Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3 - Shakespeare begins - Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile

Thinking about the Elizabethan history plays sent me back to Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, a substantial step forward – I will go ahead and call this progress – in the history of English drama, although I think of Marlowe’s Edward II as the big turning point and Richard II as the Shakespearean miracle, meaning as good as parts of Richard III are, how did he move from that to this?  No rummaging through contemporary plays will answer that question.

I will just make some notes about what I saw this time in The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry VI, now known as Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3.  I read them in The Norton Shakespeare: Histories (2nd ed., 2008) which for some reason uses the 1594 Quarto titles but a heavily-edited version of the 1623 Folio texts.  I read the essays about the texts with some confusion.  Who knows what I read.

The story is the War of the Roses.  Henry VI is a weak king following a strong king.  The kingdom falls apart around him; his nobility schemes against, and murder, each other; his French wife, tougher than any of them, joins right in.  The meek, pious king just wants to be a shepherd. The ferocious Queen wishes someone “[w]ould choose him Pope, and carry him to Rome” (Pt I, 1.3).

I am just going to write, although not all of it in this post, until I run out of points.

1. I am convinced that Shakespeare wrote a substantial part of these plays and had a strong hand throughout.  He was something like the head writer or show runner.  I also think Parts 2 and 3 were conceived and written together.  Ambitious!  They were a hit, thus the prequel Part 1 and the sequel Richard III.

I am looking at the introduction to the 1999 Arden Shakespeare edition of Henry VI, Part II.  It is 141 pages long and I have not read it all:

In their Introductions to the Henry VI plays Hart and Wilson argue extensively for the variously combined authorship of Greene, Peele, Nashe, Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare. (116)

The entire book has about 500 pages.  It contains a scan of the First Folio pages and a table showing how the parts can be doubled.  It is an amazing object, although I found the Norton book more comfortable to actually read.

Anyway, that list is more or less every famous active playwright circa 1591, which is when I tentatively put these plays.  Stephen Greenblatt, in his new biography of Christopher Marlowe, Dark Renaissance, is convinced Marlowe was involved, but likely minimally.  “The resulting plays have many Marlovian phrases and touches, but they are folded into a structure that Shakespeare clearly dominates” (144).

2. That structure is still fairly close to that of the chronicle plays.  Shakespeare marches us through the major events.  Characters, even the ones not killed off quickly, have little room to grow or show their depths.  Part 3 is especially monotonous, a series of battles and betrayals.  The great betrayal has to wait for the next play, Richard III.

Richard of Gloucester, the future Richard III, has a terrific monologue (Part II, III.2, pp. 250-2) where he declaims his grievances against his enemies, his brothers, and the world in general, ending with an open declaration that he is now the official villain of the play.  He will “Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could” and “set the murderous Machiavel to school.”  At this point in theatrical history, there was nothing worse than Machiavelli.  A fun speech - I pulled the title quotation form it - but so blunt.  Maybe Marlowe wrote it.

How far will I get tomorrow?  I will write about the puns, and the severed heads, and we will see what else.

History before Shakespeare - The Famous Victories of Henry V - he hath taken the great raze of ginger that Bouncing Bess with the jolly buttocks should have had

The establishment in the 1570s of permanent theaters just outside of the walls of London led to a massive increase in the demand for new plays.  Every available source of stories was looted.  English history proved to be especially popular or at least easy to adapt to the stage.

William Shakespeare was much more of a history specialist in the 1590s than I had understood.  Nine English history plays, plus one comic spinoff, and one Roman play, so nine or ten or eleven plays in a decade.  To the extent that they were published, the plays were generally called tragedies.  We still call Julius Caesar a tragedy rather than a history, but the plays with British subjects were moved into the category of histories in the First Folio, so that The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry VI became Henry VI, Part 3.  For example.

Since the Henry VI plays were more sophisticated than the history plays that preceded them, and Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II even more so, scholars have categorized older plays with subjects from British history as “chronicles.”  Before Shakespeare and After Shakespeare is what they mean.  But I thought I had better read at least one of the chronicles.

I picked The Famous Victories of Henry V (1580s?)*, authors unknown.  I am rarely sure what people mean when they talk about their “reading experience” but this was, for me, a strange reading experience.  The short play in twenty scenes races through the events of three familiar Shakespeare plays, the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V.  Interspersed with the history scenes are clown scenes, a vehicle for Richard Tarlton, the greatest comic actor of his time.  So it was like reading a poor prose summary of Shakespeare with unrelated comic scenes mixed in.  Odd.

As I understand it, the real difference between the chronicles and the histories is that the chronicle plays more or less just march through the key episodes.  That is what Famous Victories does (plus the comedy).

So for example in scene vi, wild Prince Hal reconciles with his dying father.  He hands the King his dagger.  King Henry pardons his son. This is from the historical accounts.  I will go straight into scene vii to show the contrast.

HENRY IV  Stand up my son; and do not think thy father, but at the request of thee, my son, I will pardon thee.  And God bless thee, and make thee his servant.

PRINCE  Thanks, good my Lord.  And no doubt but this day, even this day, I am born new again.

HENRY IV  Come, my son, and lords, take me by the hands.

                                                                                            Exeunt omnes.

Scene vii

DERICK  Thou art a stinking whore; and a whoreson stinking whore.  (vii, 168)

The effect was often this jarring.  Shakespeare made dull and undramatic followed by something rather more vigorous.

The scene where Hal renounces the Falstaff character is almost totally flat.  It is one of the most moving scenes in Shakespeare.  Here it is another checkmark from the list of episodes.  Shakespeare knew this play and borrowed a few things from it, but there is not much hint of his Falstaff here.

Let’s have another bit of Derick the clown.  Here he has dragged Cutbert Cutter the thief into court:

Oh, masters, stay there!  Nay, let’s never belie the man! For he hath not beaten and wounded me also, but he hath beaten and wounded my pack, and hath taken the great raze of ginger that Bouncing Bess with the jolly buttocks should have had.  That grieves me most.  (iv, 158)

And how about this amusing French captain, in the Henry V section of Famous Victories.

CAPTAIN 

Why, take and Englishman out of his warm bed and his stale drink, but one month, and, alas, what will become of him?  But give the Frenchman a radish root, and he will live with it all the days of his life.  (xiii, 186)

No wonder the French lost so badly.  This speech, a note tells me, comes right out of the source chronicle, lightly paraphrased, although the English author added the radish root.  The British theater audience wants to learn history, and here it is.

The text and page numbers are from The Oldcastle Controversy (1991) which also includes Sir John Oldcastle, Part 1, which I have not read but perhaps should.  If you somehow have a particular chronicle play to recommend, please do.  The early version of King Leir (pre-1594) is tempting.

* Published in 1598, presumably because of the success of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.