According to Henry VI biographer R. W. Griffiths, the “Good” king of Shakespeare’s True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York and the Death of Good King Henry the Sixth existed in Tudor ideology long before Shakespeare gave him dramatic form.1 To most “Tudor eyes” the “virtuous” and “saintly” king stood “ultimately above” the various political “malignancies” of his time.2 That is, Shakespeare presented his audience with something of a corresponding vision to what many already imagined.
That said, Shakespeare was not simply seeking historical or ideological accuracy. The playwright’s first concern was with generating sufficient dramatic sympathy for this particular king, dramatic sympathy that would seize an audience’s attention. Henry VI was not a heroic figure like his father, Henry V, nor was he even a tragic figure like Richard II. Absent other means, it seems reasonable to consider that Shakespeare found a way to generate sympathy in Henry’s religious posture.
Harnessing Henry’s historical piety for dramatic purposes would not have been uncomplicated. Piety lacks a certain theatrical force, even in religious cultures. It pales on the stage, for example, when compared to the Machiavellian charisma of Richard III. Moreover, Henry’s piety may have been admired, but it also was understood to be the cause of his ineffectiveness, his weakness, as a ruler. Henry’s attention to the other world, it was widely assumed, compromised his attention to this world.
There were additional dramatic challenges more specific to the late sixteenth century. The Catholic language of saintliness that permeates descriptions of Henry must have been an issue. According to Catherine Sanok, the early Tudor attempt to canonize Henry was still an active memory, and the “cult” that emerged around his name was still a real presence.3 So while a certain religious sympathy was accessible, the playwright had to negotiate some potentially difficult terrain:
Even if public devotion to Henry was no longer possible when Shakespeare’s first history plays came to the stage, it endured in communal memory through Protestant texts such as Foxe’s Actes and Monuments and Catholic calendars, which continued to list the king’s feast day even while acknowledging that he had never been officially canonized. Shakespeare’s inaugural history plays may well have been—for some audiences in a devotionally meaningful way and for others in an ironic one—plays about a saint.4
Intriguingly, though, Sanok suggests that the cult of Henry may have charted something of a middle way for Shakespeare to represent Henry, a path that would allow the playwright to employ Henry’s reputation for piety without representing him as fixed on one side of the confessional divide or the other: The cult recognized that Henry’s failings as a king—“his catastrophic inability or refusal to exert sovereign agency”—made him unusually close in kind to his subjects. Consequently, he became neither a Catholic saint nor a Protestant martyr but something of a more universal “figure for the labors and limits of ordinary human life.” Sanok argues that, at moments, Henry VI can even be affiliated with an ancient figure like Job, “a figure for an essential humanity.”5 In other words, Shakespeare finds an effective strategy via the cult of Henry to represent the King that exceeds the strict religious boundaries defined by Whig, Protestant narrative history.
I argue, however, that in managing dramatic sympathy for this unusual royal figure, Shakespeare turned, not to Job, but to another biblical character—Abraham—one more familiar to him and to audiences that were not very distant from the cycle play tradition. The historical figure of Henry was determined not by Job-like providential torments, but by his own limitations as a ruler, limitations that specifically were determined by his piety, his religious commitments—commitments that were thoroughly entangled with his son.
In this, Henry’s struggles could be understood in terms of the patriarch whose commitment to a divine “Other” compromised his responsibilities to this world, particularly in the events of Genesis 22. It is in tracing Tudor narrative history and responding artfully to existing ideological constructions of Henry VI that Shakespeare makes his first Abrahamic explorations, and these explorations ultimately give us not just a better understanding of 3 Henry VI, but a fascinating preliminary glimpse at how the playwright would come to use Genesis 22 and its interpretive tradition. Toward the end of this chapter, I will turn to Shakespeare’s other consideration of a weak sovereign—King John—and that play’s striking use of a sacrificial scene to address the problem young Arthur presents to the title character.
In 3 Henry VI Shakespeare’s interests in Genesis 22 emerge in the rather disturbing opening scenes, which include Henry’s sudden and shocking disinheritance of his son Edward (1.1) and Clifford’s attack on young Rutland, perhaps the most brutal child killing in all of Shakespeare (1.3). Again, this is not to suggest that Shakespeare was borrowing directly from the sparse biblical passage or subsequent interpretations. The playwright clearly follows chronicler Edward Hall and The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre and York (1548) in beginning with these two events.
However, as soon as we begin tracking the way the playwright refashions Hall’s narrative history, his engagement with Abraham comes in to focus. Here is Hall in the first paragraph of the section titled “THE. XXXIX. YERE” describing the dynastic change from Lancaster to York:
After long arguments made, & deliberate cosultacio had among the peeres, prelates, and commons of the realme: upon the vigile of all sainetes, it was condescended and agreed by the three estates, for so muche as kyng Henry had been taken as kyng, by the space of. Xxxviii yeres and more, that he should injoye the name and title of Kyng, and have possession of the realme, during his life naturall: And if he either died or resigned, or forfeted the same, for infringing any point of this concorde, then the saied Crowne and aucthoritie royal, should immediately bee devolved to the Duke of Yorke, if he then lived, or els to the next heire of his line or linage, and that the duke from thensefurth, should be Protector and Regent of the lande. . . . Such was the pleasure of almightie God, that Henry beeyng a good and verteous manne, whiche had tasted innumerable adversities and calamities of the worlde, should be deprived of his terrestrial Croune, to be recompensed with an heavenly garland, and a joyfull place: For surely a perfite good man, all though he be plagued with a thousand displeasures cannot but be blessed, and have a good soule toward God.6
And here is Hall, a few lines later, describing the death of Rutland during the battle of Wakefield:
While this battaill was in fighting, prieste called sir Robert Aspall, chappelain and schole master to the yong erie of Rutland ii. Sonne to the above named duke of Yorke, scace of y age of. Xii. Yeres, a faire getleman, and a maydenlike person, perceiving y flight was more savegard, then tariyng, bothe for him and his master, secretly conveyed therle out of y felde, by the lord Cliffordes hande, toward the towned, but or he coulde enter into a house, he was by sayd lord Clifford espied, followed, and taken, and by reson of his apparel, demaunded what he was. The yog gentleman dismayed, had not a word to speake, but kneled on his knees imploring mercy, and dsiryng grace, both with holding up his hades and making dolorous countinace, for his speache was gone for feare. Save him sayd his Chappelein, for he is a princes sonne, and peradventure my do you good hereafter. With that word, the lord Clifford marked him and sayde: by Gods blode, thy father slew myne, and so wil I do the all thy kyn, and with that word, stacke the erle to y hart with his dagger, and bad his Chappeleyn bere the erles mother & brother worde what he had done, and sayde. In this acte the lord Clyfford was accompted a tyraunt, and no gentleman, for the propertie of the Lyon, which is furious and an unreasonable beaste, is to be cruell to them that withstande hym, and gentle to sucha prostrate or humiliate them selfes before him.7
In describing the unprecedented political decision to shift the dynastic line from Lancaster to York, Hall barely notes Henry’s participation and does not discuss the son’s (Edward’s) fate at all.8 In a notable contrast, Shakespeare makes the disinheritance of the son—and the violence done to him—the centerpiece of the scene, if not the play in its entirety.9 Faced with an overwhelming Yorkist force intent on seizing the throne, a force dramatically emphasized by the appearance of soldiers on stage at the stomp of Warwick’s foot (1.1.169), Shakespeare’s Henry asks to rule only for “this [his] lifetime” (1.1.171). If any audience does not immediately think of the violence done by the father to the son here, Clifford specifically directs their attention to the point: “What wrong is this unto the Prince your son!” (1.1.176).
The refashioning of narrative history might seem easily explained. Hall’s description of Clifford’s revenge killing of young Rutland, following so quickly as it does the description of the dynastic shift to York, must have somehow inspired Shakespeare to emphasize the distinctly political violence a father does to a son. In reading backwards, from play text to source material, the general parallel between Rutland and Edward seems obvious. And I would certainly concede that the description of Rutland and Edward must have informed Shakespeare’s decision to cast the opening scene as he did.
But precisely how did Shakespeare move from the murder of young Rutland as described in Hall to his to decision to recast the dynastic shift as violence done to a son? One might reasonably suppose that because there is violence done to a child in both events, Shakespeare saw the dramatic potential in such doubling. One could argue persuasively that Shakespeare refashions the dynastic shift as described in Hall to focus on the violence done to Edward because the Rutland scene is so close, a point magnified by the narrative proximity between the two events in Hall.
If we give this process of dramatic refashioning just a bit more attention, however, things get more interesting. For instance, the parallel between the violence done to Rutland and the violence done to Edward is far from exact or even clear. One form of violence is physical—murder by a nonrelative for revenge; the other form of violence is political. Henry deprives Edward of his right, not his life, and he does so under considerable duress. More than a simple doubling seems to drive Shakespeare’s imagination.
The connections Shakespeare realized between the Abraham and Isaac story and Hall’s description of Rutland’s murder are detectable in Shakespeare’s Rutland scene itself, apart from any consideration of Shakespeare’s refashioning of the dynastic shift. While Shakespeare stages Clifford as really wanting to kill Rutland, just as Hall does, without any angst (1.3.25–29), the dramatic pity Rutland elicits in Shakespeare’s scene is more than comparable to the pity generated by Isaac in some of the cycle dramas depicting Abraham and Isaac. Tellingly, when Rutland pleads, “I never did thee harm; why wilt thou slay me?” Clifford responds “Thy father hath” (1.3.38–39). One can usefully compare the scene to Hubert’s attempted killing of Prince Arthur in King John, a scene whose Abrahamic debts, we shall see, figure more distinctively. Certainly Clifford refers to his own motivation for revenge that was staged at the end of 2 Henry VI, but when one also considers the fact that Shakespeare completely refashioned Hall’s description of the dynastic shift to focus on the political sacrifice of Edward, we begin to have some sense of how deeply the Abrahamic interpretive tradition and logic informed Shakespeare.
Oddly enough, the imaginative path I am tracing begins with the fact that Hall represents the political process that disinherited Edward as something of a social good. In Hall, the dynastic shift involving the disinheritance of Edward suggests the possibility of a negotiated peace between rival factions, one remarkably amenable to our modern sense of political process.10 When Shakespeare’s Henry offers to sacrifice his son Edward’s claim to the throne in Act 1—seemingly just in order to preserve his own reign for his lifetime—it often goes undiscussed that in so doing he challenges the practices of succession and makes visible a more modern form of governance to come: one based on compromise and negotiation and what we understand as law.
So while Hall does not discuss the disinheritance of Edward, the political sacrifice of the son is certainly implied and considered not only not a heinous crime—as it is by most of the characters in Shakespeare’s play and most of the play’s critics—but something potentially quite desirable. (Something of this more positive understanding, interestingly, briefly manifests in Shakespeare’s opening scene. In response to Clifford’s immediate condemnation of Henry’s act, Warwick exclaims, “What good is this to England and himself!” [1.1.177]). If, again, we start with the assumption that the description of the horrific murder of Rutland somehow inspired Shakespeare to refashion this “positive” political process into the sacrifice of Edward, then we also must consider that Shakespeare also had some positive, comparable interpretive (and dramatic) frame to understand Rutland’s death. In order to imaginatively pair the brutal description of Rutland’s death with the general social good Hall implicitly ascribed to the disinheritance of Edward, we must consider that Shakespeare saw something potentially good in both events.
Simply put, the only part of Shakespeare’s dramatic experience that would allow him to imagine positive content in the horrific murder of a child is the Abrahamic and Isaac story. Abraham’s terrifying near slaying of Isaac was inextricably linked to a general social good, usually by Christian typology that connected it to the death and resurrection of Christ to come. Abraham unnerved audiences, but audiences also understood that God required his act. As discussed in chapter 1, the staging of Genesis 22 may elicit horror and disgust comparable to Hall’s description of Clifford killing Rutland; but the staging of Genesis 22 also elicits a certain anguish and sympathy for Abraham. The Rutland killing was not simply a horrific murder for Shakespeare, then, as it seemed to be for Hall, but a description that recalled for him the complex range of affect a staging of Abraham and Isaac could elicit. And this complexity led him not only to generate such sympathy for Rutland, but to refashion and refocus the role of Edward.
The primary imaginative link for Shakespeare between these two scenes, I am arguing, is not necessarily the general parallel of violence done to a child, but the affect Hall seeks to elicit from readers in narrating the story of Clifford and Rutland.11 The image of the slaying of an innocent child contained within it the potential for it to be understood as a positive and necessary sacrifice. In shifting the critical attention from Hall to the cycle plays, I am following John D. Cox. Although Cox concentrates his attention on the “slaughter of the innocents” and the role of Herod in the cycle plays, he usefully suggests that Shakespeare’s construction of 3 Henry VI, its opening scene in particular, was informed by the mystery plays: “Though Shakespeare took the suggestion for this scene from the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, he devised its staging entirely according to his own imagination, and it seems clear that his imagination turned to an impressive dramaturgical precedent in the mystery plays.”12
It is, of course, somewhat risky to argue for such a profound connection to Abraham and Isaac in a play where the title character offers a direct allegorical explanation from another father-son tradition altogether: “I, Daedalus,” Henry tells Richard late in the play; “my poor boy, Icarus” (5.6.21). This points us not to Genesis 22 but to 1 Henry VI and Talbot’s comparable reference to his own son (4.6.54–55) and, ultimately, to Ovid.13
But the Abrahamic connections, once considered, cannot be easily ignored. Genesis 22 provides not just a visual and affective resource for Shakespeare but, as Sanok argues of the cult of Henry VI, a “conceptual resource.”14 For example, for Shakespeare’s Henry, the decision to disinherit Edward comes so suddenly that it is perhaps more accurate to call it a response rather than a decision. Henry is certainly under pressure, a pressure theatrically intensified by soldiers that appear on stage at Warwick’s command. But many critics hear only the language of Clifford and Margaret condemning Henry as weak and thus similarly categorize the king’s gesture as a simple, self-serving, and fearful attack on Edward. This utterly ignores the fact that the King responds, Abraham-like, to a call for peace and justice—and his response regarding Edward occurs in this context.
In other words, Shakespeare sets the call to respond to the absolutely Other (justice) in contrast to the call to respond to one’s own (Edward). Notably, when the irreconcilable tension between the call of the “Other” and the call of one’s own becomes apparent to Henry, he responds immediately within the religious logic of Abraham’s “Here I am.” Indeed, when Henry and others first enter the palace to discover York sitting on the throne, Clifford, Northumberland, and Exeter all call for a fight, but Shakespeare has King Henry interrupt them—rather authoritatively for such a weak king:
Far be the thought of this from Henry’s heart,
To make the shambles of the Parliament House.
Cousin of Exeter, frowns, words and threats
Shall be the war that Henry means to us.
(1.1.70–74)
Shakespeare’s King decides immediately that he will not fight, that he does not want a civil war.
In trying to recontextualize Henry’s gesture in what I am calling more “positive” Abrahamic terms, I do not expect that gesture itself to become any more appealing than the standard interpretation of self-serving weakness. Genesis 22 always disturbs, even in the most extreme Christian typological renderings. Henry himself describes his response and, specifically, the consequences for his son, as “unnatural” (1.1.193), a term frequently used to describe Abraham’s actions. But if we are willing to attend more closely to the religious complexity of Henry’s weakness, then our impressions will change. Margaret’s condemnations of her husband, for example, properly read, actually clarify Shakespeare’s engagement to the Abraham story. She flies into a maternal rage, and her lines echo the sentiments traditionally given to Sarah in various interpretations of Genesis 22:
Hadst thou but loved him half so well as I,
Or felt that pain which I did for him once,
Or nourished him as I did with my blood. . . .
(1.3.218–21)
These lines seem markedly at odds with the seductive and Machiavellian Margaret so often discussed in Shakespeare criticism. A comparable Sarah-like plea, which I will discuss in chapter 3, comes from the Duchess of York in Richard II, as she tries to convince her husband to spare their son, Aumerle.
Let me now turn back, again, to what makes it even possible to read Henry’s disinheritance of Edward in terms of Abraham: the simple dramaturgical fact that Shakespeare structures the opening sequence so that Henry’s act sets the stage for perhaps the most disturbing child-killing scene in the plays. The very ferocity of the Rutland scene quickly presses an audience member (and, again, certainly a reader) to compare and contrast the two “attacks” on children. Having just been prompted to follow the impressions of Margaret and Clifford about Henry, an audience suddenly has to reevaluate. Shakespeare compels an audience to look more carefully and sympathetically on Henry’s initial deed—the political sacrifice of his son—as a point of contrast to Clifford’s more disturbing, deliberate, and self-indulgent violence. The dramatic recontextualization prompts a search of one’s imagination for instances in which doing violence to one’s own child is at least comprehensible.
For an increasingly secular audience, it is difficult to find any historical context where an attack on an innocent child can be understood and contemplated, rather than simply resisted. As I will discuss in more detail in examining Aaron’s decision not to kill his child in Titus Andronicus in comparison to Titus’s involvement in the death of at least twenty-one of his children, there are very few historical or dramatic contexts other than Genesis 22 where an act of violence toward one’s child can elicit some form of sympathy.
Post-Kant, we may have simply lost some sense of the importance of this strange and disturbing narrative and its enormous explanatory power. Shakespeare’s careful tracing of narrative history, we should recall, has produced remarkably mixed dramatic results over time. Initially, it seems, the Henry VI plays were quite popular. Not long after, though, audiences responded quite differently. As Randall Martin writes, “Because Henry hardly measures up to the expansionary ideals of the British Empire and muscular Christianity, English stages showed little interest in Part 3 or the trilogy as a whole from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.”15 In the second half of the twentieth century, and on in to the twenty-first, one can detect yet another shift in the play’s reception. Various theatrical productions have recognized a powerful antiwar sentiment guiding the king, which has led to some inspired performances and, overall, increased admiration for the play. The positive interpretive possibilities surrounding Genesis 22 have just been too foreign to our modern world.
Critics have certainly sketched Shakespeare’s efforts to make an audience sympathize with Henry before, but, generally speaking, Henry’s political sacrifice of Edward has been understood as running counter to that effort. According to Larry Champion, for example, Henry develops to a “near tragic stature,” but only in addressing and acknowledging the fault of this early sacrifice of a son. Henry “comes full circle in the play—from the naïve and timorous ruler in Act I who admits the weaknesses of his title and, fearing all will desert him, willingly barters his son’s right to the throne for the promise of life, to the realist who can appraise his own political weaknesses in Act IV and, somewhat like Richard II, can confront his death with dignity and courage in Act V.”16 This Henry stands as a voice of compassion and reason, but only to the extent that he repents his initial decision to disinherit (sacrifice) Edward. It is, in short, very difficult for a twentieth-century critic to even consider that Henry’s political sacrifice of Edward organizes Shakespeare’s attempts to make Henry a more sympathetic and engaging character.
By displaying the dynastic shift as represented in Hall in Abrahamic terms, Shakespeare does two things at once: he gives a political event that has little inherent dramatic appeal (at least as it appears in Hall) a rather remarkable dramatic gloss, and he begins to reveal a political theology based on Abraham at work in his own thought. In linking the decision by Henry to disinherit Edward with such wanton violence and, in particular, with Clifford’s killing of Rutland, Shakespeare begins at least drifting toward—if not crafting—an Abrahamic understanding of Henry’s situation. One either protects and revenges one’s own, like Clifford, and thus sacrifices others or an abstract “Other” (God, justice, peace), or one reaches out toward others/Other and sacrifices his own, like Henry. That Henry even considers this paradox puts him in stark contrast to the number of other father and son revengers in the play.17 The initial (non) sacrifice of a son in this play, one filled with sacrifices of sons, is not an inauguratory moment of violence but a manifestation of Shakespeare thinking through dramatically the irreconcilable tension embedded in the narrative of Genesis 22 and, in turn, using that narrative to think through early modern English history.
My take on Henry is comparable in many respects to that of recent critics who have contested a simple rendering of Shakespeare’s Henry as “weak.”18 These arguments, however, tend to see Henry as prescient, pushing forward toward a modern understanding of pacifism. Martin, for example, talks cogently of “Henry’s attempt to transcend the reflex of compulsive revenge” and his “idealistic—or radical—repudiation of opportunistic power.”19 In reading Henry this way, Martin notes that performers generally have outpaced critics. The critical tradition that insists that Henry is “consistently weak, in both his moral and political judgments,” for instance, has difficulty making sense of the strange interruption in the flow of the plot in 2.5, where Henry, pushed aside by Margaret and Clifford, detaches himself from the battle and contemplates the disturbing scene involving fathers and sons.20 The King watches as a son kills a father and a father kills a son—a display of violence he understands is tied to his initial gesture. For most critics, this is still just another instance of Henry’s weakness. For many actors, however, 2.5 has become the “pivotal moment of their performances.”21 In this otherworldly space of 2.5 Henry has been understood to contemplate the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of standing apart from cycles of revenge and violence that consume others in the play.22 I would contend that this otherworldly space is, indeed, otherworldly, determined by Shakespeare’s religious thought.
It should come as no surprise that, for contrast, Shakespeare surrounds this otherworldly scene with two scenes involving the distinctly worldly Clifford, the figure against which Shakespeare has been measuring the Abrahamic features of Henry. In 2.4 an audience watches as Clifford engages Richard (later Richard III) in combat and flees; in 2.6, having watched Henry’s meditation, which ends with a seemingly cowardly flight alongside Margaret, an audience watches as Clifford dies—pierced through the neck with an arrow. Given that an audience has watched Clifford slaughter Rutland, they now will be less inclined to accept Clifford’s willingness to fight in contrast to Henry’s meditations, nor will they be particularly inclined to accept his dying indictment of Henry:
And, Henry, hadst thou swayed as kings should do,
Or as thy father and his father did,
Giving no ground unto the house of York,
They never then had sprung like summer flies;
I and ten thousand in this luckless realm
Had left no mourning widows for our death,
And thou this day hadst kept thy chair in peace.
For what doth cherish weeds but gentle air?
And what makes robbers bold but too much lenity?
(2.6.14–22)
Clifford’s charge that Henry’s violence toward Edward is the critical fault here has little persuasive power in comparison to his own actions. I am not suggesting that there is a dramatic celebration of modern pacifism here, but rather a solemn awareness that Henry’s piety is legitimate and valuable in and of itself, even if it brings no real-world solutions.
More telling, perhaps, in terms of assessing the play’s engagement with Abrahamic themes, is Clarence’s rather unusual and unanticipated reference to Jepthah in Act 5. Clarence had sided with Warwick, and then Henry against his brothers, Edward and Richard; but at a critical moment—after speaking with his brother Richard—he changes sides again, and this time sides with his own.
I will not ruinate my father’s house,
Who gave his blood to lime the stones together,
And set up Lancaster. Why, trowest thou, Warwick,
That Clarence is so harsh, so blunt, unnatural,
To bend the fatal instruments of war
Against his brother and his lawful King?
Perhaps thou wilt object my holy oath.
To keep that oath were more impiety
Than Jepthah, when he sacrificed his daughter.
(5.1.91)
Given the dramaturgy at work, no audience could sympathize with the move back to his brothers—even though normally any audience appreciates or at least sympathizes in some fashion with a primary commitment to family.
This positioning of sentiment against Clarence warrants special attention because of the interpretive history of the relationship between Genesis 22 and Judges 11, where the story of Jepthah is recounted.23 Jepthah was the general/father who made a vow to God that he would sacrifice whatever he saw first if God gave him victory over the Ammonites. What he saw first was his own daughter. His insistence on keeping this oath has long been compared to Abraham’s absolute willingness to kill Isaac, but it is usually read as a horribly overeager impulse to make a deal with a God who has not called, unlike in Genesis 22, for any such gesture.
In having Clarence refer here to Jepthah’s insistence on keeping his oath as impious, then, Shakespeare clearly contrasts Clarence’s decision to side with his own—rather than sacrifice his own—to Henry’s more complicated Abrahamic posture at the beginning and, indeed, throughout the play. In one of Shakespeare’s few direct references to Abraham in Richard III, Clarence’s brother will say of the boys killed in the tower that they rest in “Abraham’s bosom” (4.3.38)—refashioning his own murder of children to mock, perhaps, the imagined Abraham-like piety of the Lancasters. That Shakespeare casts his villains as pointing to Jepthah as a sacrificial model should give us pause. What always contrasts with the overeager and thus impious impulse of Jepthah is Abraham’s true willingness to give. The latter is easily misunderstood or misrepresented, and Jepthahs—as Prince Hamlet will explain via Polonius (2.2.409–10)—abound. To identify the true Abrahamic stance is difficult; sometimes it can be done only by contrast, as one can glimpse the gift only by thinking of exchange.
Those who side with their own may win—temporarily—but in this play Shakespeare seems to be thinking through or realizing the possibilities of maintaining an Abrahamic stance. Sacrificing or being willing to sacrifice your own isn’t always just unnatural, crazy, or irreligious piety, and so on. It is the price of extending out to something “Other,” such as justice or peace or a model of sovereignty not grounded in violence. To reiterate, though, this stance—like the character of Henry—is not something to celebrate or admire. Rather, Shakespeare seems to understand this religious posture much as Derrida does, as something of a structural and unavoidable necessity.
While Henry VI’s gesture—like Abraham’s—seems initially shocking and unnatural and mad, it is also, in the words of Derrida, the “most common everyday thing”—that which we cannot avoid, that which is “inscribed in the structure of our existence to the extent of no longer constituting an event.”24 As I discussed in the introduction, Derrida argues that we are all sacrificing like Abraham every day. Genesis 22, he acknowledges—a father sacrificing a son for a mysterious, abstract call of some kind—“is no doubt monstrous, outrageous, barely conceivable,” (Kant, again, was scandalized.) “But a duty or responsibility links me to my son as other while that same duty to mine puts me into conflict with my duty to many others, infinite others, justice itself.” “How,” Derrida asks simply, “would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years, whereas other cats die of hunger every instant?”25 Shakespeare wrestles with this Abrahamic paradox as he struggles dramatically with depicting the War of the Roses.
If I choose my own (an other person), Henry realizes, I must sacrifice others. If I choose others or something abstractly “Other”—like a sense of justice and peace—I must sacrifice my own. The tension, Shakespeare seems to realize dramatically (even as Derrida will later realize philosophically), is irreconcilable.
Henry’s willingness, then, to give over his son in the early moments of the play needs to be recalibrated as something other than weakness. It needs to be understood, at minimum, in terms of Hall’s original rendering of the dynastic shift as a positive, peaceful political process—rather than a violent and cowardly disinheritance of a son. Shakespeare did not refashion Hall’s positive description of the dynastic shift to critique it in the terms of Margaret or Clifford (or much of Shakespeare scholarship); rather he refashioned it to understand it in religious terms, the terms of Abraham—terms he came to via Hall’s description of Rutland’s murder.
If we are to think of Shakespeare’s Henry as weak, it is both more accurate and productive to think of this weakness in terms of a weak sovereignty as discussed by John Caputo, a sovereignty with minimal force or violence. One could say that in his dramatic imagination at this point in his career Shakespeare is trying to think through weak sovereignty in religious terms.
His infrequently staged (and read) King John opens immediately with the problem of sovereign legitimacy, the difficulty of imagining a sovereignty not dependent purely on force or greater violence.26 The French ambassador, Chatillion, about to challenge John’s kingship in favor of John’s young nephew, Arthur, refers to John’s position as “borrowed majesty” in the fourth line. This insinuation immediately elicits an irritated reaction from Eleanor, John’s strong-willed mother: “A strange beginning: ‘borrowed majesty’” (1.1.5).
But the scene quickly reveals that even Eleanor has some doubts about King John’s place on the throne. While John believes his “strong possession” and “right” argue for him, his mother secretly cautions, “Your strong possession much more than your right, / Or else it must go wrong with you and me (1.1.40–41). The implication is clear. John has “strong possession” and perhaps some right (“more than your right”), but certainly not absolute right. As King Philip of France points out a bit later to King John, “Geoffrey was [your] elder brother born” and therefore Geoffrey’s young son, Arthur, according to the logic of patrilineal inheritance, rightfully claims the throne (2.1.104). John certainly recognizes Arthur’s substantial claim to the throne, a claim that threatens his reign. In the play’s most powerful scene, the king prompts his loyal supporter Hubert to kill Arthur because of the young boy’s very real claim. Cardinal Pandulph, the pope’s legate, aptly describes the sovereign situation from John’s perspective: “That John may stand, then Arthur needs must fall. / So be it, for it cannot be but so” (3.4.142).
When Hubert threatens Arthur’s life, then, Shakespeare comes very close to casting the whole question of sovereign legitimacy as a matter of violence or force. He comes very close to dramatically suggesting what a modern audience thinks it knows absolutely, certainly, without doubt: A divinely determined and just monarch is simply a fiction, one that conceals the truth of Realpolitik that the greatest exertion of violence determines sovereign authority. All sovereignty begins with an act of constituting violence, and the acts of violence that sustain that sovereignty—once established—are “lawful.”27 And in exceptional moments or states of emergency modern nation-states must consider the founding act of violence; otherwise, that act is better left shrouded in mystery.
But Shakespeare hesitates on this crucial issue of political philosophy and religion—to the utter consternation of many, particularly those who like to see the playwright as embracing the modern and secular side of things. As I pointed out in the introduction, Hubert fails to complete his rather straightforward task. Arthur dies, yes, but only in manner—an accidental fall off a “high wall,” dressed as a lowly “shipboy,” visible only to the audience—that complicates rather than secures John’s claim to the throne (4.3.1–10). Moreover, as Roland Wymer astutely has shown, Shakespeare, in a striking contrast to his probable source, the anonymous play The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, depicts the scene involving Hubert and Arthur as oddly sacrificial, distinctly evoking the language and sensibility of the Chester and Brome Abraham and Isaac plays.28 And, then, perhaps even more strangely, the playwright disallows the very sacrifice he conjures. The scene reveals, with extraordinary clarity, I think, Shakespeare’s tendency to turn to Genesis 22 to think through the most difficult questions of political theology, such as divine right and sovereign legitimacy.
In brief, for no apparent reason, and without preparing the audience, Shakespeare casts the attempt on Arthur’s life as an Abrahamic sacrifice. The scene rather surprisingly reveals that Hubert and Arthur had a familial relationship, one where Arthur once nursed Hubert. Even before Hubert announces his intent, the fatherless Arthur says to him, “I would to heaven / I were your son” (4.1.26). Hubert, exactly like Abraham in the medieval cycle plays, worries in an aside about his ability to sacrifice this boy: “If I talk to him, with his innocent prate? He will awake my mercy.”29 Arthur, like Isaac, ultimately offers himself as a willing sacrifice:
I will not struggle; I will stand stone-still.
For God’s sake, Hubert, let me not be bound:
Nay, hear me, Hubert! Drive these men away,
And I will sit as quiet as a lamb . . .
Thrust these men away, and I’ll forgive you.
(4.1.85–91)
All this is a far cry from the traditional debate over duty and conscience that takes place in The Troublesome Raigne of King John of England. In that earlier play, as Sigurd Burckhardt argues, Arthur “pleads not so much with Hubert as for him.”30 Arthur does not make the personal and emotional plea he does in Shakespeare’s play, but rather tries to convince Hubert that obeying God’s will as it exists in his conscience is more important than his duty to obey the King. Hubert, in turn, “tries to argue that he owes the King obedience and is not morally accountable for evil done by royal command.”31 Ultimately, however, after considering the threat of damnation, Hubert follows a predictable hierarchy: “My king commands; that warrant sets me free; / But God forbids; and He commandeth Kings” (4.1.75–76).
Burckhardt points out that, in contrast, Shakespeare explicitly refuses to rely on this or any system of order, degree, and authority in his version. As he has throughout the play, Shakespeare distinctly avoids positing a clear, legitimate source sovereign authority, even God. But this conscience avoidance of positing even divine sovereign authority hardly makes him particularly modern, secular, or materialist—especially when one attends to the context of Genesis 22.
On the contrary, his dramatic management of the issue points to a deeply complex and devout religious responsiveness. What could have been staged as an expedient political killing is strikingly recast as a sacrifice, and then, even more strangely perhaps, as a thwarted or failed sacrifice. Here, again, a comparison with The Troublesome Raigne is most illuminating. In the earlier play, Hubert “sets aside the instruments of blinding, saying, ‘Goe cursed tooles, your office is exempt.’” The tools of torture and death become “exempt” because of Hubert’s decision of conscience.32 In Shakespeare, however, the hot irons Hubert planned to use go mysteriously cold, briefly but importantly suggesting the role of some kind of Providence. “The fire is dead with grief,” Arthur says,
Being create for comfort, to be used
In undeserved extremes. See else yourself.
There is no malice in the burning coal;
The breath of heaven hath blown his spirit out
And strewed repentant ashes on his head.
(4.1.101–10)
Arthur suggests the inanimate “fierce fire and iron” (4.1.119) extend more mercy than Hubert. Hubert abruptly changes his mind at this point, assuring Arthur he will not harm him even though he had “sworn” and “did purpose” to burn Arthur’s eyes out with the “same very iron.”
We get a momentary glimpse of Providence here, but no more. To the extent that God intervenes in this dispute about sovereign legitimacy, he intervenes only to reject a murder that has morphed strangely into sacrifice, a sacrifice never called for or demanded.33 To the extent that we get some sense of Providence or the Divine, and we certainly do get some sense of it via Shakespeare’s use of Abraham and Isaac, it has no traffic with sovereign authority and the structural political relations of human beings. In short, Genesis 22 allows Shakespeare to imagine a paradox: a divinely inspired weak sovereign with no directed access to the Divine. To consider this imaginary engagement in full, we must turn to Richard II.