Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction

The history plays written in the 1590s were set in a period distant enough for Shakespeare to consider writing without causing offence to Elizabeth I. These plays kept a respectable and politically sensible distance from the century of Elizabeth’s birth, Elizabeth’s reign and the tumultuous reign of her father. Shakespeare, perhaps wisely, didn’t write a play about Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, until approximately ten years after her death in 1603 when, in 1612–13, he wrote one in collaboration with John Fletcher, as discussed in Chapter 27. He also made some minor contributions to a collaborative play, Sir Thomas More (Henry VIII’s Chancellor), in around 1600.

Nevertheless, the Henry VI and Richard III plays concerned a history that brought the Tudors, including eventually, in 1558, Elizabeth, to power and as such had a topicality for Elizabethan audiences that Shakespeare was glad to exploit. They were a huge success at attracting audiences for a dramatist who was starting to make his fame as a playwright.

Key idea

To us, unfamiliar mostly with the characters except through his plays, it can become confusing as to which are the Lancastrians, which the Yorkists and who is who and is on whose side at whatever time in the history. Many texts of the plays, including the Arden Shakespeare, which I am using, have a chronology, a royal family tree and explanations of who is who. Similarly, when the plays are performed, the programmes usually include such material. It is useful to keep these aids at your side as you go through the plays. You may also find Appendix 3 in this book, listing the historical dates of the English monarchs, useful.

Shakespeare’s sources for the history plays

Shakespeare’s sources for the English history plays are largely a set of chronicles published or translated throughout the sixteenth century. The principal ones are those by Froissart (translated by Bernes in 1523–5), Edward Hall (1548) and Ralph Holinshed (1587). There was also Samuel Daniel’s epic poem on the history of the Civil Wars (1595?); Thomas More’s Tudor-biased historical account of Richard III (c.1513); and A Mirror for Magistrates, a historical poem sequence published in 1559 and with additional material in 1563. Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke places the Henry VI plays within their historical chronological structure from which Shakespeare develops a dramatic art of counterpointing, which is employed throughout the history plays. Also, although the first tetralogy deals with a single stretch of time, it is probable that Shakespeare completed 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI before he wrote, probably in collaboration with Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) and others, 1 Henry VI. (See Chapter 12.)

King Henry VI parts 1–3

The Henry VI plays have demonstrated, through modern performance and adaptation, that they are theatrically adept and engrossing in production. Despite each part having its own integrity, they can together tell a good story in a series of episodes which modern audiences, familiar with box-set series perhaps on television or DVD, enjoy.

In the early 1960s, at the time of the Cold War in which the USA and the Soviet Union were squaring up to each other, Peter Hall and John Barton adapted the three Henry VI plays into two and added Richard III as a sequence entitled The Wars of the Roses. They saw the plays as involving polar opposites, inevitably attracting and colliding with one another. Everything stemmed back, however, to the deposition of Richard II:

‘Underlying these plays is the curse on the House of Lancaster. Bolingbroke deposed Richard II to become Henry IV. Richard II was a weak and sometimes bad king, unbalanced; he could not order the body politic. Yet for Shakespeare his deposition is a wound in the body politic that festers through reign after reign, a sin which can only be expiated by the letting of quantities of blood. The bloody totalitarianism of Richard III is the expiation of England.’

Hall, P. (1970: xiii), The Wars of the Roses. London: BBC Books, 1970

In a letter to John Barton concerning the ‘first play’ in the adaptation, Peter Hall writes of exposing a movement found ‘from the opposition between two principles, one patriotic and constructive, but misguided, the other destructive and selfish. There’s a feeling of growing disaster. There’s the antithesis and interplay between strife and concord, peace and war, at home and abroad’ (Hall, P. [1970: xx]).

Later interpretations of Henry VI at Shakespeare’s Globe in London as well as at the RSC have either placed the plays in a historical context or emphasized elements of subversion contained in their representation of the growing inefficacy and instability of monarchical ritual. In the decade following the turn of the millennium, Michael Boyd, then Artistic Director of the RSC, embarked on an adventurous panoramic, if perhaps controversial, view of Shakespeare’s English history plays, rehearsing and producing both cycles ‘in the order that they were written and in the order in which Shakespeare’s audience would have seen them, thus giving us an insight into Shakespeare’s journey as a writer, and a deeper understanding of his developing view of England and its history’ (programme note, 2007–8 season).

This was somewhat in contrast to Adrian Noble’s 1988 adaptation of Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III into The Plantagenets, in which he noted the ‘apparently cavalier way’ in which Shakespeare as ‘a writer of fiction…refused to worship at the shrine of actuality’. For Noble, ‘Shakespeare’s primary purpose in the plays is moral’, especially in being ‘explicit in its condemnation of civil war’ (Noble, A. [1989: viii–ix], Introduction, The Plantagenets. London and Boston: Faber & Faber).

In 1994 Katie Mitchell produced another adaptation for the RSC: Henry VI: The Battle for the Throne. In 1977, however, Terry Hands had bravely directed the Henry VI plays without adaptation, in a sequential production that demonstrated how a short space of time can change interpretations. Whereas in the 1960s Hall and Barton’s work had been influenced by big power oppositional politics, Hands in the 1970s saw his characters as self-aggrandizing, petty people squabbling over and with power at the cost of ordinary people. In 2013 Henry VI, as Harry the Sixth; The House of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of the Duke of York, was produced by Shakespeare’s Globe in London and on tour in productions of the three plays as individual units, the programme noting that their original titles ‘make it clear that they are not a trilogy’ but they were conveniently placed as such by Heminges and Condell in the First Folio. As noted above, the order of composition is uncertain, especially in relation to Part 1. So it was only fitting that Shakespeare’s Globe, with some strong productions of the individual plays, raised the issue of historical sequencing through performance.

The character of Henry VI overall, as Julia Briggs has pointed out, ‘recalls Erasmus’s gentle, passive and unworldly ruler’, in contrast with Machiavelli’s view that an effective ruler is required to be able to address the world of ‘tough, competitive power politics’ (Briggs, J. [1977: 207–8]).

1 Henry VI deals with England’s loss of its overseas territory and with the downfall of its national hero the Earl of Talbot. In 2 Henry VI, where the emphasis is more on domestic politics, we witness the comic yet pertinent uprising of Jack Cade, which presages some of the issues that occur in King John (1595–7), over the authenticity of inheritance, succession and authority. In a humorous scene, Jack Cade claims to be a Plantagenet and that his wife is ‘descended of the Lacies’. These claims are comically undermined by Dick the Butcher, who in a series of asides mocks the rebel leader as in, for example, the claim for his wife: ‘She was indeed a pedlar’s daughter and sold many laces’ (4.2.42f.). It is Jack the Butcher who also gets unfailing predictable laughs from the audience for his suggestion ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’ (4.2.72). But all this is expressed comically, and seen as such by the audience, even though the poor Clerk, after examination by Cade, is led away to be hanged because he confesses that he can read and write.

The scene, though a pantomime expression of discontent and the dangers of civil disturbance, presaged perhaps the episode in Julius Caesar (Act 3, Scene 3) where, with a greater touch of sombre realism, Cinna the Poet is mistaken by the rabble as one of the conspirators and murdered. In both cases, popular unruliness is offered as a symptom of a larger disorder. The plight of the common man, however, is put in a more pertinent perspective in 3 Henry VI (Act 2, Scene 5), where the weak King Henry VI enters the stage alone and ruminates on the fortunes of the battle and how the thrones of York and Lancaster seem to be of equal strength.

Counterpointing and juxtapositioning

Sitting on a ‘molehill’, the King wishes to be no more than a ‘homely swain’ (3 Henry VI, 2.5.22), someone not involved in politics and responsibility but rather a man able to count the hours and plan out his quiet life: ‘Ah, what a life were this! how sweet! how lovely!’ (2.5.41).

As he meditates on this comforting domesticity, a young man enters, dragging the body of a soldier he has just killed in battle. The young man rifles the body for booty and as he does so he uncovers the face:

Who’s this? O God! it is my father’s face,

Whom in this conflict I unwares have kill’d.

O heavy times, begetting such events!

From London by the King was I press’d forth;

My father, being the Earl of Warwick’s man,

Came on the part of York, press’d by his master;

And I, who at his hands receiv’d my life,

Have by my hands of life bereaved him.

Pardon me, God, I knew not what I did:

(2.5.61–9)

The son grieves, as does the King witnessing his distress:

O piteous spectacle! O bloody times!

…

Weep, wretched man; I’ll aid thee tear for tear;

And let our hearts and eyes, like civil war,

Be blind with tears, and break o’ercharg’d with grief.

(2.5.73, 76–8)

As the King weeps, an older man enters carrying the body of a soldier and, rifling the body, similarly uncovers the face:

Is this our foeman’s face?

Ah, no, no, no; it is mine only son!

Ah, boy, if any life be left in thee,

Throw up thine eye!

…

O, pity, God, this miserable age!

What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly,

Erroneous, mutinous and unnatural,

This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!

(2.5.82–5, 88–91)

Again, the King grieves and wishes that his own death might stop the warring factions. It appears a fatuous desire.

Spotlight

Shakespeare, with this scene – and, as we will see later with Falstaff’s diatribe against honour (1 Henry IV, 5.1.127–41) and with the soldier Michael Williams’ warning (Henry V, 4.1.132–44) of the King’s responsibility for the souls of those killed in battle – expresses something of the common man caught up in the power games of kings. Counterpointing by the juxtaposition of experiences and attitudes reveals, thereby, an understanding of the social condition of ordinary people. So in Henry V the King’s heroic call to battle, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more’, ending ‘Cry “God for Harry! England and Saint George!”’ (Henry V, 3.1.1–34), is immediately parodied in the following scene by Bardolph, Nym, Pistol and the Boy.

BARDOLPH	On, on, on, on, on, to the breach, to the breach!
NYM	Pray thee, Corporal, stay; the knocks are too hot, and for mine own part I have not a case of lives. The humour of it is too hot, that is the very plain-song of it.
PISTOL	The plain-song is most just, for humours do abound,
	Knocks go and come, God’s vassals drop and die,
	And sword and shield
	In bloody field
	Doth win immortal fame.
BOY	Would I were in an alehouse in London! I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety.
	(Henry V, 3.2.1–11)

Note here the comical fivefold repetition of ‘On’, and the fact that Shakespeare moves from verse into prose and then doggerel of the kind that Bottom uses in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The simple, naively honest expression of the Boy’s desire is indicative of the way in which Shakespeare invests the history plays with a human viewpoint in the face of the miseries and tragedies that are unfolding. Civil war in the Henry VI plays is not just about the aristocratic classes, political ineptitude or ambition, since decisions made affect everyone whether or not they are educated or have access to power.

Richard III

Historically, Richard the crookback, having been defeated at the Battle of Bosworth (1485) by Henry VII, became the butt of Tudor propaganda. His deformity symbolizes and caricatures evil, which from the opening of the play allows for virtuoso acting that has attracted the greatest actors of successive generations.

ADDRESSING THE AUDIENCE

Uniquely for Shakespeare, the play opens with the protagonist acting as a chorus – which is also a commentator on his own intrigue and evil – entering the stage alone to confide in his audience:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York;

(1.1.1f.)

Richard’s soliloquy sets the framework for the play, taking the audience into the character’s confidence as he plays and toys with them as he reveals what he is and what he intends to do:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain,

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,

To set my brother Clarence and the King

In deadly hate, the one against the other:

(1.1.28–35)

To this extent Richard is in control of the narrative for the first four acts of the play.

Reminiscent of Iago in the later play Othello, Richard audaciously proclaims to the audience at the end of the scene that he’ll ‘marry Warwick’s youngest daughter–/What though I kill’d her husband and her father?’ In the next scene he proceeds to woo Lady Anne successfully, despite her condemning him as a ‘dreadful minister of hell!’, a ‘lump of foul deformity’, a ‘Villain (that)…know’st no law of God nor man’ (1.2.46, 57, 70). He keeps her talking, perseveres, offers her his sword to kill him, or offers to kill himself, and persuades her to agree. Once she has left the stage, he turns and confides in the audience with incredulous, humorous relish:

Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?

Was ever woman in this humour won?

I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long.

What, I that kill’d her husband and his father:

To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,

With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,

The bleeding witness of her hatred by,

Having God, her conscience, and those bars against me –

(1.2.232–9f.)

Spotlight

Shakespeare creates this character’s outrageous impudence through his direct interaction with the audience, which draws us into the character’s confidence, relishing with him the arrogance of his self-proclaimed enjoyment and pride in his evil – ‘I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long.’ The audience recognizes this as a disgraceful statement and yet unfailingly laughs at it. We appreciate and enjoy Richard’s outrageous manipulation, but we are also being manipulated by Shakespeare. This is not Richard’s art but the art of the dramatist.

There is little sympathy for Lady Anne at this point, in contrast to Katherine of Aragon’s predicament in the later collaborative play Henry VIII (1613), because here Shakespeare’s focus is on the dexterity of the evil villain. Some critics, for example Bernard Spivak, see Richard in this respect as a secularized adaptation of the medieval Vice figure from the medieval morality plays. Other critical perspectives have challenged this view, but the old Vice figure was comic in his audacious declaration and sought to establish a close bond with audiences, all of which Richard, Duke of Gloucester does.

‘His weeping and laughter do not by themselves establish the archaic source of Richard’s performance, but they confirm it, alongside his other unmistakable tricks of language and behavior. The dominant trait in his descent appears in the unnaturalistic dimension of his role, in the repetitious and gratuitous deceit surviving out of the old Christian metaphor, in the homiletic method of the timeless personification. It is the inspirational force of the method itself that gives birth to Richard’s wooing of Lady Anne, for which there is no hint in the chronicles (Shakespeare’s sources). That scene has its origin in theatrical convention, not in history, and its dramatic caliber sufficiently explains the playwright’s recourse to the old dramaturgy. His caliber explains the great energy and brilliance we discover in this flashing version of the transformed Vice.’

Spivak, B. (1958: 406–7), Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil. New York and London: Columbia University Press

DE CASIBUS TRAGEDY

Richard III is not just a history play in the sense of the chronicle history plays that preceded it. Some might argue that it is part of Tudor propaganda, reinforcing the Tudors’ legitimacy and authority. There is little doubt that Shakespeare was influenced by Sir Thomas More’s historical account of Richard III, written during the reign of Henry VIII. The play, however, although it has historically determined the perception of Richard III for generations, also provides an opportunity for the actor playing the protagonist. Within the context of what is termed de casibus tragedy (see Chapter 16), Richard III demonstrates the rise and fall of the protagonist.

Through the course of the play, Richard moves from the role of manipulative, intimidating and insinuating villain assisted by Buckingham, into that of the King practised in the art of counterfeit. Indeed, he is the consummate actor, who inadvertently exposes the ways in which power invests heavily in theatrical performance. He encourages Buckingham to do likewise, saying:

Come, cousin, canst thou quake and change thy colour,

Murder thy breath in middle of a word,

And then again begin, and stop again,

As if thou were distraught and mad with terror?

To which Buckingham replies:

Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian,

Speak, and look back, and pry on every side,

Tremble and start at wagging of a straw,

Intending deep suspicion.

(3.5.1–8)

But once he gains the crown, Richard loses control of the narrative and the wheel of fortune turns. The play now takes a different course until, haunted by the ghosts of those he’s murdered (including Buckingham), Richard is brought to despair on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth, where he ends on the battlefield famously crying out, ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ (5.4.7).

King John

Whether King John was written before or after Richard III is not entirely certain but it, too, has a comic side that comes through in performance. There is, however, a difference in that Shakespeare’s focus in King John is not mainly on the King, to create a virtuoso acting role, as in Richard III, but on the surrounding events. Here it is the bastard Falconbridge who takes on the role of the protagonist, as the King had in Richard III, and in addition to the decrying of ‘commodity’ Falconbridge is tolerated because he is part of the opposition to the power of the Pope.

King John appears to have been a successful play in Elizabethan England and certainly it proved popular in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, however, it did not greatly appeal. For mid-twentieth-century production it had neither the heroism of Henry V nor the comic villainy of Richard III. ‘What a bad play this is! All about a war in which it is not possible to take the slightest interest’, wrote the theatre critic James Agate in 1941. In 1924 he had written, ‘One does not pretend that the play has no good bits. There are one or two exquisite bits.’

‘King John is a character at once odious and weak…Shakespeare…had little taste for the spineless, and therefore wrote this play, not about, but round King John, whom he leaves mum in the middle of the stage whilst everybody else, including that old bore, Pandalph, talks his head off. And when John does talk it is all wind…One of the reasons why this play is so seldom acted is the difficulty of doing much with the title role.’

Agate, J. (1943: 89, 86), Brief Chronicles: A Survey of the Plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans in Actual Performance. London: Cape

INFIGHTING

Historically, and particularly since the nineteenth century, the reign of King John is known in the Western world for the signing of the Magna Carta. Although historically it was an agreement between the King and his barons, it has become indicative of the start of an evolution towards democratic governance, which extends centuries later to include the creation of the USA. Ironically, however, the Magna Carta does not figure in the play, although some modern productions insert some reference to it.

King John’s reign, historically, stands apart from the English history plays. To some extent, Shakespeare emphasizes the theatrical element rather than the political polemics, but does not, as in Richard III, exploit this in the context of de casibus tragedy. Rather he explores, as in the Henry VI plays, the infighting over power and questions of ‘truth’ and ‘authority’.

Whereas in 2 Henry VI, Jack Cade absurdly claims his royal heritage, in King John the issue of claims and reality becomes a major focus. Where in the history of King John is the truth behind the claims to the English throne? John’s proclamation of his right is that he is the one who occupies the throne. His nephew Arthur’s claim is that he is really the first in line. So whom do the people follow? The character of Hubert stands on the walls of the French town of Angiers, being besieged by the forces of the rival claimants, and he proclaims ‘…we are the king of England’s subjects:/For him, and in his right, we hold this town.’ John replies: ‘Acknowledge then the king, and let me in.’ But in reply Hubert demands proof of authority:

That can we not; but he that proves the king,

To him will we prove loyal: till that time

Have we ramm’d up our gates against the world.

(2.1.269–72)

So the town of Angiers watches as men fight and die to prove legitimacy and, again, they are similarly asked ‘…who’s your king?’ to receive the reply ‘The King of England, when we know the King’ (2.1.362–3).

LEGITIMACY AND AUTHORITY; TRUTH AND THE LAW

The issue is over the legitimacy and authority of the rival claims; John’s coronation hasn’t persuaded them that he is king; nor has France’s argument in favour of Arthur. So where is the proof of legitimate authority? It is then that the bastard son of Richard Coeur de Lion, who sees through the various claims and what motivates them, pragmatically advises the rival forces to unite and take the town. Arguments of legitimacy can be put to one side and authority is demonstrated by force when townspeople quibble.

The Bastard’s authority is like the Alexandrian order to cut the Gordian knot. Truth is irrelevant in the face of brute force or pragmatic politics. In the opening scene, the Bastard claims possession of his father’s lands that have been given to the second son, Robert, on the basis of a deathbed revelation that the elder boy ‘was none of his’ (1.1.111), but that is challenged by King John telling Robert ‘…your brother is legitimate;/ Your father’s wife did after wedlock bear him…’ (116–17), but the Bastard, on being recognized to have the features of a possible illegitimate son of Coeur de Lion, gives up his inheritance to follow John. Opportunism, pragmatism and ambition win the day, no matter whose son he is.

Spotlight

When is the truth law? Is it with the word of the king? Is it with the word of God? John is excommunicated by the Pope, through the words of Cardinal Pandulph. Who has the greater authority, the reigning King or the Pope? John proclaims himself to be supreme head of the Church in defiance of Rome and orders that the monasteries should give up their wealth. So John’s history presages Henry VIII’s revolt against Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and his declaration of ecclesiastical independence.

RELEVANCE TO TUDOR ENGLAND

Although more historically distant from Shakespeare in time than either the subject of Henry VI or Richard III, King John is nevertheless concerned with issues close to the Tudor England in which Shakespeare lived, and he constructs a series of parallels with which his Queen would no doubt have concurred.

‘Nineteenth-century readers first noticed the plot’s correspondence to events in the 1580s; the problem is whether the Elizabethans noticed it. Elizabeth I’s right to the throne was challenged, as John’s is in the play. She inherited from a sister, he from a brother. Her legitimacy was questioned, and she was under papal excommunication, so that the Armada of 1588 was under the same sanction as the Dauphin’s forces in the play. Mary, Queen of Scots, like Arthur, was a legitimate claimant to the throne, supported by France and the Church. Like John, Elizabeth issued a kind of indirect death warrant, and she disowned the state servant who carried it out as John disowns Hubert. Shortly after Mary’s death, the Catholic powers tried to invade England and depose Elizabeth; as in the play, the attack was beaten off by English valour, and finally scattered by violent storms.’

Brownlow, F. W. (1977: 93), Two Shakespearean Sequences. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan

Critical debates, however, continue about how much weight to place on the historical parallels found in the play with the Elizabethan political situation immediately prior to and contemporaneous with its composition, but to my mind these connections are quite evident. Shakespeare may have diluted the overt Protestant polemic of his source play but the conflict with papal authority is manifest. Interestingly, in 2015 the Shakespeare’s Globe production of the play began with incense and ritual.

ENGAGING THE MODERN AUDIENCE

King John is not a tragedy but an exploration of chronicle history with much humour, even farce, some terror and diplomacy. It is an entertainment and, remarkably, one that in its historicity still has the power of narrative to engage with modern audiences, who also enjoy modern works such as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall both as a novel and as a television adaptation. Over the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the play has had number of contemporary revivals, often emphasizing its comic elements. It is a play that comes in and out of fashion as the appetite for social humour lessens or heightens, in contrast with the virtuoso acting tradition of a play such as Richard III, but it is a play that deserves more attention than it usually receives.