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.
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