The Rise of Richard: Henry VI, Part Three
The story continues… This play is very much a straight sequel to Henry VI, Part Two and we meet a lot of the same characters from the previous play. Those who haven’t been killed already, anyway. And a fair number of them do get killed in this episode. This is Shakespeare’s most battle-heavy play, featuring four on-stage battles and one more that gets reported. Later on he worked out that maybe that was overkill (so to speak) and that just one or two battles per play was probably sufficient.
Having taught Richard III before, this play was most interesting for me in the way it sets up the later work. Richard is the most interesting character here and I think Shakespeare worked out that he was onto a winner with ol’ crookback, giving him the juiciest soliloquies that he’d yet written in his fledgling career. Plenty of people on both sides of the Wars of the Roses were vicious bastards, but here was the anti-hero par excellence.
The guy with his name on the front page is still Henry VI, though, and he is still a wimp, a “faint-hearted and degenerate king, in whose cold blood no spark of honour bides.” That’s because the play begins with Henry cutting a deal with the Duke of York, whom we saw victorious along with his sons at the end of the last episode. The deal he arranges is that he gets to remain king, but when he dies instead of his son (also Edward, like the eldest son of the Duke of York — couldn’t they come up with a wider variety of names? Prince Kanye or something would have been a nice change) inheriting the throne it will pass to the Yorks.
As you can imagine, this doesn’t go down to well with others, especially the now disinherited Edward and his mum, Queen Margaret. In fact, Margaret is furious with her pathetic husband (which is pretty much how she’s felt about him from the moment they got married in the previous play), saying
Had I been there, which am a silly woman,
The soldiers should have toss’d me on their pikes
Before I would have granted to that act.
But thou preferr’st thy life before thine honour:
And seeing thou dost, I here divorce myself
Both from thy table, Henry, and thy bed,
Until that act of parliament be repeal’d
Whereby my son is disinherited.
Shades of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata here, but instead of withholding sexual privileges until the men negotiate peace, here Margaret is doing the opposite: no sex until you go to war to get back your son’s inherited right to the crown.
Margaret is a tough woman, one to be underestimated at your peril, as Richard of Gloucester does in a rare miscalculation from him when he dismisses the “five to twenty” odds against them, saying, “a woman’s general, what should we fear?” They should fear losing, actually, which is what they proceed to do in the first of the battles we see in this play.
Margaret has on her side the bloodthirsty psychopath Clifford whose dad was killed by the Yorks in the previous play and he is out for revenge. This play is all about the bloodthirsty cycle of revenge that perpetuates itself as people kill someone to avenge their loss, which in turn prompts the other side to do the same, ad infinitum, until it all comes to an end (eventually) with the death of Richard III. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Clifford’s got a kid to kill first, the fresh-faced Rutland, youngest son of the Duke of York, and his pleading’s not going to save him, because, says Clifford, “…my father’s blood hath stopp’d the passage where thy words should enter.” This brings to mind a later echo from the mature Shakespeare, when he has Lady Macbeth plead to the spirits to “Stop up the access and passage to remorse, / That no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake my fell purpose.”
Not satisfied with just killing Rutland, Clifford also kills the Duke of York who manages to say, just before his death: “My ashes, like the phoenix, may bring forth a bird that will revenge upon you all.” And so that cycle of revenge will continue.
York also manages to get out a dig at Margaret, telling her that she’s not being very ladylike as she exults in her victory and his imminent death, calling her a “She-wolf of France” and observing, “How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex to triumph like an Amazonian trull, upon their woes whom fortune captivates.” York’s son Edward comments later in the play that “Belike she means to play the Amazon” and at the end of the play Richard wishes that she “might still have worn the petticoat, and ne’er have stol’n the breach from Lancaster.” So what was this woman doing wearing the pants instead of her petticoat? The references to Amazons are apt for this warrior queen who felt it necessary to take charge when her husband wouldn’t. As she was in the previous play and as she will continue to be (anachronistically) in Richard III, Margaret is a wonderful role to play, full of vigour and venom, cursing her opponents and refusing to back down. Sure the suggestion might be that she should have stayed in her expected role and kept out of men’s business, but how can we resist the conclusion that her opponents are just saying that because they’re afraid of her intelligence and power? I mean, they’re even reduced to criticising her looks: “‘Tis beauty that doth oft make women proud; / But, God he knows, thy share thereof is small.” Sure you might have beaten me in battle, but you know what, you’re ugly! Just in case we haven’t got it yet, York sums up the difference between Margaret and what he expects a woman to be: “Women are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible; / Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless.” That is, stop being so much much like a man. There’s a large degree of anxiety here: if women can behave just like men do, then how can we justify keeping them down and treating them differently? The supposedly innate differences are appealed to even as Margaret’s transgression of them shows that they aren’t innate at all.
Even as the cycle of revenge is played out all around him, King Henry stands outside it all in existential despair, lamenting “Would I were dead! if God’s good will were so; / For what is in this world but grief and woe?” He even wishes he was a shepherd instead of a king. This from the son of Henry V. He’s clearly not cut out for this whole ruling business, but even as the plays are critical of him for his weakness, which allows the feuding nobles to destroy the country, I think Shakespeare shows some sympathy for him as well. At least he’s not a traitorous, bloodthirsty monster like the rest of them. As soon as we see Edward IV gain the crown he’s portrayed as misusing his authority, trying to get the Lady Grey to sleep with him in return for granting her petition for her dead husband’s lands. When this doesn’t work he impulsively marries her, which screws over Warwick who is acting as his ambassador in France, trying to arrange a marriage to the Princess Bona. Is Edward a better king than Henry? Almost certainly not.
As I’ve suggested, though, it’s Richard who’s taking over this play, especially in Act III when he gets to deliver the best soliloquy that Shakespeare has yet written. This is the second half of it:
Then, since this earth affords no joy to me,
But to command, to cheque, to o’erbear such
As are of better person than myself,
I’ll make my heaven to dream upon the crown,
And, whiles I live, to account this world but hell,
Until my mis-shaped trunk that bears this head
Be round impaled with a glorious crown.
And yet I know not how to get the crown,
For many lives stand between me and home:
And I, — like one lost in a thorny wood,
That rends the thorns and is rent with the thorns,
Seeking a way and straying from the way;
Not knowing how to find the open air,
But toiling desperately to find it out, —
Torment myself to catch the English crown:
And from that torment I will free myself,
Or hew my way out with a bloody axe.
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.
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 slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down.
“Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile…” What a great line. What a great speech. It’s so good that when Laurence Olivier and Ian McKellen made their versions of Richard III they both had to take it and insert into Richard’s opening soliloquy in that play (which is also brilliant). In fact, Olivier inserted all of the lines above, greatly extending Richard’s Machiavellian scheming. This is what we’ve been waiting for from Shakespeare: a dramatic speech that lifts a character out of the history books and off the stage to take up residence in our minds.
After those verbal fireworks it’s really just a matter of getting the rest of the battles and other historical events out of the way. Henry’s son Edward will have to be killed of course, all three brothers chipping in on that one when he gets a bit lippy and stands up to them. And Henry himself will need to be murdered in the tower by Richard. There’ll be some fickle changing of sides from Warwick, who is so pissed off at Edward’s about face on the French marriage he’s been sent to arrange that he joins forces with Margaret. By the time he’s been killed in battle the assessment is that “Wind-changing Warwick now can change no more.” And even Clarence, Edward’s brother, joins in with Lancasters until he decides that actually, no, he’ll stick with his family after all, vowing that he “will henceforth be no more unconstant.” But towards the end of another very long play it’s hard to keep things all that exciting no matter how many battles we get to see.
The BBC film was made at the same time as the rest of the tetralogy, so there’s not much more to say about the staging except to say that the set that began brightly coloured in Henry VI, Part One (which I’m watching next) has now thoroughly decayed. The doors are all blackened and burned and everything is starting to fall apart. Of the actors, Brian Protheroe as Edward comes more to the fore in this play, although I actually find him a little hammy. Ron Cook impresses as Richard, so I’m looking forward to watching him as the lead in his own play. He’s more understated than Olivier and McKellen from what I’ve seen of him so far. Mark Wing-Davey also gets a lot more screen time, as the Earl of Warwick, a fearsome and respected warrior who ends up fighting on both sides. He’s very good and it was nagging away in my head that he looked familiar but I couldn’t think what from. It turns out that I’ve seen him before in the television adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, playing Zaphod Beeblebrox (if he’d had an extra prosthetic head in his role as Warwick I would have recognised him straight away).
I’ve enjoyed the history lessons in these two plays so far (distorted as they may be for dramatic effect) and I’m looking forward to seeing how obvious it is (if it all) that Part One was written after Parts Two and Three.
