Henry VI, Part 3, page 25
Henry’s hard-won certainty about the futility of using war to overcome injuries recalls arguments made by certain early Renaissance humanists—notably, John Colet (1466/67–1519), Thomas More (1478–1535), and Desiderius Erasmus (1467?–1536). Insofar as it presents such views, Part 3 participates in wider early modern—and by no means outdated—debates over the merits of peace versus war for the formation of national identities and the practice of international relations. Like Henry, Renaissance humanists were led by their experiences of the cruelties of late fifteenth-century civil conflicts to regard all war as a man-made calamity to be strenuously avoided, except possibly as a last resort in self-defense. Philosophically, such views challenged St. Augustine’s idea—often restated by early modern military apologists and preachers alike—that war was God’s recurring punishment for human sin. Though Henry is increasingly aware of the evil motives around him, it is telling that he never makes such arguments. Augustine had also constructed the theory of the just war, which drew on Roman legal precepts and natural law to argue that war could be waged by Christians under certain conditions if its notional goal was worldly or spiritual peace. These views displaced early Christian principles of nonviolence and universal brotherhood with subjective, and infinitely malleable, pretexts for war, as Erasmus pointed out in his well-known antiwar tracts “Dulce Bellum Inexpertis” (“War Is Sweet to Those Who Do Not Know It,” 1515) and The Complaint of Peace (1559; originally published as Querela Pacis in 1517), both of which Shakespeare had possibly read.
One small but significant war-versus-peace debate occurs in 2.2, when Clifford uses just war arguments to persuade Henry to press home the Lancastrian victory at Wakefield (2.2.9–42). He catalogues animal behaviors to justify defending one’s family and possessions from harm as natural, and he defends primogeniture as a stabilizing political principle. By contrast, Henry’s willingness to lay aside his son’s inheritance can be related to humanist arguments that war should not be fought to defend elite privileges masquerading as the country’s collective interests. Instead, war must significantly benefit, and be approved by the consent of, the common people. Henry also rejects the slippery idea that noble intentions justify using violence to advance a nation’s strategic goals (“didst thou never hear / That things ill got had ever bad success?”) and daringly alludes to Henry V’s French conquests to illustrate his point: “I’ll leave my son my virtuous deeds behind, / And would my father had left me no more” (2.2.45–46, 49–50). Anticipating the rueful epilogue of Henry V, this surprisingly negative allusion to England’s victory at Agincourt is, from a popular perspective, patriotic sacrilege. But it made sense to Tudor humanists as an objective evaluation of the human and economic costs of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) and the Wars of the Roses. As Ben Lowe has demonstrated, the social impact of these conflicts in England seriously eroded medieval amplifications of just war theory, and it exposed the false glamour of chivalric militarism to unprecedented scrutiny.6 Henry VI, Part 3 is part of this early modern critique.
Erasmus’s cultural antagonist was Niccolò Machiavelli, whose famous treatise Il principi (The Prince, 1513) was published the same year as Erasmus’s most famous work, Institutio principis christiani (The Education of a Christian Prince), which concludes with several chapters on peacemaking. Anticipating the modern theorist Carl von Clausewitz, Machiavelli argued that war was a rational and often necessary instrument of political power. And whereas Erasmus maintained that the prince’s will in making war was limited by the agreement of the people, Machiavelli identified it absolutely with the identity of the emerging nation-state. In their attitudes toward violence and the legitimate boundaries of a prince’s power, King Henry and his antagonist Richard of Gloucester emblematize the ideological rivalry between Erasmus and Machiavelli within the historical event of Lancastrian and Yorkist feud (see, e.g., Richard’s early declaration, “Priests pray for enemies, but princes kill” [Henry VI, Part 2 5.2.72]). Each character also gravitates toward the political ethics of each respective writer along the culturally English route of empirical experience. Henry’s awakening, as we have seen, comes about through anguished sympathy for the powerless victims of war. Shakespeare energizes Richard’s Machiavellian identity by having him psychologically redefine the revenger profile that dominates his personality in the first half of the play. This technically groundbreaking revelation bursts out at the exact midpoint of the play (3.2.126–97).
Having just witnessed his brother Edward recklessly give in to impulsive lust and thereby squander the chance to use royal marriage as a tool of international diplomacy, Richard, in soliloquy, vents his frustration at being unable to achieve the same level of worldly advancement or sexual satisfaction as his brother. Seeking a cause for these disappointments, Richard constructs a pathological case history, itemizing the alleged evil omens of his birth and his supposedly debilitating physical deformities (which may or may not correspond with his actual appearance on stage; modern actors tend to suggest that Richard exaggerates his disabilities). Unjustly victimized by these circumstances, Richard is therefore exempt from the moral constraints that regulate ordinary people, and he is entitled to seek the compensation of political power by any possible means:
Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry “Content” to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
(3.2.184–87)
Erasmus argued that just war theory allowed princes to relativize Christian prohibitions against killing when there were extenuating national provocations or personal grievances. Richard’s ability to turn his alleged physical and sexual frustrations into excuses for his transgressive desires epitomizes this tendency to rationalize the inhumanity of violence. Leaving the memory of his murdered father behind, Richard exchanges the monomania of the revenger for the psychopathy of the Machiavel—an Elizabethan caricature of the amoral, ruthless, and (in the theater) deviously entertaining politician:
I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colors to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
(188–95)
At the same time, Richard’s creed exemplifies a new modern political reality. Rather than being rooted in battlefield prowess or traditional heroic or moral virtues, power comes from manipulating public opinion through role-playing and image-making.
The dramatic fruits of this Protean transfiguration will be fully harvested in Richard III, which Shakespeare evidently had in mind while writing Henry VI, Part 3. The Wars of the Roses finally end when Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, defeats Richard on Bosworth Field and unites the kingdom through a political marriage joining the families of York and Lancaster. Notwithstanding Tudor government propaganda celebrating these events as a divinely ordained triumph, and modern critics’ dissatisfaction with both this historical spin and the complacent tone of Richmond’s victory speech (Richard III 5.5.15–41), Henry VII’s accession did establish the precarious but relatively durable civil peace that encouraged Renaissance humanists to dream of a new ethic founded on civic and international values other than war. It was also a society that most ordinary Elizabethan men and women preferred over the economic and social dislocations of impressment, taxes, and ideologically driven wars. In Henry VI, Part 3, Shakespeare symbolically unites these widely approved, though still contested, shifts in historical and philosophical outlook in two of Henry’s prophetic speeches: one over the young Richmond (4.6.70–76), the other in the teeth of Richard’s murderous threats (5.6.36–57). They doubly foreshadow positive and negative outcomes of the debased militarism Shakespeare boldly memorialized in his play about the Wars of the Roses.
* * *
1. Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour, ed. Robert Miola (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), Prologue 9–11.
2. Michael Manheim, “The English History Plays on Screen,” in Shakespeare and the Moving Image, ed. Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 121–45.
3. Susan Willis, The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making the Televised Canon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 63.
4. Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter, Shakespeare in Performance: The Henry VI Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), especially chapter 2, “Rediscoveries: Nation, War, and Empire (1899–1953),” pp. 33–53.
5. Michael Hattaway, “Blood Is Their Argument: Men of War in Shakespeare and Others,” in Religion, Culture, and Society, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 84–101, esp. 95.
6. Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas, 1340–1560 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
Further Reading
In addition to the following books and articles, see www.folger.edu/shakespeare and www.folger.edu/online-resources.
Henry VI, Part 3
Abbreviations: BBC = British Broadcasting
Company; H5 = Henry V; 1H6 = Henry VI, Part 1;
2H6 = Henry VI, Part 2; 3H6 = Henry VI, Part 3;
John = King John; R3 = Richard III; RSC = Royal
Shakespeare Company; True Tragedy = The true
Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke; Union = The
Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies
of Lancastre and Yorke
Berman, Ronald. “Fathers and Sons in the Henry VI Plays.” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 487–97.
Its immaturity notwithstanding, Berman claims that the H6 trilogy “shares the perceptiveness of Aeschylus and Sophocles,” for whom the most profound tragic action “emanat[es] from guilt of the past, and affect[s] the family and the state.” Central to the dynastic relationships of fathers and sons in the three plays are the rights of inheritance and questions relating to the issue of legitimacy—especially the idea of moral bastardy, which “comes to constitute more and more of a mocking counterpoint to the passionate claims made on behalf of the privileges of kinship, and derides the righteousness of the protagonists.” In 3H6, where “loyalty leads to revenge, but revenge leads only to futility,” the pattern is unmistakably ironic. Between two focal points—York’s tormented death (1.4) and its counterpart, the stabbing in Margaret’s presence of her son by the surviving progeny of York (5.5)—comes the allegorical scene (2.5) that expands the “sacred, corrupted theme of fathers and sons” to include national as well as personal degeneracy. Margaret’s phrase “bloody cannibals” (5.5.61) best symbolizes the moral debasement of birthright plaguing the House of Plantagenet: “the bastardy of nature shall continue until the deus ex machina of Henry Tudor rescues civilization from its by now inescapable corruption.”
Berry, Edward I. “3 Henry VI: Kinship.” In Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare’s Early Histories, pp. 53–74. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975.
In the chapter on 3H6, Berry brings his examination of the breakdown of society in the H6 trilogy to a close. Having focused on the decline of ritual and ceremony in Part 1 and of the rule of law in Part 2, he explores the decay of kinship in Part 3. The dissolution of family ties—Henry’s disinheriting his son and Margaret’s divorcing herself from the marriage bed in retaliation—“provide[s] the emblematic core” of the first scene. For the Lancastrians, the theme unfolds through the bonds between parent and child and husband and wife; for the Yorkists, the bond of brotherhood joins with parental and filial loyalties. The “mindless violence” that distinguishes 3H6 perverts the sacredness of such bonds: see, for example, the maniacal savagery of Clifford’s filial love (1.1.163–66; 1.3.48), the brutal consequences of Margaret’s natural affection for her son (1.4), the bloodlust (1.1.10–20) and oath breach (1.2.4–47) that taint the love between York and his sons, and the laments of a father who has killed his son and a son his father (2.5). In the latter part of the play, Richard of Gloucester’s emergence as the “self-conscious violator of all bonds of family affection” proves that even the Yorkist brotherhood cannot “surviv[e] the strains of power.” 3H6 depicts “the gradual dissolution of a society at war with itself, a society in which the single bond of kinship, isolated from the higher values that must sustain it, becomes increasingly corrupted and is finally destroyed.”
Blanpied, John W. “Henry VI, Part Three: ‘To make a bloody supper in the Tower.’ ” In Time and the Artist in Shakespeare’s English Histories, pp. 64–76. Newark: University of Delaware Press; Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1983. (The chapter incorporates “The Henry VI Plays: In Pursuit of the Ground,” Susquehanna University Studies 10 [1978]: 197–209.)
Viewed from a metatheatrical perspective, 3H6 emerges as a “brute play, proliferating props and dramatic occasions with a kind of rampant mechanical energy, yet with little transfiguring power.” Setting the stage for what is to come, the opening moments (1.1.10–20) graphically express “gangster humor from Renaissance princes”; a reductive realism reduces characters to “heads and blood—not blood as pedigree . . . but lifeblood,” thereby exposing chivalry and ceremony as mere pretense. All is multiple and interchangeable: heads, oaths, alliances, battles, and kings. Forgoing “the myth of drama as a ‘naturally’ intelligible form,” Shakespeare expends little energy on “maintaining credible dramatic conventions,” and “scene after scene enacts the dissolution of language itself into one or another form of puppetry.” Blanpied singles out the Towton molehill episode (2.5) to illustrate the play’s overall helplessness as drama. Out of the chaos, however, the dramatist sees emerging a “profoundly ambiguous and misshapen version” of himself, the Richard of Gloucester in 3.2, whose newly energizing force imparts a sense of futurity to a plot previously dominated by repetitive impulses. Embodying disorder, Richard, in effect, “is tempted into being” and becomes “the dramatist we have been pursuing.” In what Blanpied calls an “outrageous parody of the artist,” Richard claims the power “to shape ‘history’ to his liking, in his own image”: “In creating himself, he will recreate the play itself.” R3 will “test out the terrific temptations” of that promise.
Brockbank, Philip. “The Frame of Disorder: Henry VI.” In Early Shakespeare, edited by John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, pp. 72–99. London: Edward Arnold, 1961. (Reprinted in Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, edited by James Calderwood and H. E. Toliver [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970], pp. 121–36.)
In a widely cited essay, Brockbank advocates greater critical appreciation of the “stresses and ironies, complexities and intricate perspectives” at work in the prolonged violence of the H6 plays, wherein chronicle theology—i.e., the Old Testament idea that “makes catastrophe a consequence of sin”—is exposed to the “ ‘machiavellian’ idea that makes it a consequence of weakness.” As Brockbank observes, the two kinds of “anarchic scepticism” in 2H6—the “soldier’s nihilism” of Clifford and the “politician’s realism” of York—give way in Part 3 to the more significant moral contrast between “two figures representing the ultimate predicament of man as a political animal—Henry and Richard, martyr and machiavel.” Henry’s virtue, which comes across as absurd and irrelevant in Parts 1 and 2 and in the opening scene of Part 3, assumes a finer quality as the play unfolds, just as Richard’s evil intensifies. Shakespeare’s treatment of the battle at Wakefield holds the seeds of this changing dynamic. Turning on “two blasphemies of chivalry”—the brutal slaying of the innocent young Rutland (1.3) and the iconoclastic paper-crowning of York (1.4)—the battle marks the end of conventional heroic ideals. Whatever its defects, Henry’s virtue, by the time of his murder at the hands of his “ultimate antagonist” (5.6), “commands . . . full reverence.” Brockbank disputes the claim that the Tudor myth informs the H6 trilogy: the ghost of Richard II does not haunt the plays, and the catastrophes of the Wars of the Roses are not attributed to the “original sin” of Henry Bolingbroke’s usurpation of the throne. Moreover, with respect to Part 3, Henry VI’s “catastrophic virtue” and Richard of Gloucester’s “catastrophic evil . . . are not an inescapable inheritance from the distant past but are generated by the happenings we are made to witness.”
Hampton-Reeves, Stuart, and Carol Chillington Rutter. Shakespeare in Performance: The Henry VI Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
This study of the Henry VI plays in performance focuses on their “Englishness” and textual malleability as an index to their modern theatrical afterlife. Perhaps Shakespeare’s “most English works,” they are the least performed of the canonical dramatic texts outside of England, where productions since the 1950s have been “bound up with issues of nationhood and national culture.” The authors point to Peter Hall and John Barton’s 1963–64 landmark The Wars of the Roses: Henry VI and Edward IV as instrumental in establishing the RSC as England’s “de facto national theater.” While recent scholarship has emphasized the separateness of the plays, the modern theatrical approach has focused on them as either a trilogy or the first three parts of a tetralogy that demand adaptation, whether by compression (reducing the three parts to two), transposition of scenes, or verbal alteration of passages. Besides the Hall-Barton revival, other productions receiving extensive coverage include the following: Sir Barry Jackson and Douglas Seale’s staging for the Festival of Britain (Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 1953); Terry Hands’s uncut Folio-text trilogy (RSC, 1977–78); Michael Bogdanov’s “punk” Henry VI: House of Lancaster and Henry VI: House of York (English Shakespeare Company, 1987–89); Adrian Noble’s “dazzling” The Plantagenets: Henry VI and The Rise of Edward IV (RSC, 1988–90); Michael Boyd’s nightmarish, color-blind Part One: The War Against France, Part Two: England’s Fall, and Part Three: The Chaos (RSC, 2000–01); and, for the BBC, the Michael Hayes–Peter Dews 1960 adaptation of the two tetralogies titled An Age of Kings (episodes 9–13) and Jane Howell’s 1981–83 full-text treatment of each play. Part 3 receives special attention (chapter 8) because of Katie Mitchell’s 1994–95 revival at Stratford-upon-Avon’s The Other Place. Retitling the play Henry VI—The Battle for the Throne, Mitchell took a Brechtian approach, interpreting the text in light of the civil war then being waged in Bosnia to issue “an indictment to Britain for failing to intervene.” For Mitchell, 3H6 offered a “distinctive vision of medieval England as a peasant culture deeply rooted in folk tradition, nature and religious ritual”; this folk culture, however, was under threat by a “materialist modernity, represented by the Yorkists,” who sought to “replace communal expression with individual ambition.” In addition to an introductory overview and a chapter on the popularity of the plays in the early modern period, the authors also provide an appendix of major theater personnel for the productions discussed and a bibliography.
