37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 26: Henry VI, Part 3

The Third Part of Henry the Sixt, first broadcast January 16, 1983

• When was it written? Possibly in 1591, perhaps his second play (after Part 2 but before Part 1)
• What’s it about? The Duke of York and Henry VI’s Lancasters continue to vie for the throne. Both of them (and thousands of others) end up dead, with York’s son Edward on the throne, but Edwards’ brother Richard is plotting to take that throne from him in our next play…
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Hall and Holinshed again
• Interesting fact about the play: According to Wikipedia, “the first major American performance was in 1935 at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.” So apparently no one produced this play during the American Civil War?? That is insane! In the play’s best scene, Henry strays onto a battlefield, where he finds that one father has accidentally killed his son in the heat of battle, and, nearby, a son has accidentally killed his father. It wasn’t uncommon for libraries in Civil War times to have the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Nobody read this play? Nobody thought they should maybe stage it? Of course, if they had, it might have had one of the Booth brothers in it, and wouldn’t that have been ironic!
• Best insult: Henry has Richard’s number: “The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign; The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howled, and hideous tempest shook down trees; The raven rooked her on the chimney’s top, And chatt’ring pies in dismal discord sung; Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope, To wit, an indigested and deformed lump.”
• Best words: Orisons, quondam, malapert
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never seen it or read it until now.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Just Bernard Hill again

How’s the cast?

• They just get better and better. Peter Benson as the title character and Julia Foster as his queen suffer more than in the previous two plays and really get to show how great their performances are. Lots of actors get to have tear-jerking death scenes.

How’s the direction by Jane Howell?

• Excellent. The set and costumes have all turned black to show that the party’s over. The many, many battle scenes are all well-portrayed, with the final one being gloriously fought in the (indoor) snow. This is a fifteen hour epic, shot on video in 1983, but it’s shockingly watchable.  She has made the case here that the Henry VI plays are among Shakespeare’s best. 

Storyteller’s Rulebook: We Don’t Need Another Hero

When we read the history plays today, we read them in chronological order. Certainly the BBC did them in that order, as does everybody else who does the work of staging all eight. But it’s important to me to remember, as I watch these “Henry VI” plays, that these came first. The “Henry VI” plays were, in all likelihood, the first three plays Shakespeare ever wrote. And that’s wild.

The specter of Henry V looms large over these plays. “Henry VI, Part 1” begins with the nobles standing around Henry V’s coffin and lamenting that they’ll never see his like again. And indeed, when his son turns out to be too mild-mannered to hold the country together, everyone is constantly contrasting him with his father. Everyone on every side claims that they will bring back Henry V’s greatness.

As he half-heartedly fights for power and his life, Henry VI’s whole pitch is, “I know you dislike me, but you can’t impeach my claim to the throne without impeaching my father too, and he’s practically England’s patron saint!”

As viewers, this all makes so much more sense if we’ve seen “Henry V” first! We know what they’re talking about! We’ve seen the greatness! But when these plays were written and performed, this specter was entirely immaterial. Henry V was much discussed, but never seen.

When you have all eight plays, you’ve got a rise and fall narrative, peaking right in the middle with the Battle of Agincourt, then sliding down precipitously for the next four plays. But, when first performed, these plays were all fall and no rise.

Why did Shakespeare choose to begin his career by writing three plays about a horrific civil war with not a single hero to be found anywhere? Why did he not write about Henry V for many years later? At least at the first, the Bard was hardcore. Let others write about heroes, he’s writing about gory, grimy degradation, where every single character dies horribly (and first has all their dignity stripped from them.)

One can’t help but feel that he might have been a little disappointed in himself when he finally caved and wrote about Henry V later. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll write a bunch of prequels and give you a hero, but I prefer wallowing in the muck.”

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Write Beyond Good and Evil

Watching the first two “Henry VI” plays, it did occasionally occur to me “Oh yeah, isn’t Game of Thrones based on this same war? I’m not really seeing it.” It was only when I got to the plot point here when Edward impetuously decides to break from an arranged marriage and marry a common woman (pissing everybody off) that it all snapped into place:

• Evil, cheating Queen Margaret (a Lancaster) became Cercei Lannister
• Her trusting dupe of a husband, Henry VI, became Robert Baratheon
• The beheaded Duke of York became Eddard Stark
• York’s son’s Edward became Rob Stark
• And Margaret is always trying to install her son Ned, so that must be Joffrey
• So I guess Edward’s brother, the future Richard III, is… Jon Snow? Theon? I’m not sure. That’s where George R. R. Martin breaks with the true story.

What makes it so fascinating is that these two TV series tell such similar stories, with so many of the same plot points, but I rooted for different families in each one. In GOT, I boo-hissed Cercei, as I was supposed to, but in this BBC series, Queen Margaret, despite her lying, cheating ways, eventually won me over to her side. (It helps that her son Ned isn’t a monster like Joffrey!) In GOT, I liked the Starks, but here I just never liked the family they were based on, the Yorks. There’s just something slimy about them, at least in this portrayal.

Shakespeare, unlike Martin, writes such rich texts that I’m sure you could stage this in such a way that I was rooting on the Yorks and not the Lancasters. Certainly the Lancasters, like the Lannisters, do many revolting things. My choice to root for them was uncertain.

GOT is ultimately a fairly straightforward good-vs.-evil story, albeit very well written. Shakespeare’s plays, on the other hand, are far more ambiguous about good and evil. There’s not a good family and evil family here, just a bunch of very flawed human beings lashing out at each other for hundreds of different conscious and subconscious reasons.

(I suppose I’m being unfair to GOT, because the presence of Tyrion does morally complicate things, but even then, it’s clearly supposed to be ironic that this ultimately-good character could come from such an evil family.)

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 25: Henry VI, Part 2

The Second Part of Henry the Sixt, first broadcast January 9th, 1983

• When was it written? Possibly in 1591, perhaps his first play.
• What’s it about? Everything goes wrong for poor Henry VI. His terrible wife plots with various nobles against him, falsely accusing and executing each other one by one until there are almost none left. The Duke of York encourages Jack Cade to mount a bloody populist uprising, then, when that fails, returns from a trip to Ireland with his own army, eager to depose Henry. The play ends indecisively after the first main battle in that war.
• Most famous dialogue: One of Cade’s mob leaders yells, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
• Sources: Once again, Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548). He also drew upon the second edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) I hadn’t noticed until now how new the Chronicles were. He was dramatizing a recent bestseller.
• Interesting fact about the play: Obviously, if this was his first play, it had a different title.  (This wasn’t a George Lucas type situation.)  It is possible that its original title was “The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the Whole Contention betweene the two Houses, Lancaster and York,” or “The Contention” for short.
• Best insult: “Blunt-witted lord, ignoble in demeanour! If ever lady wronged her lord so much, thy mother took into her blameful bed some stern untutored churl, and noble stock was graft with crab-tree slip, whose fruit thou art!”
• Best word: Guerdoned and conventicles are both good words, but I really love the word that is often used to describe this production. To quote Wikipedia: “Many critics felt these set design choices lent the production an air of Brechtian verfremdungseffekt”
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never seen it or read it.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Despite the fact that this play has Shakespeare’s largest cast, and appears to be uncut, they didn’t add any future stars to the cast, just Bernard Hill (Titanic, Lord of the Rings) returning as the Duke of York.

How’s the cast?

• Everyone is excellent. Trevor Peacock played the noble Talbot in Part 1, but returns as the evil Jack Cade here, to equally good effect. Peter Benson is really heartbreaking as the right-man-in-the-wrong-time Henry, and Julia Foster seethes well as Queen Margaret.

How’s the direction by Jane Howell?

• She once again does a great job, using the same set as Part 1 but now dingier and more beat-up, as is the rest of the production design. It’s a much darker play and even more violent, filled with many severed heads. (The mob holds two of them on pikes and makes them kiss.) Howell is less amused and more sickened by the clashes this time around, but that works equally well.

Rulebook Casefile: Every Part Deserves a Satisfactory Wrap-Up.

On the very rare occasions that this play is staged today, it’s because companies are staging the whole trilogy, or the tetralogy by including “Richard III,” or the full octology by including “Richard II,” the “Henry IV” plays and “Henry V,” or even, in one case, all ten Histories by including “King John” and “Henry VIII.” Virtually no one has staged it by itself since it was first performed.

I’m encountering these plays for the first time, and writing them up as I watch them. I would agree with the general consensus that this play is more sophisticated than Part 1 (though many of those same critics insist this was written first), but I feel like Part 1 can easily be staged as a standalone play, and this play’s fatal flaw is that it cannot. It clearly ends right in the middle of the story with no satisfactory wrap-up.

Don’t do this! Don’t make movies like Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse, which just ended arbitrarily. Make movies like Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1 which had a satisfactory ending while still including some cliffhanger elements. (Yes, I know S-M: AtS was a hit and M:I:DRP1 was a flop, but the real goal of movies is to please me, and I disliked the former and liked the latter.) (I’ll discuss Wicked: Part 1 and how it did soon.)

As I’ve said before, Voldemort dies in the first Harry Potter book. And in the second. If you’re selling any time of media that takes longer than 90 minutes to consume, give us something satisfying to go home with.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Why Does Shakespeare Always Have to Be So Timely?

It was very hard to watch this play, given what’s going on in America. England is dying in the play, and America is dying around me right now. When I wrote about “Timon of Athens,” I talked about all its parallels to what was going on then, which seemed to be the ignominious downfall of Donald Trump. Now Trump has surged back to power, eager to rape us all as surely as he raped E. Jean Carroll, and this now seems to be the far more timely play.

Jack Cade mounts a populist rebellion by rousing the rabble with xenophobic and anti-intellectual rhetoric, ludicrously overpromising about what he will deliver (“And here, sitting upon London Stone, I charge and command that, of the city’s cost, the Pissing Conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of our reign”) and even though he is flat-out telling them that he will be an even worse dictator than the people who are supposedly holding them down, they still get wrapped up in it and mount a bloody insurrection that installs him as mayor of London.

Until November, I might have given the play the standard Socialist Criticism reading: Shakespeare is a royalist and his anti-populism is to be criticized as fundamentally anti-democratic. But I’m not feeling very small-d-democratic right now, and I’m with Shakespeare: Fuck the rabble. Those people are stupid and dangerous, and they’ll just destroy everything. So I’ve got no problems with anything Shakespeare has to say here.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Let Smaller Scenes Foreshadow the Meaning of Larger Conflicts

The line “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war” is from “Julius Caesar,” but it perfectly sums up this play. This play is very episodic, as a progression of things goes wrong for poor Henry, a godly, innocent, trusting man who can’t cope with the destruction of his country.

To a certain extent it’s just one damn thing after another, but it’s actually pretty beautifully constructed, as the dogs of war slip a little bit looser in scene after scene. In one of the earlier scenes, one workmen accuses another of sedition, and the royals have them fight it out in trial by combat, which is quite brutally portrayed here. It seems like a vicious distraction from the plot, but in Howell’s brilliant staging, the whole play is right there. The whole war is bloodsport, and all talk of chivalry by each side is a sick joke.

The Tudors were descended from both the Yorks and the Lancasters, so Shakespeare didn’t have to pick a side in this war to keep his bosses happy. Instead, he damns both their houses. It’s all spiteful, brutal, and pitiful.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: The Exception That Proves the Rule

As we’ve been going through, I’ve been tracking Shakespeare’s tendency to focus on women that are falsely accused of adultery (and the danger that puts them in). He used that plot at least five times. But I’ve also been looking for any exceptions to the rule. Titania? Not really. Cressida? I wouldn’t say so. Well, folks, I’ve found her: Our first truly cheating wife, hiding all this time in what might be Shakespeare’s very first play. Maybe he got it all out of his system here with Queen Margaret and focused on falsely accused wives and lovers for the rest of his career.

Shakespeare could write great female characters, and he knew that falsely accused women, nobly attempting to withstand their accusations, were great characters to root for. But it’s fascinating that he started with this character, also well written, that was so despicable.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 24: Henry VI, Part 1

The First Part of Henry the Sixt [sic], first broadcast January 2nd, 1983

• When was it written? Possibly in 1591, perhaps his third play (the first two being the plays that are now known as Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3, so it’s possible that there was a sequel followed by a prequel.)
• What’s it about? With Henry V dead of dysentery, England falls into squabbling and begins to lose its French lands. A French girl named Joan of Arc (or “Joan La Pucelle”, as Shakespeare calls her, which means “Joan the Maid”, and is what she actually called herself) raises an army, comes to the attention of the Dauphin, beats him in one-on-one combat, and is basically handed the whole army. (And he beds her. And proclaims her the new patron saint of France.) Meanwhile, contentious Englishmen, led by noble-but-weak Henry VI, decide to pick sides, some represented by the red rose and some by the white rose. This divide eventually affects and impedes the war against Joan. After much back and forth, her forces kill the great English general Talbot, but she is eventually captured and burned at the stake. Cut back to Henry, who turns down a good marriage for a bad one, in a way that will allow him to be controlled. To be continued!
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York and, of course, Holinshed’s Chronicles.
• Interesting fact about the play: The Wikipedia page for this play is a lot. Drama drama drama! Was the play co-written? If so, was it with Marlowe, Nashe, Kyd, or someone else entirely? Is it not Shakespeare at all? If it is, is it his first play? If not, did he start with the three Henry VI plays, but in a different order? 1,2,3? 2,1,3? 2,3,1? Nobody knows!
• Best insult:
• Thou most usurping proditor
• Alas, this is a child, a silly dwarf! It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp should strike such terror to his enemies
• Thou art a most pernicious usurer, Froward by nature, enemy to peace; Lascivious, wanton
• Best word: So many!: Proditor, extirped, reguerdoned, immanity, periapts
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: Never seen it or read it until today.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: I hadn’t mentioned that Brenda Blethyn (Secrets and Lies, Vera) was in Lear, but I’ll mention her this time because she’s the biggest name here, doing a great job as Joan. A young Bernard Hill (Lord of the Rings) also shows up in a part that will continue on to the next two plays.

How’s the cast?

• Everyone is excellent. As we learned with “Troilus and Cressida”, it’s very hard to play roles that are equal parts Comedy, Tragedy, and History (That play failed utterly onscreen), but here everybody does an amazing job, creating a play that is fun, meaningful, and riveting, despite a 3:06 runtime.

How’s the direction by Jane Howell?

• Howell had previously directed “A Winter’s Tale”, which was quite beautiful, but couldn’t overcome a weak text. She impressed enough, though, that they decided to entrust her with a big four-parter, the second half of the Henriad. The result, at least from this Part I, is glorious. Brilliantly staged on one set painted like a child’s playroom, with pompous knights riding ridiculous hobbyhorses, she lets everybody have their say, but brilliantly skewers them all, exposing this war, at home and abroad, for the childish spat that it is. (Until the blood starts flying)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Humanize the Supposedly-Superhuman

In the endless debates over who wrote the play and what order it came in, the one thing everyone seems to agree upon is that this is one of Shakespeare’s worst plays, if not the very worst. Well, no one told Howell that. She clearly loves the text, and makes it delightful.

This play should actually be called “Joan of Arc” (and I suspect it would be staged a lot more often these days if it was!) Henry VI is barely in it, not even appearing until Act III in the text (though Howell has him appear first here to sing a prologue). Joan is the character here with a full and satisfying arc (no pun intended).

And she is fascinating. The history plays, are, of course, pro-English and anti-French, so you would expect Shakespeare to be less enamored of Joan than non-English writers have been, and indeed he is not, but, being Shakespeare, he can’t help but make her very complex and human.

Of course, that’s part of the problem some people have with this play: We’re used to seeing Joan as super-human, or at least unearthly, but Shakespeare is having none of that. The possibility of superpowers is there (When the Dauphin tests her by putting someone else on the throne upon first meeting her, she immediately sees through it) but she eventually proves to be all too human.

Shakespeare does her no favors by naming her after her professed maidenhood, because it just sets us up for when she bewitches the Dauphin and beds him immediately, only to be embarrassingly forced out of bed by a raiding English army. But she recovers quickly and continues to show amazing leadership abilities.

She certainly believes herself to be godlike, and her martial prowess is almost superhuman, and she can certainly bewitch almost everyone she meets, but is she a Macbeth-style witch or merely a Cleopatra-style witch? Eventually, when she loses her way, she says that her “fiends” have abandoned her, and apparently some performances show actual fiends doing that, but Howell and Blethyn would never give us any such visual clues that Joan is anything but a brilliant madwoman.

Shakespeare’s ultimate humiliation of her comes after she’s captured, and, realizing she’s not a goddess, begs for her life, lying (?) that she’s pregnant, then claiming various men are the father, in order to see which one would please the English and save her life. It’s certainly below the dignity of any other portrayal of Joan of Arc you’ll see (Falconnetti this is not) but I love it. She’s never anything less than canny, and professing pregnancy in the courtroom is a tale as old as time from Beulah Annan (fictionalized as Roxie Hart) to Elizabeth Holmes. In this case, her ploy fails, but I love that she goes down fighting using any tools she can.

Joan sees herself as superhuman, and perhaps simply because of that self-confidence, performs spectacular feats, but she proves to be all-too human in the end. In the hands of Blethyn and Howell, it feels like it’s brilliantly written. In lesser hands, maybe I would have hated the character as much as other critics do.

(I will add that it’s fascinating to compare Shakespeare’s Joan to his Cleopatra, another great woman leader from history who Shakespeare also paints as a bit of an overrated strumpet. It’s also fascinating to compare Joan to Shakespeare’s actual boss, Elizabeth the first, who also professed that her authority sprang from her maidenhood. Shakespeare doesn’t buy that from Joan. Did he buy if from Elizabeth? Certainly, many at the time did not. By doubting one, is he doubting the other?)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Mimetic is Better Than Diagetic (And Sometimes Writers Write Better Before They Know How to Write)

Apparently, another reason that some critics insist Shakespeare didn’t write the play, or that it was his first play, is that there’s so much violence on stage. To quote Wikipedia: “critics such as E. M. W. Tillyard, Irving Ribner and A. P. Rossiter have all claimed that the play violates neoclassical precepts of drama, which dictate that violence and battle should never be shown mimetically on stage, but should always be reported diegetically in dialogue.”

I had not realized this was a rule, but now I see it everywhere, and it always seem so dreadfully dull to me in plays like “Julius Caesar” or “Antony and Cleopatra” when people keep running in and describing battles we never see. Give me a bloodfest like this any day, especially with a badass swordswoman onstage hacking away.

My suspicion is that Shakespeare did write the whole play, and that this was simply a glorious example of how exciting something can be before a writer learns to, ugh, write.