RE: 2 Henry VI - Closure

Notes: "There you go again" was actually referring to myself, who often seems to take a non-new-critical angle. That's partly because I was poorly trained (or made skeptical of New Criticism in my infancy), entering Yale easily intimidated and unprepared.

As far as Randall's remarks are concerned, I have been searching the web and discovered that there is a 1990 re-do of Harbage's Annals of English drama for sale in various places -- at prices only a university library is likely to pay. I suspect it is probably a fine summation of all the writing and publication hints that history provides. I will have to find a friendly library that owns one and photocopy the pages covering the years between, say, 1550 and 1615, the years that most interest me.

Then, on a different note, we watches a film called Stage Beauty last night. It purported to be about the change from men playing women to women playing women at the start of the Restoration, but it blundered through a plot and series of plot shifts and tossed-off little "truths" that its actors couldn't begin to manage -- like a miraculous 5-minute change of one character from what struck me as 19th-century acting styles (portrayed as Restoration styles -- Gil would know) to some sort of Stanislavsky "realism." Ugh. This led to MY dream which was to find myself suddenly in charge of a bunch of young people who were rehearsing a play that was going to be performed soon to me have two days to learn the part of Kent for King Lear. Sweet dreams!

Ernst

2 Henry VI - Closure

Randall’s last, his “small crisis of confidence,” worries about the vast too-much discovered country of the thing called Shakespeare that we are exploring. Perhaps I provoked this with my too-cavalier rejection of Marjorie Garber’s assertion that Henry VI, Parts II and III were “almost certainly” written before Part I. I took this “know-nothing” stand in order to attempt to argue for the superiority of 2 Henry VI as a piece of drama as opposed to an animated pageant of history, though I perhaps came off as an unsupported version of Jack Cade’s rejection of the entanglements of literacy. Randall recognizes that Mike raised the powers and limitations of language and Ernst the poetry of the philosophical debate about leadership. Randall himself, limited to one scene, penetrated the effects of dramatic pairing. My Shakespeare students were forbidden to write “Shakespeare believes…,” because in each reading of the play, the dramatic plot is always developed through “on the one hand Hotspur, but on the other hand Falstaff” or “although Gloucester believes in ethical, public order, yet Gloucester is touchingly supportive of his humiliated wife.”

There is indeed a mind of William Shakespeare, and I am sympathetic with Randall’s furrowed brow, but I am also really thrilled with The Will Shakespeare Experience to date, in that we have opened up rich and illuminating dialogue, sharp eyes, and sensitive ears. My assumptions are that William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays (Chapter 3 in Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare makes an airtight, if impatient, case) and the “text,” in my quaint definition, is the play on the printed page in front of me. I choose Riverside because it had the widest margins for me to make notes in, but I also accept that what I am reading is the cumulative effort of Heminge and Condell, then Malone, Sam Johnson … Hardin Craig, et al. I do not dismiss the efforts of the 10,000 books and articles which enrich or multiply readings, though as I confessed while summarizing Greenblatt, much of it seems more interested in translating Shakespeare into support for some alternative thesis.

I, of course, am perfectly susceptible to the same thing. I am an old New Critic by training. I admire the way you three can light up lines, metaphors, cadences, themes. And the “uber-text” that we are working up is a cumulative Shakespeare emerging from the order we choose to read the plays. The general Signet introduction has always put Comedy of Errors first (or fifth), 1 Henry VI fifth (or third) and Titus Andronicus seventh (or third). But I’m perfectly cool that we read the play we are reading, and engage, often, that inter-textual criticism, both inside the oeuvre and elsewhere — Ernst from Cambises or Gil from Dryden’s Anthony, for instance. Wherever, whatever, what fun! Yes, my Riverside Love’s Labor’s Lost includes a couple of passages that certainly must be a first then a later revised version. I hope all of us will range free.

As I write this, I am sitting under 124 monographs and essay collections (and ten—ten!!--Complete Works), and I’m planning on sticking my finger in them when the urge arises, and I would gladly account for some of them as I did with Greenblatt, but I’ll try to start with my eye, my ear, my personal experience of teaching and plays and films seen. But the primary thing I want is to hear what Ernst and Mike and Randall have to say, and I hope that dialogue emerges from that, and any- and everything goes.

For 2 Henry VI our dialogue was a bit desultory, because the host couldn’t meet the suggested dates. (Last night, to top it off, I dreamed I had three days to write a PhD dissertation, and I spent the first 24 hours eating and drinking and wandering around some fair.) The “modified Matchett” — one scene at a time — was not able to reach full fruition because the host was out to lunch … out to dinner … out to the airport. Nonetheless, Mike's focus on the Ilium metaphor was most promising, especially with Gloucester cast as Hector, the defender of proportion, balance, unity. As Gloucester anticipates that the coming political storm will even obliterate the book of memory, we can look way ahead (in Shakespeare) and back (in history) to Henry V in which such heroic deeds will be resurrected (“retro-raised?). Also Mike’s ear for irony, noting that York, among others, is a face-man, masking his scheming, is not just a key to the way I see the plot work out, but already a draft of York’s “indigested lump” of a son, Richard. I thought Suffolk’s surrogate marriage as a curious bit of history, while Mike raised it to a wry comment on character: Henry “can’t even marry his own wife.” I really respond to Shakespeare’s opening scenes—even Sampson and Gregory in Romeo—but I didn’t find much in 2 Henry VI until I had Mike’s reading.

Randall picked up the Ilium metaphor with Margaret as Helen and, limited to the first two scenes, can ask “what are we to make of Margaret?” As I tried to develop the play as drama more than as history, I noted the intense love plot of Margaret and Suffolk — other than Antony and Cleopatra, is there another such story of infidelity? I hope Mike and Randall come back here when we get to Troilus. But I thought there was continuity weakness here; despite Suffolk’s articulated plan for seduction at the end of 1 Henry VI, the liaison is not developed in 2 Henry VI until Suffolk’s exile, when we learn the affair has been continuous, passionate, obsessive. Both of Ernst’s postings sent me back to the play, this time to listen. Very rewarding.

Both Gil pieces showed that I am the most conservative among us. I used Talbot, then Richard of York to organize new territory for me, but what emerged was sort of “English paper,” or semi-interpretive paraphrase. I had argued the “tragedy” of Talbot more for thesis than discovery, and, when Ernst’s 2 Henry VI subject heading was “There you go again!” I knew I had fallen into the same rut. Nonetheless, I still would argue that 2 Henry VI is a much more complex and coherent work of drama than 1 Henry VI, so at least I think I said something viable about why I would place them in “real” historical order.

2 Henry VI turned out to be really interesting. Mike and Ernst, you should contemplate Randall’s ability to catch, then focus Suffolk’s “O, that I were a god to shoot forth thunder.” As host, I had hoped there would be discussion of the Lieutenant and Suffolk (Ernst also looked at the rhetoric of IV.i), and I would still be interested in anyone’s take on how the witches prophesy about death by water devolves into death by Walter. Is that Shakespeare himself stepping to the stage apron and saying “you guys believe in prophecy? How do you like this prophesy???” Wink, wink.

I have from Roger Sale something called “the Jacobean moment,” a time about the coronation of James I when words began to be detached from things. Perhaps, Shakespeare is looking at prophesy from this perspective. Lastly, I especially sign on to Ernst response to Jack Cade. “Cade is not an unsympathetic character.” Yes, but I also called it black comedy. Cade’s out-of-control record as a soldier in Ireland has been exploited by York to create a “commotion,” such a commotion that England needs York and his army to reimpose order. Richard gives Cade a “cover” identity, the lost twin son of Mortimer, but Cade believes it, insists he be called only Lord Mortimer, and then executes the poor little messenger who still calls him “Jack Cade,” A clerk is executed for being able to read and write. Lord Say is condemned for knowing French, “the language of the enemy.” And yet, I, too, am sympathetic. Jack Cade was my biggest surprise, and I will think about Jack Cade even longer than I will remind you, my lords, that Edward III had seven sons.

Gilbert

2 Henry VI - Can't Get a Date

Gentlemen,

In 2 Henry VI Mike sees "the seeds of Shakespeare's fascination with the powers and limitations of language." Gil argues that the play shows "greater muscle in both the lines and the drama itself" and that the play shows greater unity than 1 Henry VI, revolving around the Duke of York. Ernst follows with a catalog of rhetorical speeches that demonstrate "the ascendancy of rhetoric over character and politics." I put the play down and think 'I'm with Ernst; I find it difficult to believe Shakespeare wrote this before Part 1.' And I am comfortable with our assessment, that this play shows "maturation" of language and structure and characterization over the previous play, because we perceive that these aspects arrive with greater force in this play than in Part 1.

But I am also discomfited. And I would love to see an article on the dating of the early plays and the complications associated with that dating. I'm sure the result of my reading it would be a deeper understanding of my own ignorance. This is not a complaint: I am excited by the observations we have made and continue to make not only of each play on its own but in context with those we have read before and those we already know. When Ernst wrote "I am altogether ready to side with those who claim that Shakespeare wrote the better part of all these plays and did so in the order in which we are reading them," I agreed. And yet that order is artificial, based ― however informed it may be ― on speculation.

I guess I'm having a small crisis of confidence. I am fascinated with the idea of discerning the mind of William Shakespeare, his maturation, his evolution of craft and content, as we progress through our approximation of his career. Yet I find myself wondering which of my criticisms and observations are valid, textually supportable, and worth considering, and which are mere construct, reflecting a "text" ― and therefore an author ― that doesn't really exist.

I've noticed, for example, that every authority I look to has a different order for the early plays, some with coherent rationale, some not (see Harold Bloom). With no hard evidence regarding the birth order of Shakespeare's works, all of us ― amateur and decorated scholar alike ― are left to speculate, to draw legitimate though tentative conclusions based, to name a few factors, on the mumbo jumbo of literary psychoanalysis (see my assessment of the immaturity of the person writing Love's Labor's Lost),

• on the detection of possible allusions to contemporary events, plays, and people (consider our discussion of Titus Andronicus and its relationship/reaction to Kyd and Marlowe's revenge tragedies, and our use of Nashe's Pierce Penniless (1592) to both date and discuss 1 Henry VI),
• on the cross-reference of performance records (which one might suggest introduces another nagging variable as much as defines a play's creation date),
• on the quantity and quality of pre-publication revision Shakespeare may have done (and as we know 18 of the 36 plays published in the first folio appeared in print there for the first time),
• and on the amount of extra-Shakespearian sources that finds its way into each text making the previously mentioned assessments less reliable (did Will Kemp ad-lib a passage and write it in his promptbook, thereby sealing its inclusion in the posthumously published folio?).

Thus, we are critically safe when we are reading particular lines, but as we move to the relationship of passages to play or to the relationship of one play to the next, does not the integrity of the text matter? And when we invoke Shakespeare, is it important that he actually be there?

With the Henry VI plays we have an added difficulty. Bad Quartos! (When they make a movie about this, Harvey Keitel will play Shakespeare.) Apparently, two of the plays, 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI, were previously published, anonymously, in inferior forms as 1) The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and 2) The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, respectively. These latter may be by Shakespeare, or they may not. Or he may have written them, badly, then revised them years later. Or they may be "memorial reconstructions" by fellow actors of Shakespeare's actual plays. And I'm not even going to get into the plagiarism argument which suggests that he copied Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3 from the Contention plays, or the sillier Oxfordian argument that smirkingly declares that the whole confusion comes about because Shakespeare was himself … a Shakespeare stealer!

(According to Gwynneth Bowen, from whose 1972 article, "Purloined Plume," I became aware of these different points of view, Shakespeare may have simply been one of those actors who produced memorial reconstructions but unlike the others he managed to get his name on subsequent publications. Bowen calls this "a kind of squatter's right." Sigh.) Lest we write these labyrinthine quibbles off to the lunatic fringe of Bardology, Herschel Baker in the Riverside Shakespeare devotes hundreds of words in his Henry VI introduction to these questions of authorship and the relationship between the Contention plays and what we now read as 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI.

It makes my head ache. One of the things I am enjoying most about our discussion is the inter-textual criticism, the connections that arise between works, and your prodigious talents in helping me see these works in the context of Shakespeare's complete works. Maybe the actual specific order of the plays doesn't matter, and it is possible to consider them in terms of early, middle, and late plays? Maybe I juke around the possible contributions of Greene, Peele, Marlowe, Fletcher, et. al., and emendations by editors, and insertions by actors, and mis-remembering by compilers, and corruption from Bad Quartos, and take Shakespeare to be not the man but the thing I hold in my hand, the text, regardless of its origins? Is that ignorant?

I'm sure I've missed something that will put me at ease. I want to talk about the power and limitations of language, the muscle of Shakespeare's lines, the ascendancy of rhetoric. But I seem to have floated off in a small bark and temporarily lost my oars.

Send wind,
Randall

2 Henry VI - Favorite Line

Gentlemen,

An anecdote: Gil and I saw Baz Luhrmann's film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet in Denver soon after it came out in 1996. We were in an audience of about 20, and were both the only males and the only people over 18. Despite the assumptions one can form from the audience in attendance, Luhrmann's film is thoughtful and complex, not merely the "MTV Shakespeare" it was dismissed as. Luhrmann layers the film with modern cultural references (like the use of Hispanic religious iconography), powerful and persistent visual imagery (water, for example, represents not only love's ability to purify the families' enmity but the lovers themselves), and sly references to the Shakespeare oeuvre.

One of these latter has mystified me for the last decade; in one scene the camera catches a billboard, hanging like the eyes of T. J. Eckleberg over Luhrmann's Miami-esque Verona Beach, for Thunder bullets. (The characters carry guns made by the "Sword" company, so that the audience won't laugh when they say things like "Put up your sword.") The ad says: "Shoot Forth Thunder." Clever. But I could never figure out where the phrase came from or if it was, indeed, even from Shakespeare.

So imagine my surprise when, after 2 Henry VI's Lieutenant dresses down Suffolk for all the evil he has perpetrated on England, Suffolk responds with: "O, that I were a god to shoot forth thunder / Upon these paltry, servile, abject drudges" (4.1.104-105). Gil can have his "Edward the Third, my lords, had seven sons..." and the t-shirt/coffee mug manfacturers can have their "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" (a line my lawyer friends will be pleased to know is spoken by a Dick), but I will emblazon my future 2 Henry VI marketing tie-ins with "O, that I were a god to shoot forth thunder."

That said, Suffolk's demise may be fitting in that he gropes for the wrong analogy. If it's Zeus he'd emulate, he really wants a lightning bolt. He can, and does, thunder all he wants, comparing himself to Tully, Caesar and Pompey after the Lieutenant complains "let him talk no more." It doesn't stop the axe.

Yours,
Randall

2 Henry VI - Stephen Greenblatt's Henry VI

I have not read Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, but after picking out the 2 Henry VI passages, I think I will. I know Greenblatt as a New Historicist, and I am always wary of postmodernists, but he is also the mentor of a Colorado State colleague, Barbara Sebek, whom I admire immensely. Also, starting the book on p. 167, I'd guess he is using his historicism to account for Shakespeare psychologically, another aspect that usually makes me nervous. Usually, though, the psychological folks tend to translate the text to fit their jargon, and to my limited eye, Greenblatt seems to interpret history/psychology parallel to the way I might interpret metaphors, etc. So, heeere's Stephen:

Greenblatt uses 2 Henry VI for two points:the idea of the city and the lower class, and Shakespeare's relation to Christopher Marlowe. Shakespeare is a country boy. Of the idea of the city: though certainly the site where Shakespeare remade himself, "what principally excited Shakespeare's imagination abut London were its more sinister or disturbing aspects" (162). Jack Cade, descending on London to overthrow the social order, promises a kind of primitive economic reform. "In the sequence of wild scenes, poised between grotesque comedy and nightmare, the young Shakespeare imagines...what it would be like to have London controlled by a half-mad belligerently illiterate rabble from the country" (167). "While the upper-class characters are for the most part stiff and unconvincing...the lower-class rebels are startlingly vital" (167).

Greenblatt then does a psychological job, "possibly" detecting a shakespeare self-portrait in Cade's first victim, the literate clerk, who is hung because he can read and write, noting Shakespeare's self-consciousness about what separates him from Stratford, his literacy, a self-consciousness also identified in Cade's "inveterate pretending, his dream of high status" (169). Shakespeare's fixed point of urban reference was London, even if the plays calls it Rome, Ephesus, Vienna, or Venice. Only in 2 Henry VI does Shakespeare place the London crowd firmly in the city in which he lives and works, without disguise (170). And Cade's condemnation of Lord Say for the grammar school, the paper mill, and the printing press (anachronisms) shows him "interested in the sources of his own consciousness" (171).

"Shakespeare was fascinated by the crazed ranting of those who hate modernity, despise learning, and celebrate the virtue of ignorance. And it is characteristic of him even here -- when he was imagining those who would have attacked his own identity -- that he heard not only the grotesque stupidity but also the grievance" (171). Greenblatt cites IV.vii.34-39 -- Cade condemning Lord Say for appointing justices of the peace who hang poor men because they cannot read -- with a description of how this condemns English law at the time.

Lastly, Greenblatt says the three plays about the troubled reign of Henry VI are Shakespeare's counter thrust to Tamberlaine. The Queen's men needed to write historical epic, like Marlowe's, but needed books to make an English epic. "In Shakespeare's vision of English history, vaunting ambition leads to chaos, an ungovernable, murderous factionalism and the consequent loss of power at home and abroad -- Shakespeare's petty Tamberlains, even though they are queens and dukes, are like mentally unbalanced small-town criminals: they are capable of incredible nastiness, but cannot achieve a hint of grandeur" (197). For instance, in comparison to Tamberlaine, Greenblatt finds Talbot ("shrimp") an ordinary mortal. I'm sure there is much more on Marlowe, but this is the fragment relative to Henry VI.

So, except for Mike, I just saved you part of $26.95.

Gil

2 Henry VI - "There you go again!"

Hail!

When I remember listening to 2 Henry VI, I remember appreciating the poetry of the philosophical debate about leadership that rises to a grand conclusion with the affair of Jack Cade, which, for me, is the climax of the work. Next to this development, both the final battle (which is merely a kind of advertisement for the extended struggles to come in chapters 3 and 4) and, even, the arguable centrality of the Machiavellian Duke of York fall to second place.

Different from and yet -- at the same time -- continuing the rhetorical thrust of the first two acts’ prophesies and readings of fate, the often hortatory political speeches that dominate the third and fourth acts become a kind of musical theme that rises and takes over toward the
play’s end. Listening, these speeches are the leitmotif that rises up and overwhelms the listener.
There is a series of long, rhetorically effective speeches here.

A Catalogue:

3.1.4-41: The Queen’s long dissertation on how to save the kingdom from men like Gloucester, where she concludes, like Richard II’s Gardener, that the growing "weeds" in the kingdom should be promptly exterminated.

3.1.107-171: Gloucester’s extended self-justification before Parliament advocating counselors as even-handed as himself and naming the connivers who are already angling for the Crown.
3.1.198-222: The King’s long, defeatist "wail" (giving in to the Queen’s and to York’s allies), once again stating the case for counselors like Gloucester.

3.1.331-383: York’s mixture of setting forth his plans and, implicitly, justifying his own sense that a politic, "resolute" aristocrat has the most valid claim to the Throne in chaotic times.

3.2.73-121: The Queen’s lament over the incipient fall of Suffolk, describing England as an "a scorpion’s nest" and revealing the problems of self-indulgence among rulers.

3.2.242-269: Salisbury’s ("quaint orator" that he is) speech threatening the king with a popular revolt should he not banish Suffolk, a speech which brings the potential influence of the commoner mob to greater prominence.

3.2.309-328: Suffolk’s rhetorically flamboyant cursing of his enemies: one more dog has had his day.

4.1.1-14: The lieutenant’s wonderfully metaphor-filled account of a storm at sea whose death-dealing certainty parallels affairs in England. (Read this alone, if you doubt the ascendancy of rhetoric over character and politics in this part of the play.)

4.1.70-103: The same Lieutenant’s grand summary of Suffolk’s evildoings and the Yorkists’ rise in the failing English realm.

And then, set up by all this speechifying, the rise and fall of the play’s most interesting character — Jack Cade:

4.2.62-81: Cade’s first announcement of the know-nothing communism that will mark his future realm

4.7.22-44: Cade’s triumphant demonstration (after taking London) that he is (like Tamburlaine) the "besom that must sweep the court clean of such filth [as Lord Say], combined with his criticism of grammar teaching and corrupt government underlings. (If all we had were the Cheney Administration, Ann Coulter, and Fox News, might not we think similarly?)

4.8.10-17 and 33-51: Clifford’s rousing speech in favor of the King’s Right that, although it counters Cade and shows the Mob to be all too easily led, also shows that clever rhetoric wins the day, which, in a way, cynically undercuts all speechifying.

4.10.1-15 and 71-75: Cade’s final remarks—starved, "Kent’s best man," retaining still a bit of humorous rhetorical flair.

After this, in Act 5, little really happens that has not been thoroughly foreseen, and only one extended speech, an echo, perhaps, of Talbot’s lament for his son:

5.2.31-65: Young Clifford laments Henry’s defeat, bemoans his father’s death, and sets himself up to kill Rutland in the story’s next chapter.

Next to this sort of stuff, made mostly to move the plot along and give us a final, not entirely decisive battle, the rhetorical chain of speeches, culminating in Cade’s rebellion, seems to me to stand out. Cade is not an unsympathetic character, I would suggest. He has a nice way with words, a humorous sense of verbal irony, and a notion of justice (a mad one, I’ll admit) and service to the realm as a whole that constitute a kind of reference point in a world driven by selfishness and aristocratic self-indulgence: a world coming apart and waiting for the devil himself to arrive before it can be set right again.

Ernst

2 Henry VI - The Drama of Richard Plantagenet

"Although the title by which the play is today best known, Henry VI Part 2 -- which corresponds to the title that appears in the First Folio as The Second Part of Henry the Sixt -- suggests that the play is the second in a series, this play and Henry VI Part 3 were almost certainly written before Part 1."

So says Marjorie Garber in Shakespeare After All (103). For our purposes in the Will Shakespeare Experience, I am not much interested in researching her evidence or argument for this "almost certainly," but my own readings reject it. Whereas my struggles with 1 Henry VI were to find handles in what I called "note card" organization, that is the relentless data from Hall and Holinshed's historical chronicles, 2 Henry VI seems for many reasons more drama than mere history, and drama, as we know selects, simplifies, organizes, and concentrates in order to produce meaning.

Or, to put it another way, in the E.M. Forster/Gilbert Findlay distinction between "story" and "plot," story is chronology -- this happened and this happened and this happened -- whereas plot includes cause and effect or motivation-before this could happen, this happened, and then this happened, and therefore this happened. We are only at 2 Henry VI, prefaced by Suffolk's little 1 Henry VI postscript about arranging the marriage of Margaret of Anjou to King Henry, then seducing her and as a result controlling England, and followed by, I presume, the fall of Henry (I haven't read it yet) and the conflagration of Richard III.

But 2 Henry VI does have a central protagonist, though neither "hero" nor "villain," in Richard of York. It has his contrasting predecessor, The Good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. It has a complex array of antagonists: Suffolk, of course, and the Cardinal, Buckingham and Somerset, and even York's allies, Salisbury and Warwick, and his surprising instrument Jack Cade, are not lined up as simple members of the red team or the white team. Then there is a thematic conflict between the nobility and the commoners, both a class war and, at times, a parodic commentary (Cade, Simpcox, Peter Thump, Dick the Butcher, and even Walter "pronounced Water" Whitmore) on the behaviors of authority.

The Cade rebellion is a black comedy in itself. Margaret and, to a lesser extent, Eleanor seem more complex than the Countess of Auvergne or the inconsistently presented la Pucelle. The perverse romantic plot between Margaret and Suffolk is developed as drama far more subtly than what I understands history supports. Even the style perks up to dramatic effect. For instance, I noticed more "notable passages," and when Clifford speaks in blank verse but Cade replies in prose, it alerted me to the statistic that of 2 Henry VI's 3,162 lines, 448 are prose, 2,562 are blank verse, and 122 are pentameter rhymes, whereas Part 1 has 2,677 lines, 2379 in blank verse and 314 pentameter rhymes, but no prose at all (Love's Labour's Lost had 1,086 lines of prose, whereas Titus Andronicus had but 43). [Statistics from Hardin Craig, ed, The Complete Works..., 1951, p. 39]

In 1 Henry VI the conflict was between the English, Lord John Talbot, champion, and the effete and arrogant French, Joan la Pucelle savior, then toast. The York/Lancaster conflict was curiously introduced in symbolic form in the red rose-white rose scene, then sort of realized by the misdistribution of military jurisdiction in France: foot soldiers to York, cavalry to Lancastrian Somerset, that leads to the undersupported Talbot's death. We arrived at a thesis of chivalric order overwhelmed by political divisiveness. Talbot is "hero" pretty much by assertion.

In 2 Henry VI, let us start with Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York. "Edward the Third, my lords, had seven sons" (II.ii.10) [sorry, guys, I gotta get that line in], in which York explains to Salisbury and Warwick his rightful claim to the throne through number 3 son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence's daughter Phillippa who married Edmond Mortimer, Earl of March yadda yadda to Anne Mortimer, married to Richard, Earl of Cambridge, our Richard Plantagenet's parents, whereas we know that the Henrys, IV, V, and now VI, are son number 4 John of Gaunt's boys, and these Lancasters usurped the throne from the number one Son's son Richard II. Aseverybodyknows.

We first meet York in Act 1, when he joins Gloucester, Salisbury, and Warwick in denouncing the pusillanimous marriage treaty Suffolk has negotiated for King Henry, giving away Henry V's conquests, Anjou, Maine, and a player to be named later, for the hand of Margaret of Anjou. York's first words, "For Suffolk's duke, may he be suffocate,/ That dims the honor of this warlike isle! (I.i.124-5) give us a little wordplay, a harbinger of the extra-dramatic Shakespeare who will not only give us drama, but spice much of it with a little wit besides. York, solus, analyzes the loss of France, where he would be regent, and concludes:

"A day will come when York shall claim his own,
And therefore I will take the Nevils' [Salisbury and Warwick] parts,
And make a show of love to proud Duke Humphrey,
And when I spy advantage, claim the crown,
For that's the golden mark I seek to hit....
Then, York, be still awhile, till time do serve.
Watch thou, and wake when others be asleep
To pry into the secrets of the state." (I.i.239-43, 248-49)

So here, at the beginning, we have York revealing his plans, lie low, suck up, watch out, then seize the day. Notice he tells only us, the audience (did we have soliloquy in Part 1?), so we are alerted to evaluate York's subsequent actions through our awareness of his revealed intents. Dramatic irony. I am put in mind of Prince Hal's early "I know you all, and will a while uphold/ The unyok'd humor of your idleness" soliloquy in 1 Henry IV (I.ii.195-6) in which the protagonist reveals to the audience that what follows will be a show, until such time he is free to exercise his power.

Indeed, by the time we have "Edward the Third, my lords..." York sways the above noted Nevils to his claim: "And Nevil [Warwick], this I so assure myself,/ Richard shall live to make the Earl of Warwick/ The greatest man in England but the king." (II.ii.80-2). His ambition is now partially revealed, though we also know that manipulating the Nevils is part of his strategy. More dramatic irony. The array of obstacles that York faces is vast. King Henry possesses the crown, though possession by the "bookish," pious ("all his mind is bent to holiness"), cuckolded Henry is probably less than nine-tenths of the law. Somerset, Buckingham, and especially the Cardinal are the king's party, though they are corrupted with ambition and political intrigue, overt in their anti-Gloucester plots. Suffolk is the play's real villain, ambitious and violent, though despised by the commoners, and he is aligned with the scheming Queen, contemptuous of her husband.

Different from these, Gloucester stands most in York's way. We discussed Talbot as the last, anachronistic representative of chivalry in a raw political state. Gloucester, to me, seems more a representative of order and ethics, a humane practitioner of doing the right thing. He is a Good Man, and thus he is the one beloved by the commoners (thus, his murderer, Suffolk, is hacked to death with a rusty sword rather than ransomed by his commoner captors). When Eleanor, the Duchess, warns Gloucester that Suffolk and York and the impious Beauford, the Cardinal, are all conspiring to destroy him, his defense is pure: "All these could not procure me any scathe/ So long as I am loyal, true, and crimeless" (II.iv.61-2). King Henry's defense, "The Duke is virtuous, mild, and too well given/ To dream on evil or to work my downfall" (II.iv.72-73), is a way of unintentionally saying "naïve."

Soon we have the trial by combat of Horner the armorer and Peter Thump, who has accused his master of treason for asserting York has rightful claim to the throne. The drunken Horner is killed (death by sandbag), thus "proving" his treason. I don't quite know what to make of this, though of course the scene (II.iii) immediately follows Richard's own above claim to the throne (II.ii), so King Henry's condemnation of the little drunken armorer is absurdly trivial. The audience may note that York himself seems to be the referee in this little dumb show. Next York is one among his arch enemies in court, the Queen, the Cardinal, and Suffolk, in conspiring to bring down Gloucester, each threatened and jealous of Gloucester's ethics as well as his power, so Gloucester is arrested for treason. Gloucester at last realizes "Virtue is chok'd with foul ambition" (III.i.143) and wonderfully provides a proverb to describe such political throat-cutting: "A staff is quickly found to beat a dog" (III.i.171). The machiavellian York joins with the Gang of Three to plot the murder of Gloucester, then is able to escape complicity in the eyes of the commons, as they send him to Ireland, with an army, to quell the Irish rebellion. "Please, Br'er Somerset, don't throw me in that briar-bog.' Whereupon York offers us with his second soliloquy:

"Now, York, or never, steel thy fearful thoughts,
And change misdoubt to resolution,
Be that thou hop'st to be....
My brain, more busy than the laboring spider,
Weaves tedious snares to trap mine enemies.
Well, nobles, well, 'tis politicly done,
To send me packing with a host of men:
I fear me you but warm the starved snake,
Who, cherish'd in your breasts, will sting your hearts." (III.i.331-3, 339-44)

It was an army he lacked, and his rivals gave one to him. Meanwhile he has seduced a headstrong Kentishman, Jack Cade, to make a "commotion."

"Why then from Ireland come I with my strength,
And reap the harvest which that rascal sow'd.
For Humphrey being dead, as he shall be,
And Henry put apart, the next for me." (III.i.380-33)

For me, this sets the stage for drama as well as history. Gloucester is dead. CSI proves he was murdered, rather than died in bed in the way the murderers posed his corpse. Suffolk is exiled, and has a passionate parting with his Queen/paramour. The Cardinal goes mad, confesses, and dies. Pirates/commoners capture the despised Suffolk and chop of his head, which later the Queen carries lugubriously around the court (Henry is a little jealous). Cade indeed raises a commotion, is rhetorically defeated by Clifford and, while eating herbs in Alexander Iden's garden (apparently historically accurate, though the garden of Iden/Eden connection is tempting), Iden captures him, and "there cut[s] off thy most ungracious head." Chaos.

Who will ride to the rescue of England? Why "From Ireland thus comes York to claim his right,/ And pluck the crown from feeble Henry's head" (That is two deposed "heads" within five lines.) "Ring bell, aloud, burn bonfires clear and bright/ To entertain great England's lawful king!/ Ah, sancta majestas! Who would not buy thee dear?/ Let them obey that knows not how to rule" (V.i.1-6). So the drama has been played. York and his sons, Edward and "foul indigested lump" Richard lead their army, while poor King Henry laments "O where is loyalty?/ If it be banish'd from the frosty head,/ Where shall it find a harbor in the earth." (V.i.166-68). The drama ends with York's triumph at the battle of Saint Albans, and Warwick declares victory: "And more such days as these to us befall! (V.iii.33). Only History knows how many more "falls" are yet to come.

Gilbert

2 Henry VI - Deadbeat Host Arise!

My first response to 1 Henry VI was to classify it as a "note-card" play, Shakespeare using everything in his research notes from Hall and Hollinshed. Some commentator asserted that the play really was The Tragedy of Talbot, and I used that to pursue Randall's lead about the end of chivalric culture. Ernst objected, and I acknowledge that I wouldn't really want to attempt a case for tragedy either of Talbot or Joan. Similarly, my Signet edition of 2 Henry VI is titled The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, with the Death of the Good Duke Humphrey. (I see that Ernst has already noted this). This subtitle was apparently added after performances to acknowledge what the early audiences found most compelling.

Worse, the 1594 quarto is entitled The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: and the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Jacke Cade: and the Duke of Yorkes first claime unto the Crowne. Hell, if I'd just looked at this quarto title, I wouldn't have had to read the play at all, and you would have heard from me weeks ago.

1 Henry VI was hard for me to find a focus for, while 2 Henry VI is much more compelling. Many characters have more range and depth (I'm thinking of York, Suffolk, Margaret, Warwick, and Gloucester); Henry is "profoundly" shallow. Lord Say, Eleanor and Alexander Iden each has a memorable little moment on stage. And Jack Cade -- hoo boy! -- carnival buffoon, megalomaniac, class-warrior, il- and anti-literate, killer; where will we see fragments of Cade resurface in the next 34 plays? 2 Henry VI has dialogue, characters exchanging ideas and arguments in the 'he said-he listened and responded' pattern. Examples are the vicious insults between Warwick and Suffolk in III.ii (I even wrote 'yo' mamma' in my margin), the romantic love exchanges between Margaret and Suffolk, as promised by Suffolk's little soliloquy-promising-a-sequel at the very end of 1 Henry VI, but, alas, under-developed earlier in this play; the comic display of Cade's self-aggrandizing claims in IV.ii while Dick the butcher and Smith the weaver counterpoint with ridiculing asides.

While thinking of 2 Henry VI as a tighter play, I look again Dramatis Personae. 1 Henry VI has 37 speaking parts, not counting the Joan's fiends that refuse to talk, while 2 Henry VI has 44. You remember of course Vaux, Matthew Goffe (who actually is killed before he speaks, but I should add the poor soldier who is killed just for just saying "Jack Cade!" (IV.vi.7), the brothers Stafford, and Margery Jordan, the witch. Personally, I like the recruits to Cade's rebellion, George Bevis and John Holland, not because of what they say, but because Bevis and Holland were players in London during the '90s and the prompt copy or whatever that was the basis for the quarto immortalized them along with the Duke of Somerset and Lord Scales. But the difference for me, apart from the practice I had with the earlier play trying to find a dramatic backbone through all the historical data, is the greater muscle in both the lines and the drama itself. Of style, in IV.viii, Buckingham addresses the rabble in verse, then Cade counters, but in prose. By 1 Henry IV, this verse/prose character contrast will be brilliant. York is complex in his reasons and rationalizations for claiming the throne, starting with the other line from 2 Henry VI I have "always known": "Edward the Third, my lords, had seven sons." (II.ii.10) [I hear my friend and mentor Roger Sale's voice declaiming this line.]

I want to explore some of the things Ernst noted: the class warfare, from Duchess Eleanor's "let them eat cake" attitude to Cade's Cultural Revolution against "all scholars, lawyers, courtiers, gentlemen [whom] they call false caterpillars (IV.iv.36) (and we scholars/caterpillars might contemplate Cade's vow to kill anyone who has founded a grammar school or even can read a book); the humor; the juxtaposition of scenes such as the York/Suffolk followed by the Cade/Dick and Smith. How about the ur-CSI of using forensic evidence to deduce if Gloucester has been murdered or died of a stroke? And what do we make of the prophesies of I.iv in which Suffolk is to die by water and Somerset should avoid castles, and we wait three acts for Walter Whitmore to chop off Suffolk's head (and footnotes in all three of the editions I have open insist Walter is pronounced "water"), and Somerset dies under a pub sign for the Castle Inn. Now we can keep straighter faces when we explain Macbeth cannot die by a man not "of woman born."

Gilbert

2 Henry VI - Thoughts After Listening to Acts 1-2

This comes without reading either Randall’s or Mike’s responses. I’ve got nothing terribly profound to say, I’m afraid.

This play is so much more tightly put together that I am altogether ready to side with those who claim that Shakespeare wrote the better part of all these plays and did so in the order in which we are reading them. I hear no particular echoes of other playwrights, although, I suppose, it’s remotely possible that Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus may have been an influence for the spirit-raising scene (1.4). [I would also note in passing that Marlowe’s and Kyd’s plays were played when they were first written and also re-staged from time to time. Both sorts of performances produced imitations and homages. It was probably such a re-staging that led to Pistol’s Marlovian outbursts or to Richard Burbage’s asking his friend Bill to consider writing a “Jew” play (that he asked is mere hypothesis on my part)]. In any case, the play is well built, and the plot is well pointed, nicely reinforced by parallel episodes and events, and moves right along. It reads easily, and there is no old-style poetry — at least in the first two acts.

I was delighted to find an early echo of Roethke’s “In a Dark Time” at 2.4.40: “…dark shall be my light and night my day” (Eleanor).

Obviously, the fall of Humphrey of Gloucester is much like the Talbot’s fall in the preceding play and, apparently, an audience-pleasing feature of early productions — to the extent that a 1594 printed version added “with the death of the good Duke Humphrey” to its title page, a fact I imagine you have all already read.

And, sure, the factionalizing and the duplicity of powerful men remains a strong theme, carrying forward what was established in Part 1. The best lack sufficient real power; the worst are full of passionate intensity, and the anti-herald of the GRB, the Devil himself, will appear before the usurpation of Richard II can be cleansed and the Tudors brought to the throne.

To me, the two most interesting aspects of the first two acts are (1) the many curse- or prophesy-like pronouncements, voices from the “other world,” and audience-engaging questions concerning the fate-like forces driving history (Indeed, fate and inevitability might be key components in any definition of a “History Play”), and (2) the parallelisms. A third theme is the relationship between the self-obsessed nobles and the common people. And a fourth element worthy of thought is the way humor is included in the larger picture.

1. Just a list of curses, predictions, etc.:

• (A) 1.1.212ff: York’s Richard III-ish plan for the future — all of which will come true.
• (B) 1.2.87ff: Hume’s plan for Eleanor—all of which will come true. [Hume is an instance of what I might call a “tool villain,’ and early example of which is Pedringano in The Spanish Tragedy.]
• (C) 1.3.53-60: Eleanor’s setting up an opposition between Henry’s dependence on Christian traditions (vs. her own dependence on witches and diabolic interpreters).
• (D) I.3.145-7: Eleanor’s prediction of Queen Margaret’s taking power—which is already happening as she speaks.
• (E) 1.3.205-11: Gloucester’s apparent looking upon a duel as the proper way to settle the Horner-Peter Thump conflict.
• (F) 1.4.24-41: The diabolical Spirit’s predictions of Henry’s, Suffolk’s and Somerset’s ends—all of which come true.
• (G) 2.1.1-15: Henry, Suffolk, Gloucester, and the Cardinal commenting on the significances of the flight of Henry’s falcon [as managed by Margaret].
• (H) 2.1.66-150: The phony Simcox’s efforts to con the nobles with his “miracle.”
• (I) 2.2.69-82: York’s “prophesying” the future of his and Henry’s careers—not entirely true, for he will never become king himself, although his son will.
• (J) 2.3.93-105: The battle between Peter and Horner reveals that Horner has lied about Peter, which Henry takes to be representative of God’s will. (Horner will have learned greater subtlety by the time Wycherley gets hold of him.)
• (K) 3.4. 48-73: The shamed Eleanor predicts her husband’s downfall—all true—which Gloucester refuses to believe, although an unconsented-to summons to the Court suggests to us that he will be a believer soon.

2. I will leave parallelisms undiscussed, although there are several, including Henry/Margaret and Gloucester/Eleanor; the lying con-man Simpcox and, let us say, the truth-speaking Demon; and the duplicitous Horner and the conniving Suffolk (Is Horner his Suffolk’s creature?).

3. About this the relationship between the nobles and the commoners, I will only note that the commoners’ discontent makes its way into the first two acts at several points:

• (A) 1.3.1-40: the Commoners’ complaints—ignored by Queen Margaret and Suffolk [in Cambises there is an allegorical character named “Commons Cry”].
• (B) 1.3.177-223: The falling out between the [probably suborned] Horner and Peter, suggesting that duplicity among the nobles produces duplicity among commoners.
• (C) 1.4—the witch Margery Jourdain, whose mere existence bespeaks an unsettled lower class in the realm.
• (D) 2.1.57-150—The townspeople’s foolish enthusiasm for a miraculously healed con-man reminds one of the impoverished, close-to-the edge existence underlying Pompey Bum’s “I am a poor fellow that would live (Measure for Measure, 2.1.222).”
• (E) The Sheriff’s being dragged (reluctantly, one would suspect) into York’s and Buckingham’s design to undo Eleanor.

4. Here I will only note that there is a good bit of humor in these two acts—in the obvious foolishness of some of the commoners, the undercutting of various pompous speeches, and the blatant excesses of some of the characters, most especially, York’s lone dissertation on his genealogy (2.2.9-62). Keeping this entirely serious would be a difficult task for an actor or a director, I would think.

Some time Later: I find myself wondering about Shakespeare’s religious attitudes in 2 Henry VI. He seems to hold little regard for Henry’s version of religious piety and believe in God’s ultimate justice. At the same time, here, as in so many plays, he seems to maintain a skeptical attitude about those who would judge others quickly without walking in (or imagining walking in) their shoes. I will mull on this.

Ernst

2 Henry VI (I.2) - Further Muddling

Gentlemen,

If Mike is going to throw out compelling connections like Troy and England, then I'm content to just sit back and let him lead me through the text. It was very satisfying to read Mike's thoughts, then go through Act 1, scene 1, where the various dukes and earls (and a cardinal in a pear tree) perform a series of disheartening political pirouettes. After 1 Henry VI, reading the first scene of Part 2 would have seemed like more of the same, although more efficiently laid out, "factions scheming and counter-scheming" as Mike put it. Been there; done that.

So it was more than pleasant to have Mike's examination of Suffolk's Paris simile and his take on the power of words to lend substance to my reading. A thought: If Suffolk is Paris, England Troy, and Gloucester Hector, then Margaret is Helen. Her rather devoted speech (1.1.24 - 31) reminds me a bit of Helen's performance in Book IV of Homer's Odyssey, where she is very careful to appear the dutiful wife of Menelaus rather than the passionate (revisionist Helen calls it "the madness Aphrodite sent me") woman who runs off with Paris. It seems to me that in 1 Henry VI (5.3) and 2 Henry VI (1.1), Margaret's temperament fits Henry's religiosity quite nicely. Even Suffolk's stolen kiss in the previous play doesn't seem to faze her, and she brushes it off as a "peevish token." So, amid the collapse of Henry's rule, what are we to make of Margaret?

Which brings us to Act 1, scene 2. My essential question reading this scene was: how does it build on the first scene? Shakespeare frequently sets up parallel situations -- think Hal and Hotspur, or Hamlet and Laertes, or Lear and Gloucester -- and scenes 1 and 2 give us two wives, Henry's queen and Gloucester's duchess. Whereas Margaret's limited appearance suggests none of the subversive plotting of those around her, Dame Eleanor (Nell), Duchess of Gloucester, harbors an ambition on a par with York, Buckingham and Somerset. She hints at it to her husband, suggesting it is a vision she had in a dream:

"Methought I sat in seat of majesty
In the cathedral church of Westminster,
And in that chair where kings and queens were crowned;
Where Henry and Dame Margaret kneeled to me,
And on my head did set the diadem." (1.2.36-40)

How like York's soliloquy this is ("A day will come when York shall claim his own ... and, when I spy advantage, claim the crown" [1.1.239, 242].) Even after suffering some reproof from her virtuous husband, Nell continues to plot, assisted by some miscreant dabblers in the occult. So Act 1, scene 2 builds on scene 1 in that both present us with our "heroes," Henry and Gloucester, threatened by internal corruption. Henry will suffer from the poisonous machinations of his court, Gloucester from his family.

Nell is further interesting because she clearly anticipates Lady Macbeth. Frustrated by Gloucester's unwillingness to pursue the kingship, she says:

"Follow I must; I cannot go before,
While Gloucester bears this base and humble mind.
Were I a man, a duke, and next of blood,
I would remove these tedious stumbling blocks
And smooth my way upon their headless necks." (1.2.61-65)

Her "were I a man," sounds a lot like what Lady Macbeth might have thought moments before she demanded that the spirits "unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty." In the same way that Lady Macbeth realizes that her ambition cannot be achieved unless she frees herself from the feminine, Nell understands that her position as wife and woman forces her to "follow." She wants to lead, but does not have Lady Macbeth's ability to transcend / deny her own gender.

What makes the comparison even more interesting to me is that both women turn to the occult to gain power. Lady Macbeth prefaces her demand with "Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts," while Nell has employed a conjurer and a witch to conduct a seance, sort of a medieval pyschic friends network. That Nell has not reached Lady Macbeth's level is evidenced by her goal: she has some questions she wants to ask the spirits. Lady Macbeth seeks support for the deed. Both women, however different in degree, are similar in their murderous intent. And that doesn't bode well for Gloucester any more than it did for Macbeth.

At this point, Gloucester is going to wish he were lord of himself, unencumbered of a wife (sly allusion to Dryden for Gil). Ask not, Gloucester, for whom the bell knells; it knells for thee.

Randall

2 Henry VI (I.1)

Well, here we go...

I've never read 2 Henry VI before (nor have I read any of the others we've read thus far), so I'm playing fair. I've not read a word past Act I, scene 1.

Not to be the overly eager student, as we "read aloud," but given that we start with Suffolk hauling Margaret up from France, I thought that we might return to the final speech of Part One:

Thus Suffolk hath prevailed, and thus he goes,
As did the youthful Paris once to Greece,
With hope to find the like event in love,
But prosper better than the Trojan did.
Margaret shall now be queen, and rule the king;
But I will rule both her, the king, and realm. (5.5.103-108)

So, by his own declaration, Suffolk is Paris. Ill-chosen metaphor, as far as England is concerned, and it gives Gloucester a touch of Hector when he declares in lines 98-103 of the opening scene of Part Two:

O peers of England, shameful is this league!
Fatal this marriage, canceling your fame,
Blotting your names from books of memory,
Razing the characters of your renown,
Defacing monuments of conquered France,
Undoing all, as all had never been.

Shades of Ilium... This list of verbs (canceling, blotting, razing, defacing, undoing) suggests an erasure on par with Troy, and places us in the midst of a mess utterly at odds with the classical virtues of proportion, balance, unity, etc. And didn't England trace their lineage back that way and rather consciously identify, via the Arthurian Legend, with Troy? (Since I'm just reading aloud in class, I'll throw stuff out like that...)

I find it interesting that we begin a place about History this way. Suffolk should know better than to throw out disastrous literary/historical allusions and assume that he can just insert his big "but" and rewrite the books: "BUT prosper better than the Trojan did"? There's too much order and continuity in Shakespeare's world view (at least concerning the monarchy) for him to get away with that.

And Gloucester's appeal has as much to do with how the story will be told as it does with the current political situation; he's concerned with "fame" and "names" in the "books of memory." The "characters" of the peers' renown could even function as a pun, moving beyond persona and elevating the very letters that define their deeds into an edifice (not marble, nor the gilded monuments...) vulnerable to being razed. The poetry doesn't sing the way it does later, but I do see the seeds of Shakespeare's fascination with the powers and limitations of language here, as well as his acute sense that author and authority stem from the same etymological root.

So, clearly we have a shitstorm brewing here. (That's the proper classical term, I believe.) And when all kneel and proclaim Margaret to be "England's Happiness" in line 37 or so, I'd imagine even the most addled groundling felt the irony resonate in his wee brain. My guess is scene one is going to be a microcosm of what's to come -- different factions scheming and counter-scheming, internicine squabbles, some acting for the "public good," some in naked personal interest, and York sitting back and letting it play out until he can act in the "public good" on his own behalf.

I mean, the king is immediately established as someone who has others act on his behalf; he can't even marry his own wife -- he's a cipher, a vessel, a role simply waiting to be inhabited. The "subtance" and the "shadow" have been reversed, Suffolks little speech notwithstanding. Politically, he's clearly not of this world, and while I think we might be able to read him as spending a lot of time in another one (the world of prayer, piety, and beyond), that basically transforms him into a very nice coat that everyone else in the kingdom yearns to try on for themselves, or at the very least see worn by a real king, someone who fills it out a bit more. His center is not located in this realm, and thus he is too willing to compromise to achieve the "peace" and "unity" he alludes to earlier.

And to top it off, he leaves his own play after only 70 lines. Richard the Third would never do that. Words equal power. And, after each prominent player exits and we then listen to the others talk behind their back (not a subtle dramatic technique, I'd say), York has the last word. I've few more wrinkles that I'll follow to see how they play out, but that's it for now.

Peace and Disunity,
Mike

RE3: 2 Henry VI - Muddle, Muddle, Toil ...

Me too. And, incidentally, I have sent out CDs of the three Henry VI plays to all of you (Randall and Mike sharing one), but it took longer than I intended, and they all went into today's mail.

Ernst

RE2: 2 Henry VI - Muddle, Muddle, Toil ...

I'm game as well. With closure, graduation, etc. this week, I won't get to it until the weekend, but I'm delighted to kick things off.

Thus far, every play has been new to me. Given that I'd never read any of them, including this one, I'm intrigued by Gil's idea. I likes it.

Mike

RE: 2 Henry VI - Muddle, Muddle, Toil ...

Chorists,

I get it now. And I'm game. (Or gamey; it's 85 degrees and I've been gardening.) What's more, my schedule is clear so I can be pretty quick to sing my part, after Mike. If Mike's available, I'd recommend he jump in even earlier, if possible. Act I has four scenes, so Mike and I would toss the Act back and forth for a few days, then Ernst could jump in with his impressions of Act 1 and/or responding to our e-mails. If we got off the ball early next week, we'd still have time to read the rest of the play by the weekend, when Gil launches the big boat.

Intriguing approach. Mike? Ernst? Wanna try to make it work?

As for Herny, isn't that Hernia's brother? I hear that when she threw over Demetrius for Lysander her father wanted to cancel her truss fund.

Randall

2 Henry VI - Muddle, Muddle, Toil ...

Guys,

Sorry, sorry, sorry. I just thought if none of us knew 2 Henry VI very well, we could find a way to go really gently. We are due to finish reading on June 16, and I am due to post first on June 17. My proposition, open to objections, modifications, or forgetaboutit's would be: somewhere about June 12 to 15 Mike would explore Act I, scene 1 (only), without reading any farther. When we get that, Randall would read that and explore Act I, scene 2. Ernst could go next, one more scene, though I proposed Act I, scene 3 go back to Mike, then Act I, scene 4 to Randall. If, possibly, Ernst has an audio tape, he could write an "initial impressions," I thought of the whole play, but it might be better on only Act I. Then, as per schedule, your host would come in with introductory responses to the whole play on June 17.

My point, referring to Prof Matchett on King John, was for all of us to explore how the "puzzle" is put together. Some of the commentators assert 2 Henry VI was written first (before Part 1), so we could be in the presence of Shakespeare inventing the genre. " Explore" could mean exposition, plot, character, language, imagery, or Freudian discovery of deeply embedded phallic symbols.

If this seems awkward, conflicts with schedules, or is silly, then everybody sit tight, read, and wait to hear from me next on June 17.

Gilbert

RE2: 2 Herny VI - Host's Greetings

I'm glad someone is paying attention; I'm not. I do wonder about this Herny guy. A lot of heaving lifting if you're going to play the King.

(I'll tell you how I flunked out of the National Guard one of these days.)

Ernst

RE: 2 Herny VI - Host's Greetings

Guys,

This is one of those moments where I feel like the teacher caught me looking out the window at the audaciously fuschia crabapple blossoms framed against a swimming-pool-tile sky, and all of sudden I realize the class is waiting on me. So, with some embarrassment, I'm asking for clarification: Could you restate the assignment? Does Mike read the first scene, and comment, on June 12? Then I read scene 1 and 2 and comment on the 13th? Etc? Then, we, all of us, comment on the play in its entirety after June 16?

I promise to pay attention in class. [Repeat 500 times.]

R

2 Herny VI - Host's Greetings

Cry sometimes heard in the corridor outside Colorado State's English professors' offices: "READ IT??? HELL, I HAVEN'T EVEN TAUGHT IT YET!!!"

In truth, at CSU, there was a curmudgeonly, hard-drinking (don't take his classes that met after lunch) prof who was assigned the Contemporary American Novel class. When he announced the syllabus, he bragged he had not read some of the books, so he would engage in the critically revolutionary activity of reading, with no preconceptions, along with the students. In fact, he never did get around to reading them.

Howsomever, when I was an undergrad at the University of Washington, I took Shakespeare from Ernst's and my friend and mentor, William Matchett. We started with King John, which Bill correctly surmised none of us had ever read (or heard of). He read it aloud in class, pausing to inquire what we now knew, what we might infer about plot or character, what surprised us, what we anticipated might happen next, what we could infer from the language, or how the unfolding scenes fit together-that is, how we experienced a play. We were forbidden to read ahead, though we could reread what had already gone by in class (e.g., there really is a stage direction: "enter the Bastard"). As he accelerated through the later acts, we were at last assigned to read Shrew, I think, for the next week, and on Monday, Matchett asked what did we think as we read on our own. A punk kid piped up: "I kept hearing your damned voice." The next class, Bill gave him a neatly wrapped gift box that contained-earmuffs "to wear while reading Shakespeare."

We perhaps anticipated when the Will Shakespeare Experience decided to begin chronologically that some of the early plays would be a bit thick. (I agree with Ernst that neither Titus nor Talbot is tragic, by the way.) Full disclosure: I have never read any of the Henry VI's, Henry VIII, Coriolanus, Timon, or Two Noble Kinsmen, and I only read Cymbeline because I had been volunteered to mentor Odyssey of the Mind and three sixth (!) grade boys chose it for their project. My experience/ or memories of Merry Wives, All's Well, John, and Winter's Tale are all rusty. But that's why I am enthusiastic about doing all this with you folks. [Before you scoff at my ignorance, I have read Shakespeare's lost tragedy Vortigern, "discovered" about 1790, and I read every page of a godawful 300-page manuscript about it.]

I am assuming that 2 Henry VI is quite new ground for all of us. So, after Ernst has sent each of us a quarter of his finals to grade, and Randall and Mike will have asked me to write witty end of year comments on each of their students) let's do a little modified Matchett. About June 12-15, given that only I will have read all the play, Mike take Act I, scene 1 (only), then right away, Randall Act I, scene 2; back to Mike for I.3; then, Randall on I.4. Then, Ernst, if he has a Caedmon or Arkangel cassette, could do an "initial reaction" of the sort he did with Part 1. Then June 17, as host, I will roll the ball about the whole play, which, cheers!, I will have read to the end, and we will be on the announced schedule, and see where it goes from there. One ground rule: no one is allowed to say "Part Deux." That way we will still be free later to refer to Dick the Tooth, the play which precedes 1 Henry IV (which, of course, comes before Hank the Cinque). Sound OK?

2 Henry VI is quite alien ground for most. I looked in 124 monographs or essay collections (admittedly many on comedy), and only five listed more than a page of commentary. CWRD Mosley, Shakespeare's History Plays, gives it only four (4) sentences. Seven others had sections on the Henry VI trilogy as a whole. On the other hand, 2 Henry VI is Shakespeare's shortest play -- there's really only one line, which we already know by heart. All together now: "The first thing we do, let's kill..."

Gilbert

P.S. I am trying to recruit two more contributors, brilliant actor John Gilbert and my ex-Shakespeare TA, Cindy Calder, a public high-school department head in Denver, but don't count on it.