The Plays of Shakespeare

Although there is much that we don’t know about William Shakespeare the man, we can say confidently that he was not an individual who liked to be typecast. Right after completing his Comedy of Errors, a play so thin it threatened to blow away on the merest spring breeze, he embarked upon the theatrical project that stands, in terms of sheer breadth and scope, as the most ambitious of his entire career. Over the course of four plays, each of them more than half again as long as his theatrical debut, he presented a chronicle of English history between the years 1422 and 1485, a turbulent period marked by the extended internal wrangles for the kingdom’s crown known as the Wars of the Roses.

The tetralogy, which consists of the three parts of Henry VI followed by Richard III, was audacious in ways that went beyond its daunting length. For Shakespeare used it as his testing ground for a whole new genre of play, one that fit neatly into neither of the traditional categories of comedy and tragedy. It came to be known as the “history play.” As the name would imply, its first fidelity was to history itself, to telling Shakespeare’s countrymen something of who they were and where they had come from. Importantly, the history depicted here was not only proudly English but relatively recent, making it distinct from tales of the semi-mythical ancients or the so-called “passion plays” that depicted episodes from the Bible at religious festivals. The Wars of the Roses were about as far removed in time from Shakespeare’s contemporaries as, say, the American Civil War is to modern-day Americans — not the stuff of headlines anymore (if newspapers had existed in Elizabethan England), but nonetheless a conflict whose resonances and ramifications could still be felt within the body politic in ways that temporally and geographically farther removed stories involving figures like Julius Caesar or Timur did not. No one had ever tried to do anything quite like this before.

To understand how these plays came to be — or at least to understand how the market conditions that would make them very, very popular came to be — we have to turn yet again to that seminal event of Shakespeare’s young manhood, the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English in 1588. The spirit of patriotism that spread across the land after that great victory represented a splendid opportunity for any writer who was savvy enough to see it and seize it. Shakespeare was such a writer. He chose his time period and subject matter with care. Despite the best efforts of the red-rosed Lancasters and the white-rosed Yorks, the two branches of the royal family tree who were the antagonists of the Wars of the Roses, the ultimate outcome of these decades of intrigue and open civil war was the rise of a new dynasty: the Tudors, the family of England’s current reigning monarch Queen Elizabeth. It would be unfair to call the tetralogy nothing but an exercise in Tudor propaganda. And yet there can be no doubt that propaganda was one of its purposes, through showing Shakespeare’s countrymen what interesting times — a certain Chinese proverb comes to mind — the Tudors had rescued them from.  Shakespeare thus provided the public with the plays they hadn’t known they wanted at the same time that he curried favor with the queen. Nice work if you can get it…

Though immensely popular in their day, the first three plays of the tetralogy are not often performed today, for good reasons on the whole. There is a declamatory quality about them that’s not really the stuff of great literature. Shakespeare moves a large cast of more or less interchangeable pieces around on his game board, having them announce in speeches exactly what they’re doing and why in between pantomime sieges and sword fights. There’s not a lot of subtext here, and not much that feels all that relevant to the life of a modern theatergoer. King Henry VI makes for a less than compelling figure at the center of the three plays that bear his name, a state of affairs that may be true to the history, but that doesn’t do much for the drama. His downfall at the end of the third play is more anticlimactic than tragic. At times, one can sense that Shakespeare wishes to flesh out his characters more fully, but he’s hamstrung by the rush of historical events which he’s committed himself to depicting.

The final effect reminds me a bit of Thucydides, the ancient Greek “Father of History,” who earned his sobriquet by attempting to write a sober, fact-based account of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, absent the heroic exaggerations and supernatural interpolations of predecessors such as Herodotus. But at the same time, Thucydides did employ any number of techniques that would not be considered kosher by his modern peers. One of his favorites was to place words in the mouths of historical actors, writing long speeches for them in which they explained what they were about and why, as Thucydides understood those things at any rate. As I already noted, these plays of Shakespeare work in largely the same way, turning their cast into mouthpieces for history writ large. There is probably more than coincidence behind this. The Bard would surely have learned of Thucydides in his Stratford-upon-Avon grammar school, and would probably have read him too, if not in the original Greek than in a popular Latin translation by the fifteenth-century Italian philologist Lorenzo Valla.

That said, Shakespeare’s sins against sober-minded, fact-based history are far more extreme than those of Thucydides. If he thinks a given event will fit better at a different point in the chronology than the one documented in his history books, he doesn’t hesitate to move it. Everyone who has ever sat down to write a story based on real events has felt the temptation to give the messy real world some of the thematic tidiness of fiction. Shakespeare indulges the impulse shamelessly here. Some of the discrepancies in his account can perhaps be chalked up to simple errors, either on his part or that of the authors whose history books he read, but some are so at odds with the real timeline that they have to be the result of calculated, conscience choices. To use Hollywood’s favored formulation, these plays are only based on a true story.

For all of the reasons just mentioned, we can feel fairly comfortable in filing the three Henry VI plays alongside The Comedy of Errors under the heading of Shakespeare’s juvenilia.  The conclusion of the tetralogy, on the other hand, is something different. In contrast to the weak and passive Henry VI, the capering villain Richard III dominates the play that bears his name from first to last, becoming in the process Shakespeare’s first truly memorable — even iconic — character. Unlike the three plays whose story it purports to conclude, Richard III remains very popular today, the oldest work of Shakespeare that is still frequently performed and filmed. As examples from John Milton’s Lucifer to George Lucas’s Darth Vader show, audiences love a delicious villain, sometimes more than they do a noble hero.

But before we get to all of that, we need to decide how to handle the Henry VI plays, which are clunky in many ways but also fascinating for what they can tell us about Shakespeare’s evolution as a playwright and Elizabethan England’s view of itself. Here’s what we’ll do:

We’ll tackle these plays in swift succession, one right after another, so that we don’t lose track of a pretty intricate plot. For each of them, I’ll spend the bulk of my time telling you about the real history depicted, with occasional interjections from the Bard to spice things up. I have two reasons for taking this approach: because the history is so exciting and interesting in its own right, and because these plays can be quite difficult for the modern reader to follow without some sort of guide to their events. Each of them has large cast of characters who can seem almost indistinguishable. And just to make matters that much more confusing, the same person is often referred to by different names. A character like Lord Protector Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, for example, might be addressed under the name of “Lord Protector,” “Humphrey,” or “Gloucester.” Such are the complexities of Medieval heraldry, by the standards of which everyone who is anyone is entitled to a list of names and titles longer than your arm.

At the end of each article, I’ll have just a bit more to say about the play in question. And once we’ve made it through all three of the Henry VI plays, I’ll offer up some ways of experiencing these stories through modern media. I believe I can do all of this without boring you — for boring is one thing this period in English history most definitely is not. The was more backstabbing and intriguing to be had than in Black Adder and Game of Thrones combined.

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One can make the case that the history of the country of England as we know it today doesn’t begin until 1066, when the aptly named William the Conqueror left his home in French Normandy to carry off the last successful invasion of the British Isles to date. The new Norman rulers of England spoke Old French, a Romance language with roots in the Latin of the Romans, while the Anglo-Saxon people they subjugated spoke Old English, a Germanic language. Over the centuries that followed, the tongues of the rulers and ruled gradually converged into Middle English, the language of Chaucer, and after that Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare. This linguistic blending is one of the reasons that English has so darn many words, often referring to the very same objects and ideas; there tends to be an Anglo-Saxon-derived word that is short and punchy (“own,” “speed”) and a lengthier, fancier French- or Latin-derived one (“possess,” “velocity”) to go along with it. It’s a boon for English writers and a bane for English learners.

But the question of what was French and what was English was a bit of a muddle for quite a long while in domains that extended well beyond that of language. For William the Conqueror had imported along with himself and his knights and nobles a whole host of family relationships and territorial claims back in France. In an ironic inversion of William’s direction of flow, the monarchs who succeeded him in England were constantly laying claim to various pieces of France, pointing back to their family roots there as justification.

The endless squabbling between England and France, those two cats in a sack, reached a kind of absurdist climax with the Hundred Years War, which actually lasted 116 years, thereby laying a strong claim to the title of the longest single war in human history. It began in 1337, when King Edward III of England, pointing to the usual tangled table of genealogy to explain why in his opinion the throne of France as well as England rightfully belonged to him, set out to take by force what he felt was owed to him by virtue of his bloodline. We need not go into all of the ins and outs of the early fighting. Suffice to say that, as the most careful readers among you may have already noticed, the period of this ridiculously protracted war overlaps with that of the time frame covered by Shakespeare in his tetralogy. The ending of the Hundred Years War is inextricably bound up with the beginning of the Wars of the Roses.

 

 

Edward III proved to be one of the most enduring monarchs in English history, with a reign that lasted for fully 50 years, from 1327 to 1377. He outlived his first crown prince, a firstborn son who was also named Edward. Just before old King Edward finally died, he directed that his crown be passed to his eldest grandson, the only legitimate child of the aforementioned deceased crown prince, rather than to one of his three surviving sons. This boy became King Richard II at the age of just ten years. Like many monarchs in his position — among them, as we will see, Henry VI — he found it difficult after he came into his majority to exert his will over the courtiers who had grown used to ruling England in his name while he was still a child. Deciding that enough was enough, he took drastic measures in 1397, executing, imprisoning, exiling, or disinheriting a wide swath of the nobility. One of the disinherited was a first cousin of his named Henry Bolingbroke, another grandson of King Edward through his own father John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Refusing to accept his diminishment, Henry led a rebellion that overthrew the king in 1399. Richard died in captivity some months later, leaving no inconvenient children behind, while his nemesis assumed the English throne as King Henry IV.

But even as he was doing so, there were legitimate questions to be raised about who the next king really ought to be. Old King Edward had explicitly ordered that his grandson Richard be made his heir; he had issued no such decree relating to his other grandson Henry. In its absence, and with Richard having died without children, should not the line of succession revert to King Edward’s sons rather than his grandsons? One of the former was still alive: Edmund Langley, Duke of York. Why should the crown not go to him?

These questions planted the seed of the Wars of the Roses half a century before the bitter vine would shoot up in earnest. Edmund died in 1402, but his descendants in the House of York, who wore a white rose as their badge, still had reasonable grounds to ask why the king was not drawn from their ranks. Meanwhile Henry IV and his descendants in the House of Lancaster, who wore a red rose as their badge, naturally preferred to bury the debate by saying that what was done was done, let bygones be bygones, etc., etc.

The Lancastrian cause was helped for the time being by the fact that Henry IV, who reigned until 1413, was a decent king, while his son and successor Henry V was a truly great one by the reckoning of his day, being the last of the proud Medieval warrior-kings who were more comfortable presiding over armies in the field than an opulent court. Under Henry V, England forged an alliance with Burgundy, a rich duchy right on the doorstep of Paris that was nevertheless at odds with the French king there. Together the two allies prosecuted the Hundred Years War with renewed vigor. In 1415, soon after Henry V’s personal arrival in France, his army was attacked by a French force that outnumbered it by four or five to one; he routed it disparity in numbers, thus winning the Battle of Agincourt, one of the most legendary in English history. In the wake of that stupendous victory, achieved thanks to the superiority of the English longbow as well as Henry’s tactical genius, it suddenly seemed as if he might actually succeed in realizing his great-grandfather’s cherished dream of uniting England and France into a single mega-kingdom that was ruled from London. More victories followed as Henry and the Burgundians romped across the length and breadth of northern France. In 1418, the Burgundians took Paris itself, driving the French King Charles VI away to the south.

Charles, who earned his epithet “The Mad” by standing stock still for hours on end insisting he was made of glass when not smearing himself with his own feces and running around in the buff, was utterly over-matched. In 1420, desperate to make his tormentors stop their depredations, Charles agreed to sign an astonishingly selfish treaty. In it, he disinherited his own son from his throne, giving it along with his daughter’s hand in marriage to Henry, if only the English king would allow him to retain his own title as king of France until his death. The mega-kingdom looked like a done deal, pending only the demise of a single deranged 52-year-old man who seemed not at all long for this world.

Later in his career, Shakespeare wrote plays about all three English kings from Richard II to Henry V, which means that we’ll have the chance to revisit their reigns in more detail in the future. The story of our current tetralogy really begins, however, with the untimely death of the last-named king on August 31, 1422, at the age of just 35, probably from dysentery contracted on the battlefields of France. Needless to say, no one had expected the vigorous young man to die before the ailing Charles VI. As it was, his death would “save France and almost ruin England,” in the memorable formulation of my favorite populist historian, Will Durant. Henry left behind by his new French queen only a single fragile son who was less than one year old. As any student of hereditary monarchies will readily recognize, this was a situation fraught with peril for the stability of the realm.

Nonetheless, the infant was duly crowned King Henry VI of England. Just weeks later, Charles VI finally kicked the bucket in Paris, and the same infant was named king of France as well. On paper, the mega-kingdom was a reality.

Because a baby could hardly be expected to rule one kingdom, much less two of them, Henry V’s two younger brothers stepped up to act as regents until the boy came into his majority at age fifteen. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was to take charge of England itself and overarching control of the mega-kingdom as a whole, a job that brought with it the title of Lord Protector to the young king; John, Duke of Bedford, was to become Regent of France.

Gloucester served his underage king faithfully during his fourteen years as Lord Protector. The worst sin of which you can credibly accuse him is that of having a messy romantic life. In 1423, at the very beginning of his Protectorship, he married a Flemish noblewoman named Jacqueline d’Hainault, who had recently divorced John IV, Duke of Brabant. Five years later, the marriage was annulled: Pope Martin V declared the divorce to have been invalid after it was brought to his attention, presumably by Gloucester’s jealous enemies. Gloucester then shocked everyone at court by marrying Jacqueline’s lady-in-waiting, a commoner named Eleanor Cobham with whom he had long been carrying on an affair.

Meanwhile the mega-kingdom was proving to be less of a reality on the ground than it was on paper. In the view of the French nobility, surrendering their independence to a fearsome warrior like Henry V was one thing; surrendering it to an infant still in the cradle was quite another. They pushed forward their disinherited Crown Prince Charles — their dauphin in their own language — to lead the fight to reclaim his elder namesake’s crown. Thus Bedford found himself having to press home by main force Henry VI’s own supposedly signed and sealed claim to the same crown.

For a time, Bedford’s armies gave better than they got on the battlefield. One John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, became England’s star general, in the opinion of some a leader almost the equal of Henry V; he would go on to be praised to the stars by Shakespeare in Henry VI, Part 1. The would-be Charles VII of France, who at age nineteen had been thrust by the nobles around him into the role of his kingdom’s shining hope for deliverance without being given the chance to state his own views on the matter, seemed scarcely more capable a leader of men than his deranged father had been. He was perpetually a step behind the English and the Burgundians, a ditherer where a decisive man of action was sorely needed. It looked like it might only be a matter of time before Bedford and Talbot succeeded in making the mega-kingdom a reality on the ground as well.

And then one of history’s wildcards dropped into Charles’s lap from out of the clear blue sky. Joan of Arc — referred to by herself and by Shakespeare as simply La Pucelle (“The Virgin”) — seemed a figure more suited to Greek or Norse mythology than these messy times of realpolitik. She was a humble peasant girl who had grown up in a tiny village in northeastern France. From the time that she turned twelve, she heard voices whispering to her. At the beginning of 1429, when she was seventeen, their message became clear. “Go to the succor of the king of France,” the archangel Michael told her, “and thou shalt restore his kingdom.” Defying her father, who had threatened to drown her if she persisted in deluding herself and those around her about these voices of hers, she ran away to the nearest town, telling the people there of her divine calling. They proved more credulous than her father had been; they bought her a horse and hired an escort to guide her to the resort town of Chinon, where, what with Paris still being in enemy hands, Charles currently had his court. Once there, this illiterate peasant girl somehow convinced the dauphin’s handlers to admit her to his presence. And then she convinced Charles of something that he had never seemed to more than half believe prior to his interview with her: that he was the one and only legitimate king of France, who ruled by the will of God.

Charles asked his unlikely new political and spiritual mentor to go to the vital city of Orléans, where what was left of his army was attempting to make a stand against John Talbot. She did so gladly, arriving on April 29, 1429. Her first act there was to send a letter to Talbot, suggesting that they all stop fighting one another and join together in a Crusade to the Holy Land instead. When he spurned her offer, she rode at the vanguard of a French counterattack that drove England’s best general and his army back. She was struck in the shoulder by an arrow during the fighting, but lost no time returning to the fray after the wound had been dressed. Word of her exploits spread like wildfire. To the French, she was an angel of God on Earth.

Pucelle
Joan of Arc hath been
A virgin from her tender infancy,
Chaste and immaculate in very thought,
Whose maiden blood, thus rigorously effused,
Will cry for vengeance at the gates of Heaven.

To the English and the Burgundians, one the other hand, Joan of Arc was a witch who made a mockery of the duties and strictures of her gender.

Whichever she was, she became a much-needed helpmate to Charles. The French soldiers now fought more stalwartly than they had in years, doing it more for this peasant girl than for the dauphin. Although she never personally raised arms against the enemy, she continued to inspire those men who did so from the front, prancing on horseback in gleaming battle regalia. And she continued to inspire Charles himself as well: on July 17, 1429, he finally deigned to let himself be officially crowned King Charles VII of France. The tide had well and truly turned; the shoe was on the other foot; pick your metaphor. Bedford rushed Henry to Paris to be declared king of France in a ceremony of his own at Notre Dame Cathedral. But it felt like the weak, futile gesture it was, as the French under an ever more assertive and confident Charles VII racked up more victories on the battlefield and slowly took back the territory that Henry V and John Talbot had seized from them.

Charles
Mars his true moving, even as in the heavens
So in the earth, to this day is not known.
Late did he shine upon the English side;
Now we are victors, upon us he smiles.

Joan of Arc, the savior of her people, was well on her way to being canonized as the patron saint of France, but she wasn’t quite there yet, for sainthood must ultimately walk hand in hand with martyrdom. In May of 1430, she was ambushed by a group of Burgundian soldiers, pulled off her horse, and captured. She was eventually handed over to the English, who put her on trial for heresy and witchcraft. The inevitable verdict was that the voices Joan of Arc still claimed to be hearing came not from God but from Satan. On the morning of May 31, 1431, she was burnt at the stake in Rouen. Her English executioners were unnerved by her steely calm as the flames rose around her and consumed her with agonizing — possibly supernatural? — slowness. “We are lost,” said one of their number according to legend. “We have burnt a saint.” It was later said that she had pronounced a curse upon England with her dying breaths.

Pucelle
May never glorious Sun reflex his beams
Upon the country where you make abode;
But darkness and the gloomy shade of death
Environ you, till mischief and despair
Drive you to break your necks or hang yourselves!

Anyone familiar with English weather might be tempted to believe her curse came true — as might those familiar with the subsequent course of the Hundred Years War.

Seeing which way the wind was blowing, in 1435 the Duke of Burgundy concluded a separate peace with Charles, gave his palace and the rest of Paris back to him, and more or less rejoined his kingdom.

Burgundy
Forgive me, country, and sweet countrymen!
And lords, accept this hearty kind embrace.
My forces and my power of men are yours.

The loss of their Burgundian allies left the English that much more in the lurch. The mega-kingdom was now a pipe dream.

It was against the backdrop of these demoralizing events in France that Henry VI came into his majority in England. Although he couldn’t be blamed for what had transpired before he took the reins of power, it soon became clear that he wasn’t inclined to grip them with any particular firmness even now. Even had he been a different, more dynamic sort of man, he would have had a hard time making a go of it as king, being tarred with a war effort that had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and all but bankrupted the royal treasury in the process, being surrounded by ambitious men who had grown used to exercising power in his name while he was still playing in his nursery, and being the target of persistent questions about his overall legitimacy in light of the counter-claims of the House of York. Being the person he was in addition to all of that, he became a puppet in a court full of all too eager puppet masters.

Historians remain divided as to whether Henry was a sloth, a dullard, or a misplaced saint, being able to agree only that he was nothing like his father. Even Shakespeare, a writer who is usually happy to pick a personality for his characters and stick with it, doesn’t seem certain what to make of Henry VI in his plays about the man. Will Durant declares that he “never rose to royal stature. He was a delicate and studious neurasthenic who loved religion and books, and shuddered at the thought of war.” This is as likely a depiction as any. The one thing that is crystal clear is that he had a tendency to fade into the background — a difficult trick for a king to pull off at the center of his own royal court, but somehow he managed it.

With such a power vacuum at the center of court life, intrigue and backbiting became even more rife than it generally was in such a setting. In 1441, Gloucester’s lowborn wife Eleanor, who had a strong interest in astrology and the occult, was unwise enough to predict publicly that Henry would soon come down with “a life-threatening illness.” Prophesying about such subjects was always dangerous, in that prediction and desire could be easily conflated. Gloucester’s enemies rushed to condemn Eleanor and her two male astrological compatriots for treason and witchcraft. The men were executed, while the woman was forcibly divorced from her husband and imprisoned for life. Realizing that he hadn’t the juice to save her, Gloucester seems to have judged discretion the better part of valor under the circumstances, watching meekly while his former wife was hauled off in chains. But his relationship with Henry, who had looked on and likewise done nothing to save her, was badly damaged. Going forward, the wise old Gloucester would no longer be a steadying presence at the young king’s side.

The most prominent of the advisors (manipulators?) who rushed in to fill the space that was thus opened up was William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, who advocated for cutting England’s losses and concluding a peace with King Charles VII that would allow the country to retain some portion of its remaining holdings in France. Henry, being the farthest thing from a warrior-king by talent and predilection, was fully onboard with this idea — which, to be fair, was sensible enough in the abstract. In practice, however, Suffolk was widely perceived to have made a hash of it. The Treaty of Tours which he concluded with Charles on May 28, 1444 — King Henry is made conspicuous by his absence from these deliberations, as he was from so many other events during his reign — stipulated that England give up fully half of its dwindled holdings in France without a fight and that Henry marry Margaret of Anjou, a niece of Charles. A mere niece was a token of favor which Charles might be expected to bestow upon a useful marquis, not a vehicle for cementing good relations between two monarchical peers. Then, too, just to make the transaction that much more demeaning for the English, the French said that they couldn’t provide a dowry for Margaret, what with their coffers being drained by the war effort and all. In return for his concessions, Suffolk wasn’t even able to secure a lasting, guaranteed peace, only a 21-month truce which might be extended at a later date if both parties agreed to it. One didn’t have to have read Machiavelli to see what Charles had in mind: use the period of truce to repair and rebuild his armies, and then, at his convenience, reignite hostilities and make the final push to oust the English from France once and for all. The French king had come a long way from the confused prevaricator who had once had to be cajoled into defending his realm by a teenage peasant girl. Now, it was the English king who seemed totally over-matched by the demands of his position.

To say that the Treaty of Tours was not positively received back in London hardly begins to state the case. The disgruntlement and dissension in the capital were palpable, even among many of Henry’s hitherto steadfast supporters. The terms of the treaty were considered scandalous — borderline treasonous, a betrayal of more than a century’s worth of English campaigning in France. Among the most vocally aggrieved was Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester…

And it’s here at this fraught juncture that Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1 ends.

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I’ve already made note of the principal problem which dogs all of Shakespeare’s early history plays, the sense that these characters are not so much flesh-and-blood people as chessmen being pushed about the stage in arbitrary patterns. I’ve likewise mentioned the errors or deliberate distortions of the chronology. Some of the discrepancies here are small: Henry VI compliments Gloucester by telling him that he can “remember how my father said a stouter champion never handled sword,” belying the fact that he was nine months old when Henry V died.  But some of the discrepancies are massive: Shakespeare moves the death on the battlefield of John Talbot, which didn’t occur in reality until 1453, a good twenty years forward in time. In this telling, Talbot dies before Joan of Arc, who herself lives way, way too long, until the very end of the play.

In fact, let’s dwell just a little bit more on Talbot and Joan before we say farewell today, if only for the sake of humor. (This play is devoid of overt humor, so we have to grab it where we can find it.)

Shakespeare is not, shall we say, an unbiased recorder of history. On the contrary, he’s an English partisan to the core. His  depiction of John Talbot is hilariously over-the-top in this respect. He suggests that Talbot can “rend bars of steel and spurn in pieces posts of adamant,” leaving me to wonder if Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had been reading Shakespeare when they invented Superman. Near the end of the play, the Bard gives Talbot a maudlin warrior’s death by the side of his equally heroic son. Throughout, you’re left to scratch your head and wonder why he chose this guy to man-crush on; Talbot was a good general, but hardly an infallible one. He was no model of chivalry either, being considered a hard case with a cruel streak even by his compatriots. Maybe Shakespeare just felt he needed a glorious English hero to place in the midst of this series of events that don’t redound overmuch to England’s glory.

When not gilding his lily John Talbot, Shakespeare is an enthusiastic practitioner of the time-honored English pastime of bashing the French. He does everything short of calling the Duke of Burgundy a snail-munching surrender monkey. But it’s on Joan of Arc that he really lets loose. Far from the virginal peasant girl who became the patron saint of France, here she’s a witch and harlot who spends her working hours calling demons up from the infernal realms to aid the French in battle and her leisure hours fornicating her way through the entirety of the French army. One of her scenes reads like an early draft of the famous “Double, double, toil and trouble” scene from Macbeth, except that poor Joan doesn’t seem to be very good at this sort of thing. The demons she calls up listen to her about as well as my cats listen to me.

Pucelle
The regent [Bedford] conquers and the Frenchmen fly.
Now help, ye charming spells and periapts;
And ye choice spirits that admonish me,
And give me signs of future accidents.
Thunder.
You speedy helpers that are substitutes
Under the lordly monarch of the north,
Appear and aid me in this enterprise!
Enter fiends.
This speedy and quick appearance argues proof
Of your accustomed diligence to me.
Now, ye unfamiliar spirits that are culled
Out of the powerful legions under earth,
Help me this once, that France may get the field.
They walk, and speak not.
O, hold me not with silence overlong!
Where I was wont to feed you with my blood,
I’ll lop a member off and give it you
In earnest of a further benefit,
So you do condescend to help me now.
They hang their heads.
No hope to have redress? My body shall
Pay recompense if you will grant my suit.
They shake their heads.
Cannot my body nor blood-sacrifice
Entreat you to your wonted furtherance?
Then take my soul — my body, soul, and all,
Before that England give the French the foil.
They depart.

“How the hell did we lose to these guys?” you can almost hear Shakespeare muttering between the lines.

So, Henry VI, Part 1 isn’t a great play, but it can be both informative and a lot of fun if you approach it in the right frame of mind. It even sports one of my favorite Shakespearean insults, issuing from the lips of the Bard’s man-crush John Talbot no less: “Be quite degraded, like a hedge-born swain that doth presume to boast of gentle blood.” I have no idea what a “hedge-born swain” actually is, any more than I could tell you how you can be hoisted with your own petard. But I sure do like the sound of both of them.

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