Henry VI, Part 1

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry VI, Part 1 opens at a funeral. Henry V, conqueror of France and one of England's most celebrated kings, has died unexpectedly in his prime, leaving behind a child heir and a kingdom about to fracture. The dukes who gather to mourn him can barely agree on how to grieve, let alone how to govern. In France, English-held towns are already falling. A rebellion led by the Dauphin Charles is gaining momentum. And a young woman nobody has heard of is about to take command of the French army.

  The play has been called Shakespeare's weakest. Scholars have argued for centuries about whether he even wrote most of it. Yet when it first appeared on stage, probably in early 1592 at the Rose Theatre in Southwark, audiences wept at the fate of one of its characters with what one contemporary described as the tears of ten thousand spectators. That character was Lord Talbot, the last knight of a vanishing England.

  What the play actually examines goes far beyond a military campaign. It asks what holds a nation together when its leaders care more about themselves than the country. It stages a debate about the nature of language, of honour, of sainthood and witchcraft. And it introduces the red and white roses that will define English political life for generations. How all of that came to be written, and by whom, remains one of the most contested questions in English literary history.

• 2. A Contested Authorship

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  Philip Henslowe's diary records a performance on the 3rd of March 1592 at the Rose Theatre of a play called Harey Vj, performed by Lord Strange's Men. Henslowe notes it was new, that it earned £3.16s.8d, and that it ran for fifteen performances, making it extremely successful. That entry is the single most important piece of evidence scholars have for dating and identifying the play.

  Thomas Nashe, writing in Piers Penniless his Supplication to the Devil, which was entered into the Stationers' Register on the 8th of August 1592, praised a play that featured Lord Talbot. Nashe wrote that Talbot would have rejoiced "to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators." Since no other play featuring Talbot from that period is known, most scholars take Nashe's words as confirming that Harey Vj and 1 Henry VI are the same play.

  The question of who wrote it, however, has never been settled. Edmond Malone, in his 1790 edition of Shakespeare's plays, first argued that the large number of classical allusions and the character of the language pointed away from Shakespeare and toward writers like Nashe, George Peele, or Robert Greene. Malone's view dominated for over a century. In 1929, Peter Alexander challenged it, and scholars have been divided ever since.

  Gary Taylor's 1995 article offered the most exhaustive quantitative analysis, concluding that approximately 18.7 percent of the play, roughly 3,846 out of 20,515 words, was written by Shakespeare. Taylor attributed Act 1 almost certainly to Nashe, and credited Shakespeare with Act 2, Scene 4 and most of Act 4. In 2016, Oxford University Press went further, crediting Christopher Marlowe as co-author alongside Shakespeare for all three Henry VI plays in its New Oxford Shakespeare. The specific credit for 1 Henry VI read: "Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and Anonymous, adapted by William Shakespeare."

  Brian Vickers and Darren Freebury-Jones have since argued for Thomas Kyd as Nashe's co-author. Paul J. Vincent, writing in 2005, proposed that what Shakespeare actually did was revise a pre-existing play, with his contributions most likely composed around 1594. A version of the play performed in 1592 may have been the original non-Shakespearean text. The one thing all parties agree on is that the play existed in some form by early 1592 at the latest.

• 3. The Order of the Trilogy

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  A separate and equally heated debate concerns not who wrote the play but when, relative to 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI. The obvious assumption would be that Part 1 came first. But a number of scholars have argued the opposite.

  The argument begins with publication dates. A quarto of 2 Henry VI appeared in March 1594, and an octavo of 3 Henry VI in 1595, under long descriptive titles that make no reference to a Part 1. If 1 Henry VI had already existed when those texts were published, critics would expect some acknowledgment of it. E.K. Chambers first raised the possibility in 1923 that 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI were the original plays, and that 1 Henry VI was written as a prequel. John Dover Wilson revised the theory in 1952.

  R.B. McKerrow pointed out that if 2 Henry VI was written to continue Part 1, it is almost impossible to explain why it contains no mention of Talbot, who is central to Part 1. McKerrow also observed that the symbolic use of roses is discussed repeatedly in 1 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI, but barely at all in 2 Henry VI. He concluded that 1 Henry VI was written closer in time to 3 Henry VI, and since 3 Henry VI was definitely a sequel, 1 Henry VI must have been written last. Eliot Slater's statistical examination of vocabulary across all three plays reached the same conclusion.

  Against this, Samuel Johnson, writing in 1765, had already argued that 2 Henry VI so obviously begins where Part 1 ends that it presupposes Part 1 was already written. E.M.W. Tillyard in 1944, Andrew S. Cairncross in his Arden editions of 1957, 1962, and 1964, and Michael Hattaway in his 1990 New Cambridge Shakespeare edition all argued that the plays were composed in order.

  The Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works of 1986, its second edition of 2005, and both editions of the Norton Shakespeare placed 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI before 1 Henry VI. No consensus has been reached. The text of 1 Henry VI was not published until the 1623 First Folio, under the title The first part of Henry the Sixt, compiled by the editors John Heminges and Henry Condell.

• 4. The Death of Chivalry

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  Lord Talbot, Constable of France, functions in the play as the embodiment of a code of honour that the world around him has already abandoned. Michael Taylor describes him as "the representative of a chivalry that was fast decaying." Michael Hattaway calls him "a figure for the nostalgia that suffuses the play, a dream of simple chivalric virtus."

  The clearest illustration comes in Talbot's speech against Sir John Fastolf, whom he accuses of abandoning him at the Battle of Patay. With six thousand men facing nearly ten to one odds, Fastolf simply fled before a stroke was struck, costing the English twelve hundred men and leaving Talbot himself captured. Talbot tears the garter from Fastolf's leg and delivers a formal account of what the Order of the Garter once meant: knights "valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage,/Such as were grown to credit by the wars;/Not fearing death nor shrinking for distress,/But always resolute in most extremes." The passage sets the ideal against the reality and makes the gap between them impossible to miss.

  Henry V is treated in similar terms, though he has been dead since the first scene. Gloucester describes him in language that strips him of ordinary humanity: "His brandished sword did bind men with his beams,/His arms spread wider than a dragon's wings." He is not remembered as a man but as a heraldic image, an icon of a past that cannot be recovered.

  The play sets this old order against a new one, and the agent of the new order is Joan. Where Talbot wins by open combat and refuses to acknowledge tactics he finds dishonourable, Joan sneaks her troops into Rouen disguised as peasants and uses language to turn the Duke of Burgundy against his English allies. Talbot finds her methods literally incomprehensible. Jane Howell, director of the BBC Shakespeare adaptation, put it plainly: "With the death of Talbot, one starts to see a demise of chivalry."

  By the end of the play, Talbot and his son are both dead. The nobles who failed to send reinforcements, Somerset and Richard, were too consumed by their private quarrel to act. Suffolk is already manoeuvring to control the king through a future queen. The politicians have replaced the knights, and the play records the transition without sentimentality, even as it mourns what was lost.

• 5. Language as Power and Weapon

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  "Thou hast astonished me with thy high terms" says the Dauphin Charles to Joan after she convinces him she can end the siege of Orléans. The line is the first of many in the play that treat language itself as a subject of examination, something capable of doing exactly what swords and armies do.

  Joan's most dramatic use of language comes when she persuades the Duke of Burgundy to abandon the English cause and join the French. As Burgundy feels himself yielding, he cannot tell whether it is nature acting on him or her words: "Either she hath bewitched me with her words,/Or nature makes me suddenly relent." When she finishes, he concedes that her "haughty words" have "battered me like roaring canon-shot,/And made me almost yield upon my knees." Language has become artillery.

  A similar dynamic plays out when Suffolk convinces Henry to agree to marry Margaret of Anjou. Henry finds himself agreeing to a match his advisors oppose, yet cannot explain why: "Whether it be through force of your report... or for that/My tender youth was never yet attaint/With any passion of inflaming love, I cannot tell." Again, words produce effects indistinguishable from natural forces.

  The play is equally attentive to language's failure. Gloucester, at Henry V's funeral, laments that "His deeds exceed all speech." After the French retake Rouen, Bedford declares, "O let no words, but deeds, revenge this treason." Gloucester, facing Winchester outside the Tower, says, "I will not answer thee with words but blows." When Suffolk tries to speak to Margaret, he finds himself struck dumb: "Fain would I woo her, yet I dare not speak."

  The pivot comes in Act 2, Scene 4, the Temple Garden scene, where Richard introduces what he calls "dumb significants." Unable to get the lords to declare themselves openly, he instructs them to "proclaim your thoughts" through silence and symbol: a white rose for his cause, a red rose for Somerset's. Henry, choosing a red rose without grasping its implications, trusts in literal language and misses the weight of the symbolic act entirely. The play frames his error as the consequence of failing to understand that a gesture, especially a careless one, carries more force than words.

• 6. Saint, Witch, or Both

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  Joan la Pucelle enters the play when the Bastard of Orléans tells Charles of "a holy maid" with visions who knows how to defeat the English. Charles tests her in single combat, she wins, and he immediately places her in command of his army. From the first scene she appears in, the play runs two contradictory accounts of her simultaneously.

  The French treat her as a saint. After the lifting of the siege of Orléans, Charles declares, "No longer on Saint Denis will we cry, but Joan la Pucelle shall be France's saint." When she talks Burgundy into switching sides, Alençon promises to have her statue placed in a holy sanctuary and revered "like a blessed saint." Alençon also alludes to Deborah, the Old Testament prophetess from the Book of Judges, who masterminded a surprise victory against a Canaanite army that had oppressed the Israelites for over twenty years; the comparison comes directly from Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles and appears only there, not in Edward Hall's earlier account.

  The English read her as the opposite. Talbot, on first hearing of her, contemptuously calls her "Puzel or pussel" and "dolphin or dogfish," running together insults in French and English simultaneously. "Puzel" means slut in French, while "pussel" takes the word "pucelle," meaning virgin, and twists it with a negative connotation. Both words are puns on Joan's own name. Later, Talbot calls her "Pucelle, that witch, that damn'd sorceress" and "Foul fiend of France, and hag of all despite." York, before ordering her execution, calls her a "Fell banning hag."

  The play does not resolve the contradiction cleanly. Joan herself, about to be burned, begins to speak in her own defense: "First let me tell you whom you have condemned." The source text breaks off here in the version that survives, but the speech is begun. She has been presented throughout as, in one critical formulation, "a fascinating mixture of saint, witch, naïve girl, clever woman, audacious warrior and sensual tart." The play uses Joan to dramatize the impossibility of certainty: language, as the play keeps insisting, can make the same person appear holy or monstrous depending on who is doing the describing. Warwick silences her final speech with the words, "Strumpet, thy words condemn thy brat and thee./Use no entreaty, for it is in vain." Even her execution is framed as language failing to save her.

• 7. Sources and Historical Liberties

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  Shakespeare drew his primary material for the play from Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, published in 1548. He also used Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, which appeared in 1577 with a second edition in 1587. Holinshed had himself relied heavily on Hall, in some places reproducing passages verbatim, but enough differences exist between them that scholars have established Shakespeare must have consulted both independently.

  The difference matters because specific scenes in the play can be traced to one source but not the other. When Gloucester tries to enter the Tower and is told by Woodville that the order came from Winchester, Gloucester calls Winchester "that haughty prelate/Whom Henry, our late sovereign, ne're could brook." Only Hall records any conflict between Henry V and Winchester; Holinshed has no such suggestion. Similarly, when Sir Thomas Gargrave is injured by the artillery at Orléans, the play has him die immediately. Hall agrees; Holinshed says Gargrave took two days to die, as he did historically. The semi-comic scene of the French leaders fleeing Orléans half-dressed in Act 2 appears to come from Hall's account of the English taking of Le Mans in 1428, where Hall writes that some French soldiers "being not out of their beds, got up in their shirts."

  Other material comes exclusively from Holinshed. The deathbed vows Henry V extracted from Bedford, Gloucester, and Exeter, that they would never surrender France and would never let the Dauphin become king, appear only in Holinshed's account and shape the opening scene directly.

  Some material appears in neither source. The scene in which Joan and her soldiers disguise themselves as peasants to sneak into Rouen has no historical basis and is recorded in neither Hall nor Holinshed. A similar incident does appear in Hall, but it concerns the English capture of Cornhill Castle in Cornhill-on-Tweed in 1441, a completely different event in a different country. The writers lifted the device and transplanted it. The Duke of Somerset in the play conflates two historical people, John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset, and his younger brother Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset. The Earl of Warwick present in the play is Richard de Beauchamp, the 13th Earl, though the character is frequently misidentified as Richard Neville, the 16th Earl, who appears in the later parts of the trilogy.