Henry VI, Part I – William Shakespeare, c. 1591-92 ★½

Days of Whine and Roses

If we can’t call this Shakespeare’s bitchiest play, that’s only because we don’t quite know how much of Henry VI, Part I is his. Otherwise, this is a bitchfest in two ways: A vast array of interchangeable characters bicker with one another from first scene to last; and you have one of Shakespeare’s most reprehensible female villains, Joan of Arc.

You read that right. That legendary peasant hero of France, a saint in the church I happen to go to, becomes a slut-shamed harridan who consorts with demons when not making time with Charles, King of France. This may keep some from appreciating this first installment of Shakespeare’s earliest tetralogy; another is that it’s not much of a play.

It begins in 1422. After conquering a large chunk of France, Henry V dies at the young age of 36, leaving a war-enlarged kingdom in the hands of his son, only nine months old at the time. England finds itself facing an immense power vacuum:

GLOUCESTER 
England ne’er had a king until his time.
Virtue he had, deserving to command;
His brandished sword did blind men with his beams;
His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings;
His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire,
More dazzled and drove back his enemies
Than midday sun fierce bent against their faces.
What should I say? His deeds exceed all speech.
He ne’er lift up his hand but conquerèd. [Act I, scene i, lines 8-16]

Court conversation soon turns ugly. Gloucester squares off with the unctuous Winchester, a power-hungry bishop. News soon arrives of major military reversals at the hands of the resurgent French, bolstered by the arrival of the mysterious Joan.

The play lacks for Shakespeare’s signature wit and dispatch. Scenes play out sluggishly, with much repetition and choppiness. The introduction of my Modern Library edition, which combines the three Henry VI plays, notes the common consensus that Henry VI, Part I was actually the third of the plays to be written, as a prequel to Parts II and III, and that it represents a rare collaboration of Shakespeare with other playwrights, possibly Thomas Nashe and/or Christopher Marlowe.

In 2016, the Oxford University Press took this idea even farther, crediting authorship of all three Henry VI plays to Shakespeare and Marlowe. This pushes things too far in my opinion; Shakespeare remains the only credited author according to the First Folio of 1623, when the plays’ debuts were still a part of living memory.

But consider the judgment of Samuel Taylor Coleridge specifically regarding Part I, as quoted in the Modern Library’s introduction: “[I]f you do not feel the impossibility of this speech having been written by Shakespeare, all I dare suggest is, that you may have ears – for so has another animal – but an ear you cannot have.”

There is thus a tendency to ascribe large chunks of Part I to hands other than the Bard’s, specifically Acts I, III, and V and most of Act II. What is claimed for Shakespeare are what might be called the good parts: A dynamic scene in Act II when the nobles declare their allegiance for one or another bickering faction by plucking and wearing white or red roses; and a series of scenes in Act IV where the heroic Talbot unsuccessfully entreats his son John to flee a battlefield with his life.

Talbot & Talbot: The one notable character in the whole of Henry VI, Part I, heroic Talbot, mourns his slain son in this pencil drawing. Image by Scott Howard from http://fenixdesign.com/portfolio/tag/drawing.

The back-and-forth between father and son is crisply rendered, witty dialogue, in which filial loyalty is demonstrated by a lack of obedience:

TALBOT

If we both stay, we both are sure to die.

JOHN TALBOT 
Then let me stay and, father, do you fly.
Your loss is great; so your regard should be.
My worth unknown, no loss is known in me.
Upon my death, the French can little boast;
In yours they will; in you all hopes are lost.
Flight cannot stain the honor you have won,
But mine it will, that no exploit have done.
You fled for vantage, everyone will swear;
But if I bow, they’ll say it was for fear.
There is no hope that ever I will stay
If the first hour I shrink and run away.

[He kneels.]
Here on my knee I beg mortality,
Rather than life preserved with infamy. [IV, v, 20-33]

The weaknesses of Henry VI, Part I are many and manifest. After the first scene introduces the idea that “France is revolted from the English quite/Except some petty towns of no import” [I, i, 90-91], the next scene shows the French already licking their wounds after some major, unseen reverses, which cues the entrance of Pucelle, i. e. Joan of Arc.

Her introduction is handled rather well. Charles the King opts to test her rumored divine powers by having one of his lieutenants pretend to be him, only for Joan to call him out for it. Then it’s down to business.

PUCELLE 
Assigned am I to be the English scourge.
This night the siege assuredly I’ll raise.
Expect Saint Martin’s summer, halcyons’ days,
Since I have enterèd into these wars. [I, ii, 132-135]

If only this character lived up to her early billing! One reason people may suspect Henry VI, Part I to be a multi-authored affair is because we never get a handle on who Joan is or what she is really about. She’s rendered more a trickster than a heroine for her cause.

Pucelle does manage to lift the siege at Orléans, but unlike other villainous foils of other Shakespeare plays, her character is not sustained from one scene to the next. At times she is defiantly brave, at other times sneaky. A suggestion of illicit romance with Charles is floated when the couple are spotted fleeing together from an English attack, yet left hanging.

In one scene she turns an English commander, the Duke of Burgundy, but in a slapdash manner that reads highly contrived on the page. She calls over to him as his army passes by, and tells him he is hurting his French countrymen. Burgundy takes her words to heart, without knowing quite why: “Either she hath bewitched me with her words/Or nature makes me suddenly relent” [III, iv, 58-59].

If Shakespeare was managing affairs with his usual sharpness, there would have been more warning given of Burgundy’s decision to flip sides, perhaps even some motive. But as he has been heretofore one of the few British nobles not portrayed as bickering with his comrades, this pivotal scene fails the smell test.

The play stumbles many times in explaining why the French so often have the upper hand in the play. The weakest scene in the play has Joan openly consorting with demons, who for the first time are revealed as the source of her power. Only here they turn away from her for some reason, abandoning her to capture and death. Her whole purpose in this play seems to have been to give the groundlings someone to jeer at.

The end of Joan: Beatriz Romilly as Joan begs for her life in a 2013 production of Henry VI, Part I by the Shakespeare Globe Trust. Image from https://globeplayer.tv/videos/henry-vi-harry-the-sixth

The French do have something non-Satanic working in their favor: Disunity in the British ranks. This is an important theme, as it sets up the main concern in the Henry VI plays that follow.

The key scene is Act II, scene iv, the only non-Act IV scene commonly ascribed to Shakespeare. In it, opposing nobles Richard Plantagenet (later father to Richard III) and Somerset press their comrades to take sides in their dispute over Richard’s birthright, which is done by plucking red and white roses. This sets up the famous War(s) of the Roses, as well as the ruin of Henry VI to come:

WARWICK

And here I prophesy: this brawl today,

Grown to this faction in the Temple garden,

Shall send, between the red rose and the white,

A thousand souls to death and deadly night. [II, iv, 125-129]

Perhaps this is the best way to appreciate Henry VI, Part I, as a set-up piece rather than a coherent dramatic work. Joan of Arc certainly lacks for a fitting send-off, trying to bargain with her executioners by claiming pregnancy and taunted for her pains. In a better play, this would be cause for rogue sympathy; here we are invited only to ridicule her as she names one Frenchman after another as her secret lover.

Shakespeare (or whoever was writing this) was clearly concerned with putting on a patriotic show rather than a more involving drama of complex parts. Unlike the later play Henry V, which centers on a decisive and miraculous victory at Agincourt, this time there was less in the historical record to lift the spirits, and it shows. French victories are invariably ascribed to “treachery,” however warped that interpretation may be. The British failures are (more sensibly) blamed on disunity, as is the case with noble Talbot’s end. In that instance, two English lords appear on the scene with their armies, but both prefer to blame the other for Talbot’s fate rather than attempt a dangerous rescue alone.

Many scenes lack a coherent motive; others a fitting conclusion. A scene where Talbot is trapped by a scheming French noblewoman only to effortlessly turn the tables on her reads like someone checking off boxes in a history book, especially as the noblewoman’s fate is never revealed.

Henry VI, Part I is frustrating in this way, and in others, too. It promises much but despite hints of greatness, never gets far off the ground.