More Henry VI - I am myself alone

 

More rambling around Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3, Shakespeare’s first big playwriting project.

3.  As easily as I accept that large parts of the plays were written by who knows who, I was shocked to see that scholars have tried to assign the Jack Cade rebellion (“The first thing we do let’s kill all the lawyers”), Act IV of Part II, to Thomas Nashe.  This is the part, more than any other, that sounds to me like Shakespeare, later Shakespeare.  One reason is that it is full of puns.

How Shakespeare loved puns, in a way that Marlowe or as far as I can tell no one before Shakespeare had (except for Thomas Nashe, right).  Puns are a basic part of his understanding of language, and perhaps the world.

Jack Cade, the textile worker, leads a working-class rebellion against King Henry.  That he is spurred on by the money of Henry’s enemies in the nobility is one irony we recognize from recent history; that he is a communist but also a tyrant is another.  A “clothier,” he and his army are introduced with many lines of tailoring puns.

FIRST REBEL  I tell thee, Jack Cade the clothier means to dress the commonwealth, and turn it, and set a new nap upon it.

SECOND REBEL  So he had need for ‘tis threadbare…

The rebels come from different professions, each generating puns.  Jack Cade is named for “stealing a cade [barrel] of herrings.”  His wife, a “pedlar’s daughter,” is now “not able to travel with her furred pack, she washes bucks here at home” (all of this from Part 1, IV.2, 181-2).  I remind myself that in Shakespeare, if it sounds like a dirty joke it is.  The archaic vocabulary, densest in the comic scenes, is either a pleasure of Shakespeare’s language or an aggravation, or both.

              Enter a rebel with Lord SAYE

CADE  Well, he shall be beheaded for it ten times. [To SAYE] Ah, thou say, thou serge – nay, thou buckram lord!  (IV.7, 188)

Five scenes later, it never ends.  “Say” is a kind of silk. Cade’s own severed head is presented on stage three scenes later, without puns, since Shakespeare did not write that scene.

4.  The severed heads.  The Henry VI plays have so many severed heads.  The first severed head in Part 3 appears after the fourteenth line, presented by crookback Richard, who talks to it sarcastically.  But I’ll go back to Jack Cade:

         Enter two with the Lord Saye’s head and Sir James Cromer’s upon two poles

CADE  But is not this braver?  Let them kiss one another, for they loved well when they were alive.

          [The two heads are made to kiss]  (IV.7, 191)

Or how about – I cannot leave Act IV – when Queen Margaret wanders around the stage with her lover’s severed head while King Henry and his advisers have a meeting.  Later (Part 3, I.4) she gets her revenge, smearing her enemy the Duke of York with the blood of his murdered son before having him, what else, beheaded.  The blood-smearing is Shakespeare’s, or someone’s invention, an addition to the chronicle history.

These plays have a level of violence, of grotesque violence, that rivals Titus Andronicus, which Shakespeare may well have been working on around the same time.  The torture scenes in Tamburlaine, the mass slaughter and that business with the tongue in The Spanish Tragedy, and all of these prop heads – or was there a prop-master re-wigging a single head from scene to scene – how I would like to see one of these prop heads – testify to a taste for extreme violence that we have in common with the Elizabethans.  At least we do not have to walk under a row of severed heads on our way to a Coen Brothers movie, like they did.

5.  There is that scene where King Henry sits on a molehill and laments he is not a shepherd.

When this is known, then to divide the times:

So many hours must I tend my flock,

So many hours must  I take my rest,

So many hours must I contemplate,

So many hours must I sport myself,

So many days my ewes have been with young.  (Part 3, II.5, 240)

And so on, a remarkable intrusion of a kind of poetry not found elsewhere in the plays.  Henry witnesses a tableau of a father who has killed his son and a son who has killed his father, blunt and artificial, a beautiful scene of pure theater.

I will note the penultimate scene, where King Henry and the future Richard III finally meet and have a marvelous insult battle before Richard murders Henry and prepares for the next play:

I had no father, I am like no father;

I have no brother, I am like no brother;

And this word, ‘love’, which greybeards call divine,

Be resident in men like one another

And not in me – I am myself alone.  (Part 3, 5.6, 283)

A pretty good start.