[In the essay below, Dickinson studies the way in which King Henry, of the Henry VI plays, deceives himself into thinking that he is a capable ruler. The critic demonstrates that this self-deception is maintained until the King's impulsive and inconsistent actions reveal his weak will.]

Scholarship and criticism, once less than kind to Shakespeare's youthful effort, the trilogy of Henry VI, have finally come to regard it as a little more than kin. With his authorship now accepted for most of it, if not all, the critical stature of the dramatic chronicle has also risen beyond its former dismal level as a subject for graduate study only. Best of all, it was the theater that in the last decade rescued Henry VI from the limbo of plays unplayable and unproduced. It did so in England when the Birmingham Repertory Company vindicated the long-held conviction of its producer, Sir Barry Jackson, that the plays were both actable and stageworthy.

Sir Barry's revivals of 1951, directed by Douglas Seale, later repeated their success at the Old Vic in London. Shakespearean audiences thus owe these men a debt of gratitude, and a double debt to Seale who, in London and later at Stratford in Canada, also rescued from a neglect nearly as great that other early effort at a history play, Shakespeare's King John. Indeed, Seale triumphed to such an extent that for many at Stratford in 1960 King John was the principal success of the festival. It may be hoped that Henry VI, if interpreted and staged as excitingly, would come to enjoy similar popularity in the New World.

The proven stageworthiness of the trilogy invites further interest and appreciation, if it is realized that history, in the person of the boy-king whose pathetic incapacity for rule precipitated the Wars of the Roses, presented Shakespeare a most difficult problem of dramaturgy. King Henry is necessarily the pivot of the action in all three plays. A king both strong and good was, in Shakespeare's view, indispensable to the peace of an ordered society; and Henry was the symbol of that kingship, the objectified embodiment of all the dynastic ambitions and struggles of the Houses of York and Lancaster, their enemies, and allies. But the historical Henry was not only too young for the burdens of office, he was at first weak-minded and later, if only at times, actually insane. As such, he was most unpromising material for drama. It would be hard to see how the playwright could have eliminated him, weak as he was, except at the risk of weakening the point of the plays. Yet a weak-minded man, let alone an insane one, could not figure prominently and effectively in the long and complicated action. How was the playwright to meet this unavoidable problem?

In order to place the events of three generations on the stage, Shakespeare did not hesitate to distort freely the historical facts as he found them in the chronicles: he telescoped, transposed, and invented incidents; he altered ages, characters, and motives. He had no nice regard for accuracy in historical particulars; and so he was free to change the character of the king, if he could find a solution. It was his awareness of dramaturgic demands that must account for the interesting stage character of King Henry VI which he eventually created.

Why not show Henry mad, and let it go at that? Insanity is touchy stuff for a playwright to handle. Shakespeare would later treat it in Ophelia, more interestingly still in King Lear, and most interestingly of all in Hamlet, in whom he made it yield incredible dramatic force. But the risks are high, the drawbacks considerable. In the case of Henry, Shakespeare avoided them entirely. Ophelia, mad, is a pathetic figure. We feel keenly the pathos of her plight, yet we can follow the workings of her mind but intermittently, and then only in relation to what she was and what has gone before. With her mind gone, her actions cease to have much meaning, except as they affect others. Her character is fixed, incapable of development. Dramatically speaking, one might almost say that Ophelia is dead before she takes her own life. King Lear is something else again, for we tremble with him as he fears and fights against his oncoming madness; and, when it comes, we know it is a necessary part of his agony and redemption. But, so long as it lasts, he is less active than acted upon: and it is necessarily brief.

History reveals Henry as ineffectual because irrational, and therefore irresponsible. Without mind, there can be little or no significant dramatic action, because there can be no rational choice: and drama requires choice, for it centers in the will. The will creates conflict, either by its presence or its absence, especially in the case of a king upon whom, by reason of the gravity of his office, the whole health of the state depends. Here lay the key to the playwright's solution, the workable substitute for royal madness. It offered Shakespeare a way to retrieve the historical King Henry and rehabilitate him for the stage. It was a conception as brilliant as the way in which he showed the white and red roses becoming the symbols of York and Lancaster. The solution was to make King Henry, not weak-minded, but weak-willed. Dramatically, this made all the difference in the world.

If subtlety consists in doing complicated things simply, this solution was extremely subtle. It did more than give the king a dramatically viable character, it placed him in sharp contrast to those around him and worked his fatal flaw of character into the fabric of the action. This centered the action on the great weakness of kingships: the monarch incapable, for whatever reasons, of reigning as events require. As the keystone of society, a king had to have for successful rule the qualities of power and cunning, but also of unselfishness. Henry utterly lacked power and cunning; he also lacked, as I hope to show, the third kingly virtue of self-sacrifice. Could there be an unconscious echo of the historical Henry's madness in the contemptuous question of his wife, Queen Margaret: "What is the body when the head is off?" In any case, this reference to the king's inadequacy has direct bearing on the created Henry and a deeper application: it sums up one of the themes of the plays. It would have been easy, but obvious, to deprive Henry of the two kingly virtues, but leave him self-sacrifice. But Shakespeare conceived the character more complexly, and he found most credible ways of motivating and rationalizing the incapacity of his weak-willed king. He was able to do so, even while using the king to utter those ideals of justice and order by which all the characters are measured and judged—King Henry too, no less than the others.

Since King Henry acts chiefly by refusing to act, or by acting inadequately; and since so much violent and bloody conflict swirls about his figure, we may tend to overlook the fact that his character is gradually, if unobtrusively, revealing itself throughout the three plays. This revelation is, in part, an ironic study of inconsistency and self-deception. The flaw of inconsistency arises from, and contributes to, the chain of ironic reversals which make up the complex action of the plays. And so it receives its full significance only in relation to it. As for the self-deception, it is so complete that for a time we, too, are taken in by it.

Before we are introduced to King Hemy, we see two acts of the "jarring discord of nobility" in the English campaigns in France, and with them the beginning of York's ambitions. When the king does appear, the main elements of his character are present, but veiled from us. His youth, his inexperience, the fact that even the practiced and honorable Gloucester, his protector, can succeed no better—all these circumstances keep us from sensing clearly what this king is or may become. But later the scene proves to have been very characteristic: lords jarring as if Henry were not present, Henry hoping to prevail through prayers and assuming that reproofs unsupported by might will bring men to their senses, so that he may unite them in love and amity. Here, along with his piety, are the first of the weeping king's many references to his sighs and tears, the mere sight of which he seems to think will suffice to melt the relentless disputants. Here, too, is his ignorance of the realities of motive and situation, or his blindness to them; yet, coupled with this, there is a grasp of the moral lessons of history that ironically proves prophetic: "Civil dissension is a viperous worm, That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth." The others know these truisms, but do not act as if they believed them; Henry believes them intensely, but cannot act upon them.

When he restores Richard of York to his blood and to his whole inheritance, it is like the close of the first act in the five-act drama of Henry's life. The issues are drawn. Henry has set going the machinery of his own doom, he has directed our expectations to the impending tragedy, and has, by statement and contrast, established the ideal of kingly love and lordly obedience against which we measure the true state of affairs.

Thereafter, Henry does a number of right things that help for a time to hide the full extent of his incapacity to rule. He gives Talbot deserved preferment, peremptorily banishes Fastolfe for cowardice in the field; consents, despite his unreadiness for marriage, to the politically wise alliance with the House of Armignac; and defends Gloucester against the imputation of witchcraft. But some of these acts are offset by impulsive inconsistencies that are a growing sign of his weak will. He is quickly inflamed by Suffolk's suit for Margaret of Anjou, so that he reneges on his previous agreement, disregards Armignac's wealth and power, and offers his hand to Margaret without consulting Gloucester. Driven by his own desires, he quite forgets his previous words: "I shall be well content with any choice Tends to God's glory and my country's weal." In his excitement at Margaret's arrival, he ignores the serious loss of Anjou and Maine that his marriage has cost the English crown, presents Suffolk a dukedom for causing the loss, and takes an irresponsible position in regard to the regency of France: "For my part, noble lords, I care not which: Or Somerset or York, all's one to me." The same indifference, amounting to dereliction of duty, again shows itself when Somerset as regent, announces the loss of all royal holdings in France: "Cold news, Lord Somerset: but God's will be done!" And this, too, after having summarily dismissed his "no less belov'd" Gloucester: "Henry will to himself Protector be; and God shall be my hope, My stay, my guide . . ." Then he puts the fate of Gloucester, who of all men he should defend and try to save, squarely into his "vowed enemies'" mighty hands: "My lords, what to your wisdoms seemeth best Do or undo as if ourself were here." Henry does not recognize this for what it is: the betrayal of his friend; and his actual, if not his formal, abdication.

His blindness has another aspect: he cannot learn wisdom from past experience, nor change his view of the world by which he interprets men and events. He assumes that men have only to be reminded of the law to submit to it, despite the abundant evidence of his own experience. He begs God to forgive him, if Gloucester was murdered; but his pious pleas to heaven are by now so habitual that he seems to have no true grasp of his own share of guilt in Gloucester's death. Even after Jack Cade's rebellion and further strife among the nobles, he can still think no man will go against his oath and true allegiance—not even York.

All this is because he thinks—as later Shakespeare will have Richard II think—that some dread majesty inheres in kingship itself: "Frowns, words and threats Shall be the war that Henry means to use." He cannot see that the majesty of kingship, if worn by a weak ruler, becomes a spur and not a check to emulous men. He is the reverse of Richard III, who deliberately seems a saint when most he plays the devil: so unlike the bloodthirsty, rapacious nobles that surround him, that he can never quite believe they will do such wicked deeds—until they have done them. He fancies somehow that a sense of decorum, a regard for law and justice, and a reverence for the crown will deter them. So he copes with them, not by deeds, but by gestures—that is, by ineffectual threats.

King Henry dreads war above all, but to retain the throne he inherited he will "unpeople this my realm";—only to temporize at the first sight of York's troops: "Let me for this life-time reign as king." Here we see another inconsistency cutting deep: for his longing to be rid of the burden of kingship—indeed, his wearniess of life itself—has begun to grow in him, yet he clings like a limpet to his unique eminence. The split in his will is glaring, but completely plausible: all his breeding, his reverence for the throne, his deluded faith in its mystical power, no less than his enjoyment of its ease and worship, keep him from yielding it up, as he thinks, outright. His thorough-going egotism is now more apparent than it has been earlier: for he thinks not of his queen's state or his son's inheritance, but only of himself. He does not, or cannot, answer the queen's furious charge: "Thou preferr'st thy life before thine honour . . ."

With egotism goes self-justification. At the sight of York's head upon a pike, he again cries out for forgiveness—and in the same breath justifies himself: "Withhold revenge, dear God! 'tis not my fault, Nor wittingly have I infring'd my vow." When Clifford rebukes him for "too much lenity and harmful pity," telling him to think instead of his son Edward, Prince of Wales, and to "steel thy heart To hold thine own and leave thine own with him," Henry's reply is both unanswerable and inadequate: "But Clifford, tell me, didst thou never hear / That things ill got had ever bad success? . . . / I would leave my son my virtuous deeds behind; / And would my father had left me no more!"

The sincerity of Henry's piety is patent; yet, at the same time, one cannot help but sense the deep, unconscious self-deception that mars it. In the midst of a battle, when he should be fighting, he can sit upon a molehill and say: "To whom God will, there be the victory!" He can also thank Warwick for his deliverance from the Tower with the words: "He (God) was the author, thou the instrument." But that he himself, as king, might more effectively be God's instrument by accepting the full responsibility of kingship and acting upon it, utterly escapes him. His weak will, coupled with a delicate conscience, has found in religion its invincible armor—and its justification for doing nothing. It is the greedy and ambitious plotters in his court—Margaret, Richard, and the others—who tell him to his face the truth about his character, but he is as incapable of grasping it as he would be of acting upon it.

The full extent of his weakness becomes apparent only when, in the third play, we can contrast our first picture of him and the stout courage and readiness his own son shows. And by now his persistent faith in his own kingship has become so ironical that it is pathetically laughable: he is never weaker than when he says: "Methinks the power that Edward hath in field Should not be able to encounter mine." Yet when the moment of his death approaches, he is not despicable. Anticipating it, he can lament his son's sad end, and watch himself, as it were, meeting death: "What scene of death hath Roscius now to act?" Here, as in his irresponsibility and his view of kingship, he is an interesting anticipation of Shakespeare's creation of Richard II: he is Henry Yea-and-Nay.

The playwright, by substituting weakness of will for Henry's insanity, has made it the central irony of the plays. It is not only that the person with the clearest view of kingship and of the country's good is the one man least capable of achieving them. Rather, it is that the man who expresses the moral order governing events is blindest about the part his own nature plays in them, because he is subtly self-deceived. Shakespeare reserves for him a final irony, which relates to his prophetic powers. The scene in which he prophesies that young Henry, Earl of Richmond, "will prove our country's bliss," may at first seem merely a theatrical stroke, an adventitious reliance upon the audience's knowledge of history, in order to point to a solution that exists only outside the action of these plays. But examination of the trilogy will show that, from the beginning, and even while making the grossest mistakes in government, Henry has prophesied correctly the outcome of this or that immoral act or ambition. And at the instant of his death, he can foresee that the people of the land will come to rue the day Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was born. But the poor king's fate is that of Cassandra: to foretell events truly—and not to be believed.

Henry lacked all the kingly virtues: strength, cunning, and self-sacrifice. For all his prating of self-sacrifice, what we have been shown is self-love. This king had been a better monk: perhaps in the monastery he could not so easily have cloaked and justified his weakness with the garb of piety. Shakespeare has made of him a study, and a pitiless one, in religious egotism. Yet he has not withheld from him, in his last extremity, the grace of a forgiving heart. "For this, amongst the rest, was I ordain'd," says the future Richard III, and stabs him abruptly. King Henry replies to his slayer thus: "Ay, and for much slaughter after this, / O, God forgive my sins, and pardon thee!"