Henry VI, Part 3

“Ill blows the wind that profits nobody.”

     In Henry VI Part 3, Shakespeare continues to develop characters from the previous play and uses their development to create dramatic set pieces.  He also experiments with imagery and scene placement to emphasize his theme of social chaos and its effect on the human condition.  Most importantly, not only does the country dissolve into chaos, but the individuals do as well.

     The story begins exactly where Henry VI, Part 2 leaves off.  The bickering among nobles is now the negotiations between would-be and won’t-be Kings.  But ambition and revenge sever the deal.  Many want power, but do not know how to use it.  Some want peace, but cannot find it.  Most want vengeance, but are never satisfied.  Loyalty to crown, to country, to family and to friends no longer exists. As society shatters, it’s every man-- and woman-- for himself. It is a graphically violent play, from RIchard’s display of Somerset’s head in Act I Scene 1, to Henry’s murder in the next to last scene of the play.

     The first set piece takes place at the end of Act I.  York, wounded and captured, is confronted by Margaret.  It is an explosion of twin madnesses.  Facing execution, he hurls insults at Margaret, attacking her parentage, her looks, and her femininity. He’s not only describing Margaret, but also searching for one last weakness to exploit.  It isn’t until he exhausts every last ounce of venom that he allows himself to grieve for his murdered son.  Margaret, on the other hand, relishes his humiliation, his pain,and his death.  She baptizes him in a profane storm of religious imagery: places him on a molehill (Golgotha), begs him to wipe his tears with a cloth stained with his son’s blood (Veronica’s veil), and mimics his ambition with a paper crown (the crown of thorns.) It’s as if she has two suits of armor: one for the battlefield, the other for her heart.  The language here is alive and visceral. When Margaret demands 

“Stamp, rave, and fret, that I may sing and dance.”

you can hear the horrible music of her voice. 

     In Act II Scene v, Henry’s soft voice gives the audience a clearer picture of his character.  Throughout the play, Henry is removed further and further from the throne.  Banished from the battlefield (and soon to be sent out of the country), he observes the fight from a molehill of his own.  Incapable of tending to his kingdom, Henry rhapsodizes about living the life of a shepherd.  It’s a peaceful, dreamy soliloquy, simple words from a simple man.  But the Son/Father-Father/Son scene blasts that fantasy, reminding him (and the audience) that Henry’s lack of political strength is responsible for all this carnage.  On its own, the soliloquy is effective.  The Son/Father-Father/Son part would be at home in a pageant.  By putting the two together in the same scene adds depth to Henry as a character and underlines the horrors of civil war.

     Shakespeare uses the same technique in the third set piece.  Henry failed as a King because of his piousness.  Edward fails because of his penisness.  And out of this chaos rises Richard.  In his soliloquy, taking place after Edward’s clumsy wooing of Lady Grey, Richard is so self-aware and so self admiring, it’s as if he were wooing himself over to the dark side.  His dream is very different from Henry’s and many obstacles stand between him and the crown.   Richard responds by feeling “flatter(ed)... with impossibilities.”  Nature may have cursed him from the womb, but he takes delicious inventory of his strengths:

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,

And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart,

And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,

And frame my face to all occasions.

I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;

I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk;

I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,

Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,

And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.

I can add colours to the chameleon,

Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,

And set the murderous Machiavel to school.

Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?

Tut, were it farther off, I'll pluck it down.

     The scene that began with a comic treatment of the royal libido ends with the revelation of a charming villain.  

     In the final set piece, Richard meets Henry in the Tower of London.  The play began with York negotiating with Henry for the crown and peace.  Here, Richard arrives to do what, in his mind, his father should have done.  But Henry is a wiser man now.  He sees Richard for what he is, what he intends to do, and what havoc he will wreck in the future.  He offers a prophecy that all of England will rue the day Richard was born, then recalls the hideous details associated with his birth.  Enraged, Richard stabs Henry.  Typically, Henry’s last words are to ask forgiveness for himself and Richard.  Richard responds with  blasphemy, wondering why the saintly King hasn’t resurrected. He then confirms that the rumors concerning his birth were not exaggerated.  With the House of Lancaster in ruins, he turns his attention and his ambitions toward his brothers.  The War of the Roses will continue in the House of York.

Learning Points:

Character Development

     Because the characters are based on historic figures, Shakespeare was limited to what he could do with them.   Henry couldn’t come to his royal senses any more than Margaret could choose to dedicate her energies to world literacy.   And even though the sources he consulted tilted acutely toward the Tudor version of history, Shakespeare takes a decidedly neutral approach to the story and its characters.  He could have exaggerated the contemporary impressions of Henry, of Margaret, of York. Instead, he shows remarkable patience with these characters.  He makes a point of allowing room for their emotions, and patience enough to let them grow.  For instance, York has a arguable claim to the throne.  But Shakespeare shows him willing to wait to ascend.  He lets his sons influence him to act beyond his patience, and then is made to pay for it.  By using his imagination, he give context to the historical facts.  And in doing so, he learns to create characters.  His patience, his willingness to to understand various possible angles for his character’s motivations, without settling on a single cause, allows his characters and the audience to infer for themselves, and within themselves, what the motivation is.   The key to Shakespeare’s character development is the room he gives them and the audience.  In Henry Vi Part 3, this technique is in its infancy, but it is the key to to everything he does for the next twenty years.  

Richard’s DNA

In Henry VI Part 2, York has his share of ambitions, but possesses the political smarts to hold his tongue while developing a plan.  This is the beginning of RIchard’s character. York is more than Richard’s father; he is the template on which Shakespeare develops his first great character.  But Shakespeare adds to that by incorporating traits from other major characters in Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3.  He inherits Margaret’s fierceness, the vanity of Suffolk, Warwick’s sense of loyalty, and the blood lust of Clifford.  But it’s his self-awareness and self analysis that bring all these ingredients to a boil.  The end result, two plays from now, is mighty tasty.

20% is Appropriately Gratuitous

     The play has been criticized, as it was when it was written, for being excessively violent.  Many believed than as now, that such unpleasantness belongs off-stage.  Bloody heads?  Murdering children?  At what point does the honest portrayal of violence become gratuitous?  For Shakespeare, the brutal horrors of war and civil chaos justified brutal honesty.  If it has a point, it’s ok.  If it is the point, it crosses the line.

Petty Complaints:

The Rest of the Play

The poetry remans uneven throughout the play.  The set pieces are wonderful, but the rest remains episodic and often flat. It seems as if Shakespeare worked harder on the parts that interested him and spent the rest of the play writing lackluster battle recreations.  But this is part of the growing process.  One’s best writing reflects one’s greatest interest.

Imagery

     All of creation drops by to tip its hat to the audience. From religious, to mythic, to the animal images suggesting the sinking of men to the level of beasts. The imagery in this play rushes by like subway cars. If a member of the audience misses one image, not to worry: another, more familiar one will come by shortly.

Next: Henry VI, Part 1

Henry VI, Part 2

“Fear frames disorder, and disorder wounds where it should guard.” 

     Holinshed and Hall provided Shakespeare with an enormous amount of raw material to work with, but it’s how he put the stories together that make the plays worth studying. He is as much an editor of history as playwright at this early point in his career.

     Shakespeare knew a good story when he found it and he didn’t let timelines or certain facts get in the way.  When Shakespeare wrote Henry VI, Part 2, the War of the Roses was barely a century gone by.  The events, the principals, the slaughter, and resulting social chaos remained firmly in the consciousness of the English people.  But enough time had passed to take chances with the story as long as he didn’t play too loosely with the facts. 

     So, for the sake of drama, he did.  Years of rivalry and scheming among the nobles are compressed to a single scene.  Gloucester was arrested, but not murdered.  The affair between Suffolk and Queen Margaret was speculative at best. Eleanor’s dabbling with the witches really did happen, but some seven years before Margaret’s arrival as Queen.  Jack Cade did lead a failed rebellion against Henry, but he didn’t advocate illiteracy and he didn’t get nearly the laughs as he does in the play.

     With Henry blindly smitten with his new Queen, Shakespeare quickly sets events in motion.  The devastating loss of valuable and hard won lands in France arrives on line 52, and conspiracies ignite 100 lines later.  The wordplay, and possibly Shakespeare’s first pun, makes its debut at Line 122  (“For Suffolk’s duke, may he be suffocate.”)

     The plot proceeds, but does not develop.  One episode follows another, with little cause in one scene leading to an effect in the next.  The scenes illustrate the characters involved, but neither develop the characters nor explain their actions. Yet, the story progresses forward because because an entire nation is at risk.  Onstage and on the page, social chaos makes for compelling drama.   

     Henry isn’t a bad man, just a bad King; a pious, but ineffective leader because he relies on God to do all the ruling, to take care of his and the states’ fortunes.  (Margaret’s comment that Henry would make a better Pope than King is a bit of a joke; Popes of the 14th and 15 Centuries did not lack for regal arrogance in politics, war or other shenanigans.)  But God’s will often requires human action to get things done.  Ambition requires the individual to play God. Henry’s lack of action leads to lesser nobles to act beyond their reach.

    The Queen, Suffolk, and Cardinal Beaufort all want the power, but all seem as ill-equipped as Henry.  Margaret is rash, petty and vain; Suffolk holds the common people in contempt; Beaufort is a blustering coward. 

     Only York has a claim to the throne and the patience of a successful usurper. And he feels compelled to bit his tongue and bide his time in order for his plan to work.

     If there is a hero in this play it is Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.  He holds the King’s well-being (and, therefore the welfare of the State) as his first priority.  He is wise, loyal and genuinely cares about the people.  The feeling is mutual.  If anybody in this play should be King it’s him.  It is his reputation and popularity that stands in the way of the conspirators.

     Shakespeare develops tension in the story by juxtaposing characters and actions.  While Henry waits on God to determine the country’s future, Eleanor conjures up a demon to predict hers.  Peter Thump and Thomas Horner fight a duel that foreshadows the coming civil war.  Like the King, Alexander Iden enjoys the peace of contemplation. Unlike the king, when confronted, he doesn’t wait to defend himself.  And when he learns that it’s Cade the Traitor he’s fighting, he kills him straight away.  If only Henry had the common sense of this common man, the civil war might have been avoided. Prophecies and dreams come true, but they are not the result of God’s Will, or demon’s curses, or even the stars.  They are the result of bad decisions, not the fulfillment of fate.

     Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare’s early writing is enormous. Members of the Royal Court speak as if they were Tamburlaine impersonators, as stiff and exaggerated as Gloucester’s corpse. They don’t talk to one another, they exchange speeches.  The rhetoric flows, the similes wander, and metaphors waft like tapestries amid all the hot air.  It’s only when speaking in asides that they feel or sound like humans.  Like a novice magician, Shakespeare knows how the tricks work, but lacks the subtlety to make the illusion seem real.

     Jack Cade is Marlovian as well, and the personification of social chaos. He complains about the loss of France, just as the nobles do.  His disdain for law and learning equals Suffolk’s and Beaufort’s disdain for Gloucester.  Cade’s serpentine genealogy echoes York’s concise claim as the legitimate heir.  He mocks Henry's Christian priorities by promising to provide the poor with food and drink (the good stuff, too.) But he is the Marlovian hero writ small, stripped of poetry, pulled off the staged and set in the real world among commoners who get what he says, but see him for what he is.  In Cade, Shakespeare takes Marlowe’s hero and humanizes him.  As a result, Cade is the most fully drawn character in the play. Cartoonish, but human.

Learning Points:

Organize the material into a narrative

     Whether it’s an epic novel or an analysis of how the Marketing Department screwed up the introduction of a company’s newest line of products, get the audience involved early by getting to the point early.  Keep them engaged by providing context that advances the theme.  And if strict chronological order doesn’t do the job, then play with it.

Double Clutch When Shifting Gears

     Without comic relief, the story in Henry VI Part 2 would be unbearably tragic.  But the comedy here is not gratuitous. Each scene either advances or comments of the plot.  Some critics think the Simpcox Miracle of St. Alban’s (Act II, Scene i) is unnecessary.  But it demonstrates more that Gloucester’s judgement and sense of the law.  It shows that Henry’s piousness and naivete are so well known that even the commoners feel they can take advantage of it.  And the next time he visits St. Alban’s, it’s Henry who gets spanked and forced to flee.

Jack Cade as Character Development

     Since many of the main characters are historical figures, their actions and reputations were well known through folklore or the chronicles.  HIstory had decided their characters.  Shakespeare admits as much when Gloucester bemoans:

“And shall these labours and these honours die?

Shall Henry's conquest, Bedford's vigilance,

Your deeds of war and all our counsel die?

O peers of England, shameful is this league!

Fatal this marriage, cancelling your fame,

Blotting your names from books of memory,

Razing the characters of your renown,

Defacing monuments of conquer'd France,

Undoing all, as all had never been!”

     Besides, they were nobles and had to be treated with the respect due them (and to the Master of Revels whose approval was required before a play could be produced.) 

     Jack Cade’s reputation was not an official matter.  To some, Cade was a patriot and reformer.  To others, he was a trouble-making rebel.  In either case he was certainly a commoner, which gave Shakespeare more flexibility in portraying him.  Taking into consideration both views of Cade gives the character more depth.  That his rebellion succeeds (historical fact) raises him above mere comic relief.  Throughout the play, Shakespeare draws parallels, compares and contrasts events in order to develop the plot.  By focussing the same technique on Cade, he begins to learn how to develop a character.

Next: Henry VI, Part 3