Richard Duke of York’s brain, “more busy than the labouring spider,” “weaves tedious snares to trap” his enemies; his son Richard, future Duke of Gloucester and eventual Richard III, will develop both this kind of language and his father’s strategizing to chilling effect. As various characters shift allegiance between the houses of York and Lancaster, so audience sympathies shift as the fast-moving action unfolds: the power-hungry York of Part II becomes a figure of pathos when he is forced to wear a paper crown in the final moments before he is stabbed to death in Part III.

THE POPULAR VOICE

Shakespeare does not reveal his own allegiances, but he knows the direction in which history is moving. A key incident in this regard is the fake miracle of Simpcox in Part II: King Henry is taken in, a mark of his naive faith, whereas Humphrey of Gloucester adopts the skeptical, interrogative voice of a witchfinder—for which the contemporary equivalent would have been a seeker after closet Catholics. Revealingly, the source for this scene was not the pro-Tudor chronicle of Edward Hall but the anti-Catholic martyrology of John Foxe. Other “medieval,” and thus implicitly Catholic, elements are also subverted: the Duchess of Gloucester’s reliance on conjuration and the trial by combat between the armorer Horner and his man Peter both backfire.

Protestantism, with its rejection of the hierarchies of saints and cardinals, its commitment to the Bible in the language of the people, was associated with a democratization of religious faith. Part II is the element of the trilogy that toys with the popular voice (hence its significant proportion of prose writing, which is entirely absent from the first and third parts), but it cannot be said to endorse a modern notion of democracy. Jack Cade is a highly attractive figure onstage because he speaks in the same language as the commoners in the audience; his clowning offers welcome respite from the high rhetoric and low cunning of the aristocrats, and such lines as “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” elicit an approving laugh in every age. But Shakespeare, who made his living by the literacy that his father lacked, can hardly be said to approve of a character who orders the hanging of a village clerk for the crime of being able to read and write. And Cade’s vision of England is self-contradictory to the core:

CADE Be brave, then, for your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny: the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass: and when I am king, as king I will be—

ALL God save your majesty!

This is a double-edged “reformation”: cheap bread, un watered ale, and the land held in common sound Utopian, but Cade does not really want representative government. He wants to be king himself. Shakespeare plays the same trick against the “commonwealth” idealism of the courtier Gonzalo twenty years later in The Tempest: “No sovereignty— / Yet he would be king on’t.” If Shakespeare has an Eden, it is not a place anterior to class distinction on the lines of the old rhyme “When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?” but rather an English gentleman’s country estate, a place of peace and retreat where Cade is an intruder: the Kentish garden of Alexander Iden.

THE TRAGIC AGON

There is a primal quality to the three plays of Henry VI. The basis of drama is agon, the Greek word for “struggle” or “contest.” According to Aristotle, the origin of tragedy was the moment when an actor split off from a chorus and began to enter into dialogue with them. Later came a second actor and a further opportunity for confrontation—the term for the first actor was “protagonist” and the second “deuteragonist.” Conversation in the theater of historical tragedy is always a form of agon, which rapidly escalates into emotional intensity (agony) and thence to physical violence. Shakespeare, with his highly self-conscious theatrical art, is always acutely aware of the several agons that coexist in the theater: between the actor and his role (the struggle to master a part), between the players and the audience (the struggle to grab attention, to move a crowd of onlookers to woe and wonder), within each individual character (the play of conflicting desires and duties), as well as between the characters in their dialogue and stage disposition.

War is the logical culmination of an agonistic world: it is the beginning and end of the three parts of Henry the Sixth. The process of escalation is such that Part III in particular portrays the complete breakdown of society. The play has the harrowing, relentless quality of Greek tragedy, where people live and die according to a code of revenge, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, and the language moves between rhetorical, proto-operatic arias of anger, anguish, invective, and rapid-fire one-line exchanges in which the essential conflicts between Lancastrians and Yorkists, men and women, old and young, self-servers and seekers after justice, winners and losers, are stripped to their essentials. In this world, words are weapons, but just occasionally they are harbingers of hope, as when King Henry VI lays his hands on young Henry Richmond’s head and says:

Come hither, England’s hope. If secret powers

Suggest but truth to my divining thoughts,

This pretty lad will prove our country’s bliss.

His looks are full of peaceful majesty,

His head by nature framed to wear a crown,

His hand to wield a sceptre, and himself

Likely in time to bless a regal throne.

Make much of him, my lords, for this is he

Must help you more than you are hurt by me.

This anointing looks forward to the establishment of the Tudor dynasty when Richmond becomes Henry VII, Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather. But, as always seems to happen at moments of apparent stasis in these plays, a messenger then rushes on with the news that the rival king, Edward, has escaped. The violence continues apace. And before the final victory of Richmond at Bosworth Field, England must endure the darkness and blood of Crookback Richard’s reign, to which Shakespeare will turn his attention in his next tragedy.

ABOUT THE TEXT

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else.