (except for the distress of Egeon at V.i.306-17) and we find no polyphonic elaboration of mode or mood; in Titus Andronicus there is no double-plot, and the savage grotesquerie of Aaron is among the milder of the emotional states portrayed.

We seem justified, therefore, in claiming that the Henry VI trilogy, far from being hackwork as was once thought, contains the most powerful and richly-textured writing in Shakespeare's earliest work. Again one must ask what gave Shakespeare the impulse to treat his material in this way if, as the orthodox view insists, there were no dramatic sources.

II

I have, I hope, cleared the ground for a dispassionate comparison of certain aspects of Shakespeare's technique in the Henry VI plays with his technique in the “romance” histories. Now, perhaps, some general remarks about the structure of the trilogy will be helpful.

So long as critics concerned themselves with the bibliographical problems of the Henry VI plays, they were bound to find them shapeless, since they were working on the assumption of composite authorship and so were predisposed toward disintegration of the text. Then, too, the plays contain such diverse material that it might seem merely misguided to look for unity. And, finally, if the plays were seen as creations ex nihilo of a new mode, the existence of a recognizable structure might be discounted as a remote possibility. We should nowadays reject these views:¹⁵ the plots of the plays do not radiate from a central hub, but neither are they just self-contained episodes. Early attempts to ally their construction to that of epic¹⁶ may be dismissed as a confusion of kinds. More satisfactory is Geoffrey Bullough's term “wavelike,” which he applies to the process whereby “the major figures come to the fore, become temporarily important in the struggle, and then are rivalled or succeeded by others who share the same motives and in their turn rise and are overthrown by fortune or intrigue.”¹⁷ The episodes, that is, are not related causally but spatially. They are amplifications of an underlying theme: the rise and fall of ambitious men on Fortune's wheel.

The precursors of the trilogy, from this point of view, are the pageants of the medieval mystery plays, each pageant exploring one stage in the cyclical history of Man's fall from grace and his eternal search for reunion with God.¹⁸ We should beware, however, of inferring that the trilogy uncritically endorses a Providential reading of history.¹⁹ The strongest believers in such a view in the plays themselves are overthrown, often by the very forces—Providence, Revenge, the Devil—which they claimed to represent. Moreover, the episodes which I have likened, in function if not in form, to subplots further interrupt the undulations of now-conquering, now-conquered characters; against the “chronicle” concerns of the main plot they oppose a “romance” view whose idealized stylizations of plot, character, and language balance the moral demonstrations found elsewhere in the plays. Shakespeare's career as an historical dramatist may be seen as a series of progressively complex interfusions of “chronicle” and “romance” materials and techniques. The culmination of this is the perfect articulation of double plot in 1 and 2 Henry IV,²⁰ but his interest in such materials is there from the beginning.

In the next four sections I shall discuss four main aspects of treatment which seem to link the Henry VI plays with “romance” histories: supernaturalism, love-triangles, disguise, and the concept of kingship.

III

When Joan first appears in 1 Henry VI she is tested by Reignier's pretending to be the Dauphin, a pretense she quickly exposes (I.ii.65). While she claims divine inspiration (I.ii.73-90, 113-16, 129) and is imaged as Deborah (I.ii.105), as “Astraea's daughter” (I.vi.4), and as “France's saint” (I.vi.29), she is also seen as Helen (I.ii.142), as Venus (I.ii.144), and as the focus of a number of sexual quibbles (e.g. I.ii.92-95, 111: see the notes on this passage in the New Arden). This double-sidedness culminates in her attempt to evade martyrdom by claiming to be pregnant, an explanation derided by the English as a parody of the Virgin Birth (V.iv.65).²¹ We are clearly meant to agree with the English that Joan is evil and to see in her sexual relationship with the Dauphin a symbolic joining of France to the powers of darkness. In V.iii we see her conjuring onstage “substitutes / Under the lordly monarch of the north” (l. 5 ff.), devils to whom she vainly offers successively her blood, a limb, her body, and her soul (ll. 14, 15, 18 ff., 22) in return for a French victory. She then sees that her power is at an end, and the supernatural disappears until Part II.

Although Joan's methods are reprehensible, her motives are laudable and, as far as we can tell, genuinely patriotic; but in Part II Eleanor's fight is not national (against England) but personal (against the Queen);²² her motives are selfish and petty, and even Hume, her confederate, is privately in the pay of Suffolk and the Cardinal (I.ii.91-101). The whole atmosphere is much more sordid than in Part I. The raising of the spirit Asmoth (I.iv) to answer questions about the fates of the King, Suffolk, and Somerset is followed by the arrest of the necromancers by York and Buckingham, so the spirit works against Eleanor rather than for her; moreover his predictions, although correct, are useless not only to her but to those whose deaths they forecast, since York dismisses them as nonsense (I.iv.60 ff.). In Part II the devils tell the truth: it is human beings who ignore or corrupt it.

This sketch of the supernaturalism in Parts I and II may well remind us of Dr. Faustus, whose search for knowledge through diabolic means also destroys him and gives him correct information upon which he cannot act. But unless we accept 1588 and not 1592 as the date of Dr. Faustus, we must look elsewhere for a source. Since the problem of the date is so vexed, I think we shall do better with a play whose date is fixed: Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.²³

There is one striking parallel: an early proof of Bacon's powers is his seeing through the disguise of Prince Edward, the heir to the throne (scene v), just as Joan saw through the Dauphin's. Like Joan's, Friar Bacon's black magic²⁴ is initially deployed for patriotic purposes, winning the King's approval by defeating the German court magician, Vandermast, in a contest treated by all present as an entertainment; his intervention to prevent the marriage of Margaret and Lacy by striking Friar Bungay mute is also more diverting than culpable. With the failure of the Brazen Head project the tone becomes more somber: Bacon admits that “I have dived into hell / And sought the darkest palaces of fiends” (xi.9 ff.), that he has boasted “more than a man might boast” (xi.127). And when two students, looking into his crystal, see their fathers kill each other, whereupon they do likewise, he reproaches himself: “Bacon, thy magic doth effect this massacre” (xiii.75). But unlike Faustus,²⁵ he recognizes the availability of grace for repentance and is accepted into the final festive banquet.

Shakespeare may be said to have split Bacon's attitude toward his magic into two parts: Joan dies unrepentant and cursing, Eleanor repents and is forgiven. Like Greene, Shakespeare also relates the supernatural theme to other themes in his play.²⁶ For example, the Dauphin/Joan relationship is, as I noted earlier, reflective of the corruption of France; again, Joan's ambiguous nature (now saint, now witch) reflects the ambiguity of Fate in the play, the “bad, revolting stars” and “planets of mishap” (I.i.2, 4) whose government of human affairs seems arbitrary. In his emphasis on the sinister aspects of magic Shakespeare seems more akin to Friar Bacon, for all its prevalent festivity, than to Dr. Faustus.

IV

The device of the triangular love-relationship goes back at least as far as the rivalry between good and bad angels for the soul of Everyman. But as far as history plays are concerned, the starting-point—seen as such despite its apparently irrelevant subject-matter because of its close connection with Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay²⁷—is Lyly's Campaspe, in which the emperor Alexander and the painter Apelles contend for the love of the eponymous heroine, a slave-girl. Alexander's love makes him neglect his duties as a prince/warlord. And when, at the end of the play, he renounces Campaspe and resumes his kingly dignity, he comments, “It were a shame Alexander should desire to commaund the world, if he could not commaund himselfe” (V.iv.150 ff.). The link here established between the ruler's government of the state and of himself (deriving perhaps from such moralities as Magnificence) and the thematic connection, often worked into image-patterns, between making love and making war, run through “romance” histories and appear in the Henry VI plays. Similarly, in Friar Bacon the triangle Edward/Lacy/Margaret corresponds to that of Alexander/Apelles/Campaspe. Again we see that the suitors are one royal, one noble, with the object of bringing home to Edward the definition of true kingship and power. He soliloquizes:

Edward, art thou that famous Prince of Wales
Who at Damasco beat the Saracens
And brought'st home triumph on thy lance's point,
And shall thy plumes be pulled by Venus down?
Is it princely to dissever lover's leagues,
To part such friends as glory in their loves?
Leave, Ned, and make a virtue of this fault,
And further Peg and Lacy in their loves.
So in subduing fancy's passion,
Conquering thyself, thou get'st the richest spoil.

(viii.112-21)

Lacy has been sent to woo on Edward's behalf, but has fallen in love with Margaret himself, thus encountering the danger (not faced by Apelles) not merely of betraying his Prince but of wronging his friend. Yet by forcing Edward to rise to his own best self he does perform a subject's service.

In James IV there are three triangles: James/Dorothea/Ida, James/Ida/Eustace, and Dorothea (as a man)/Anderson/Lady Anderson. The conflicts are correspondingly less straightforward. James wrestles with a temptation one stage on from Edward's: his love is for a married woman, so the dilemma involves a sin rather than a social gaffe. He is flattered by the parasite Ateukin into believing that as a king he may murder his wife Dorothea. But he is afraid of Eustace, and his oscillations between superhuman pride and subhuman terror are finally resolved by repentance (V.vi.25-39). Thereafter our main interest is in Dorothea, who, in male disguise, is “wooed” (adulterously!) by Lady Anderson—an episode which reflects back on James because, since this “love” cannot be developed,²⁸ we can detachedly evaluate an attraction as unnatural as James's. Ironically Dorothea flees the Court to save her marriage only to imperil someone else's. Yet when Lady Anderson discovers her mistake she finds her experience of love enlarged (“Although not as I desired, I love you well,” V.v.57), and Dorothea extends to her the same compassion which she later (V.v.67-71, V.vi.160-72) extends to James. Greene in this play is using his character-relationships not merely the better to define kingship but also, in a fashion looking back to Lyly and forward to the Shakespeare of As You Like It and Twelfth Night, to present an anatomy of love: sexual, Platonic, egocentric, admiring. Through the characters' experiences he suggests the balance of self-knowledge and self-forgetfulness which makes for emotional stability.

In Fair Em we again have a monarch (William) rivaling a courtier (Lubeck) for the love of a girl (Mariana). But there are three important new elements: William does his courting in disguise;²⁹ Mariana is of his own rank; and the author constructs a parallel situation in Manchester, where Em is courted by Mountney, Valingford, and Manvile, the last-named (whom she loves) deserting her for Elner when she feigns blindness to deter the other two. The constancy of Mariana and Em contrasts with the deceit of William and Manvile, so the exploration of “kingliness” cuts across social divisions. William's reflections initially follow the usual lines: “Must a Conqueror at armes / Disclose himself thrald to vnarmed thoughts / And threatned of a shaddowe, yeeld to lust?” (ll. 37-39). But he is too swayed by appearances: he goes to Denmark to woo Blanch, the King's daughter, but comes to prefer Mariana, who thwarts his plan to smuggle her to England by substituting Blanch for herself. When William discovers this he becomes churlish and misogynistic (“vtterly I doe abhore their sex,” l. 1404), but on hearing of Em's ruse he recognizes the parallel, admits that he has acted as shabbily as Manvile, and marries Blanch, bestowing Em on Valingford. This resolution is, however, purely conventional tidying-up: William is not shown to undergo any genuine enlightenment; his final act of bounty is capricious; and, unlike Alexander, Edward, or James, he has learned nothing from his experience. By implication, the play criticizes power that makes demands upon others that are not made to apply equally to the wielder of power himself.

In George a Greene King James of Scotland is attracted to Jane a Barley, whose husband is away at the wars; George a Greene and Sir Gilbert Armstrong (honest yeoman and nobleman) are rivals for Bettris, daughter of old Grime. In Sherwood Forest, Maid Marian is jealous of Bettris' reputed beauty and browbeats Robin Hood to “beate the Pinner for the loue of me” (l. 941). The debilitating effects of love on one's military strength are again clearly shown in James, whose siege of Jane's castle is interrupted by his old enemy Musgrove (scene v), who beats him. By contrast, George and Robin, both true lovers and hardy fighters, accept each other as equals. To extend the anatomy of love, George's boy Wily, dressed as a girl, frees Bettris from the imprisonment to which Grime has confined her, whereupon Grime falls in love with Wily (scene vii: a reverse of the James IV situation). In this play, however, there is no serious dilemma for a monarch, and the treatment of love is distanced by comic business and offers no thoughtful exploration or fruitful ambiguity.

We must not neglect the “Countess” scenes in Edward III, since Acts I and II, which contain them, are probably (partly?) by Shakespeare. Acts III, IV, and V, once thought to be unrelated additions, have since been recognized as thematically connected to Acts I and II: having successfully withstood the temptation posed by the Countess, the King can be victorious in the subsequent war against France and can pass on his wisdom to his son, the Black Prince. The play is in the line of descent from Campaspe, as two previous critics have noted,³⁰ and in its treatment of princely education it anticipates the similar examination, made via the Hal/Hotspur contrasts, in 1 Henry IV. The two “sections” of the play are also integrated in terms of imagery, love being seen as a war (e.g. II.i.101 ff.) and vice-versa (e.g. III.iii.27-30).³¹ The central oppositions (King as lover/warlord, psychological/internecine conflict) are carefully treated. The Countess brings Edward to his senses by demanding that he kill his Queen and her husband, and, when he agrees, by declaring that she will kill herself. She has a moderation not to be found in him: “That power of love, that I have power to give, / Thou hast with all devout obedience …” (II.i). The search for equilibrium in self and state is enacted dynamically by the formal complementarity of the plot-structure and by integrated imagery, in what is the most mature realization of the love-triangle we have yet discussed.

When we ask to what use Shakespeare put this convention in the Henry VI plays we look first at the role of Joan and Margaret in Part I. As has often been noted, the exit of the cursing and captured Joan is, surely deliberately, followed at once by the entry of Margaret and the no less “enchanted” Suffolk, who recognizes the magical effect of her beauty:³²

Be what thou wilt, thou art my prisoner. [Gazes on her.]
O fairest beauty, do not fear nor fly!
For I will touch thee but with reverent hands,
And lay them gently on thy tender side.
I kiss these fingers for eternal peace.

(V.iii.45-49)

The language is that of hushed reverence, ornate in a manner quite unlike anything we have had before in the play. It becomes more so in an aside of Suffolk's:

                    I have no power to let her pass;
My hand would free her, but my heart says no.
As plays the sun upon the glassy streams,
Twinkling another counterfeited beam,
So seems this gorgeous beauty to mine eyes.

(V.iii.60-64)

The lyrical note stops abruptly as Suffolk rebukes himself, just as Alexander, Edward, and William have done before him:

Fie, de la Pole! disable not thyself;
Hast not a tongue? Is she not prisoner here?
Wilt thou be daunted at a woman's sight?
Ay, beauty's princely majesty is such
Confounds the tongue and makes the senses rough.

(V.iii.67-71)

Suffolk admits that his sense of military conquest is itself conquered by Margaret's “princely majesty,” which is her form of sovereignty. In the succeeding lines he responds to her questions only with asides, until she doubts his sanity:

How canst thou tell she will deny thy suit,
Before thou make a trial of her love? …
She's beautiful, and therefore to be woo'd;
She is a woman, therefore to be won. …(33)
Fond man, remember that thou hast a wife;
Then how can Margaret be thy paramour? …
I'll win this Lady Margaret. For whom?
Why, for my king! Tush, that's a wooden thing!

(V.iii.75-76, 78-79, 81-82, 88-89)

Nonetheless he woos her ostensibly on Henry's behalf—even though Henry has contracted to marry Armagnac's daughter (V.i.17). We notice the ethical choices here—monogamy vs. adultery, loyalty to Henry vs. treachery—exactly as before. Suffolk temporarily subdues his passion (V.iii.186-88), but his speech concluding the play, after Henry has been talked into the match, reveals his true intentions: “Margaret shall now be Queen, and rule the King; / But I will rule both her, the King, and realm” (V.v.107-8).

The link with Friar Bacon and its congeners is clear. It has been remarked by Professor Brockbank, but I think he misinterprets it: “In Greene's play the courtship is an engaging frolic merely, while here the treacheries exercised in the politics of flirtation are as sinister as they are amusing—the betrayal of trust must have evil consequences in the harsh chronicle setting.”³⁴ The assumption of what is proper to “chronicle” history limits Brockbank here. In Greene's play the courtship has a perfectly serious, even sinister, aspect, which is cushioned by the mode but not obliterated; Shakespeare develops from Greene rather than against him. In Part II the liaison is fully developed along lines similar to the Isabella/Mortimer affair in Edward II (1591-93),³⁵ and when Henry unexpectedly banishes Suffolk the latter takes leave of Margaret in terms which indicate the change in his character:

'Tis not the land I care for, wert thou thence;
A wilderness is populous enough,
So Suffolk had thy heavenly company:
For where thou art, there is the world itself,
With every several pleasure in the world,
And where thou art not, desolation.

(III.ii.358-63)

Suffolk's political ambition has been rendered insignificant by his personal involvement with Margaret, although this is a political fact also and is the first appearance in Shakespeare's work of his favorite theme of the ruler's private and public selves. In “romance” history the love-triangle is presented less for purposes of psychological verisimilitude than as a pattern of attitudes: Shakespeare invites us to consider the pressures working from both within and without upon individuals. The next time we see Margaret she is holding Suffolk's head (he has been killed by Royalists in IV.i) and mourning, while all around her news pours in of the rising rebellion. Like Vindice's address to the skull at the opening of The Revenger's Tragedy, this spectacle functions both as a memento mori and as a gloss upon the political ambitions of courtiers and commoners alike. What began as a “romance” episode, with elegant compliment and wordplay, ends as a “chronicle” one, with an implied warning against lust and greed. Yet the “romance” background enables us to see the development in proper perspective, and the critic who dismisses all the Suffolk/Margaret episodes as “made up of sentimental claptrap out of metrical romance, carrying on at the moment in fashionable love-pamphlets and romantic comedies,”³⁶ displays sad limitations.

V

I wish now to consider the use of disguise.

In a brilliant article relating the disguise of Shakespeare's Henry V to “romance” histories, including George a Greene, Edward I, and Fair Em, Anne Barton has argued that Henry V recalls yet dismisses the fantasy of equality expressed by the fiction of the King moving and speaking as a man among men: “a nostalgic but false romanticism.”³⁷ But it is not only at the end of his career as a dramatist of English history that Shakespeare shows interest in this idea. An earlier instance of disguise occurs in the trilogy, in Part III, and the person disguised is the King.

Behind this episode lie the disguises of William, Edward in Friar Bacon, Dorothea in James IV, and Edward and James in George a Greene. Disguise occurs, of course, in The Comedy of Errors (with debts to Gascoigne's Supposes [1566] and to Plautus) and in Titus Andronicus (V.ii, apparently influenced by the Morality), but 3 Henry VI presents us with far subtler uses of the device than do the other two plays. The loss of personality consequent upon disguise is, in comedy, the signal for chaos and amusement; but it is also a signal for the release of inhibitions. Hence, paradoxically, a character can discover, through disguise, his or her “real” nature. In tragedy, on the other hand, loss of the self usually leads to disturbance, madness or even death. Shakespeare approaches such a moment in Egeon's perplexity (Comedy of Errors, V.i.307-18), only to retreat from it again; while in Titus Andronicus the device is merely the medium through which a moral emblem can be staged.³⁸

Against this background we can review disguise in the “romance” histories. In Friar Bacon its function is initially to secure Margaret for Edward, who has been courting her in green (note the Robin Hood associations). Lacy woos her on Edward's behalf in disguise; Ralph, the fool, dresses as the Prince, only to be exposed by Bacon. Thereafter the motif is abandoned. The moral, if we are to seek one, is that true nobility will out (as in the scene between Joan and the Dauphin discussed earlier). But latent here is a distinction between physical and mental disguise: men may hide from themselves as much as from other men. In James IV this becomes explicit, and disguise is, as I argued earlier, both a comment on the deceptions in the characters' lives and a means of dispelling those deceptions. Similarly when William in Fair Em goes to Denmark under the name of Sir Robert Windsor, his disguise suggests the superficiality of his character. When judged against the moral victories obtained by Alexander or Edward III, he is seen to have very little stable identity. Thus, although disguise (or in Em's case deception, which tells her the truth about her suitors) as a medium for the exploration of love is central, it is the other characters who learn, William profiting little because his character is so vaguely defined. By contrast the kings in George a Greene test the worth of George, who ironically takes them for “some pesants / Trickt in yoemans weeds” (ll. 1142-43) and scorns their seemingly cowardly refusal to obey the Wakefield custom of fighting the shoemaker. After he has fought the shoemaker himself, the stage directions read: “Enter the Earle of Warwicke with other noble men, bringing out the Kings garments: then George a Greene and the rest kneele down to the King” (ll. 1190-94 s.d.). Previously in the play there have been three “kings,” each the chief of his own society—Edward (Court), George (Provinces), Robin (Forest)—but in this final unifying emblem they converge upon the single figure who is representatively inclusive of them all, and who then restores Bettris to George. Yet the King is no mere benevolent manipulator as William is. Grime agrees to the marriage thanks to a stratagem of George's (the disguising of Wily), not that of the King's, and George limits the King's bounty by politely refusing a knighthood because “'tis more credite to men of base degree, / To do great deeds, than men of dignitie” (ll. 1316-17). His innate nobility makes such token honors pointless. Of all the chief men in the play he alone has never assumed a disguise, never pretended to be what he is not: a knighthood would, after a fashion, be such a pretense.³⁹

In dramatizing Henry's disguise, then, Shakespeare had available a wide range of significances, from the use of disguise solely to promote confusion, to its use as a means of self-discovery. Henry enters a deer-park where keepers are hiding for their quarry (with an obvious symbolic meaning). They recognize him immediately; he has never been adept at dissimulation and, indeed, much of his trouble springs from his inability to tell the political lie. He soliloquizes about how Margaret and Warwick will play on the French King's emotions to win his support either for or against the newly-installed King Edward IV. We then have this exchange:

2 KEEP.
Say, what art thou that talk'st of kings and queens?
K. Hen.
More than I seem, and less than I was born to:
A man at least, for less I should not be;
And men may talk of Kings, and why not I?
2 KEEP.
Ay, but thou talk'st as if thou wert a king.
K. Hen.
Why, so I am, in mind: and that's enough.

(III.i.55-60)

Henry may be speaking “in character,” but the whole point of his story is that it is not enough. In “romance” history the basis of the pretended equality between monarch and subject is their unspoken agreement that this is only a temporary convention; the monarch's condescension is in itself an aspect of his superiority. But Henry is too equable to want any outward pomp with which to express his position—we have consistently seen him refusing to behave like a king—and when the Keepers ask where his crown is, he answers “in my heart, not on my head … Nor to be seen: my crown is call'd content; / A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy” (III.i.62, 64-65). The Keepers declare their intention to arrest him, dismissing his objection that they are oath-breakers with “we were subjects but while you were King” (III.i.81). Henry tries to snub them—“Such is the lightness of you common men” (III.i.89)—but his fatal decency reasserts itself:

But do not break your oaths; for of that sin
My mild entreaty shall not make you guilty.
Go where you will, the King shall be commanded;
And be you kings; command, and I'll obey. …
.....… your king's name [Edward] be obey'd:
And what God will, that let your king perform;
And what he will, I humbly yield unto.

(III.i.90-93, 98-100)

In disguise, Henry shows that he is a greater anarchist than the most fervent of his opponents. To have the position of King without a commanding nature, or to be regal in nature although deprived of the position, are equally dangerous in a world of crafty politicians. The democratic fiction of the “romance” history here becomes a literal fact: the keepers are kings, but indeed they are more, since they command the King. Instead of a rigid hierarchical system we see Henry taking the pragmatic view that might gives right; the discovery of the disguise is ours as well as his. The point recurs when Edward, in his turn, is captured by Warwick, formerly one of his chief supporters:

Yet, Warwick, in despite of all mischance,
Of thee thyself and all thy complices,
Edward will always bear himself as king.
Though Fortune's malice overthrow my state,
My mind exceeds the compass of her wheel.
War. Then, for his mind, be Edward England's King. …

(IV.iii.43-48)

Shakespeare has seen to the heart of the disguise convention. He is becoming interested in mental disguise, and it is only fitting that at the end of the trilogy there should erupt upon the stage, with wicked attractiveness and manic energy of speech, the arch shape-shifter, master of a thousand disguises, Richard of Gloucester.

It is through disguise that Shakespeare makes his reflections upon the nature of kingship, a central topic in the history-play but one about which “romance” and “chronicle” plays stress different elements. The former tend to take a comic view of it (“comic” in the medieval sense), concentrating on the representative inclusiveness of the monarch, on the sense of national unity born of common ideals, on the preservation of the succession through peaceful continuity. The latter tend toward a tragic view, pointing to the various forces—enmity, jealousy, greed—which divide men and nations and set them at each other's throats. In the plays discussed in this article we have seen representative kings (Henry in Friar Bacon, Edward in George a Greene, and we might add the King in Jack Straw), kings involved in personal conflict (Alexander, James in George a Greene, Edward III, William), kings combining both roles (William). Other royal figures (Edward in Friar Bacon, the Black Prince in Edward III) may suffer analogous trials before they learn the meaning of kingship. The governing mode of all these plays is, however, romance, and suffering is rarely closely engaged. A complementary picture emerges from Peele's Edward I (where the King rises above the corruption of his court but comes near to being tainted by it), Edward II, Woodstock, and the Henry VI trilogy, which begins with prolonged lamentations for the dead paragon, Henry V, and examines in turn Henry VI, Edward IV, and the future Richard III, only to find them all radically flawed, weak, or wicked. Yet at the back of this “chronicle” view lies a “romance” world whose echoes remind us of the gap between the ideal of monarchy and the inadequacy of those called upon to embody it.

VI

A recent critic has written a book interpreting Shakespeare's histories as studies in a postlapsarian world of lost innocence populated by outcasts from the Garden of Eden.⁴⁰ The spatial structure, not only of Shakespearean plays but of their predecessors, frequently uses conventional antitheses of pastoral (court vs. country, formal garden vs. wilderness, civilization vs. barbarism) as a shorthand for the conflict of values in which the playwrights are interested. Such a scheme is clearly basic to Friar Bacon with its triple locatons—Court/Oxford/Suffolk—the last-named giving the cue for the lyrical expression of patriotism and the assertion of a spontaneous joy in life to which the sumptuousness of the Court and the sophistication of Oxford form marked contrasts. Again, when Dorothea in James IV goes wandering into the Forest in man's clothing, her indeterminate environment reflects both her ostensible purpose, a knightly quest, and her real one, a search for new understanding of herself. Again there is an implied criticism of the Court with its network of deceit and intrigue, although in Lady Anderson Dorothea meets a problem as testing as any at Court, showing that the real stability is in herself. In Fair Em Manchester, the Court, and Denmark are analogous rather than opposed, Em and Mariana continuing Dorothea's role as women whose integrity triumphs over their environment. George a Greene shows us the Court, Wakefield, and the Forest, each ruled by a king literal or metaphorical, where the only menace comes from outside (the rebellion by James and the Earl of Kendal). This is appropriate, since one of the purposes of the play, as I argued, is to show nobility operating throughout society. The “green world” of gardens, descending from the prototype, Eden, exists in comedy as a world of licensed release, where characters can act in ways prohibited at Court and so discover things about themselves which they could not otherwise have known.⁴¹

In the light of this it is interesting to note how many scenes in the Henry VI trilogy are located, on evidence from the text, in gardens. In Part I there is the Temple Garden scene (II.iv). In Part II we have the conjuring in Gloucester's garden (I.iv), York's exposition of his claim to the throne (II.ii, set in a “closed walk,” i.e. a private path), and Iden's execution of Cade (IV.x). In Part III, although there are no gardens proper, we may include the “laund” of III.i in which the Keepers capture Henry, “laund” being “an open space of grass among trees,”⁴² and the “park” (IV.v.3) in which Edward is released. These are all events which, in various ways, threaten the Court, so their location is entirely appropriate.⁴³ Moreover, the choice of this setting is Shakespeare's, and some of the scenes are his own invention. I suggest that he may have been prompted by the “romance” histories.

I shall confine detailed discussion to the execution of Cade, which is the most interesting of the episodes. The resemblance (not to be overstressed or inflated into an allegory) between the names “Iden” and “Cade” and “Eden” and “Cain” should alert us to ambiguities in Iden's predictable reflections on his suburban paradise: “Lord! who would live turmoiled in the Court, / And may enjoy such quiet walks as these?” (IV.x.16 ff.). Such a life is to him “worth a monarchy” (IV.x.19): the tone anticipates Henry's famous soliloquy in Part III (II.v), in which he hankers after the pastoral life. Yet the slaughterhouse and animal instinct invade Iden's Eden and he has no choice but to draw the sword, bringing down Cade's dying curse, not on himself but on the garden: “Wither, garden; and be henceforth a burying-place to all that do dwell in this house, because the unconquer'd soul of Cade is fled” (IV.x.62-64). This scene has been dismissed as “a perfunctory expression of the ideal,”⁴⁴ but it is surely not so simple. What we see is Iden's recognition that his little kingdom affords no protection from postlapsarian human nature, with its susceptibility to destructiveness and death. He cannot shut himself away from the political tug-of-war, but must bear Cade's body to the King and (unlike George a Greene) accept a knighthood and be taken into the King's service (V.i.64-82). This prompts the reflection that Iden's situation in the garden and Henry's in the park are parallel: both are men who thought to escape the exigencies of political responsibility but discover that monarchy of the mind is insufficient.

Compare with this incident the “Countess” scene in Part I, which as late as 1965 could be written off by a critic as “a pointless excrescence.”⁴⁵ As A. S. Cairncross notes, the Countess' summons to Talbot is “fictitious, but probably suggested by the Robin Hood cycle”;⁴⁶ the scene is the most direct evidence of “romance” material in the trilogy, but it uses such material only to undermine it. Talbot's response to the invitation, “Nay, then I see our wars / Will turn unto a peaceful comic sport” (II.ii.44-45), with its evocations of the love/war link in other plays we have considered, and the Countess' typically “romance” invitation to him and his men to eat with her—these mark off a world where courtoisie is more important than international warfare, a private world like Iden's but, also like Iden's, a precarious dream. The Countess and the courtly atmosphere she brings with her disappear from the play, and Talbot dies, scorned by Joan as “stinking and flyblown” (IV.vii.76).⁴⁷

VII

I wish, in concluding, to make very clear exactly what I do and do not claim to have proven. I do not claim to have proven—since the matter is incapable of proof—that Shakespeare had read the “romance” histories discussed here. But I hope to have demonstrated parallels which, cumulatively rather than individually, make it more difficult to deny that he had. Even if this claim is denied, I suggest that consideration of the “romance” plays throws light upon Shakespeare's interests and techniques in the first trilogy—light which is not shed by a consideration of the non-dramatic chronicles, which oblige us to ask ourselves whether it is more likely that Shakespeare invented all these strategies ex nihilo, or that he adapted material he found to hand. No other works I can think of tell us so much about the background against which Shakespeare ventured into historical drama as do these much-neglected, much-derided plays. Given what we know of Shakespeare's habits later in his career, I am compelled to believe that he is to the history-play as he is to comedy and tragedy—not a man working in isolation but a transmuter and transformer, to an unparalleled degree and with an unmatched genius, of existing forms and conventions.

Notes

1. F. P. Wilson, Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 108. Fresh support has recently come from Antony Hammond, who in his New Arden edition of Richard III (London: Methuen, 1981) declares he sees “no reason to dissent” from Wilson's view (p. 115).

2. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), III.

3. Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (London: Methuen, 1977).

4. Cairncross, 1 Henry VI, pp. xxxi-xxxvii.

5. See Lavin, p. xii.

6. See Sanders, pp. xxv-xxix.

7. The allusion at line 47 to Tamburlaine (S. R., 14 August 1590) looks like a topicality. For the authorship see H. D. Sykes, “Robert Greene and George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield,” Review of English Studies, 7 (1931), 129-36; 9 (1933), 189-90; and C. A. Pennel, “Robert Greene and ‘King or Kaisar,’” English Language Notes, 3 (1965-66), 24-26.

8. Satirized by Greene in Farewell to Folly (1591).

9. See I. A. Shapiro, “The Significance of a Date,” Shakespeare Survey, 8 (1955), 100-105, and H. F. Brooks's New Arden ed. of A Midsummer Night's Dream (London: Methuen, 1979), p. lxvi and nn. 1 and 2.

10. Cf. “We must remember that to most Elizabethans Randolph, Earl of Chester and other characters in Mundy's John a Kent … were figures just as historical as those in Sir Thomas More” (I. A. Shapiro, “Shakespeare and Mundy,” Shakespeare Survey, 14 [1961], 29).

11. Hardin Craig, “Shakespeare and the History Play” in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, eds. Brander Matthews and Ashley H. Thorndike (Folger Shakespeare Library: Washington, D.C., 1948), p. 56 (on 2 Henry VI, my italics).

12. Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957; rev. ed., London: Methuen, 1965), p. 25, my italics.

13. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944), p. 111, on The Famous Victories, Edward I, and Jack Straw among others; my italics.

14. See Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare as Collaborator (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. 31-55, and I. Koskenniemi, “Themes and Imagery in Edward III,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 65 (1964), pp. 446-80.

15. The pioneering rehabilitation work was done by Hereward T. Price, Construction in Shakespeare (Univ. of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology, 17: Ann Arbor, Mich., 1951). Among recent books on the trilogy see especially David Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: “Henry VI” and its Literary Tradition (Harvard: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971) and E. I. Berry, Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1975).

16. Schlegel apparently first applied this term to the histories (see Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship [London: Chapman and Hall, 1841: 1894 ed.], p. 267), and it was taken up by John Addington Symonds, Shakspeare's Predecessors in the English Drama (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1884), pp. 364-65; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 166; A. S. Cairncross, ed. Part 1, p. xli; C. R. Forker, “Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays as Historical-Pastoral,” Shakespeare Studies, 1 (1965), 86; and F. P. Wilson, Shakespearian and other Studies, ed. H. Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 18.

17. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, III (London: Routledge, 1960), 168.

18. Cf. Eleanor's “I will not be slack / To play my part in Fortune's pageant” (Part 1, I.ii. 66-67): Cairncross glosses “pageant” with reference to the Mysteries. Affinities between the trilogy and the Mystery cycles have also been discussed by A. P. Rossiter, “Prognosis on a Shakespeare Problem,” Durham University Journal, 33 (1941), 136; E. W. Talbert, Elizabethan Drama and Shakespeare's Early Plays (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1963), p. 175; and Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 31-84 (an outstandingly good treatment).

19. As assumed by, e.g., D. L. Frey, The First Tetralogy: Shakespeare's Scrutiny of the Tudor Myth: A Dramatic Exploration of Divine Providence (The Hague: Mouton, 1976). The Providentialist view is penetratingly criticized by A. L. French in three articles: “Joan of Arc and Henry VI,” English Studies, 49 (1968), 452-59; “Henry VI and the Ghost of Richard II,” English Studies, 50 (1969), Supplement, xxxviii-xliii; and “The Mills of God and Shakespeare's Early History Plays,” English Studies, 55 (1974), 313-24.

20. See G. K. Hunter, “Henry IV and the Elizabethan Two-Part Play,” Review of English Studies, NS, 5 (1954), 236-48, and, more generally, J. M. R. Margeson, “Dramatic Form: The Huntingdon Plays,” Studies in English Literature, 14 (1974), 223-38. I am preparing a fresh discussion of two-part structure in a separate article.

21. Noted by D. M. Bevington, “The Domineering Female in 1 Henry VI,” Shakespeare Studies, 2 (1966), 52-53.

22. Compare the rivalry between the Queen and Mary Bearmber, Mayoress of London, in Peele's Edward I. Shakespeare's treatment of Eleanor's downfall may have influenced that of Mistress Shore in Heywood's 1 and 2 Edward IV (1599).

23. Shakespeare certainly used this play in Richard II: see P. Mortensen and J. A. Davis, “A Source for Richard II, II.i.40-68,” Notes and Queries, 220 (1975), 167-68.

24. See F. Towne, “‘White Magic’ in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay?” Modern Language Notes. 67 (1952), 9-13.

25. There is evidently a relationship between the plays, but the uncertainty about the date of Faustus makes its direction impossible to determine.

26. Margaret's beauty is dangerous in its power, and the contest between the magicians parallels the rivalry of Edward and Lacy for Margaret (See William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral [London: Chatto and Windus, 1935; Penguin ed., 1966], pp. 32-33).

27. Since this article was written, a full account of the dependence of Friar Bacon upon Campaspe has been published by Charles Hieatt, “A New Source for Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” Review of English Studies, NS, 32 (1981), 180-87.

28. Interestingly, Lyly in Gallathea (1583-85) had explored just such a relationship and had resolved it by a supernaturally-effected sex-change.

29. The first monarch to disguise himself onstage, according to V. O. Freeburg, Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1915), p. 161.

30. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 151; I. Koskenniemi, op. cit. above, n. 14, p. 448.

31. Noted by Koskenniemi, p. 459.

32. Is it mere coincidence that the rural setting of Friar Bacon is Suffolk? That both enchantresses should be called Margaret is also interesting.

33. Cf. Richard III, I.iii.227 ff.

34. “The Frame of Disorder—Henry VI” in J. R. Brown and B. Harris, eds., Early Shakespeare (Stratford-on-Avon Studies: London: Arnold, 1961), III, 81.

35. Cairncross, note on III.ii.299 ff., compares the parting of the lovers (quoted in the text) to that of Edward and Gaveston. H. F. Brooks, “Marlowe and Early Shakespeare,” in B. Morris, ed., Christopher Marlowe (London: Benn, 1968), pp. 72-73, presents a strong case for dating Edward II late 1591, after the Henry VI trilogy and Richard III.

36. T. H. McNeal, “Margaret of Anjou: Romantic Princess and Troubled Queen,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 9 (1958), 3.

37. “The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History,” in J. G. Price, ed., The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 92-117 (quoted phrase from p. 99). For an extension of her argument, relating Henry V to other romance conventions, see my article “Chronicle and Romance Modes in Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 32 (1981), 18-27. Subsequently a complementary, although independent, discussion has been published by J. Altieri, “Romance in Henry V,” SEL, [Studies in English Literature] 21 (1981), 223-40.

38. See New Arden ed. of Titus Andronicus by J. C. Maxwell (London: Methuen, 1953; 3rd ed., 1961), Appendix by H. F. Brooks, pp. 131-32.

39. Similarly Walworth in Jack Straw, and Shore in Heywood's Edward IV, refuse knighthoods for helping to quash rebellion.

40. John Wilders, The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays (London: Macmillan, 1978).

41. See Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965).

42. Cairncross' note on III.i.2.

43. Other effects in Shakespeare's later work which should be seen against this background are the Garden scene in Richard II and Prince John's act of treachery in Gaultree Forest (2 Henry IV, IV.i).

44. R. B. Pierce, Shakespeare's History Plays: The Family and the State (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971), p. 57.

45. Marco Mincoff, “The Composition of Henry IV, Part I,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 16 (1965), 279. For a more sensible account see D. M. Bevington's article cited above, n. 21.

46. Note on II.ii.

47. For an excellent analysis of the theatrical images in the “Countess” scene see Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare, pp. 144-47. Jones concludes that “Shakespeare is alluding to the nature of the imaginative work he is engaged in as the author of a new kind of history-play” (my italics).

Editions followed in quotations from, and references to, the main plays discussed in this paper are: 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI, ed. A. S. Cairncross (New Arden edition) (London: Methuen; Part 1, 1962; Part 2, 1957; Part 3, 1964); Campaspe, ed. R. W. Bond, in The Works of John Lyly (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1902), II; Edward III, ed. W. A. Armstrong, in Elizabethan History Plays (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965); Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester, ed. W. W. Greg (Malone Society Reprints) (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1927); Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. J. A. Lavin (New Mermaids) (London: Benn, 1969); George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, ed. F. W. Clarke and W. W. Greg (Malone Society Reprints) (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1911); James IV, ed. N. Sanders (Revels Plays) (London: Methuen, 1970). Editions of other plays incidentally referred to will be cited in footnotes.