Shakespeare (29 page)

They also performed two other plays,
The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster
and
The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York
, which anticipate the second and third parts of
Henry VI
. They may in fact have been written before the separation between Alleyn and Burbage. Another form of contention now surrounds these two early dramas, predictably between those who believe that they were written and subsequently revised by the young Shakespeare, those who argue that they were composed by one or two unknown and unnamed dramatists, and those who insist that they are later reconstructions. The first supposition seems the most likely. Both plays were published by reputable stationers, and a later combined edition of 1619 is declared to be “Written by William Shakespeare, Gent.”
The First Part of the Contention
anticipates the second part of
Henry VI
in almost every respect, from whole scenes to individual lines and the smallest phrases.
The True Tragedy
bears an equally strong resemblance to the third part of the historical trilogy. The order of the scenes is the same; the long speeches are the same; the dialogue is the same. There can scarcely be any doubt that they are the originals of, and models for, the later and more accomplished plays.

There are certain scholars, however, who suggest that
The First Part of the Contention
and
The True Tragedy
actually came later and were in effect “memorial reconstructions” of Shakespeare’s own plays. By “memorial reconstruction” is meant the theory that a group of actors, who had played in both parts of
Henry VI
, came together and tried to recall the words and scenes of the plays so that they might act or publish them for their own purposes. They remembered what they could, and invented the rest. The texts themselves do not bear out this interesting hypothesis. Many of the longer speeches are remembered word for word while other shorter scenes and passages are not remembered at all. It is odd that, despite their lapses of memory, they were able to produce coherent plays that manifest integrity of plot, language and imagery. Which inspired actor, for example, produced the line “Et tu Brute, wilt thou stab Caesar too?” He could not have been “reconstructing”
Julius Caesar
because it had not yet been written.

The simple response, to textual evidence such as this, is to agree that the young Shakespeare wrote these early plays and then over the course of time revised them for performance. The overwhelming similarity between
The
Contention
and
The True Tragedy
and the second and third parts of
Henry VI
rests on the fact that they were all written by the same person with the same skills and preoccupations. There is no evidence for any theatrical conspiracy, and it is hard to imagine an occasion when it would be deemed necessary. Who were these actors who patched up plays already known to be composed by Shakespeare? To what company did they belong? And why was no action taken to prevent their publishing their speculative and illicit ventures? It is scarcely likely that, in 1619, Shakespeare’s name would be attached to the re-publication of their fraudulent endeavours. The theory defies common logic.

It is significant, too, that these plays represent further ventures into the genre of the history play that he had already fashioned in
The Troublesome Raigne of King John
and
Edmund Ironside
. He returned to the chronicles for much of his information, and again produced an historical spectacle complete with processions and battles. He knew that he excelled in this kind of work, and he knew also that it was extraordinarily popular.

All of the formidable qualities of the second and third parts of
Henry VI
are to be found in
The First Part of the Contention
and
The True Tragedy
. There is in all of them a truly epic breadth of scale with wars and rebellions, battles on the field and confrontations in the presence chamber; there is the poetry of power and of pathos, as well as the more martial clangour of duel and dispute; there are fights at sea and on land; there are murders and a plentiful supply of severed heads; there are death-beds and scenes of black magic; there is comedy and melodrama, farce and tragedy. Shakespeare invents passages of history when it suits his dramatic purpose. He revises, excises and enlarges historical episodes in the same spirit. It is clear that the young dramatist was revelling in his ability to invent paradigmatic action and to orchestrate great scenes of battle or procession. From the beginning he had a fluent and fertile dramatic imagination, charged with ritual and spectacle. The public stage was not then fixed; it was fast and fluid, capable of accommodating a wide range of effects. There was no dramatic theory about historical drama; playwrights learned from each other, and plays copied other plays. Shakespeare was still imitating Marlowe and Greene at this early date in his career, to such an extent that one or two scholars have ascribed these plays to them. This is most unlikely. The best analogy at this later date is with the historical films of Sergei Eisenstein, in particular the two parts of
Ivan the Terrible
where grave ritual and grotesque farce are held together in a context of overwhelming majesty. We may imagine the Shakespearian actors to have been as stylised, in action and in delivery, as the performers of the early
Russian cinema. The plays represented a ritualised and emblematic society where matters of heraldry and genealogy were of immense importance. They themselves are a form of ritual, like a religious ceremony assisted by chanting and incantation.

Shakespeare was an apologist for royal power. He makes the Catholic distinction between the priest and his office—the weak priest or king must still be obeyed because of the sacredness of his role. His sympathies may be found also in the fact that he describes the followers of Jack Cade as a “rabblement,” quite different from the presentation of them in the chronicles. Cade was the leader of the disaffected multitude who in 1450 constituted the “Kentish Rebellion” against the government of Henry VI. It was an unsuccessful uprising, yet Cade himself is vilified by Shakespeare in a manner wholly at odds with his immediate sources. Shakespeare seems to have been averse to any kind of popular movement. In particular he ridicules the illiteracy of the London artisanal class, as if to be literate (as he was) was a singular mark of distinction and separation from the mass. He felt himself to be apart.

But there is a curious paradox here, one which he and his audience may have observed. The sixteenth-century theatre is a democratising force. Common players assume the roles of monarchs. On the space of the stage itself nobles and commoners are sometimes engaged within a shared action. There is no dramatic difference between the varying ranks of society. In the history plays Shakespeare creates ironic associations and parallels between the chivalric action of the nobles and the comic action of the commoners, as if he were testing the true potential of the theatre. It is a complicated point, perhaps, but one that suggests the subversive or revolutionary potential of the stage. It was in essence a populist medium.

In revising at a later date
The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster
and
The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York
, he changed the sentence structure of certain scenes, added or excised stray lines and even words, removed local London detail and furnished more set speeches. He did not touch the actual structures of the plays but merely embellished and elaborated upon them. He also widened and deepened the characterisation. In the process of revising
The True Tragedy
, for example, he significantly added to the part of the Duke of York. It is most likely that when Shakespeare effected these revisions he already had in mind, or had written,
The Tragedy of King Richard III
. In
The True Tragedy
Richard compares
himself to “the aspiring Catalin,” Catiline being a noble conspirator against the Roman Republic, but in the revised version Richard compares himself more villainously to “the murtherous Macheuill.”

Shakespeare also changed the parts in order to complement the actors. He altered the characterisation of Jack Cade, for example, to incorporate the talents of Will Kempe, who had become the principal comic of his company; he added the detail that Cade is a wild morris-dancer, at which dance Kempe was known for his skills. In the revised version of the play, too, the stage-directions refer to “Sinklo,” “Sink.” and “Sin.”; this was not a character in the play but, rather, the name of the actor John Sinklo or Sincler, who was well known for his extreme slenderness. This suggests that Shakespeare was rewriting the part with Sincler fully in mind and eye.

These revisions and alterations were no doubt part of his practice with all of his drama. It is only through chance or fortune that copies of
The First Part of the Contention
and
The True Tragedy, Edmund Ironside
and
The Taming of a Shrew
, have survived. Shakespeare was also learning and changing his craft in another sense. His later historical dramas, in particular the two parts of
Henry IV
, display much more subtlety and inwardness both in their characterisation and in their action. The demonstrative and oratorical mode of the earliest plays is subdued in favour of Falstaff’s wit and the old king’s melancholy. It has even been suggested that Shakespeare’s histories led him directly towards his experiments with tragedy and that one form cannot really be separated from the other. Certainly Shakespeare himself does not seem to have distinguished between them. The cry of
“Et tu, Brute”
in the drama appropriately entitled
The True Tragedy
points in that direction; the English history plays lead to
Julius Caesar
, which in turn proceeds towards
Hamlet
.

Robert Greene’s autobiographical pamphlet,
Groats-Worth of Witte
, calls Shakespeare “an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you.”

S
hakespeare followed public taste
but he also helped to create it. He wrote ten plays devoted to the subject of English history, far more than any of his contemporaries, and we can infer that it was for him an agreeable and accommodating subject. But, as is often the case with literary genius, the imagination of the age helped to inspire him. This in a sense was the first period of secular history in England. The plays of an earlier date presented sacred history from Creation to Doom, but from the mid-sixteenth century onwards the twin forces of the Reformation and Renaissance learning persuaded scholars and writers to look beyond the eschatology of the Church. If human will rather than divine providence was the source of significant event, then drama had found a new subject. It could be said that Shakespeare was present at the invention of human motive and human purpose in English history.

Hall’s
The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York
had been published in 1548, and the first edition of Holinshed’s
The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland
followed in 1577. These were the books that Shakespeare devoured, although he seemed to favour Holinshed’s more popular account of the past. If we wish to see Shakespeare as a characteristically or even quintessentially English writer, this appetite for historical re-creation affords some evidence for that identification. Schelling described the history play as a distinctively English genre. It did not last for ever, of
course, but faded after approximately twenty years of successful performance; coincidentally or not, history plays really only lasted while Shakespeare continued to write them.