Henry VI, Part II – William Shakespeare, c. 1591 ★★★½

Predators and Pray

The middle installment of Shakespeare’s first historical trilogy bursts out of the gate on all cylinders and never looks back, serving up a royal soap opera of scheming and backstabbing a la “Game Of Thrones.”

Despite being an early entry in the Bard’s canon, Henry VI, Part II has the polish of a pro job and ample wit to spare.

Gone is evidence of the halting, repetitive author of Henry VI, Part I. What remains is one of William Shakespeare’s finest history plays, less a collection of pungent lines or standout scenes than a gimlet-eyed exploration of how a ruler creates a just society – or its lack.

Our story begins almost directly after Part I ends, with the arrival of Margaret of Anjou. Chosen by Henry to be his queen, she has already married him back in France by proxy of the Marquis of Suffolk. Suffolk, promoted to duke by happy Henry after bringing Margaret to the court, remains attached to the new queen, seeing her as a conduit to the throne. Suffolk is encouraged in this by Margaret herself, a woman of many parts who seems to keep her options open.

The rest of Henry’s court is less cheered. Margaret comes with a hefty price tag which includes two provinces, now back in French hands:

YORK

Anjou and Maine are given to the French;
Paris is lost; the state of Normandy
Stands on a tickle point, now they are gone:
Suffolk concluded on the articles,
The peers agreed, and Henry was well pleased
To change two dukedoms for a duke's fair daughter.
I cannot blame them all: what is't to them?
'Tis thine they give away, and not their own. [Act I, scene i, lines 213-220]

Seeing himself as king and Henry as an interloper, York later accepts the fealty of fellow conspirators who call him “our rightful sovereign.” Nevertheless, York is not shy about laying charges of disloyalty against others, specifically the Duke of Gloucester, Henry’s granduncle, the one member of the court who serves Henry true. Divided as they otherwise are, the schemers are united in wanting Gloucester out.

Henry himself is a remarkable character in this play, not for his personality but the way he lays out the central message: Blind trust in the good nature of others is a clear path to ruin. “What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted!” he declares, echoing comments of other trusting sheep who find themselves similarly undone before play’s end. [III, ii, 233]. The more evidence piles up regarding the bad intentions of those around him, the more Henry buries his head in his prayer book and leaves matters to those he can trust least.

Gloucester is the closest Henry VI, Part II gives us to a rooting interest, sharper in perception and action than gormless Henry. Just don’t get too attached to him. His fatal flaw is similar to Henry’s, in that he can’t imagine a bad world getting the better of him:

GLOUCESTER

I must offend before I be attainted;
And had I twenty times so many foes,
And each of them had twenty times their power,
All these could not procure me any scathe,
So long as I am loyal, true and crimeless. [II, iv, 60-64]

Henry VI, Part II is a sad play in that way, albeit never dreary. Gone is the endless yammering and repetition of incident that pocks Henry VI, Part I. Part II is dynamic, with constant action and an almost cinematic quality to its dramaturgy. It features the largest cast of any Shakespeare play. Shakespeare puts us aboard a ship, in a running battle across bloody London, and watching hawks hunt high in the clouds.

Unlike Part I, this play spends time with the lower classes, early on as comic relief and later as a menacing mob led by Jack Cade, who in this play is presented as a tool of York’s plot to unsettle Henry’s reign. Cade’s Rebellion provides the setting for Henry VI, Part II’s most-quoted line today, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers!” [IV, ii, 67], but despite doing in several upper-class twits, the rebels are not meant for our cheers. They are instead a case study of how base stupidity and greed combine to dangerously upset a social order when it is not held together with proper firmness.

A seated Jack Cade pronounces a sentence of death on Lord Saye in an engraving by W. Ridgeway. This historic event of July 4, 1450 is recreated in Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part II. Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/424919.King_Henry_VI_Part_2.

Notes one of Cade’s rebels: “…there's no better sign of a/brave mind than a hard hand.” [IV, ii, 15-16] By this time of the play, it is clear we are seeing a reverse example of that maxim in soft and yielding Henry.

Richard III may be Shakespeare’s most Machiavellian play; this is more certainly his most Hobbesian. Being a good or Christian person is no surety of any kind; Henry’s piousness may in fact be his greatest flaw. Life is nasty, brutish, and short for those who trust Providence to sort things out; the only compensation being it is just as nasty to those who plot and kill for their own selfish ends.

Henry VI, Part II has so much going for it I don’t get hung up wondering, as I did with Part I, over the question of how much of it is really the work of Shakespeare. First of all, it’s just so involving and satisfying as a story, from first to (very nearly) its end. Second, it clearly bears Shakespeare’s stamp in both its depth of knowledge (insight on everything from royal marriage customs to 16^th-century tailoring) and its soaring lyricism.

Consider the beauty of this speech by Margaret for her partner in adulterous intent if not deed, Suffolk:

QUEEN MARGARET
Give me thy hand,
That I may dew it with my mournful tears;
Nor let the rain of heaven wet this place,
To wash away my woeful monuments.
O, could this kiss be printed in thy hand,
That thou mightst think upon these by the seal,
Through whom a thousand sighs are breathed for thee! [III, ii, 340-346]

Before you can say “poor Margaret,” bear in mind she may well be the least likable character in a play overstocked with rogues, helping set up noble Gloucester’s doom because she resents his wife’s wardrobe and playing her husband throughout like Heifetz did a Stradivarius.

It’s quite possible Margaret is only following her Gallic instincts by laying ruin to her former nation’s ancient antagonist and would-be conqueror. If so, she does a corking job. By play’s end, Henry is fleeing before a now-openly-rebellious York, those French holdings a long-distant memory.

Henry VI (Chukwudi Iwuji) greets his new bride Margaret (Katy Stephens) at his court in a 2006 presentation by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Too bad John Dillinger wasn't alive to warn him about women in red. Image from https://www.rsc.org.uk/henry-vi-part-ii/about-the-play/famous-quotes.

The play features one of the most anti-climactic Act Vs I’ve read of Shakespeare’s, in which York finally makes his play for the throne. Since we’ve been watching his scheming since before Act I, Henry’s realization of his treachery lacks for any dramatic revelation. Act V is full of battle scenes, but so was Act IV, the twist there being it was in the form of the peasants’ revolt of Jack Cade, delivered with plenty of comic rustic banter. Act V’s battlefield soliloquys between dueling nobles seem rote by contrast. Act V also ends in unsatisfying fashion, with Henry in retreat before York and much unsettled. The underlying message at play’s end: Tune in tomorrow for Part III.

This may be one of Shakespeare’s most disquieting plays from a theological perspective. Throughout, we are confronted by the strong possibility of a God-sized hole in the sky. Henry VI’s religiousity is his signature weakness, while Cardinal Beaufort, the former Bishop of Winchester, spits contempt for his religion from his deathbed.

When one commoner calls out his master for treachery, a trial by combat is ordered, leaving it to God to decide whom is telling the truth. Alas, the confident master spends his warm-up time sharing toasts with his pals, and is struck down. The ensuing gratitude expressed to God is treated in the form of a bad joke.

“Fellow, thank God, and the good wine in thy master’s way,” is how York puts it [II, iii, 92].

If there is any sign of divine favor, it is very faint and obviously doesn’t lean in the direction of Henry. The only positive role model we see for England’s future is a humble squire, Alexander Iden, who brings Jack Cade’s reign of terror to an end. Iden speaks eloquently of his lack of ambition and a sense of civic responsibility otherwise missing from the play:

IDEN

Lord, who would live turmoiled in the court,
And may enjoy such quiet walks as these?
This small inheritance my father left me
Contenteth me, and worth a monarchy.
I seek not to wax great by others' waning,
Or gather wealth, I care not, with what envy:
Sufficeth that I have maintains my state
And sends the poor well pleased from my gate. [IV, x, 14-21]

The rest of the time, the field is left either to jackals or to commoners whose proto-socialist speech barely disguises their intent to become first among equals. Performed early in his career (the record says 1591, only a few years in if that), Henry VI, Part II presents a bitter reckoning of England’s then-recent past in the form of a diverting night at the theater. It must have served notice then that a playwright of consequence had arrived. Today, wedged beneath far more famous plays of Shakespeare’s, it is easier to miss, but still packs a punch.