Wow, it sure does feel like March 2015 has dragged on and
on. I sure can't wait for it to be April 2015, but, on the bright side, I still have time to post my review of
Henry VI, Part 1 to this thread, in the month of March in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Fifteen,
just like I said I was going to do. Anyway, yeah, so it's been over two years since the last entry in my Shakespeare review project, but it took me three or four attempts to finally get through all of Shakespeare's first historical tetralogy (also known as the first Henriad). But I finally did it! So, without further ado, here is my review of
Henry VI, Part 1 (or, as I will stylize it throughout the rest of this post,
1 Henry VI).
Henry VI, Part 1
I'm not going to give my own synopsis of the plot of
I Henry VI, but if you're interested
this summary is OK, if a bit lengthy (
Wikipedia's summary is more concise and better-written, though less detailed). Shakespeare's three Henry VI plays are widely regarded to be among his lesser plays, and Part 1 is generally considered the weakest of the lot. There has even been considerable debate as to whether such a bad play could actually have been written by the Bard himself. Indeed, a lot of research has gone into how much of the play is Shakespeare's and how much is written by collaborators. The idea that there were collaborators is a common and entirely credible one (and is of course entirely separate from the completely spurious contention of those who don't think Shakespeare wrote his plays at all), and some estimates have Shakespeare as the author of just 20% of the play. The most recent
Oxford edition of the play has even gone so far as to list Christopher Marlowe as the co-author of not only
1 Henry VI, but Parts 2 and 3 as well (I read the previous Oxford World Classics edition, edited by Michael Taylor, if you're curious). While the question of how much of the play Shakespeare wrote himself isn't one that especially interests me, I am inclined to agree with the critical consensus that
1 Henry VI is not a very good play. As I said above, I've taken three or four stabs at reading the first Henriad over the last two and a half years, and the quality of
1 Henry VI (and, to a somewhat lesser extent,
2 Henry VI), are a big part of the reason why my first several attempts failed. It's not a very focused play, with the action divided between France, where the Dauphin and Joan of Arc are attempting to take back previously French territory from the English, and London, where the young king is proving an ineffectual leader as Richard Plantagenet bides his time, waiting to claim the crown as his own. Furthermore, it's a nationalistic, militaristic, xenophobic, misogynistic play, overly focused on cheap on-stage action which doesn't appeal to readers, and is unlikely to be nearly as exciting to viewers of modern performances as it probably would have been to audiences in the 1590s.
The language of the play is, with few exceptions, thoroughly unspectacular, and at times very dull. For instance, after the death of John Talbot on the battlefield, Sir William Lucy angrily addresses the Dauphin and the French as they gloat over Talbot's corpse, reciting a lengthy, tedious list of Talbot's titles to impress upon them the magnitude of this death. It's a moment which is intended to underscore the nobility of Talbot, the tragedy of his death, and the dishonorable nature of the French, but instead it's just plodding. On the other hand, Lucy's exclamation of "O, were mine eye-balls into bullets turned, / That I in rage might shoot them at your faces!" (4.7.79-80) following Joan's flippant reaction to his recitation of titles is equally bad writing, but it's also unintentionally hilarious, so there's that.
The play's characters aren't especially interesting either. To the extent that the play has a protagonist, it's probably John Talbot, but most of the scenes set in England have very little to do with him, and, besides, he's not a very interesting lead. The scenes leading up to his death are particularly weak. Scenes with some potential (his son shows up to join his father in a hopeless battle, each tries and fails to persuade the other to flee to safety, and then they both die) are ruined by the lines all being written in rhyming couplets that don't suit the tone or gravity of the situation at all. The best that can be said of Talbot as a character is that he symbolizes an old-fashioned chivalry and sense of civic duty which is dying in
1 Henry VI, and will be completely dead by the time we get to
Richard III. This on its own would be rather uninteresting, as chivalry is vastly overrated, and people have been complaining about the supposed decline of morals and values in society throughout recorded history, but there is some nuance to Shakespeare's depiction of Talbot. Because while at times he's just a boring chivalric Mary Sue with no real personality, at other times his sense of chivalry is played as outright ludicrous, as when, early in the play, after being captured by the French, he is exchanged for a prisoner of lesser value, and is enraged at the perceived slight to his honor, or later on, when he calls the French army cowards for refusing to forsake a fortified position in a city and come out to face the British in the open field. So there
is some nuance to Talbot's characterization.
But it's Talbot's foil, Joan of Arc, who is the most interesting character in the play. Unfortunately, in this case, "interesting character" doesn't exactly mean "well-written character", for while Shakespeare's Joan of Arc is a memorable take on the historical figure, she's very inconsistently written. She's a character of extremes, who presents herself as pure, holy, and virginal, but who is deceitful and boastful, communes with spirits, and whose interactions with the Dauphin are full of innuendo. This can, at times, make her a somewhat sympathetic character, as the other members of the Dauphin's inner circle vacillate with fickle frequency between regarding her with sexist scorn whenever the fortunes of the French are on the wane, and practically revering her as a saint when the French army is triumphant. But, for the most part, it's pretty clear that we're not supposed to identify with Joan, as in the play's final act, she literally summons evil spirits to try to turn the tide of the battle to aid the French, and ends the play telling (presumably) wild lies about being pregnant, desperately changing the identity of the father in an attempt to save herself from being burned alive at the stake. It all comes across as misogynistic and distasteful, and serves to make Joan's character less complex than she could have been.
Henry himself doesn't, as I previously mentioned, show up very much in the play. Part of the reason for this is likely that the play is depicting how quickly things fell apart for England after the death of his father, Henry V. And even dead, in a lot of ways Henry V overshadows his son throughout the play. The play opens with several English nobles mourning the death of the elder Henry, and his absence haunts the scene. In that first scene, the Duke of Gloucester says of the recently departed sovereign: "He ne'er lift up his hand but conquerèd," (1.1.16) and shortly thereafter, the Duke of Bedford literally invokes Henry's ghost, imploring it to "Prosper this realm, keep it from civil broils," (1.1.53) before being interrupted mid-overwrought speech by a messenger bearing the news that a number of the French cities in territory that Henry V had conquered have just been lost. And while the Duke of Exeter has his priorities straight (from the perspective of a 14th Century English nobleman, anyway), asking (in what I found by far to be the most memorable line of the play) "We mourn in black, why mourn we not in blood?" (1.1.17), the British leadership will prove unequal to the task of keeping hold of their French territories, as they will often be too focused on petty squabbles among themselves. The most serious of these is between Richard Plantagenet and the Duke of Somerset, whose quarrel over an unstated issue which may or may not have something to do with whether Richard is the true heir to the throne, divides the English nobles into two factions, represented by red roses (for Somerset's faction) and white roses (for Richard's). Henry doesn't honestly have a lot to do with the losing of France; he was historically a child for the majority of the events depicted in the play, and regardless of the age that Shakespeare intends him to be in this play, he is likely still pretty young. In any case, he generally takes the advice of the Lord Protector, his uncle the Duke of Gloucester. But even so, the few decisions that Henry
does make are all bad ones. Early in Act 4, in the play's longest uninterrupted speech, Henry attempts (and for a time superficially succeeds) in quelling the conflict between Somerset and Richard with admittedly eloquent words, but at the same time makes some terrible strategic miscalculations. Henry says: "I see no reason, if I wear this rose, / That anyone should therefore be suspicious / I more incline to Somerset than York; / Both are my kinsmen, and I love them both," (4.1.152-155) as he takes up a red rose of Somerset's faction. But, while Henry likely meant what he said, it does him no favors with Richard, the newly named Duke of York, who was already waiting for the right moment to claim the crown for himself. Likewise, Henry ends his speech with a call for Somerset to unite the men under his command with those of Richard's in the fight against the French. This later leads to disaster, as Somerset and Richard fail to do this out of spite for one another, which leads to Talbot's forces being overwhelmed by much more numerous French forces, who kill Talbot and his son. Similarly, at the end of the play, Henry will back out of a strategic marriage with a close relative of the Dauphin in order to marry Margaret of Anjou, a French noblewoman of much lower status, upon hearing of the latter's beauty from the Duke of Suffolk, an impulsive decision made against the advice of the Lord Protector.
While I didn't think the play is very good, it's not all bad. The scene where Somerset and Richard first create their factions symbolized by roses is pretty solid, as is Henry's aforementioned botched attempt to make them settle their differences. But the most impressive thing about
1 Henry VI is probably it's structure. Not the lack of focus that comes from the play dealing with both the conflict in France with the squabbles in the English court feeling kind of shoehorned into the plot, but the way that it alters between scenes focused on the English and scenes focused on the French forces, or the way that Talbot and Joan serve as foils for one another. There's a nice structural symmetry to the play that rises above its pedestrian verse and dull characters. A part of this symmetry is seen in the ever-changing fortunes of the two armies. The English and the French trade victories back and forth, and there's rarely any rhyme or reason to it. It's thematically appropriate for this tetralogy of history plays, where success is ever-fleeting, and many more figures will go to their deaths in pursuit of the interests of their own faction in contesting for territory or a crown than will live out their days in peace. It calls into question whether the territorial interests of a nation, or being the king of a nation, is even worth pursuing in the first place, with all the death that will accompany that pursuit. In a couple of days I'll be posting my review of the second season of the BBC series
Hollow Crown, which adapted Shakespeare's first tetralogy for TV last year. The series takes its name from
Richard II, the first play in Shakespeare's second (and better) tetralogy, in a scene where the King questions the value of crown which he posseses:
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
(3.2)
While there is no immediate challenge to Henry's rule over England in
1 Henry VI, and there have been as yet no "sad stories of the death of kings", in the next three plays of the tetralogy, England will descend into civil war, and the arbitrarily changing fortunes of the battles for France in this play serve as a sort of precursor to the pointless and unnecessary bloodshed that is to come. And I will explore the beginnings of that civil war tomorrow with a post about
2 Henry VI.
