The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works

by William Shakespeare

  better and better. And therefore tell me, most fair

  230

  Katherine, will you have me? Put off your maiden

  blushes, avouch the thoughts of your heart with the

  looks of an empress, take me by the hand, and say

  ‘Harry of England, I am thine’: which word thou shalt

  no sooner bless mine ear withal but I will tell thee

  235

  aloud ‘England is thine, Ireland is thine, France is

  thine, and Henry Plantagenet is thine’, who, though I

  speak it before his face, if he be not fellow with the

  best king, thou shalt find the best king of good fellows.

  Come, your answer in broken music, for thy voice is

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  music and thy English broken. Therefore, queen of all,

  Katherine, break thy mind to me in broken English:

  wilt thou have me?

  KATHERINE Dat is as it sall please le roi mon père.

  KING Nay, it will please him well, Kate; it shall please

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  him, Kate.

  KATHERINE Den it sall also content me.

  KING Upon that I kiss your hand, and I call you my

  Queen.

  KATHERINE Laissez, mon seigneur, laissez, laissez! Ma foi,

  250

  je ne veux point que vous abaissiez votre grandeur en

  baisant la main d’une de votre seigneurie indigne

  serviteur. Excusez-moi, je vous supplie, mon très-puissant

  seigneur.

  KING Then I will kiss your lips, Kate.

  255

  KATHERINE Les dames et demoiselles pour être baisées

  devant leurs noces, il n’est pas la coutume de France.

  KING Madam my interpreter, what says she?

  ALICE Dat it is not de fashion pour les ladies of France –

  I cannot tell vat is baiser en Anglish.

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  KING To kiss.

  ALICE Your majesty entend bettre que moi.

  KING It is not a fashion for the maids in France to kiss

  before they are married, would she say?

  ALICE Oui, vraiment.

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  king O Kate, nice customs curtsy to great kings. Dear

  Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak

  list of a country’s fashion. We are the makers of

  manners, Kate, and the liberty that follows our places

  stops the mouth of all find-faults, as I will do yours for

  270

  upholding the nice fashion of your country in denying

  me a kiss: therefore patiently, and yielding – [Kisses

  her.] You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate: there is

  more eloquence in a sugar touch of them than in the

  tongues of the French Council, and they should

  275

  sooner persuade Harry of England than a general

  petition of monarchs. Here comes your father.

  Enter the French power and the English lords.

  BURGUNDY God save your majesty! My royal cousin,

  Teach you our Princess English?

  KING I would have her learn, my fair cousin, how

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  perfectly I love her, and that is good English.

  BURGUNDY Is she not apt?

  KING Our tongue is rough, coz, and my condition is not

  smooth, so that having neither the voice nor the heart

  of flattery about me I cannot so conjure up the spirit

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  of love in her that he will appear in his true likeness.

  BURGUNDY Pardon the frankness of my mirth if I

  answer you for that. If you would conjure in her, you

  must make a circle; if conjure up love in her in his true

  likeness, he must appear naked and blind. Can you

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  blame her then, being a maid yet rosed over with the

  virgin crimson of modesty, if she deny the appearance

  of a naked blind boy in her naked seeing self? It were,

  my lord, a hard condition for a maid to consign to.

  KING Yet they do wink and yield, as love is blind and

  295

  enforces.

  BURGUNDY They are then excused, my lord, when they

  see not what they do.

  KING Then good my lord, teach your cousin to consent

  winking.

  300

  BURGUNDY I will wink on her to consent, my lord, if

  you will teach her to know my meaning. For maids

  well summered and warm kept are like flies at

  Bartholomew-tide, blind, though they have their eyes;

  and then they will endure handling, which before

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  would not abide looking on.

  KING This moral ties me over to time and a hot

  summer; and so I shall catch the fly, your cousin, in

  the latter end, and she must be blind too.

  BURGUNDY As love is, my lord, before that it loves.

  310

  KING It is so: and you may some of you thank love for

  my blindness, who cannot see many a fair French city

  for one fair French maid that stands in my way.

  FRENCH KING Yes, my lord, you see them perspectively,

  the cities turned into a maid; for they are all girdled

  315

  with maiden walls that no war hath entered.

  KING Shall Kate be my wife?

  FRENCH KING So please you.

  KING I am content, so the maiden cities you talk of may

  wait on her: so the maid that stood in the way for my

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  wish shall show me the way to my will.

  FRENCH KING We have consented to all terms of reason.

  KING Is’t so, my lords of England?

  WESTMORLAND The King hath granted every article:

  His daughter first, and in the sequel all,

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  According to their firm proposed natures.

  EXETER Only he hath not yet subscribed this, where

  your majesty demands that the King of France, having

  any occasion to write for matter of grant, shall name

  your highness in this form and with this addition:

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  [Reads.] in French, Notre très cher fils Henri, roi

  d’Angleterre, héritier de France; and thus in Latin,

  Praeclarissimus filius noster Henricus, rex Angliae et

  haeres Franciae.

  FRENCH KING Nor this I have not, brother, so denied

  335

  But your request shall make me let it pass.

  KING I pray you then, in love and dear alliance,

  Let that one article rank with the rest,

  And thereupon give me your daughter.

  FRENCH KING

  Take her, fair son, and from her blood raise up

  340

  Issue to me, that the contending kingdoms

  Of France and England, whose very shores look pale

  With envy of each other’s happiness,

  May cease their hatred, and this dear conjunction

  Plant neighbourhood and Christian-like accord

  345

  In their sweet bosoms, that never war advance

  His bleeding sword ’twixt England and fair France.

  LORDS Amen.

  KING Now welcome, Kate, and bear me witness all

  That here I kiss her as my sovereign queen.

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  [Kisses her.] [Flourish.]

  QUEEN ISABEL God, the best maker of all marriages,

  Combine your hearts in one, your realms in one!

  As man and wife, being two, are one in love,

  So be there ’twixt your kingdoms such a spousal

  That never may ill office or fell jealousy,

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>   Which troubles oft the bed of blessed marriage,

  Thrust in between the paction of these kingdoms

  To make divorce of their incorporate league;

  That English may as French, French Englishmen,

  Receive each other. God speak this amen.

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  ALL Amen.

  KING Prepare we for our marriage; on which day,

  My lord of Burgundy, we’ll take your oath,

  And all the peers’, for surety of our leagues.

  Then shall I swear to Kate, and you to me,

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  And may our oaths well kept and prosperous be!

  Sennet. Exeunt.

  EPILOGUE

  Enter CHORUS.

  CHORUS Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,

  Our bending author hath pursued the story,

  In little room confining mighty men,

  Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.

  Small time, but in that small most greatly lived

  5

  This star of England. Fortune made his sword

  By which the world’s best garden he achieved,

  And of it left his son imperial lord.

  Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned King

  Of France and England, did this king succeed,

  10

  Whose state so many had the managing

  That they lost France and made his England bleed,

  Which oft our stage hath shown; and for their sake

  In your fair minds let this acceptance take. Exit.

  King Henry VI, Part 1

  First published as the sixth of the histories in the Folio of 1623, King Henry VI, Part 1 may have been written as early as 1589: more certainly it was ready for the stage by 1592. A play entitled ‘harey the vj’ was performed at the Rose on 3 March 1592 by Lord Strange’s Men, and it is usually assumed that it was this play. Later that year, Thomas Nashe remarked upon the play’s extraordinary appeal, writing of how ‘the brave Talbot (the terror of the French)’ triumphed in the theatre, where ‘ten thousand spectators at least (at several times) … imagine they behold him fresh bleeding’.

  For all its early success, since 1734, when Lewis Theobald asserted that it was not ‘entirely of his writing’, scholars have wondered if the play was solely the product of Shakespeare’s pen. Like the present Arden editor, Edward Burns, many have come to believe that it was a collaboration – as were so many Elizabethan plays – written by Shakespeare with Nashe and two other dramatists, perhaps Robert Greene and George Peele, in spite of the fact that Heminges and Condell, who included it in the Folio, seem to have regarded it as Shakespeare’s alone. In any case, the question of authorship can make little difference to our sense of the work.

  The three plays on Henry VI are the first of the history plays which, along with King Richard III, treat the end of the Plantagenet dynasty. The political and military achievements of Henry V are undone by the civil dissension that follows his death, as his son, who succeeded as a nine-month- old infant, proves unable to unify the country. King Henry VI, Part 1 moves from the funeral of Henry V in 1422 to the impending marriage of Henry VI to Margaret of Anjou, covering some twenty-three years (actually the play covers more than thirty, as the death of Talbot took place only in 1453, eight years after the last event in the play), proceeding episodically across time and space to tell its tale of England weakened by disunity and faction at home.

  As Nashe’s comment reveals, the play’s most powerful source of appeal was the character of Talbot, the ‘terror of the French’, an exemplary hero, who stands as an ideal of physical and moral excellence. His very name inspires his men. ‘A Talbot! A Talbot!’, they cry, rushing ‘into the bowels of the battle’. His rigid commitment to chivalric values, however, prevents him from fleeing the battlefield in a lost cause, prematurely depriving England of its greatest hero and also of Talbot’s only son (another of Shakespeare’s changes of history; in fact Talbot was succeeded as Earl of Shrewsbury by a surviving son, also named John). Thus, though the play ends with an English triumph, the nation is weakened and made vulnerable, not only by Talbot’s death but by the political faction that was its direct cause.

  The play’s other memorable character is Joan of Arc. She is Talbot’s chief rival, heroine of the French, though in English eyes she is no holy maid but something monstrous, at once erotic and demonic. That she is French, but also that she is an assertive and powerful woman, marks her as unnatural; her presence is thoroughly discredited, identified entirely with its challenge to English virtue – though the history plays’ readiness to demonize all women of action perhaps suggests that it is as much an insecure masculinity that is at risk.

  Henry VI himself is of strangely little dramatic consequence in the play. He does not appear on stage until 3.1 – no doubt this is, in part, because he was less than one year old when the action begins – but the virtual absence from this play of the King whose name it bears is arguably its most telling dramatic point, unmistakable evidence of the power vacuum that each of the squabbling factions seeks to fill.

  The play was an early success on stage, performed at least fifteen times in 1592 alone, but it has been seldom staged since. A performance at Stratford in 1889 advertised itself as the first since Shakespeare’s time, and modern audiences rarely have an opportunity to see it whole. If seen at all, it is often as a much reduced element in adaptations and conflations of the three parts of King Henry VI, as in John Barton’s two-part Wars of the Roses (1963), or in the two-part adaptation by Charles Wood for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s trilogy of The Plantagenets in 1988. In 1977, however, Terry Hands directed all three plays in sequence at Stratford-upon- Avon, and in 2000–1 the RSC staged them as part of its ambitious series ‘This England, the Histories’, comprising all the histories from Richard II to Richard III in chronological order.

  The 2000 Arden text is based on the 1623 First Folio.

  THE HOUSES OF YORK AND LANCASTER

  19 Genealogical table showing the houses of York and Lancaster

  LIST OF ROLES

  LONDON AND THE ENGLISH COURT

  Duke of GLOUCESTER

  Protector of the realm, in the minority of the King

  Duke of EXETER

  Earl of WARWICK