SOURCE: Manheim, Michael. “Silence in the Henry VI Plays.” Theatre Journal 29, no. 1 (1977): 70-6.

[In the following essay, Manheim stresses Henry VI's humanity and compassion, characterizing him as a man of integrity who is shocked into silence by the treachery and brutality of England's fractious noblemen.]

Alwin Thaler nearly a half century ago introduced the idea that Shakespeare, the master of words, achieves some of his most effective and meaningful dramatic moments through the absence of words.¹ Thaler of course discusses characters who have created problems for interpreters because of their refusal to speak, or to speak much, on subjects about which their responses clearly seem called for: for example, Macbeth's puzzling silence on the subject of his offspring, and Hermione's sixteen-year silence about the injustices done her (The Winter's Tale). But Thaler also examines specific scenes in which the overall effect clearly derives from a juxtaposition of silence with volubility. The dramatic values inherent in our first encounter with the hero's mother in Coriolanus are embodied in the contrast between that proud, garrulous matron and her nearly wordless daughter-in-law, who waits in terrified quiet for news of her husband's death in battle. The essential folly of Volumnia's marvelous rhetoric is implicit in Virgilia's silent response to it. Similar effects are achieved, of course, by Cordelia's brevity contrasted with Lear's volubility early in King Lear and by Juliet's resistance to Romeo's urging that she describe her love during their brief marriage scene. Such scenes and others Thaler discusses with great perceptiveness and sensitivity.

One group of plays Thaler hardly touches on, however, is the histories, that group in which Shakespeare's skills as a playwright were first developing. Thaler rightly calls attention to the stern silence of Bolingbroke in the face of Richard's princely verbosity in Richard II, as well as to Richard's own encounter with silence when he is imprisoned late in the same play. But of the voluble Bastard's disturbing silence at crucial moments in King John Thaler says nothing. Nor does he mention that figure in Shakespeare's early historical trilogy whose quiet passivity constitutes a remarkable counterpoint to the boisterous aggressiveness of all but a few about him: the meek, occasionally wife-dominated Henry VI. Shakespeare's “peculiar use of silence” in the Henry VI plays, to quote an esteemed colleague, is not unlike “the space surrounding spires in gothic architecture.”² The passive king, certainly the central figure in these plays, rarely commands our attention directly; but his silent, innocent presence frequently tells us much about the excesses of those who do most of the talking. He anticipates in some ways the silent Virgilia in Coriolanus. Their silences suggest a heavenly element in the midst of some very earthly, and bloody, proceedings.

I have described the ambivalence created by the unassuming figure of Henry in some detail in my book The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Play.³ When we carefully consider the king rather than the eternally contending nobility, who are the ones most critics focus on,⁴ we begin to sense the true nature of the plays. We receive, actually, two conflicting impressions from Henry. One is of a benevolent monarch seeking to govern justly, the other is of a foolish monarch victimized more by his own infirmities than by his enemies. Recent critics, like the barons, have for the most part overlooked the first impression in favor of the second in assessing Henry, and this is in part because they pay too little attention to the king at times when he is a silent or nearly silent participant in or observer of action dominated by the bluster of others. A total response to the being who is King Henry as he appears in semisilence through episode after episode in these plays may awaken in us the sense of a painfully, at times embarrassingly, human monarch helpless in a complex of political intrigues and conflicts which he has had no part in making, trying his utmost to govern in justice, mercy, and humility.

Lest it seem that I wish to overlook Henry's shortcomings, let me recall a few of them. From the start, Henry's follies are glaring. His succumbing to Suffolk's advertisements concerning “fair Margaret” late in Part 1 is as foolish as his fear and defensiveness before his queen throughout Parts 2 and 3. He is always slow to recognize the true motives of both enemies and allies, and his capacity to be gullible to the end is all too evident in his lauding and honoring the turncoat Warwick late in Part 3. Henry, of course, as a sensitive man forced to wear a crown from earliest infancy, often gives way to his weaknesses when we would wish a king to be of stronger stuff. But these very occasions are the indications of Henry's unvarnished humanity. Impatient, perhaps, with medieval idealizations of holy kings in legend and iconography, Shakespeare seems to have been determined to make his vision of a good king also a human king. And human Henry is. As a man, he is endowed with myriad debilitating limitations; and as a king, he is all but overwhelmed by those limitations.

But at critical points in his story, when the barons and many critics feel he is most contemptibly weak, Henry actually demonstrates the soundest and certainly most moral judgment of anyone in the plays. His selection of the red rose over the white in Part 1 is accompanied by an extremely perceptive comment on the folly of both the origins and nature of political feuds. In Part 2, Henry alone has compassion for the Cardinal in his exceedingly painful death; he alone understands how to deal with York at the moment of York's first great challenge to the crown. And Henry's statements on the molehill and his confrontation with the gamekeepers in Part 3 provide a constant image of the nature of holy leadership in that play while piracy and brutality “whirl” about Henry and “dismember” him.⁵ These responses on Henry's part are clear evidences of the attitudes of a benevolent medieval king.

In two other, rather enigmatic, episodes, however—one in Part 2 and the other in Part 3—while Shakespeare again focuses on this king's truth, soundness, and honesty, it is Henry's silence more than anything he says which sharpens the focus. It is on these two episodes, for which Henry has often been maligned by critics, that I would like to concentrate.

Henry has been much criticized for allowing good Duke Humphrey to become prey to Humphrey's destroyers early in Part 2. The Duke is certainly conspired against—“framed” might be the better word—by an alliance of his adversaries, who need only dispose of the Duke before commencing their savage competition for ascendancy; and Henry finds himself assaulted by a rash of attacks on his protector. Not wanting to desert the Duke, but feeling impelled to answer the attacks, Henry in great dismay decides Humphrey must stand trial for his accused crimes. Henry is sure in his “conscience” that Humphrey will be cleared; but Humphrey's accusers, also knowing that Humphrey would be cleared in a fair trial, have already decided to murder the Duke in prison—a murder which the Duke of Suffolk supervises on behalf of his fellow conspirators.

Immediately following Humphrey's murder (III.2), a highly disturbed Henry is as usual surrounded by forays of verbal onslaught from his peers. Henry faints at learning of Humphrey's death, a response which might prompt some to question his manliness, but others to admire his capacity to feel emotion at the death of a friend without the revengeful oaths and bloody thoughts which characterize the response of others to such happenings in these plays. Recovering in a matter of seconds, his next response is a sharp attack on Suffolk, of whose guilt the frequently imperceptive king has no doubt. This attack is Henry's longest speech in the scene. It is quickly followed by Margaret's prolonged complaint on her sorrows as the wife of so indifferent a husband—a powerful speech obviously intended to divert Henry's attention from her lover Suffolk's guilt. If Henry has any reaction to Margaret's speech, he does not reveal it—as he reveals little more of his feelings in words through the remainder of the scene. Now follows Warwick's entrance and the subsequent battle of accusation and counter accusation between Warwick and Suffolk. Henry still seems impervious to what is going on. Throughout Margaret's long speech and the fierce conflict between Warwick and Suffolk, Henry's only words are a prayer that his suspicions regarding Humphrey's death may prove inaccurate, and a lament for his dead friend. Amidst the clatter of words around him, Henry seems silently intent on something else. It is logical to assume, since his mind is clearly on the dead Duke throughout, that Henry is trying to cope with the gulf that yawns between Humphrey's honor, a dying honor in these plays, and the open shame of the events here taking place. Then, after his silence during some eighty noisy lines by others, Henry speaks four very quiet lines which seem only vaguely related to what is going on but are actually critically related to it:

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted!
Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just,
And he but naked, though locked up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.

[2: III.2. 232-235]

The point I wish to make about this scene is that Henry—not Margaret, or Suffolk, or Warwick—is the important character in it, and that Henry's silence has more to do with the central issues of the scene, play, and trilogy than do the verbal outpourings of the others. Their arias are attempts to obfuscate truth: Margaret's and Suffolk's, the truth of Suffolk's guilt; Warwick's, the truth of the absent York's ambitions. Henry's silence and brevity, at first an indication of confusion and perhaps some fear, are finally a sign of the truth he discovers through these events. Henry has assumed that the legal machinery of his state will reveal the truth he seeks concerning Humphrey. Instead, Humphrey is murdered before that legal machinery can be set in motion; and his enemies seek to overwhelm the king with their shamelessly and loudly conflicting deceits. Henry is shocked, both at Humphrey's death and the obvious perfidy surrounding him. His attack on Suffolk is the most angry and abusive statement he makes to anyone until his confrontation with Richard Crookback late in Part 3. His refusal a few lines later to say he knows the identity of Humphrey's murderer is evidence that he has regained his composure; but from this point on, he only half listens to others. In his mind he is working his way through to the conclusion stated in the four lines quoted above, the biblical injunction that absolute integrity can be one's only true armor. Humphrey's murder becomes for the silent Henry a trauma in which he focuses the entire meaning of his reign into a defense of justice and an opposition to corruption. It is in Henry's wondering silence countering the cacophony of his “tainted” associates that we become aware of the trauma.

Henry's silence in this scene strikes me as central to these plays. Although he is utterly destroyed well before his death at the end of Part 3, the integrity which he commits himself to makes him the sole representative of political man committed to both moral means and moral ends. The position Henry stakes out for himself in this scene, a position he continues to hold throughout most of Parts 2 and 3, is one apart from and above the brutality and perfidy he sees around him. It is a position of solid, uncompromising morality which isolates him from the political world he has known, a political world increasingly dominated by methods which ultimately find their most competent practitioner in Richard Crookback. Amid the gross decay of all morality in that world, Henry's isolation is inevitable. His times have been corrupted beyond redemption, and he must decide upon a position apart from his times. It is in Henry's silence in Part 2: III. 2 that we see this decision being forged.

Henry VI, being a human king rather than an idealized vision of saintly kingship, cannot of course live entirely apart from his age; and at times, some of which I alluded to earlier, even he comes close to being tainted. At one point, the opening of Part 3, Henry is severely tested and has suffered a good deal of abuse from critics as a result, critics who have too easily mistaken bewildered innocence for cowardice. The scene involves the confrontation at court between the Yorkists, who have just seized the parliamentary and royal chambers, and the Lancastrians, still nominally led by Henry, who come indignantly to cast the Yorkists out.

In Hall's chronicle, the events of this scene never take place. There, following York's victory in battle at Northampton, a parliament attended by York, but not by Henry, proclaims that Henry shall reign for the remainder of his days, to be succeeded by York. Henry, in prison, is forced to accede. The personal conflict between Henry and York in this situation is thus entirely Shakespeare's invention. Rather than making Henry the helpless victim of military conquest, Shakespeare places him in a dilemma which crucially tests whether a good and honorable king can survive in a state wholly given over to intrigue, violence and deceit. Shakespeare's invention of this action indicates more than anything else in these plays the light in which he looked on Henry. Neither wishy-washy nor cowardly, Shakespeare's Henry is a conscientious king whose weaknesses are typically human, whose benevolence is quite real, and whose cruel destruction results from the deep corruption of his age.

Henry has frequently been viewed as spineless in this scene, and there is no doubt that he is shaken and confused by the Yorkist claim. At the start, his language very briefly and artificially takes on the militant tone of his followers, but this quickly gives way to the hesitancy more characteristic of his speech generally. Here his doubts become so severe as to lead him to the compromise of naming York his heir; and it is easy to feel contempt for him. But his mental state, revealed more by what he does not say than by what he does say, again must be considered carefully. His compromise may be a bad one—at least, it solves nothing—but it is the peculiar result of his commitment to truth uncontaminated, as enunciated in the scene just looked at, rather than of folly or cowardice. He is not as silent here as he was in the earlier scene, but he speaks less than the other major participants in the action and what he is thinking must in large measure be inferred. He first makes quite clear to Exeter that, being the innate pacifist he so obviously is, he cannot tolerate bloodshed within the court—and this insistence has more than a little to do with his later deal with York. Henry at first intends no deal. He means York to leave simply because the untainted truth of Henry's position will make it impossible for York to resist. But York and Warwick, who are using political methods Henry has never faced before, get at their enemy as true budding Machiavels should: by knowing his weak point (which also happens to be his strong point in the overall moral context of these plays). Henry must yield before the truth, and if they can convince him his very reign is a lie, that he is the one guilty of the greatest deceit and injustice, they need go no further. And this they do simply by reviewing the old story of Henry Bolingbroke's deposing of Richard II. Henry's aside, “I know not what to say: my title's weak” (3: I. 1. 134), read without consideration of the prolonged agony it implies, makes him seem puerile. But York and Warwick pierce Henry's “breastplate,” making it obvious that he is as tainted as the others—and this the bewildered king cannot withstand.

Since Henry as usual says little, it may of course be argued that he is cowardly in these reactions. But the ultimate decision as to how to act the role must depend upon the cues about Henry's personality afforded us through the two previous plays. Is Henry simply spineless, or is he one of the proverbially meek inheritors of the earth? From what we have seen, Henry is as accurate a representation of the biblical inheritors as I can imagine in dramatic terms, and what we are seeing is one confrontation of the meek and the voracious of many in Shakespearian drama, a confrontation Lear suddenly becomes aware of in his “Poor, naked wretches” speech (III.4. 28-36). The meek are not without their faults—Henry's endless foibles, and the voracious are not without their talents—the Machiavellian cunning of York and Warwick; but there is no doubt about Shakespeare's attitude toward these events. He is far from dispassionate in this view of the “dismembering” of the one English king who would rule in justice, mercy, love—and, it might significantly be added, in silence.

This piercing of Henry's breastplate, his realization that he is not untainted, is followed by an event which clearly indicates the direction audience sympathies should take. Exeter—Henry's ally and friend of longest standing throughout these plays, a lord who has time and again at the conclusions of scenes given the brief speech telling the audience the realities of the situation at hand—Exeter shifts sides. This development is critical in the testing of Henry. It is not so much an indication of York's right—there can obviously be no right in this situation—as it is an indication of the extent of Henry's predicament. And predicament rather than right or wrong is the subject of this scene. Henry has placed all his faith in his breastplate of integrity. Now he finds himself “a traitor with the rest.” Exeter has seemingly confirmed the fact.

So at this point, under the conditions which we must infer exist within Henry's troubled breast, Henry makes his deal with York. Of course, Warwick's soldiers appear at this point; but since Henry has already indicated his constitutional opposition to violence in the court, the soldiers do little more than add to his dilemma. He is not afraid of them. Henry's chief reason for making the deal is the realization York, Warwick, and Exeter have brought him to: that a heart untainted does not necessarily make a crown untainted. To a medieval king like Henry, his crown is as much a part of him morally, spiritually, and physically as his heart. The nature of the deal follows from the nature of the predicament. Henry cannot forsake his kingly vows, yet he possesses an unlawful crown which his opponents may with some right seek to take from him. Hence to resolve an unresolvable dilemma, and to avoid violence in this place, Henry names York his heir. The compromise cannot work, of course, and it is more than incidental that Henry's first new concern, stated to his new ally Warwick, is for his son, whose disinheriting, Henry realizes, must be a continuation of injustice rather than an ending of it. Henry's attempt to act justly is defeated by the fact that the whole feudal structure of blood ties and royal inheritance has become enveloped in corruption and injustice. His integrity is no match for the decay of his times.

Henry speaks a good number of lines in this scene, but it is his silence which tells us what he is and what he is suffering. His lines, here as elsewhere, are usually rather abbreviated clues to the complex being he is. Henry is a good king desperately plagued by his personal shortcomings. He seems created with a sometimes over-evident effort on Shakespeare's part to emphasize the weaknesses the flesh is heir to. Henry is frequently fearful, inconsistent, and uxorious; but he is also committed to a view of leadership which rests exclusively on justice, integrity, and mercy. In Henry's world, these virtues have all but disappeared, and the ultimate inheritor of Henry's kingdom is the one who will use deceit and brutality with greatest skill. The plays are thus about the downfall of virtue in politics and the rise of a new, intricate use of vice in its place.

The image of the virtuous king in decline is essentially a silent image. Henry is in a sense like the suffering mute in Brecht's Mother Courage—fully cognizant of and responsive to the surrounding injustice, but unable to say anything about it. In both instances, the lack of speech comprises, as it were, the voice of the playwright. Shakespeare was undoubtedly responding to a political world increasingly dominated by professional scoundrels. Pained, bewildered silence is the natural state of leader and subject alike who abhor force and deceit yet see those qualities increasingly becoming the accepted tools of political leaders.

Notes

1. Alwin Thaler, Shakespeare's Silences (Cambridge, Mass., 1929; reprint ed., Freeport, N. Y., 1970). More recent critics have been considering Shakespeare's plays from the viewpoint of how both words and their absence may suggest the behavior and unspoken attitudes of characters. Many of these interpreters take their lead from Jan Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Garden City, N. Y., 1964).

2. From a letter written by Julian Olf, co-editor of ETJ, dated 19 October 1976.

3. Syracuse, N. Y., 1973.

4. I discuss the various critical outlooks on Henry in The Weak King Dilemma, pp. 76-80.

5. This language is actually used by the unfortunate Lady Blanche in King John, III.1. 330, whose predicament is much like Henry's throughout the better part of the Henry VI trilogy.