Abstract
In 2 Henry VI the violence escalates into madness and butchery. Although the ironies turn sardonic and prophetic in the last act of Part 1, the memory of the brave Talbots and the comic relish of Joan’s exposure and condemnation provide enough heroism and laughter to keep the darkness of history from completely engulfing that play. Part 2 in contrast becomes considerably more savage, as Shakespeare fills the unfolding tragedy of Henry’s reign with deaths more gruesome, conspiracies more vicious, parodies of chivalry more grotesque and farcical, lords more ruthlessly ambitious, and politics more unredeemable. Except perhaps for the increasingly ineffectual king, pushed even further towards the margins of history, none of the characters is capable of enlisting the audience’s sympathy for more than a moment; seldom do we become more than spectators of this horror show of bloody self-seeking among the predators in this jungle beyond the machiavellian landscape of Part 1. Humphrey Duke of Gloucester wishes to see himself as the loyal counsellor to the king, dispensing justice in an impartial manner, yet his “humanist” judgments are undercut by the triviality of the cases, and his continuing battle with great-uncle Beaufort, the Bishop of Winchester now Cardinal, also undermines his credibility.1 Alexander Iden, loyal squire and conqueror of Jack Cade, and Lord Say, another humanist jurist, are totally representative figures, performing their brave resistance to anarchy briefly before they disappear from the plot. The play ends with York and his three sons — and the “law” of the scabbard for which they stand — in the ascendancy.
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Notes
Almost invariably modern commentators have seen “the good Duke Humphrey” as a loyal and wise humanist, and no doubt he does support his king and does try several times to provide him with sound, judicious advice. We are sympathetic to Gloucester partly, I believe, because we see the others temporarily set aside their quarrels to conspire against him and eliminate his opposition to their several plans by deposing him from the protectorate, because Gloucester alone tries to help Henry, and because the play shows that the commoners admire him. After his murder, halfway through the play, the field is cleared for the unprincipled jockeying for power, but the Duke had actually done little to prevent violence and scheming in the first two acts. Perhaps Gloucester’s “goodness” owes more to his own self-conception, the critic’s need to find balanced structure, and the chronicle sources than to Shakespeare’s portrait. Henry’s uncle does see himself in the chroniclers’ role as the invaluable Lord Protector, but Shakespeare undermines that self-conception by highlighting his choleric nature in the lengthy and divisive criticism of the marriage contract and in the various series of insults he trades with the other noblemen and especially with the Cardinal, both openly and behind the King’s back. Michael Manheim has a point in asserting that “to the theater audience of the 1590s the image of the humanist is that of a loser in politics,” but Gloucester’s resistance to the “new Machiavels” is more passive than active (see Manheim’s The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespeare History Play [Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973], 90–2.) Shakespeare’s play challenges the humanist optimism about human nature and politics on a much broader scale, though certainly Gloucester’s expectation of the triumph of justice marks him as naive and dooms him.
For a provocative discussion of the problematic relationships among representations of rebellious peasants, generic conventions, and history, see Stephen Greenblatt’s “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,” Representations, 1 (1983), 1–29.
Complementary to my discussion is Barbara Hodgdon’s brief analysis of the shifting focus of Shakespeare’s scenes in the play: from public to private and from groups to individuals. The alternations “increase audience awareness of the discrepancies between public, cosmetic ‘shows’ of love and duty and private, truthful, thoughts, feelings, and reactions.” “Shakespeare’s Directorial Eye: A Look at the Early History Plays,” in Shakespeare’s More Than Words Can Witness: Essays on Visual and Nonverbal Enactment in the Plays, ed. Sidney Homan (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 120.
On Schadefreude, see Erich Segal’s “Marlowe’s Schadenfreude: Barabbas as Comic Hero,” in Veins of Humor, ed. Harry Levin, Harvard English Studies, 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). For the tradition of combining the comic and terrible, see especially Muriel C. Bradbrook’s discussion of the Marlovian grotesque in “Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Eldritch Tradition,” Essays on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Drama, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962), 83–90.
Eliot’s phrase comes from “Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe,” in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), 92.
Clifford Leech calls the scene “a grim comedy.” “Moreover,” he adds, “the formal combat between the armourer and his man is a parody of chivalric encounter: in a way remarkably sophisticated for this early drama, it implies a critical attitude towards the warring nobles whose quarrels are grotesquely mirrored in this fight between two simple men, one terrified, one drunk.” William Shakespeare: The Chronicles (London: The British Council, 1962), 17.
Mock-battles and mock-combats were typical carnivalesque entertainments, ritualizations of aggression which were part of the institutionalization of disorder licensed by holiday. The practice during the Middle Ages and Renaissance is too widespread to require documenting, but Peter Burke’s generalization will serve to express concisely the elements which this scene shares with the carnivalesque festivals: “The last act of the festival was often a drama in which ‘Carnival’ suffered a mock trial, made a mock confession and a mock testament, and was given a mock execution, usually by burning, and a mock funeral.” Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1978), 185. No doubt, most of the Elizabethan audience had experienced such festivities and would have recognized Shakespeare’s imitation of their form in the Horner-Peter combat.
“King Henry VI: Part 2: Notes During Production,” Theatre Annual, 13 (1955), 45–6.
For a general introduction to Carnival, Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Chapter 7, provides basic information. I have summarized some of the essential features in “Erasmus’ Praise of Folly and the Spirit of Carnival,” Renaissance Quarterly, 32 (1979), 333–53. The primary synthesis of the various practices and the rationale behind them is Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1968). In the opening chapters of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), C. L. Barber gathers and analyzes much of the written evidence about folk festivals in Tudor England.
Arthur Freeman notes this discrepancy: “Shakespeare has also introduced the otherwise gratuitous episode of Iden’s garden, a scene which may well bear cutting in a modern production. Iden himself remains an annoyingly loose end among disparate new faces in the last act: the man who announces himself loath to ‘live turmoiled in the court’ when he “may enjoy such quiet walks as these’ in Kent … seems within a few lines overjoyed to attend henceforth upon King Henry at court: ‘May Iden live to merit such a bounty!’” In his “Introduction” to the Signet edition of Henry VI: Part Two (New York: New American Library, 1967), xxxiii.
See Michael D. Bristol, “Carnival and the Institution of Theater in Elizabethan England,” English Literary History, 50 (1983), 637–54.
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© 1990 Donald Gwynn Watson
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Watson, D.G. (1990). Henry VI, Part Two. In: Shakespeare’s Early History Plays. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11035-3_3
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