- 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.
- 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.
- 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)
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.
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