Shakespeare: A Life (24 page)

He had set himself the most challenging of tasks, in that he now had
to respond imaginatively to history's chaos. Nothing in Hall or
Holinshed has anything like the appealing dramatic order of an Italian
or French
novella;
yet he had to bring the liveliest order to
Henry VI. The stage asked for clarity, intensity, and expert design as
he re-embodied the English dead. The chronicles allowed him to expand
upon details, but he was working within terribly restricting
boundaries, and thus forcing his imagination and analytical
intelligence to act to produce a cogent structure while always being
aware of facts he had to exclude. The notion that his talent was
'miraculous' undercuts the many small, conscious efforts he had to
make in his choices and deft borrowings. In Henry VI, he was relying
on more than the chronicles, fusing with them elements of popular
culture: he took something from the sportive, festive and impudent
antics of Lords of Misrule, something from political cabaret, from
Robert Wilson's popular patriotic dramas, and from Peele's and
Greene's sentimental history scenes. He was helped by Sidncy's Arcadia
( 1590), which, under the guise of pastoral convention, explores the
idiosyncratic faults of aristocratic regimes, and he learned from
Spenser's delicate finesse and insights into human power and
temptation in the first three books of The Faerie Queene ( 1590).

Arguably, for his history series he wrote I Henry VI first. A work of
some expository stiffness, though it rises to masterly stagecraft in
its 'Temple Garden'scene for example, it involved him in a ruthless
selection from sources. The politically weak and morally good Henry VI
had acceded in infancy and reigned for forty years. Later the first
Tudor king tried to have Henry canonized, after his alleged miracles
interested Pope Alexander VI. Wisely keeping the good king offstage at
first, Shakespeare brings to the fore Lord Talbot, who has among his
titles ' Lord Strange of Blackmere' (IV. vii. 65). Talbot's chivalry is
considerably heightened in the play -- as in his relations with the
Countess of Auvergne, the most charming of would-be assassins and the
contrasting cowardice of one Sir John Fastolf, or Falstaff, who fled
at the battle of Rouen, is also emphasized. One doubts that topical
satire is aimed at Falstaff's living descendants, but in his heroic
view of Talbot, Shakespeare, rather like Nashc in Pierce Penilesse, may
go out of his way to flatter Lord Strange.

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Most of the characters in I Henry VI are quite unheroic. The play
shows quarrels at home and calamity abroad, from Henry V's funeral in
1422 to Lord Talbot's death and England's final loss of France in
1453. Brutal, acerbic confrontations occur, but mere sensation is
avoided. Here the stage does not symbolize a fictive violence as in
Titus, but rather, shocking events of a bitterly terrible past reality.
France is no worse than England. Talbot's mortal enemy Joan la
Pucelle at first seems recognizably Jeanne d'Arc. She is imaged as
Deborah, as 'Astraea's daughter', even As ' France's saint' (1. viii.
29). Later she is as duplicitous as Spenser's Duessa in The Faerie
Queene, but Shakespeare includes a fictive siege of Rouen, and he may
have been obliged to show Joan in a patriotic light -- British troops
under the Earl of Essex were in fact besieging Rouen from November
1591 to April 1592. Even so, Joan turns to devils and venery when the
powers of light fail her, claims to be pregnant to avoid martyrdom,
and is no worse at last than an amusing, pragmatic witch.

Shakespeare's French hardly seem Catholic, except for an allusion to
Joan's Mariolatry, and he does not refer to Catholic repression. His
satire is that of a moderate Anglican, and at its root is a resigned,
calm gravity as if death were history's chief fact. He ridicules a
vain, meddling Bishop of Winchester for getting money from bordellos,
yet not for doctrine. Implicitly he has pity for the fatally mistaken,
and admiration for wasted splendours of feeling in his doomed barons.
His battle scenes are little more than brief calamitous testimonies to
man's ignorance and absurdity.

In 2
Henry VI he gains an advantage in placing his weak, unworldly Henry,
now subject to a vicious Queen Margaret, at the centre of the action,
so that the paralysis of a state can be depicted ironically.
¹⁴
His Jack Cade episodes in their fresh, mordant humour comment
indirectly on his own Tudor audiences. Aiming to overthrow the Crown by
stirring up unrest, the Duke of York has enlisted a headstrong
Kentishman, ' John Cade of Ashford', for the purpose. Cade's rabble soon
conquer London on the rampage. Parodying inversions of Misrule, and
of 'barring out' when pupils smashed school windows, Cade inverts
civilized codes with cheerful blasphemy. He legalizes his lust: 'There
shall not a maid be married, but she shall pay to me her

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maidenhead' (IV. vii. 118-20). Heads of nobles are made to kiss on
poles. A clerk is hanged with 'pen and inkhorn about his neck' (IV.
ii. 108-9). Literacy is a crime -- all lawyers are to be killed in
Cade's London, while the city's 'pissing-conduit' (IV. vi. 3) flows
conveniently with claret wine. Cade's rabble in mindless enthusiasm
are like sensationhunting play-goers, and as he is likened to a capering
'Morisco' himself, he is a type of the lewd jig-performer who dances at
the end of dramas at Burbage's Theater. Still, Cade can be a
spokesman of thematic truth as when he impugns the vain peers who
'consult about the giving up of some more towns in France' (IV. vii.
150-1).

Cade's quick fall foreshadows
that of the Duke of York. Early in 3 Henry VI, the author brings his
nightmare story of feuding nobles to a pitch when the Duke of York,
without his sons Edward, George, or Richard to save him, falls into
the hands of a bloodthirsty Queen Margaret. That 'She-wolf of France',
as York names her, with her 'tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide'
provokes him with galling mockery:

And where's that valiant crookback prodigy,
Dickic, your boy, that with his grumbling voice
Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies?
Or with the rest where is your darling Rutland?
Look, York, I stained this napkin with the blood
That valiant Clifford with his rapier's point
Made issue from the bosom of thy boy.
And if thine eyes can water for his death,
I give thee this to dry thy checks withal.

(1. iv. 76-84)

Hatred is evoked with an intensity new to the stage -- and
Shakespeare's rival Greene was jealously to recall this scene.
Margaret's hatred arises in a fine pattern in Henry VI, though there
have been no villains; the author refuses to promote one political
doctrine over another, and his events seem ritualized in history's
fixed past. To some extent he makes the theatre a ritual for the
public, and indeed his early history plays have a strong liturgical
aspect -- which may be too overtly developed in Richard III.

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But here in Richard III, brilliantly, he carries into a single
individual's consciousness the allegorical method of many medieval
morality plays. No doubt he could hardly have avoided the Tudor myth
of Richard of Gloucester as a 'divine scourge', sent by heaven to
punish and purge the realm. Rather more than a symbolic scourge,
however, Richard is as idiosyncratic as Aaron of Titus Andronicus,
whom he resembles. He has won his father's praise: 'Richard hath best
deserved of all my sons', as the Duke of York says in 3 Henry VI.
(1.i. 17). Unlike Hamlet to come, this son is not bent chiefly on
avenging his father's death. Since peace has robbed Richard of his
identity he will entirely refashion himself:

I in this weak piping time of peace
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determinèd to prove a villain.

(1. i. 24-30)

To achieve that end, he is endowed with several of the author's own
attributes, such as a talent for artful language, a delight in dry wit,
and a belief in the inexhaustible powers of acting and make-believe.
He becomes a Machiavel with a lustrous veneer of grace, and at first a
merry Vice, an actor on delightful terms with the audience. No more
charming and fascinating killer had been seen on the Elizabethan
stage.

Opposed to carping
politicians, stupid power-seekers and depleted moralists, he is even
endearing up to Act IV. Like Jack Cade, Richard has the advantage of
enduring for a while without the baggage of human conscience, which
with its aspect of nemesis is transferred to Clarence, Lady Anne, or
the railing spectre of Queen Margaret. With the intelligent gaiety of a
poseur
he is never more effective than when courting Lady Anne, whose husband and father-in-law he has murdered.

Here the playwright squeezes historical events together so that

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Henry VI's actual funeral rites in 1471, Richard's courtship of Anne in
1472, Clarence's murder in the Tower in 1478, and Edward IV's death
in 1483 occur at the same time. With glee, Richard scurries from one
challenge to the next. Meeting Henry's funeral cortège in the street,
he confronts Lady Anne, who is played by a boy, and boy actors were
trained in speed of repartee. He flatters his indignant lady by pleading
for a 'slower pace', matches Anne's own word-rhythms, exchanges
'angel' for her 'devil', drops or increases beats in his blank verse,
and in effect wins Anne through consummate verbal agility. His
conquest is the more amusing because boy actors were more highly
drilled than adult actors
¹⁵
-- and Anne's own articulateness itself is a part of her undoing.

In Henry VI, the device of having actors speak aloft from galleries
seems artificially over-used, but here, for once, a stage gallery is
exposed for the stage device it is. Prayer-book in hand between two
bishops, Richard appears aloft in Act III to enchant London's aldermen
with his virtue in order to appear reluctant to take a crown. (The
playwright's father having been dismissed by his brother aldermen, the
gallery drama obliges an audience to scorn aldermen as fools, just as
Richard does.) By implication, Shakespeare interestingly suggests
that the skilled actor, though possessed of great flexibility, may be
nothing more than a hollow drum. Richard's excellence as a
poseur
rests on his miserable isolation and inadequacy -- and he succeeds,
as a showman, partly because his inward life is feeble and
uninhibiting. His creative destructiveness is brilliant, but it has a
short run. His 'character' does not change -- but our intimacy with him
lessens after he loses theatrical and political initiative. A chorus
of wailing Queens precedes an innovative group of choric ghosts, and
Richard is so distanced at last that his thoughts, not his feelings,
are in focus. His opponent faces him at Bosworth, and after the tyrant
is killed, a symbolic Earl of Richmond predicts the Tudor glory.

With its clever design, Richard III creates the illusion that history
writes itself on stage. That play gave young Burbage his first rich,
complex Shakespearean role and remained popular throughout the
author's lifetime and the reigns of James and Charles I. Audiences and
censors had a chance to judge the Henry VI series first. Henslowe's

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receipts for 'harey the vj', if we assume that this work was I Henry
VI, suggest an unusual financial success. Performed at the Rose by
Strange's men on 3 March 1592, 'harey', at any rate, made Henslowe
richer by £3. 16
s.
8
d.
-- the highest 'take' noted in his diary -- and the play ran fourteen times more until 19 June.
¹⁶

Censorship of Henry VI was surprisingly moderate, so far as we know.
The Master of the Revels was irritated by reckless, feuding nobles in
their contempt for a monarch. Dialogue had to be cut. Jack Cade's
brags at Blackheath, such as 'bid the King come to me . . . ile have
his Crowne tell him, ere it be long' and 'for tomorrow I meane to sit
in the Kings seate at Westminster' must have been excised, as they are
missing in the play's Folio text.
¹⁷

But in June 1592, as rioting suddenly put the theatres in jeopardy,
the authorities had more in mind than a few insults in a company's
playbooks. And the success of Henry VI hardly bettered its author's
life. His professional calling was new, turbulent, and unprotected by
any guild; and since no one had been a city playhouse writer before
1576, he had no way of really envisioning how his career might turn
out. As it was, summer brought him bad news, as we shall see, even
before he found himself under personal attack. On the road Pembroke's
men constructed brief texts of his 2 and 3 Henry VI. These scripts, in
due course, they were forced to sell as
The First Part of the
Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and
The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke.
Shakespeare's own
scripts with their large casts would have been difficult for any
company to take on the road. But then he had not designed Henry VI for
travel, and he could not have foreseen the coming of the plague.

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Envie is seldome idle. (
Greenes Groats-worth of Witte,
1592) [Your wife] prayeth unto the lord to seace his hand frome
punyshenge us with his crosse that she mowght have you at home with
her hopinge hopinge then that you should be eased of this heavey
labowre & toylle ( Philip Henslowe in London, to the actor Edward
Alleyn on tour with 'my lorde Stranges Players', 14 August 1593)

Viewed from the bankside south of the river, London would have seemed
tranquil and beautiful in the late summer of 1592. Then as now, some
days brought haze over the Thames. In low-lying southern liberties near
the amphitheatres, the air could be hot and humid. Here, though the
tenements were sealed off from the Thames by rising embankments, the
working lives of people within the river's floodplain were influenced by
the river's commerce and the city to the north. Above a line of
public and private houses on the north bank, steeples and towers rose
into the September air. Wherries and barges would have moved on the
river deliberately as ever -- but watermen did not bring play-goers
over to Paris Garden and the Clink.

What were Shakespeare's relations with a city which was about to be
struck by the worst plague since his birth? About 14 per cent of
London's populace were to die. That calamity -- with the fear,
disruption, suffering, and bitter loss it entailed -- is so
overwhelming that his attitude to the theatre, or the effects of
pamphleteering by University

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