Henry VI

2012 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

“Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks
or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

The version of Henry VI and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-1-58836-887-4

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v3.1

Cover

Title Page

Introduction to the Three Parts of Henry VI

After Agincourt

Sequence and Authorship

Henry VI Part I: Key Facts

Henry VI Part II: Key Facts

Henry VI Part III: Key Facts

Henry VI Part III

Synopses of the Plots of Henry VI Part I, Part II, and Part III

Henry VI in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of Henry VI: An Overview

At the RSC

The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Edward Hall and Michael Boyd

Designing Henry VI: Tom Piper

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

Kings and Queens of England: From the History Plays to Shakespeare’s Lifetime

The History Behind the Histories: A Chronology

Further Reading and Viewing

References

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

INTRODUCTION
TO THE THREE PARTS OF
HENRY VI

AFTER AGINCOURT

Shakespeare’s epic drama of Henry V ends with the Chorus speaking an epilogue in sonnet form. It offers a forward look that somewhat deflates the triumph of Agincourt. King Henry, the “star of England,” will live but a small time. “The world’s best garden,” having been brought to order by his charismatic arts, will soon be choked with weeds. His son will be crowned King of France and England while still an infant. So many rivals then had the managing of his state “That they lost France and made his England bleed, / Which oft our stage hath shown.” Shakespeare thus reminds his audience that his cycle of history plays is complete: the sequence from Richard II to Henry V at this point joins on to the earlier written tetralogy of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III. Sometimes gathered together in modern productions under a title such as The Wars of the Roses or The Plantagenets, these plays tell the story of England’s self-scarring and “dire division.”

In Henry VI Part I, Henry V’s miraculous conquest of France goes into reverse, despite the exploits of the noble Talbot; meanwhile civil war brews at home. In Part II, the war with France is brought to an end by the marriage of King Henry VI to Margaret of Anjou, but the weak king cannot prevent the rise of the Yorkist faction. At the beginning of Part III, the succession is surrendered to Richard Duke of York, but his ascendancy is halted on a Yorkshire battlefield, where Queen Margaret brings his life to an undignified end; his sons spend the rest of the play avenging him—and it is one of those sons, Richard of Gloucester, the future Richard III, who proves most unscrupulous and therefore most to be feared.

SEQUENCE AND AUTHORSHIP

The Romantic poet and Shakespearean commentator Samuel Taylor Coleridge did not think well of this bloody triple-header. He said of the opening lines of Part I, “if you do not feel the impossibility of this speech having been written by Shakespeare, all I dare suggest is, that you may have ears—for so has another animal—but an ear you cannot have.” To his own finely tuned ear for poetry, the rhythm of the verse was crude and far inferior to that of even Shakespeare’s earliest plays. Coleridge was lecturing on Shakespeare only a few years after the publication of Edmond Malone’s scholarly Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI, tending to show that these plays were not written originally by Shakespeare. Ever since Shakespeare rose in the course of the eighteenth century to his status as supreme cultural icon, there has been a tendency to assume that any less than perfect work—Titus Andronicus, say, or Pericles—must have been the product of some lesser dramatist, or at the very least that Shakespeare was merely patching up a rickety old play for which he was not originally responsible. In the case of the Henry VI plays, support for the latter possibility seemed to come from the existence of early editions of versions of the second and third parts under the titles The First Part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster with the Death of the Good Duke Humphrey (published in 1594) and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Death of Good King Henry the Sixth, with the Whole Contention between the two houses Lancaster and York (1595). Malone and his successors argued that these were the originals, written by another dramatist (probably one of the so-called “university wits,” Robert Greene or George Peele), and that Shakespeare merely undertook the work of a reviser. As for Henry VI Part I, Malone regarded it as almost wholly un-Shakespearean. Though grounded in textual scholarship, his arguments were driven by critical distaste for the play’s style of verse, the “stately march” whereby “the sense concludes or pauses uniformly at the end of every line.”

More recently, scholars have suggested that The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York are in fact texts of works by Shakespeare, albeit poorly transcribed ones. The titles The First Part and The Whole Contention strongly suggest that the plays that we now call Part II and Part III of Henry VI originally constituted a two-part work. They were probably first produced in the early 1590s, when Christopher Marlowe’s mighty Tamburlaine the Great had established a vogue for two-part plays filled with battles, processions, and high-sounding verse.

What we now call Henry VI Part I would then stand slightly apart. Since it appears to have been premiered—to considerable acclaim—in 1592, it was probably written after the two Wars of the Roses plays that are now called the second and third parts. Perhaps it was what in modern film parlance is called a “prequel,” designed to cash in on the success of a blockbuster. Its lack of unity, and its use of different source materials for different scenes, suggest that it may have been a collaborative work. Thomas Nashe, who also wrote in partnership with Marlowe, has been suggested as a prime contributor, but there may have been three or even four hands in the composition. The possibility that Shakespeare was not the principal author of the Talbot/Joan of Arc play would account for some of the inconsistencies in the sequence considered as a trilogy. Among these are the fact that in Part II Humphrey Duke of Gloucester is a statesmanlike figure, a Lord Protector worthy of his late brother Henry V, whereas in Part I he is more rough-hewn, and the plot discrepancy whereby the surrender of Anjou and Maine, a condition of the marriage between King Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou, is much resented in Part II yet not mentioned in the marriage negotiations in Part I.

There is a long tradition of attempting to establish literary authorship by stylistic tests—preference for feminine endings in verse lines, contractions (them versus ’em), frequency of grammatical function words, and so forth. The availability of large-scale databases of texts and computer programs to crunch them means that such tests are becoming ever more sophisticated and reliable. When an array of different tests gives the same result, one can speak tentatively of the evidence attaining scientific standards of probability. Twenty-first-century stylometric research of this kind suggests that nearly all of Part II can be confidently attributed to Shakespeare, that there are some doubts about Part III, and that Shakespeare probably only wrote a few scenes of Part I. Perhaps the only thing that makes one hesitate about these results is that they seem too convenient, in that they so neatly mirror the consensus about the relative dramatic quality of the three plays: Part II has gloriously Shakespearean energy and variety, and nearly always works superbly in the theater; Part III has some immensely powerful rhetorical encounters but many longueurs; Part I is generally the least admired—save for the rose-plucking scene in the second act and the moving dialogue of Talbot and his son in the fourth-act battle, the very sequences which the computer tests ascribe to Shakespeare.

It cannot be determined whether the traces of non-Shakespearean language are the vestiges of older plays that Shakespeare was revising or whether they are signs of active collaboration. Nor do we know whether the plays were ever staged as a trilogy in Shakespeare’s lifetime. They only came to be labeled as such in the posthumously published 1623 Folio, where all his histories were collected and ordered by the chronology of their subject matter as opposed to their composition.

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Henry VI Read Online

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
TO THE THREE PARTS OF
HENRY VI

AFTER AGINCOURT

SEQUENCE AND AUTHORSHIP

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MY ACCOUNT

Henry VI Read Online

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTIONTO THE THREE PARTS OFHENRY VI

AFTER AGINCOURT

SEQUENCE AND AUTHORSHIP

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INTRODUCTION
TO THE THREE PARTS OF
HENRY VI