THE GENERAL ATTITUDE to the three parts of Henry VI underwent a change when Peter Alexander demonstrated1 that The Contention and The True Tragedy were not sources, written by a group of dramatists, of the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI, but piratical versions of those plays. Critics began to speak more kindly of the dramatic qualities of the plays, and even to find in them a typically Shakespearian philosophy of history.2 The plays, moreover, to everyone’s surprise, proved to be stage-worthy, not merely in the Barton adaptation at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, but also in the comparatively straight versions of the trilogy used at the Old Vic and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, as well as in the television adaptation, The Age of Kings.
The demonstration that The Contention and The True Tragedy were not sources did not in itself prove that Shakespeare was the sole author of the trilogy or that he did not base it on the work of others. The most natural interpretation of Greene’s attack on Shakespeare in A Groatsworth of Wit – if indeed Greene wrote that pamphlet –3 was that it was an accusation of plagiarism;4 although it could mean simply that an actor without a university education was presuming to imitate and rival the University Wits. John Dover Wilson in his edition of the plays argued that Greene wrote them with the help of Nashe, and that they were revised by Shakespeare. A. S. Cairncross, the editor of the other chief modern edition, believes that Shakespeare wrote all three plays and that they were not revisions of the work of others. The difficulty of Wilson’s theory is that scholars disagree on the identity of the authors involved and on their respective shares. If one examines the extraordinary divergencies with regard to Part I, for example, one will be impressed again by the vanity of dogmatizing. Tucker Brooke thought the play was by Peele and Shakespeare, a view shared by A. W. Pollard. Allison Gaw believed that six authors were involved in the composition of the play. Hart detected traces of Greene, Peele, Nashe, and Shakespeare. E. K. Chambers discerned Peele and Shakespeare, and traces of Greene in two scenes of Act V. Dover Wilson ascribed the whole of Act I to Nashe, and most of the rest of the play to Greene, with many scenes revised by Shakespeare. There are indeed only three scenes in the whole play which Dover Wilson, Chambers, and Hart agree to ascribe to Shakespeare:5 II. iv, v, and IV. ii.
There is an obvious danger of crediting to Shakespeare those scenes or passages we happen to like, and of handing over to Nashe, Greene, or Peele (or Marlowe, or Lodge) what we regard as inferior. Shakespeare by including the scenes of others in his revision made himself responsible for them.6 The parallels with Nashe’s work, accumulated by Dover Wilson, are less impressive when we consider that he found many echoes of Nashe in 1 Henry IV and had to postulate his hand in the source of that play; and one has to remember that there are parallels between Nashe’s works and other Shakespearian plays. No one has suggested that Nashe wrote the Ur-Hamlet or that he collaborated in Love’s Labour’s Lost.7
As Dover Wilson admits,8 parallels are not necessarily a proof of common authorship. The young Shakespeare, being an actor as well as a poet, naturally absorbed the stylistic tricks of the plays in which he had performed; and when he began to write, especially if a script was urgently required, he would drop into the mannerisms of the University Wits.9 It is seldom possible to distinguish between Greene’s authentic work, Shakespeare’s revision of it, and Shakespeare’s original writing in the manner of Greene.
There is a further complication. We do not know whether Henslowe’s entry about ‘harey the vi’, which attracted crowds to the Rose Theatre early in 1592, and is marked ‘ne’ by him on 3 March, is a reference to 1 Henry VI or to some other play; and we do not know to which play, if there were two, Nashe refers in Pierce Penilesse, before 8 August of the same year, where he praises scenes concerned with Talbot.10 Those who believe that the three parts of Henry VI were written in chronological sequence must assume that the Henslowe reference is not to ‘Shakespeare’s’ play, while those who believe that the Henslowe play was the one we know, and that it was indeed new, are driven to assume that 1 Henry VI was written after the other two parts. The rival views are stated effectively and at length by Dover Wilson and Cairncross in their editions of the plays, and there is no need for us to cover the same ground. My own views may be summarized: (1) I accept the views of Alexander and Cairncross that the second and third parts were wholly Shakespeare’s, and that he was not rewriting plays by Greene or Peele; (2) I accept Dover Wilson’s view that 1 Henry VI was written after the other two parts; and that (3) Part I is not wholly Shakespeare’s. Dover Wilson advances what seem to be strong arguments to show that the author (or authors) of Parts 2 and 3 were ignorant of Part I.11 It is true that these are links between Part I and the others – notably Suffolk’s final speech12 – but this can be explained by the fact that the author knew what was coming in Part 2, since that play had already been performed.
The strongest arguments against Shakespeare’s sole authorship of Part I are neither the appearance of Greene’s favourite turns of phrase nor the alleged echoes of Nashe, but rather the inconsistency of characterization, the alternation of competence and incompetence, and the weakness of construction. Hereward Price in his valuable essay, Construction in Shakespeare, argued that Shakespeare was greatly superior to all the University Wits in his power of dramatic construction, a verdict with which we may agree. It is even applicable to the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI. It is manifestly not applicable to Part I.13 Geoffrey Bullough, who believes that Shakespeare wrote it all, has to admit:
The play does not follow the sequence in the chronicles but darts about the period in a bewildering way … until it seems that 1 Henry VI is not so much a Chronicle play as a fantasia on historical themes.
(III. 25)
Although playing fast and loose with historical fact, it might still be an excellently constructed play. What is more significant is the way in which its authors seem ignorant of each other’s contributions. In the first scene Rouen and Orleans are lost to the French; but the English still occupy Orleans in Act II and Rouen in Act III.
An obvious case of lack of co-ordination concerns Falstaff. In the first scene we are told of his cowardice at the battle of Patay. In I. iv Talbot complains of it, and much later, in IV. i, he strips him of the order of the Garter because of his conduct at Patay. But in between these scenes, in III. ii, Falstaff runs away out of cowardice, and this duplicates the Patay incident. It is incredible that the same author could be responsible for this scene as for the others.
One other preliminary point has to be made. Thirty years elapsed between the first performances of the three parts of Henry VI and their inclusion in the First Folio. How often they were performed in the interval we do not know, but when Henry V was written, Shakespeare referred in the epilogue to the popularity of the earlier plays. It is very unlikely that no changes were made in the text when the plays were revived. There are, in fact, two passages in the last two scenes of Part 2, which stand out from their contexts. One is Young Clifford’s discovery of his father’s body during the battle of St Albans:
Shame and confusion! All is on the rout;
Fear frames disorder, and disorder wounds
Where it should guard. O war, thou son of hell,
Whom angry heavens do make their minister,
Throw in the frozen bosoms of our part
Hot coals of vengeance! Let no soldier fly.
He that is truly dedicate to war
Hath no self-love; nor he that loves himself
Hath not essentially, but by circumstance
The name of valour. [Sees his father’s body.
O, let the vile world end
And the premised flames of the last day
Knit earth and heaven together!
Now let the general trumpet blow his blast,
Particularities and petty sounds
To cease! Wast thou ordain’d, dear father,
To lose thy youth in peace and to achieve
The silver livery of advised age,
And in thy reverence and thy chair-days thus
To die in ruffian battle? Even at the sight
My heart is turn’d to stone; and while ’tis mine
It shall be stony. York not our old men spares;
No more will I their babes. Tears virginal
Shall be to me even as the dew to fire;
And beauty, that the tyrant oft reclaims,
Shall to my flaming wrath be oil and flax.
Henceforth I will not have to do with pity.14
(V. ii. 31–56)
The style of these lines surely belongs to a period at least five years after the composition of the rest of the play. Gloucester’s soliloquies in Part 3, splendid as they are, belong to an earlier stratum and they are reported fairly accurately in the piratical text of the play. Young Clifford’s lines have left no trace, although the more conventional lines which follow have.
As Holinshed and Grafton often copied Hall, it is sometimes impossible to tell which of the three was being used; but it is certain that all three were used. In addition, it can be shown that the authors used Fabyan’s Chronicle in Part I and that Shakespeare used Foxe’s Acts and Monuments in the other two parts. The consultation of several different works for a single play is in accordance with Shakespeare’s usual practice, as already exhibited in The Taming of the Shrew and The Comedy of Errors, so that this fact cannot be used as evidence of multiple authorship. But in view of the doubts expressed above about the authorship of Part I, it would be hazardous to draw any conclusions from that play about Shakespeare’s use of his sources. It so happens that the Temple-Gardens scene – one of the three ascribed by nearly all critics to Shakespeare – has no known source and was presumably invented by him to symbolize the beginnings of the Wars of the Roses, as the entry of the son who has killed his father and the father who has killed his son in Part 3 symbolizes its results in human misery. The next scene generally ascribed to Shakespeare (II. v) could be based on Hall or on Holinshed. There are no verbal echoes of either, but Shakespeare’s indebtedness to the Chronicles is shown by the way he follows them in their confusion of one Edmund Mortimer, who was never imprisoned, with another Edmund, his uncle, who was imprisoned by Glendower and afterwards married his captor’s daughter, as we know from 1 Henry IV. This scene, too, was dramatically necessary to link the Henry VI trilogy with the ultimate cause of the Wars of the Roses in the deposition of Richard II. If Part 1 was written after the other two parts, there was an obvious need to introduce the theme of civil war, which is the sole theme of the plays already written. If, on the other hand, Part 1 was written first, Shakespeare’s revision of it may have been to forge the links with the other two plays.
The third ‘Shakespearian’ scene is IV. ii, although it is not different in kind, perhaps, from other Talbot scenes in Act IV. These scenes are historically out of sequence since Talbot was killed in 1453, more than twenty-two years after the burning of Joan, whereas in the play Joan’s capture occurs after Talbot’s death. The Talbots, moreover, were killed at Castillon, not at Bordeaux which had been recaptured by the English in 1451. In IV. ii, on the other hand, Bordeaux is relieved by the approach of the Dauphin’s army. These changes were made to enhance the stature of Talbot, the virtual hero of Part 1, and to suggest indirectly that his defeat was due to witchcraft. Joan’s insults over his body and that of his son, Talbot’s attempt to persuade his son to flee (Scene v,) and his son’s refusal are based on Hall, though without verbal echoes. Although Chambers thought the scene was by Peele, it seems to look forward to the scene in which Aumerle is pardoned in Richard II, another scene where an alien hand used to be suspected.15
| John. | The world will say he is not Talbot’s blood |
That basely fled when noble Talbot stood.
| Tal. | Fly to revenge my death, if I be slain. |
| John. | He that flies so will ne’er return again. |
| Tal. | If we both stay, we both are sure to die. |
| John. | Then let me stay; and, father, do you fly. |
Your loss is great, so your regard should be;
My worth unknown, no loss is known in me;
Upon my death the French can little boast;
In yours they will, in you all hopes are lost.
Flight cannot stain the honour you have won;
But mine it will, that no exploit have done;
You fled for vantage, every one will swear;
But if I bow, they’ll say it was for fear.
There is no hope that ever I will stay
If the first hour I shrink and run away.
Here, on my knee, I beg mortality,
Rather than life preserv’d with infamy.
| Tal. | Shall all thy mother’s hopes lie in one tomb? |
| John. | Ay, rather than I’ll shame my mother’s womb. |
| Tal. | Upon my blessing I command thee go. |
| John. | To fight I will, but not to fly the foe. |
| Tal. | Part of thy father may be sav’d in thee. |
| John. | No part of him but will be shame in me. |
(IV. v. 16–39)
Part 2, as we have seen, is based almost wholly on Hall’s Chronicle, except for the scene of the bogus miracle which derives ultimately from More’s Dialogue of the Veneration and Worship of Images, but immediately from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Shakespeare disposes his material in a masterly way, with Duke Humphrey as the central figure, the patriot whose criticism of the marriage settlement arranged by Suffolk makes enemies of Suffolk and the Queen; whose ambitious wife makes him vulnerable; and whose murder is followed by the banishment and killing of Suffolk, and the horrifying death of the Cardinal, his third enemy. The misgovernment of the realm by self-seeking nobles and saintly King enables York to obtain support from the Nevilles in his claim to the throne.
Shakespeare makes a number of changes, although his general account conforms to that of Hall, the loss of France having been dealt with in Part I. He makes York’s acceptance of the Irish appointment a deliberate plan to obtain an army; he conflates York’s two attempts to seize power, historically separated by several years, and omits his imprisonment on the failure of the first attempt. The structure of the play is tightened up by the working out of the prophecies of the spirit raised by Margery Jourdain and Bolingbroke – Suffolk being killed by Walter (pronounced Water) Whitmore, and Somerset slain at the battle of St Albans, under an ale-house sign of a castle.
The first mention of Cade by York in III. i as stubborn and brave does not fully conform with Hall’s portrait of the rebel as ‘of a goodly stature, and pregnaunt wit’ a good general, ‘sober in communicacion, wyse in disputyng, arrogant in hart, and styfe in his opinion’;16 but in Act IV Shakespeare departs still further from his source, depicting a sinister buffoon. Whether the denigration of Cade was caused, as some believe, by Shakespeare’s innate conservatism, or by the fear of the censorship which afterwards prevented the performance of Sir Thomas More, the black comedy of these scenes is brilliantly designed to bring out the chaos caused by the feuding nobles.
One other alteration may be mentioned. Hall makes no suggestion that Suffolk and Margaret were lovers. Shakespeare shows them mutually attracted when they first meet, but Suffolk decides to conceal his love; but when they finally part their expressions of love cast a retrospective light on their whole relationship.
Here, no doubt, as with Cade, the characters developed in the course of composition. An even more striking example is that of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who in Part 2 is comparatively colourless, but who is developed in Part 3 into the dynamic figure of evil who was to achieve the throne as Richard III. Although Shakespeare must have known in general terms how the character was to be developed, he did not wish it to be too prominent at this stage, where York’s ambitions were his main concern.
The weakness of the play is neither in construction nor in characterization, but in the verse. Admirable as much of it is, Shakespeare had not yet learnt how to vary his style to suit the characters. They speak with eloquence, but they speak alike, and seem not so much men talking to men, as actors declaiming. Only with Cade and his followers does Shakespeare provide individual voices, and they speak in prose. Young Clifford, as we have seen, suddenly acquires an individual voice in the penultimate scene of the play; but this passage reads like a later revision.
Part 3 covers the period from the battle of St Albans in 1455 to the murder of Henry VI some sixteen years later; but we are not conscious of any great lapse of time. Shakespeare achieves this compactness by omission and telescoping. In Act I he jumps from the last event of Part 2, the battle of St Albans, to York’s death five years later; in Act II he dramatizes only the battle of Towton, others being reported, and one being omitted altogether. Act III begins with Henry’s capture on his return to England, and ends with Edward IV’s marriage in 1464. In Act IV two defeats of Edward’s forces, which took place in 1469 and 1470, are reduced to one. In Act V Shakespeare dramatizes the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, which took place in 1471, and concludes with Richard’s murder of Henry in the Tower.
The most remarkable alteration, however, concerns Part 2 as well as Part 3. York’s son, Richard, the future Richard III, was born in 1452 and was only three years old at the time of the battle of St Albans: he had been sent abroad with his brother, George. Yet in the play he is already fully adult and taking an active part in the battle. In the first act of Part 3, he persuades York to break his oath, but is not (as far as we are shown) ambitious for the crown. In Act II, when he vows to avenge his father’s death, he is a loyal and loving son rather than a conscienceless Machiavel. It is not until in. ii that Richard’s villainy is revealed, and his determination to achieve the crown by murdering his rivals. Up to that point in the play – at least if we are ignorant of the sequel – we think of Richard as one who is moved by family loyalty, concerned with avenging his father’s murder, as ruthless with the Lancastrians as they had been with the Yorkists, and perhaps illustrating the inevitable deterioration of morals, the stifling of humanity and compassion, during a prolonged war.17