Self-fashioning
New historicism attempts to understand Shakespearean literature through a variety of non-literary historical texts, such as birth and death records, graveyard inscriptions, financial affairs and accounts. But the one aspect of the historical prism that seems to be of the utmost importance is the public playhouses – the theatre for the people – in which the dramas were performed. Shakespeare’s English history plays present a world in torment, turned inside out by internecine warfare over hundreds of years. For the Elizabethans and Jacobeans this was their immediate history. Shakespeare himself had been born only a few years after the death of Henry VIII, Bosworth field was not in the distant past, and only 33 years after Shakespeare’s death Charles I would be executed. This was a period when authority and people had to ‘fashion’ themselves within an ever-changing society where so little appeared to be permanent. It is, perhaps, fortuitous that Shakespeare’s texts have survived, and we can now evaluate them both speculatively from within his own time, but also from within our time.
‘Self-fashioning is in effect the Renaissance version of…control mechanisms, the cultural system of meanings that creates specific individuals by governing the passage from abstract potential to concrete historical embodiment. Literature functions within this system in three interlocking ways: as a manifestation of the concrete behavior of its particular author, as itself the expression of the codes by which behavior is shaped, and as a reflection upon those codes.’
Greenblatt, S. (1980: 3–4), Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Shakespeare lived in a critical period in which human nature itself was being questioned by Renaissance and reformation writers and artists. The whole nature of society, its actions, practices and traditions were in flux. Mutability and change were ironically a constant, a living oxymoron, through which what Greenblatt calls ‘self-fashioning’ became the norm. These history plays are part of that process, written to entertain Shakespeare’s audiences with stories of great moments from the past, while at the same time demonstrating how ‘self-fashioning’ took place. Historical accuracy could take second place to entertainment value and the plays themselves were very successful over a number of years.
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The English history plays 1: The Henry VI plays (1591–2); Richard III (1592–4); King John (1595–7)
The Wars of the Roses were not so distant a period of English history for Shakespeare as for us. Though they ended in 1485 with the death of Richard III on the battlefield of Bosworth, they had shaped much of the consciousness of Tudor England. Henry VII, the victor of Bosworth who died in 1509, was the grandfather of the reigning queen, Elizabeth I, who had come to the throne on the death of her half-sister Queen Mary in 1558, just six years before the birth of Shakespeare in 1564.
To us, Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Richard III concern a history of over 500 years ago, but for Shakespeare, starting his writing career in the late 1580s, the Battle of Bosworth was only 100 years in the past. It was as if a young writer in 2015 were to have chosen the First World War for the subject of his or her first plays.
The history plays written in the 1590s were set in a period distant enough for Shakespeare to consider writing without causing offence to Elizabeth I. These plays kept a respectable and politically sensible distance from the century of Elizabeth’s birth, Elizabeth’s reign and the tumultuous reign of her father. Shakespeare, perhaps wisely, didn’t write a play about Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, until approximately ten years after her death in 1603 when, in 1612–13, he wrote one in collaboration with John Fletcher, as discussed in Chapter 27. He also made some minor contributions to a collaborative play, Sir Thomas More (Henry VIII’s Chancellor), in around 1600.
Nevertheless, the Henry VI and Richard III plays concerned a history that brought the Tudors, including eventually, in 1558, Elizabeth, to power and as such had a topicality for Elizabethan audiences that Shakespeare was glad to exploit. They were a huge success at attracting audiences for a dramatist who was starting to make his fame as a playwright.
Key idea
To us, unfamiliar mostly with the characters except through his plays, it can become confusing as to which are the Lancastrians, which the Yorkists and who is who and is on whose side at whatever time in the history. Many texts of the plays, including the Arden Shakespeare, which I am using, have a chronology, a royal family tree and explanations of who is who. Similarly, when the plays are performed, the programmes usually include such material. It is useful to keep these aids at your side as you go through the plays. You may also find Appendix 3 in this book, listing the historical dates of the English monarchs, useful.
Shakespeare’s sources for the history plays
Shakespeare’s sources for the English history plays are largely a set of chronicles published or translated throughout the sixteenth century. The principal ones are those by Froissart (translated by Bernes in 1523–5), Edward Hall (1548) and Ralph Holinshed (1587). There was also Samuel Daniel’s epic poem on the history of the Civil Wars (1595?); Thomas More’s Tudor-biased historical account of Richard III (c.1513); and A Mirror for Magistrates, a historical poem sequence published in 1559 and with additional material in 1563. Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke places the Henry VI plays within their historical chronological structure from which Shakespeare develops a dramatic art of counterpointing, which is employed throughout the history plays. Also, although the first tetralogy deals with a single stretch of time, it is probable that Shakespeare completed 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI before he wrote, probably in collaboration with Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) and others, 1 Henry VI. (See Chapter 12.)
King Henry VI parts 1–3
The Henry VI plays have demonstrated, through modern performance and adaptation, that they are theatrically adept and engrossing in production. Despite each part having its own integrity, they can together tell a good story in a series of episodes which modern audiences, familiar with box-set series perhaps on television or DVD, enjoy.
In the early 1960s, at the time of the Cold War in which the USA and the Soviet Union were squaring up to each other, Peter Hall and John Barton adapted the three Henry VI plays into two and added Richard III as a sequence entitled The Wars of the Roses. They saw the plays as involving polar opposites, inevitably attracting and colliding with one another. Everything stemmed back, however, to the deposition of Richard II:
‘Underlying these plays is the curse on the House of Lancaster. Bolingbroke deposed Richard II to become Henry IV. Richard II was a weak and sometimes bad king, unbalanced; he could not order the body politic. Yet for Shakespeare his deposition is a wound in the body politic that festers through reign after reign, a sin which can only be expiated by the letting of quantities of blood. The bloody totalitarianism of Richard III is the expiation of England.’
Hall, P. (1970: xiii), The Wars of the Roses. London: BBC Books, 1970
In a letter to John Barton concerning the ‘first play’ in the adaptation, Peter Hall writes of exposing a movement found ‘from the opposition between two principles, one patriotic and constructive, but misguided, the other destructive and selfish. There’s a feeling of growing disaster. There’s the antithesis and interplay between strife and concord, peace and war, at home and abroad’ (Hall, P. [1970: xx]).
Later interpretations of Henry VI at Shakespeare’s Globe in London as well as at the RSC have either placed the plays in a historical context or emphasized elements of subversion contained in their representation of the growing inefficacy and instability of monarchical ritual. In the decade following the turn of the millennium, Michael Boyd, then Artistic Director of the RSC, embarked on an adventurous panoramic, if perhaps controversial, view of Shakespeare’s English history plays, rehearsing and producing both cycles ‘in the order that they were written and in the order in which Shakespeare’s audience would have seen them, thus giving us an insight into Sh
akespeare’s journey as a writer, and a deeper understanding of his developing view of England and its history’ (programme note, 2007–8 season).
This was somewhat in contrast to Adrian Noble’s 1988 adaptation of Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III into The Plantagenets, in which he noted the ‘apparently cavalier way’ in which Shakespeare as ‘a writer of fiction…refused to worship at the shrine of actuality’. For Noble, ‘Shakespeare’s primary purpose in the plays is moral’, especially in being ‘explicit in its condemnation of civil war’ (Noble, A. [1989: viii–ix], Introduction, The Plantagenets. London and Boston: Faber & Faber).
In 1994 Katie Mitchell produced another adaptation for the RSC: Henry VI: The Battle for the Throne. In 1977, however, Terry Hands had bravely directed the Henry VI plays without adaptation, in a sequential production that demonstrated how a short space of time can change interpretations. Whereas in the 1960s Hall and Barton’s work had been influenced by big power oppositional politics, Hands in the 1970s saw his characters as self-aggrandizing, petty people squabbling over and with power at the cost of ordinary people. In 2013 Henry VI, as Harry the Sixth; The House of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of the Duke of York, was produced by Shakespeare’s Globe in London and on tour in productions of the three plays as individual units, the programme noting that their original titles ‘make it clear that they are not a trilogy’ but they were conveniently placed as such by Heminges and Condell in the First Folio. As noted above, the order of composition is uncertain, especially in relation to Part 1. So it was only fitting that Shakespeare’s Globe, with some strong productions of the individual plays, raised the issue of historical sequencing through performance.
The character of Henry VI overall, as Julia Briggs has pointed out, ‘recalls Erasmus’s gentle, passive and unworldly ruler’, in contrast with Machiavelli’s view that an effective ruler is required to be able to address the world of ‘tough, competitive power politics’ (Briggs, J. [1977: 207–8]).
1 Henry VI deals with England’s loss of its overseas territory and with the downfall of its national hero the Earl of Talbot. In 2 Henry VI, where the emphasis is more on domestic politics, we witness the comic yet pertinent uprising of Jack Cade, which presages some of the issues that occur in King John (1595–7), over the authenticity of inheritance, succession and authority. In a humorous scene, Jack Cade claims to be a Plantagenet and that his wife is ‘descended of the Lacies’. These claims are comically undermined by Dick the Butcher, who in a series of asides mocks the rebel leader as in, for example, the claim for his wife: ‘She was indeed a pedlar’s daughter and sold many laces’ (4.2.42f.). It is Jack the Butcher who also gets unfailing predictable laughs from the audience for his suggestion ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’ (4.2.72). But all this is expressed comically, and seen as such by the audience, even though the poor Clerk, after examination by Cade, is led away to be hanged because he confesses that he can read and write.
The scene, though a pantomime expression of discontent and the dangers of civil disturbance, presaged perhaps the episode in Julius Caesar (Act 3, Scene 3) where, with a greater touch of sombre realism, Cinna the Poet is mistaken by the rabble as one of the conspirators and murdered. In both cases, popular unruliness is offered as a symptom of a larger disorder. The plight of the common man, however, is put in a more pertinent perspective in 3 Henry VI (Act 2, Scene 5), where the weak King Henry VI enters the stage alone and ruminates on the fortunes of the battle and how the thrones of York and Lancaster seem to be of equal strength.
Counterpointing and juxtapositioning
Sitting on a ‘molehill’, the King wishes to be no more than a ‘homely swain’ (3 Henry VI, 2.5.22), someone not involved in politics and responsibility but rather a man able to count the hours and plan out his quiet life: ‘Ah, what a life were this! how sweet! how lovely!’ (2.5.41).
As he meditates on this comforting domesticity, a young man enters, dragging the body of a soldier he has just killed in battle. The young man rifles the body for booty and as he does so he uncovers the face:
Who’s this? O God! it is my father’s face,
Whom in this conflict I unwares have kill’d.
O heavy times, begetting such events!
From London by the King was I press’d forth;
My father, being the Earl of Warwick’s man,
Came on the part of York, press’d by his master;
And I, who at his hands receiv’d my life,
Have by my hands of life bereaved him.
Pardon me, God, I knew not what I did:
(2.5.61–9)
The son grieves, as does the King witnessing his distress:
O piteous spectacle! O bloody times!
…
Weep, wretched man; I’ll aid thee tear for tear;
And let our hearts and eyes, like civil war,
Be blind with tears, and break o’ercharg’d with grief.
(2.5.73, 76–8)
As the King weeps, an older man enters carrying the body of a soldier and, rifling the body, similarly uncovers the face:
Is this our foeman’s face?
Ah, no, no, no; it is mine only son!
Ah, boy, if any life be left in thee,
Throw up thine eye!
…
O, pity, God, this miserable age!
What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly,
Erroneous, mutinous and unnatural,
This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!
(2.5.82–5, 88–91)
Again, the King grieves and wishes that his own death might stop the warring factions. It appears a fatuous desire.
Spotlight
Shakespeare, with this scene – and, as we will see later with Falstaff’s diatribe against honour (1 Henry IV, 5.1.127–41) and with the soldier Michael Williams’ warning (Henry V, 4.1.132–44) of the King’s responsibility for the souls of those killed in battle – expresses something of the common man caught up in the power games of kings. Counterpointing by the juxtaposition of experiences and attitudes reveals, thereby, an understanding of the social condition of ordinary people. So in Henry V the King’s heroic call to battle, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more’, ending ‘Cry “God for Harry! England and Saint George!”’ (Henry V, 3.1.1–34), is immediately parodied in the following scene by Bardolph, Nym, Pistol and the Boy.
BARDOLPH On, on, on, on, on, to the breach, to the breach!
NYM Pray thee, Corporal, stay; the knocks are too hot, and for mine own part I have not a case of lives. The humour of it is too hot, that is the very plain-song of it.
PISTOL The plain-song is most just, for humours do abound,
Knocks go and come, God’s vassals drop and die,
And sword and shield
In bloody field
Doth win immortal fame.
BOY Would I were in an alehouse in London! I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety.
(Henry V, 3.2.1–11)
Note here the comical fivefold repetition of ‘On’, and the fact that Shakespeare moves from verse into prose and then doggerel of the kind that Bottom uses in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The simple, naively honest expression of the Boy’s desire is indicative of the way in which Shakespeare invests the history plays with a human viewpoint in the face of the miseries and tragedies that are unfolding. Civil war in the Henry VI plays is not just about the aristocratic classes, political ineptitude or ambition, since decisions made affect everyone whether or not they are educated or have access to power.
Richard III
Historically, Richard the crookback, having been defeated at the Battle of Bosworth (1485) by Henry VII, became the butt of Tudor propaganda. His deformity symbolizes and caricatures evil, which from the opening of the play allows for virtuoso acting that has attracted the greatest actors of successive generations.
ADDRESSING THE AUDIENCE
Uniquely for Shakespeare, the play opens with the p
rotagonist acting as a chorus – which is also a commentator on his own intrigue and evil – entering the stage alone to confide in his audience:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
(1.1.1f.)
Richard’s soliloquy sets the framework for the play, taking the audience into the character’s confidence as he plays and toys with them as he reveals what he is and what he intends to do:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate, the one against the other:
(1.1.28–35)
To this extent Richard is in control of the narrative for the first four acts of the play.
Reminiscent of Iago in the later play Othello, Richard audaciously proclaims to the audience at the end of the scene that he’ll ‘marry Warwick’s youngest daughter–/What though I kill’d her husband and her father?’ In the next scene he proceeds to woo Lady Anne successfully, despite her condemning him as a ‘dreadful minister of hell!’, a ‘lump of foul deformity’, a ‘Villain (that)…know’st no law of God nor man’ (1.2.46, 57, 70). He keeps her talking, perseveres, offers her his sword to kill him, or offers to kill himself, and persuades her to agree. Once she has left the stage, he turns and confides in the audience with incredulous, humorous relish:
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