In the preceding chapters I have looked in detail at Richard III, Richard II, 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV. I have argued that the plays reflect and rewrite each other, they restage the same conflicts in different ways and in different emotional keys. The themes of usurpation and legitimacy run through all four plays, linking them together in an interconnected tapestry of history. Of course, this approach to the histories has gone against the usual grouping of the history plays as two tetralogies and also excluded several of Shakespeare’s other history plays. In this final chapter I will briefly sketch how these other plays fit into my argument and how they relate to the four key plays.
Henry VI
In my analysis of Richard III I argue that it rewrites the Henry VI plays, and that it can also be said that the three parts of Henry VI rewrite each other, but in a different way. In contrast to the composition order of the other histories, it is possible that Shakespeare wrote the first part of Henry VI after he had finished the second and third parts; it is the only instance in the canon of Shakespeare returning to a reign he has already dramatised in order to expand the narrative. If, as the Oxford editors argue, the first part of Henry VI was written later but as a prequel to the other parts,1 then a large part of its meaning for the original audience would be retrospective, as they would be aware of the dramatic future of the play. The future is already known and, as a prequel, 1 Henry VI gains its meaning from this knowledge of the future. It is thus debatable whether the play can be
1 Jean E. Howard, ‘The First Part of Henry the Sixth’ in William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare,
ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: Norton, 1997), p. 436.
fully appreciated in isolation or whether it requires at least a vague awareness of the other two parts of the narrative to be dramatically satisfying.
Written non-consecutively, history in the Henry VI plays, it seems, is disjointed, a patchwork, event-driven broken sequence that reflects the events it chronicles. It is notable that neither 2 Henry VI nor 3 Henry VI explicitly refers back to the earlier play; it can be seen as an unconnected prequel which, although it sheds light on later events, is not essential to the narrative. By contrast, 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI do not stand alone. They are two parts of the same narrative. 2 Henry VI ends abruptly with York and his rebels setting off to pursue the fleeing Henry, offering no real resolution. Continuing the action immediately after 2 Henry VI’s conclusion, 3 Henry VI resumes the narrative without recapitulating the events of the earlier play. Knowledge of the preceding play is essential to fully grasp what is happening onstage. Its history relies on a pre-existing knowledge of the theatrical past.
In their onward rush of history the Henry VI plays do not pause to explain past events to the audience; the swift pace of the drama does not falter, and an audience viewing 3 Henry VI with no experience of the earlier plays would, at least temporarily, find themselves adrift. John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen observe that:
3 Henry VI is defined [...] as a history play not only in theme and characterization
but also in its open-endedness. The play begins in the midst of an ongoing conflict which is not explained by reminiscence or arriving messenger, so the past is not enclosed retrospectively in the present: soldiers enter boasting and bearing battle
trophies; one occupies a throne; they are confronted by an angry party who claim the first group is illegitimate – all without explanation or resolution.2
This focus on events themselves, as opposed to the motivations which drive them, or the way past events are remembered, is characteristic of the Henry VI plays, but a marked contrast to the way Richard III, the final part of the first tetralogy, deals with the problem of the dramatic past. The past is ever-present in Richard III; the murders of Rutland, York, Prince Edward and Henry VI in 3 Henry VI are painfully remembered by Richard and Margaret. The presence of Henry VI’s corpse onstage in I. ii. provides a physical reminder of the vanished past dramatised in the earlier plays. Richard III thus engages with its dramatic past; it restages crucial events from Henry VI by retelling them onstage. In this way the vanished past is recreated verbally, providing the audience with an oral version of the events themselves. Of course, when the events are related, they are inevitably distorted in the telling. The accounts of the past we hear in Richard III are unreliable, coloured as they are by emotion and retrospectively rewritten. The vanished past of Henry VI cannot be recovered in Richard III, and an audience that has not seen the earlier plays cannot gain a true picture of what happened in Henry VI from the speeches in Richard III. The dramatic past cannot be re-experienced or retold – it can only be rewritten. Richard III marks the discovery of the need for this dramatic past, the discovery that the history play has to have some kind of history. It cannot produce this history except by rewriting it.
Significantly, the Henry VI plays relate separate historical narratives: 1 Henry VI chronicles the Hundred Years’ War, and 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI tell the story of the
2 John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen, ‘Introduction’, William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 3 (London:
Wars of the Roses. The plays relate two different histories, with only a tangential connection between them: the fact that Henry VI was on the throne when the events occurred. A weak king, Henry VI, unlike his father or grandfather, reacts to events instead of instigating them. Events seem to happen in spite of Henry, not because of him. Indeed, the Henry VI plays are unique among Shakespeare’s histories for not presenting a monarch as the focal point of the drama. This emphasis on events instead of the
monarch’s role in instigating them is a reflection of the portrayal of Henry VI in the chronicles, as Michael Hattaway observes:
Unlike the reigns of Henry V or Richard III, that of Henry VI was not dominated by the personality of its monarch; Edward IV’s rule during the last years of Henry’s reign is stark evidence of this. Rather it was a period of war between nations (the Hundred Years’ War) and within the kingdom (the Wars of the Roses).3
Uniquely in Shakespeare’s histories, in Henry VI it is history itself that takes centre stage rather than a monarch. This ‘history’ closely follows the format of the chronicles, and manifests itself as a particular sort of early modern history play, described by Maurice Morgann as a ‘drum and trumpet’ play.4 This kind of play was soon to be obsolete as the ‘drum and trumpet’ genre of history was replaced by a new kind of history, and a new type of history play, as Shakespeare’s sequence continued. This dramatising of ‘old history’ is a theatrical experiment that Shakespeare chose not to repeat. In Henry VI the
3 Michael Hattaway, ‘Introduction’, William Shakespeare, The First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Michael
Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 1.
4 Maurice Morgann, ‘An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff’, Eighteenth Century Essays