- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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