Shakespeare's Kings

by John Julius Norwich

  Thanks to the sheer irresistibility of Falstaff, the Henry IV plays were a success from the start. (Only the Victorians were to find him shocking, as they did almost everything else.) For the same reason, however, producers of later centuries tended to cut most of the political and historical sections and focus the entire play on the lovable old reprobate. Not until 1913 - and then not in London but in Birmingham - did Barry Jackson give audiences the opportunity to hear the full text as Shakespeare wrote it.1

  Surprisingly, perhaps, in view of the opportunities it offers to a great actor, as well as for its pageantry and stage effects, Henry V was ignored between January 1605, when it was performed at court during the Christmas revels, and November 1735, when it was revived by the Irish actor Henry Giffard at his new theatre of Goodman's Fields. The warrior king then became a favourite role for such actors as Kemble, Macready and Charles Kean; David Garrick had played only the Chorus. Less to be wondered at is the play's increased popularity in time of war. Londoners at Christmas 1914 perhaps deserved something a little more thrilling than the fifty-six-year-old Frank Benson as Henry; even this, however, must have been preferable to the production two years later by Marie Slade and her all-woman company, with Miss Slade herself in the title role. Henry V shares with Richard III the distinction of having been twice made the subject of a feature film. Laurence Olivier's of 1944 — a triumph, considering the difficulties of film production in wartime and a ridiculously small budget — understandably emphasized the patriotic aspect; Kenneth Branagh's, made forty-five years later, went a good deal deeper, removing the glamour and reminding us instead of the mud and the blood and the misery of war.

  The three parts of Henry VI have always been, as it were, the runts of the litter. We know of no early stage history of any of them, unless the 'Harey the vi', mentioned in the diary of the theatre manager Philip Henslowe as having been performed by Lord Strange's Men on 3 March 1592, can be identified with Part I. In London, apart from a single performance of Part I at Drury Lane in 1738 for some 'Ladies of Quality' and a week's run of Part II in 1864, none of the three was seen in its original form until 1923, when they were all staged on two consecutive

  I remember my father - a passionate Shakespearean - telling me that the greatest Falstaff he ever saw was the sixty-five-year-old music-hall comedian George Robey, at His Majesty's Theatre in 1935.

  There have actually been three films made of Richard III, if we count the two-reeler of Frank Benson's Stratford production of 1911.

  nights by Robert Atkins at the Old Vic.1 Shakespeare-lovers then had to wait another twelve years, until in the summer of 1935 Gilmor Browne, Director of the Pasadena Community Playhouse, presented a festival season of all the history plays. Over the past half-century, productions of the trilogy have still been few and far between. (I have already mentioned the Barton—Hall Wars of the Roses at the Aldwych theatre, where on Saturday 11 January 1964 I saw, for the first and I fear the last time in my life, an edited version of the three parts of Henry VI as well as Richard III, all performed in a single day.)

  We are left with the greatest play of them all. It seems hard nowadays to believe that Richard III was ignored through most of the seventeenth century, and that for 150 years after that it survived only in an extraordinary version by the actor-playwright Colley Cibber, which included bits from Richard II, Henry IV Part II, Henry V and Henry VI Part III, plus several lines of his own invention. For the play as Shakespeare wrote it audiences had to wait till 1845, when it was produced by Samuel Phelps; even then, however, they preferred the Cibber version - and when Phelps restaged the play in 1861, this was the one they got. Not till the end of the nineteenth century did Richard III really come into its own, when Frank Benson offered productions regularly between 1886 and 1915. There can be no real doubt that the first truly definitive Richard was that of Olivier in 1944 - a vision of evil which he preserved eleven years later in his famous film version; though even this, despite his own electrifying performance and those of Ralph Richardson as Buckingham and John Gielgud as Clarence, now seems to me pedestrian when compared with the film of 1995, shot largely in Battersea Power Station, with Sir Ian McKellen in the title role.

  But now I am becoming critical, and this is not a work of criticism. Anyone wanting to know more about texts, dates and sources is recommended once again to acquire the relevant volumes of the Arden or the New Cambridge editions, the most authoritative and scholarly in existence.2 My own object has been far more modest: simply to provide lovers of Shakespeare, enthusiastic but cheerfully non-expert, with the

  It must be said in fairness that Frank Benson had staged Part II at Stratford in 1899, 1901 and 1909, and the complete trilogy in a cycle of seven histories in 1906.

  All references in this book are to the Arden, except of course those relating to Edward III, for which I have used the New Cambridge.

  sort of single volume that I myself should like to have had, when my eyes were first opened to the splendour of these Histories, more than half a century ago.

  John Julius Norwich Castle Combe, November 1998

  Edward III and the Black Prince

  [1337-1377]

  KING EDWARD. Lorraine, return this answer to thy lord: I mean to visit him, as he requests; But how? not servilely dispos'd to bend, But like a conqueror, to make him bow. His lame unpolish'd shifts are come to light, And truth has pull'd the vizard from his face That set a gloss upon his arrogance. Dare he command a fealty in me? Tell him, the crown, that he usurps, is mine, And where he sets his foot, he ought to kneel: 'Tis not a petty dukedom that I claim, But all the whole dominions of the realm; Which if with grudging he refuse to yield, I'll take away those borrow'd plumes of his And send him naked to the wilderness.

  EDWARD III

  On Monday 21 September 1327 Edward Plantagenet, the former King Edward II of England, was murdered at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. He had been deposed eight months earlier, but not before he and his infamous lover Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, had reduced the prestige of the English Crown to the lowest point in all its history. Edward was weak and impressionable, totally unable to assert himself against the ambition and greed of his favourite, who shamelessly used his hold over the King to advance his own fortunes. Had he shown the faintest degree of moderation, had he treated the great barons of the land with even a suggestion of deference and respect, they would probably have accepted the situation philosophically; instead, he rode roughshod over them all, infuriating them with his greed, ostentation and arrogance. Only two months after his coronation in 1308, they made their first demand for Gaveston's banishment; the King's reply was to appoint him Lieutenant of Ireland, and little more than a year later the odious young man was back at his side, insufferable as ever.

  The barons kept up their pressure, and in 1311 Gaveston was sentenced to permanent exile from the kingdom. Even then he and Edward fought back, and early the following year the King formally announced the Earl's return and reinstatement; in doing so, however, he effectively signed his death warrant. On 19 May 1312 Gaveston surrendered at Scarborough, and a month later to the day he was publicly executed on Blacklow Hill, just outside Warwick. Somehow Edward managed to maintain a tenuous hold on the throne for another fifteen years; but his weakness and indecision, his now habitual drunkenness and his utter inability to control an unending stream of catamites - above all a certain Hugh le Despenser, a would-be successor to Gaveston - made his downfall inevitable. Eventually his own Queen, Isabella of France, together with her lover Roger Mortimer, took up arms against him and he was obliged to capitulate. On 20 January 1327 he was formally deposed, and eight months later, on 21 September, was put hideously to death.1

  His son and successor, called Edward like his father, was a little over fourteen years old when he found himself the richest and most powerful ruler in Europe. To Scotland he could lay no claim: it had its own line of kings, the reigning monarch at that time being Robert I (the Bruce), who had trounced his father a
t Bannockburn thirteen years before. Both Ireland and Wales, however - although they continued to give trouble - were theoretically part of Edward's dominions: as was Gascony, which was more important than either, comprising as it did the larger part of south-west France. True, English possessions beyond the Channel were no longer what they once had been. Two centuries before, Edward's great-great-great-grandfather Henry II had claimed,

  John Trevisa, who was born at Berkeley in 1326, writes in his translation (with interpolations) of Higden's Polychronicon that Edward was killed 'with a hoote broche putte thro the secret place posterialle' - this particularly ghastly method having been chosen principally in order that there should be no marks on the body when it was prepared for state burial in Gloucester Cathedral, but also, perhaps, as being appropriate for a suspected sodomite.

  either as fiefs by inheritance or through his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, almost half the area of the country we know today, including — as well as Gascony — Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Poitou, Guyenne and Toulouse. Since Henry's time, however, much of this had fallen away; now only Gascony was left.

  In 1328, little more than a year after Edward was crowned, the French King Charles IV died in Paris, leaving — like his two brothers who had preceded him on the throne - no male issue; and suddenly not only the lost provinces but the whole of France seemed to Edward to be just possibly within his reach. He now claimed simply that his own mother, Isabella, the late King's sister, was the rightful heir; the French objected that according to the old Salic Law the crown could not pass to a woman, and that it should therefore go to the son of Charles's uncle, Philip of Valois; whereupon Edward pointed out that even if the Salic Law were to be upheld he himself, as the late King's nephew, was a closer relation than Philip, who was merely a cousin.

  It is interesting to speculate how European history would have been changed had Edward's view prevailed, with England and France united under a single crown. But to the French such an outcome was clearly out of the question. Philip, after all, was already Regent; Edward, now sixteen, lived across the sea, was the senior representative of that same house of Plantagenet that in Gascony had caused nothing but trouble, and was in any case still a minor. Philip duly received his coronation as Philip VI at Rheims in May 1328, and Edward was obliged, albeit reluctantly, to recognize him as King. But this presented another problem — one of the oldest and most intractable of all those inherent in the feudal system, one which had been poisoning Anglo-French relations ever since the days of William the Conqueror: how could a sovereign of one state hold land as the vassal of a sovereign of another? The duties imposed by such vassalage were as difficult for one of them to insist upon as they were distasteful to the other to perform. Edward's title to his French lands was not in dispute; but how were those lands held — in full sovereignty or as fiefs?

  The French had no doubts on the matter: so far as they were concerned the King of France retained his suzerainty under the formula superioritas et resortum, which allowed the people of Gascony the ultimate right of appeal to Paris. The English, however, refused to accept any such limitation of their authority. Lawyers on both sides of the Channel had been arguing for a century and more, but had succeeded only in smothering the issue under layer after layer of obfuscation, until the only point which was perfectly clear (though neither side could admit it) was that the problem was insoluble. In 1329 Edward did in fact travel to Amiens, where he did simple homage to Philip; but eight years later, on 24 May 1337, the French King declared Gascony confiscate to himself 'on account of the many excesses, rebellions and acts of disobedience committed against us and our royal majesty by the King of England, Duke of Aquitaine'. By now tension had been further increased by Edward's invasion of France's old ally, Scotland; and Philip's unilateral action came as the last straw. On 7 October Edward challenged his claim not only to Gascony but to France as well, declaring himself 'King of France and England'. The Hundred Years War had begun.

  It is with this declaration that Shakespeare's Edward III effectively opens. There is a brief preliminary exchange during which, for the sake of the audience, Edward's claim to the French throne is explained -and its justice confirmed - by Robert, Count of Artois;2 there then enters the French Ambassador, the Duke of Lorraine, who peremptorily demands that Edward appear within forty days before the King of France to do homage for his dukedom of Guyenne - a summons which is answered in the words that form the epigraph to this chapter. We are thus given a rousing and intensely dramatic opening scene — although two small points must be made in the interests of historical accuracy. First, Edward had actually performed the required homage eight years before (though not in satisfactory form, since he had refused to appear before the French King bare-headed and with ungirt sword); second, despite the fact that both Artois and Lorraine refer to their master as John of Valois, the King of France in 1337 was in fact Philip

  As pointed out in the Introduction, it has never been suggested that every word of the play is by Shakespeare. His name is used loosely throughout this chapter, simply because we cannot get involved here with questions of the authenticity of individual passages.

  In fact Robert was not Count of Artois at all, that county on the death of his grandfather having been assigned to a cousin. In 1334 he had sought refuge in England, where Edward, realizing the value of a renegade French nobleman to his cause, had granted him the earldom of Richmond.

  VI; John II succeeded him only in 1350.1 Neither of these points, however, need concern us overmuch; suffice it to say that the Duke of Lorraine is sent packing and his place at centre-stage taken over by the captain of the castle of Roxborough (now Roxburgh), Sir William Montague.2

  With Montague comes the introduction of two more strands of the story: affairs in Scotland and the King's love for the Countess of Salisbury. Montague reports that the league' between the English and the Scots has been 'cracked and dissevered':

  Berwick is won; Newcastle spoil'd and lost;

  And now the tyrant hath begirt with siege

  The castle of Roxborough, where enclos'd

  The Countess Salisbury is like to perish.

  Edward had in fact no league with Scotland. On the contrary, fighting had continued sporadically along the border from soon after Bannockburn until in 1328, with the marriage of Bruce's four-year-old son David - soon to be King David II of Scotland - to Edward's sister Joanna, a truce had been declared - only to be broken by the Scots when they captured Berwick in 1332. Newcastle, on the other hand, did not fall to them until 1341 — the date when, according to Froissart,3 Sir William Montague appealed to the King for help. But to attach any serious importance to these inaccuracies is to miss the point. The dramatist is not interested in historical exactitude; he is concerned only to set the general scene of almost continuous warfare along the Scottish

  The editor of the New Cambridge edition charitably maintains that 'the existence of Philip VI is deliberately ignored in order to present a single royal French counterpart to Edward in the campaign that lasted from 1337 to 1356.'

  There seems also to have been some confusion in the identity of Montague, but it need not concern us here.

  Jean Froissart, the greatest prose writer of his day, was born at Valenciennes in the county of Hainault around 1337 and was brought to England by Queen Philippa in 1361 as one of her household clerks, remaining there until her death eight years later, though making frequent trips to the continent. He was at the Black Prince's court at Bordeaux when Richard was born there in 1367. His chronicle - which includes long extracts from that of an earlier compatriot, Jean Le Bel - covers the period from 1322 to the end of the century.

  border, and of the consequent danger to Edward's subjects throughout the north, rich and poor alike.

  Edward thus finds that he has two enemies to fight; of the two, however, he has no doubt that the King of France is by far the more formidable. Against him he orders his eldest son, Edward - whom he calls 'Ned'1 - to raise
a mighty army from every shire in the land, simultaneously arranging for appeals to be made to his father-in-law the Count of Hainault and even to the Holy Roman Emperor, Lewis IV. While such preparations are in train, 'with these forces that I have at hand', he proposes to march against King David, liberating Lady Salisbury from the castle in which she is besieged - and on the battlements of which we find her at the opening of scene ii.

  The identity of this lady is not so much a mystery as the result of a chaotic confusion on the part of Froissart and other less trustworthy sources.2 She is probably based on Alice Montague, whose husband Edward was governor of the Earl of Salisbury's castle of Wark and whom the King is known to have tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce; but once again it hardly matters. Her eavesdropping on King David and the Duke of Lorraine, as they walk the ramparts below discussing the devastation that they will wreak on England, enables her to taunt them when they flee at the news of Edward's advance; her real purpose, however, is to provide the play with a love interest and to show us the King as a lover as well as a man of action. This theme is continued throughout the long first scene of Act II. It includes much fine poetry and introduces an interesting moral dilemma when the Countess's father, the Earl of Warwick - who is no more a historical character than she is herself- is commanded by the King to persuade his daughter to yield: