Since the charismatic villain Richard of Gloucester appears in Part II and Part III, it becomes very tempting to think of the whole group as a tetralogy capped by The Tragedy of Richard the Third. Perhaps the best approach is to try to treat each of the plays both on its own terms—they were, after all, designed to be performed one at a time—and as part of Shakespeare’s unfolding panorama of English history.

STRUCTURE AND STYLE

Richard III, probably first staged between 1592 and 1594, does seem to represent a quantum leap in Shakespeare’s dramatic art. While Crookback Richard has been a role that has made the names of great actors from David Garrick in the eighteenth century to Edmund Kean in the nineteenth to Antony Sher in the twentieth, the Henry VI plays have not fared well on the English (or any other) stage. The second and third parts were given a few outings in heavily adapted and compressed form between the Restoration and Regency periods, but almost three hundred years elapsed before there was a full-scale revival of the entire sequence, and even the twentieth century, which restored to favor such previously unpopular early Shakespearean plays as Love’s Labour’s Lost and Titus Andronicus, only saw some half dozen major productions: those of F. R. Benson at the beginning of the century, Sir Barry Jackson shortly after the Second World War, John Barton and Peter Hall (rewritten and compressed into two plays under the title The Wars of the Roses) at Stratford-upon-Avon in the early 1960s, Terry Hands and Adrian Noble in succeeding decades at Stratford (the latter reducing the tetralogy to a trilogy entitled The Plantagenets), and Michael Bogdanov as part of a brave attempt to stage all of the history plays in modern dress, with a strong anti-Thatcherite political agenda, for the touring English Shakespeare Company in the 1980s.

The early twenty-first century, however, witnessed a reversal of fortune: Michael Boyd directed a much-admired version with full texts under the title This England in the intimate space of the Swan theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, then on becoming artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company revived his productions on a larger stage. Edward Hall, meanwhile, followed his father Peter in reducing three to two, with an energetic version set in a slaughterhouse and entitled Rose Rage. In a new millennium, at a time of renewed religious war and deep uncertainty about the meaning of nation and national identity, Shakespeare’s exploration of the foundations of the fractured Tudor polity seemed powerfully prescient.

Sometimes even the directors who have taken it upon themselves to give the plays a chance have sounded apologetic. For Jackson, they were “ill-shaped, lacking the cohesion brought of practice, a spate of events viewed from a wide angle.” The succession of battles, busy messengers, and bombastic exhortations has been ridiculed by critics ever since the playwright Robert Greene, in what is the earliest extant allusion to Shakespeare, mocked Stratford Will as “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his ‘Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide,’ supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.” Greene’s quotation is a parody of a line in Part III, where the Duke of York is in the full flood of a formal rhetorical vituperation directed at Queen Margaret, the “She-wolf of France.” There is, however, a note of anxiety in Greene’s mockery: he doesn’t like provincial Master Shakespeare’s easy adoption of the grand style which had hitherto been regarded as the hallmark of the university-educated dramatists who dominated the London stage in the early 1590s, such as Marlowe and Greene himself.

The Henry VI plays reveal Shakespeare learning his art with great rapidity. Poetic styles and stage business are snapped up from the university men, source material from the prose chronicles of English history. Edward Hall’s Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York (1548) is compressed in such a way as to give a pattern to the march of history. The action is concerned less with individual characters than with the roles that individuals play in the drama of the nation’s destiny. Shakespeare is quite willing to change someone’s age or even their nature in order to subordinate them to his overall scheme. The demonization of Joan of Arc in Part I is among the most striking examples. Whereas we associate the mature Shakespeare with contemplation—King Harry or Prince Hamlet in troubled soliloquy—the driving force of these early plays is action. Part I deploys a set of variations on an underlying structure in which dramatic action precedes explanation, then a scene will end with epigrammatic recapitulation; each scene is presented in such a way that a different character’s viewpoint is emphasized or a new aspect of an existing character developed. The scene with Talbot in the Countess of Auvergne’s castle, for instance, highlights the courtesy and prudence of a man who has previously been seen as the exemplar of heroic courage. It also provides a contrast against which the later confrontation of Suffolk and Margaret can be measured: Talbot is a relic from the days of Henry V and England’s conquest of France, while Suffolk is a harbinger of division and the Wars of the Roses.

In Part II, Shakespeare used a structural pattern to which he returned in later tragedies such as King Lear and Timon of Athens: the hero, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, is progressively isolated as prominence is given to the legalistic conspiracies of his malicious enemies. But since the subject is the nation, not an individual hero, Humphrey is dispatched in the third act, and the remainder of the play turns to the subject of rebellion (Jack Cade’s proletarian rising in Act 4) and attempted usurpation (the altogether more dangerous Duke of York’s march on London). Part III begins in chaos, with each of the first two acts ending in a battle (at Wakefield, then Towton), then proceeds in an uneasy equilibrium which sees two kings alive simultaneously and their respective claims only resolved after a bewildering series of encounters, parleys, and changes of allegiance.

Balanced scene structure is paralleled by formal rhetorical style. The formality of the world of these plays is also apparent from the use of dramatic tableaux. The civil strife of the Wars of the Roses could have no better epitome than the paired entrances in Act 2 Scene 5 of Part III, where a son that has killed his father appears at one stage door and a moment later a father that has killed his son emerges through the other. Their entry rudely interrupts King Henry’s meditation on how he only wants a quiet life, how he’d rather be a shepherd than a king. The aspirations of the weak but pious king are formally visualized in the stage direction for his next entry, in Act 3 Scene 1: “Enter the King, [disguised,] with a prayer-book.” Only in retreat and disguise can he fulfill his desire to be a holy man. And even then his peace lasts only an instant, for two gamekeepers overhear and apprehend him, taking him to captivity in the hands of usurping King Edward. By contrast, when Richard of Gloucester becomes King Richard in the next play, a prayer-book is itself a form of disguise.

The unifying theme that makes the plays work as a trilogy, whatever the circumstances of their origin, is the pitching of two world-pictures against each other. Opposites cannot coexist in harmony, so chaos ensues. In Part I the opposition takes the form of French against English, Joan against Talbot, magical thinking against rationality, female against male, and implicitly Catholic against Protestant. The historical Talbot was a Catholic, but to an audience in the early 1590s, his plain-speaking Englishness and his heroic deeds on the continental mainland would inevitably have evoked the knightly warriors such as Sir Philip Sidney who fought with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in the religious wars of the 1580s in the Spanish Netherlands. Joan, meanwhile, is a figure familiar from anti-Catholic propaganda: a virgin branded whore (“pucelle” means “maiden” but “puzzel” connotes prostitute), a saint and martyr converted into a conjuror of devils, a figure linked to papist veneration of the Virgin Mary by way of the suggestion of miraculous pregnancy.

The dialectic of Part II pits honest old Duke Humphrey of Gloucester and pious young King Henry VI against the scheming Plantagenets.