Henry VI, Part 3

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry VI, Part 3 opens not with a coronation or a council chamber but with armed men storming parliament. The victorious Yorkists, fresh from the First Battle of St Albans, march into the parliamentary chambers and their leader, the Duke of York, sits himself down on the throne. It is 1591, and William Shakespeare is writing a play that will help establish his reputation as a playwright. What unfolds is a drama unlike anything seen in the English theatre at that time: five battles, one of them the bloodiest ever fought on English soil, a king who weeps on a molehill while fathers and sons kill each other below him, a paper crown pressed onto a prisoner's head, and a young prince stabbed to death by three brothers in a rage. The play follows the Wars of the Roses from the political collapse after St Albans all the way through to the House of York's triumph and the first dark glimmers of the man who will become Richard III. It contains one of the longest soliloquies in all of Shakespeare, running from line 124 to line 195 of Act 3, Scene 2, and more battle scenes than any other play Shakespeare ever wrote. The questions this documentary will answer are not just what happens in the play, but what sources fed its violence, what arguments its text has sparked for centuries, and why a drama once dismissed as crude spectacle has slowly been reconsidered as one of the most morally serious works in the entire Shakespeare canon.

• 2. A Nation in Pieces

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  York seats himself in the throne and King Henry walks in to find his own seat occupied. That single image announces the governing nightmare of the play: who holds power, who has surrendered it, and who will bleed to take it back. Shakespeare's design for 3 Henry VI was to concentrate on what the previous two plays had only approached. Where 1 Henry VI traced the loss of England's French territories, and 2 Henry VI showed a king unable to quiet the quarrelling of his nobles, Part 3 turns directly to the horrors of armed conflict itself, with families dissolving and moral codes swept aside in the pursuit of revenge and power.

  The play's most concentrated symbol of this collapse is the scene in Act 2, Scene 5, during the Battle of Towton in 1461. Henry sits apart on a molehill, lamenting, and watches two figures approach from opposite sides of the stage: a father who has killed his son, and a son who has killed his father. Neither knew who he was fighting. The scene was not Shakespeare's invention. His near-certain source was Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc, first performed in 1561 and reprinted in 1590, the year before Shakespeare wrote Part 3. Gorboduc is the only known pre-seventeenth-century text containing a scene in which a son unknowingly kills his father and a father unknowingly kills his son.

  The crown itself becomes an obsession in the language of the play. In Act 1, Scene 1 alone, the words 'crown' and 'throne' appear so many times they crowd out almost every other idea. Warwick tells York, 'Resolve thee Richard, claim the English crown.' Henry enters to find York seated and immediately connects the act of sitting to the claim: 'Even in the chair of state... to aspire unto the crown and reign as king.' Richard tells his father to 'tear the crown from the usurper's head.' Henry refuses to yield: 'Think'st thou that I will leave my kingly throne?' The repetition is not accident. It renders the crown less a symbol of majesty than a fixed point around which every character's ambition, fear, and rage orbits.

  By the play's end, the reach of that obsession has spread to Richard of Gloucester. After Towton, after York is proclaimed king, Richard stands aside and discloses to the audience what he wants and how far he is prepared to go to get it. Edward celebrates, believing the civil wars are over. He is unaware, as Shakespeare is careful to show, of what is already scheming beneath the surface of his court.

• 3. History Taken From the Page

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  Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, published in 1548, was Shakespeare's primary source for 3 Henry VI. He also consulted Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, in its 1577 first edition and its revised second edition of 1587. Holinshed had himself drawn heavily on Hall, even reproducing large portions of Hall's text word for word. But the two chronicles diverge on enough details to establish that Shakespeare read both independently.

  The differences between what Hall says and what Holinshed says shaped specific scenes in the play. The murder of young Rutland in Act 1, Scene 3 follows Hall rather than Holinshed: only in Hall is Rutland's tutor present at the killing, and only in Hall do Rutland and his killer Clifford debate the subject of revenge before the deed is done. The scene where Edward first meets Lady Grey, the widow who will become his queen, also follows Hall alone. Hall records that Edward made her a blunt proposition: if she agreed to sleep with him, she might find herself elevated from his concubine to his lawful wife. Holinshed does not report this.

  For the molehill on which York is tormented and crowned with paper in Act 1, Scene 4, the debt runs the other way. Both Hall and Holinshed describe Margaret and Clifford taunting York after the Battle of Wakefield, but only Holinshed mentions the molehill and the improvised crown. In the chronicle, the crown is fashioned from sedges or bulrushes rather than paper, but the essential image is Holinshed's.

  Beyond the two main chronicles, Shakespeare seems to have used William Baldwin's The Mirror for Magistrates, published in 1559 with a second edition in 1578. That work presented historical figures speaking of their own downfalls as cautionary examples, and it included Margaret of Anjou, King Edward IV and the Duke of York. York's final scene in the play, specifically his last speech in Act 1, Scene 4, has long been identified as matching the mode of the Mirror's tragic hero: a figure defeated by his own dynastic overreach. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, written somewhere between 1582 and 1591, may also have left a mark. The bloody handkerchief that Margaret brandishes during York's torture recalls the recurring image of a handkerchief soaked in the blood of Horatio that the character Hieronimo carries throughout Kyd's enormously popular play.

• 4. Margaret's Borrowed Ship

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  One of the most startling discoveries a reader can make in 3 Henry VI is that Margaret's rousing speech to her army in Act 5, Scene 4 is not Shakespeare's own invention. Much of it is taken almost word for word from Arthur Brooke's narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, published in 1562, which also served as Shakespeare's source for Romeo and Juliet.

  In Brooke's poem, Friar Laurence counsels the young Romeus to hold firm against misfortune. He describes a pilot who steers a battered ship through storm and near-wreck to reach port, and argues that weeping and letting go of the rudder is what truly sinks a vessel. Shakespeare gave almost the same extended metaphor to Margaret. She speaks of the mast blown overboard, the cable broken, the anchor lost, half the sailors drowned. 'Yet lives our pilot still,' she says. She then names Warwick as the lost anchor, Montague as the fallen topmast, and asks whether Oxford cannot serve as another anchor, Somerset as another mast. The speech runs from line 1 to line 38 of Act 5, Scene 4, and the debt to Brooke's lines 1359-1380 is not a loose borrowing but a deliberate transplantation of structure, imagery and argument from a poem about lovers into a speech about war.

  This kind of source-borrowing was not unusual practice in Shakespeare's time, but the directness of the borrowing here, and the precision with which it fits Margaret's situation, shows a playwright in active conversation with the texts around him. Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc, reprinted in 1590, Thomas More's History of King Richard III from 1518, and Desiderius Erasmus' Tragicus Rex have all been identified as contributing elements, with some of Richard's soliloquy in Act 5, Scene 6 drawing especially on More.

• 5. Two Texts, One Play

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  In 1595, a bookseller named Thomas Millington published an octavo text called The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke. The title page said it had been performed by Pembroke's Men. This text is roughly a thousand lines shorter than the play scholars now know as 3 Henry VI, which did not appear in print until the 1623 First Folio under the title The third Part of Henry the Sixt. Ever since, critics have argued about the relationship between these two texts.

  Four main theories have emerged. Samuel Johnson, writing in 1765, proposed that the True Tragedy is a memorial reconstruction, a bad quarto assembled from the memories of actors who had performed the play. Peter Alexander refined and championed this theory in 1928. The second theory, first proposed by Edmond Malone in 1790, holds that the True Tragedy is an early draft of the play that Shakespeare later revised into the text found in the First Folio. The third theory, gaining support in the late twentieth century, argues that both of the first two theories are correct: the True Tragedy is a reported text of an early draft, not of the final version. The fourth theory, which was popular in the nineteenth century and originated with Georg Gottfried Gervinus in 1849, argued that Shakespeare did not write the True Tragedy at all but adapted it from an anonymous play. That theory has largely fallen out of favour.

  One of Peter Alexander's key arguments for the bad quarto theory rested on a single name. In the True Tragedy, Clarence complains that Lord Scales married the daughter of Lord Bonfield. In 3 Henry VI, Bonfield becomes Bonville, and the scene is restructured so that it is Scales' own daughter who marries Lady Grey's brother, while Lady Grey's son marries the daughter of Lord Bonville. 'Bonfield' appears nowhere in the chronicles. 'Bonville' appears many times in both Hall and Holinshed. There is, however, a minor character named Bonfield in Robert Greene's play George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, written between 1587 and 1590 and performed by Sussex's Men. Since Sussex's Men and Pembroke's Men both performed Titus Andronicus, a link between the companies and their scripts can be traced. Alexander argued that a reporter who had worked with both companies could have carried the name Bonfield from one play into his reconstruction of another.

  Steven Urkowitz pushed back against Alexander, arguing that changing Bonfield to Bonville, and restructuring the marriage scene, represents precisely the kind of careful historical fine-tuning that a playwright does when revising, not the kind of error a confused reporter would make. Urkowitz compared the situation to Richard Brinsley Sheridan's revision of his own two-part play The Slanderers and Sir Peter Teazel into The School for Scandal in 1777, where similar layered modifications of an early draft are visible. Randall Martin, in his Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play, proposed the compromise: the True Tragedy is a reported text of an early draft, meaning Shakespeare first wrote one version, actors then reconstructed it from memory, and Shakespeare subsequently rewrote the play into the form preserved in the First Folio.

• 6. Violence on Stage

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  Ben Jonson wrote in The Masque of Blackness in 1605 that showing battles on stage was suitable only 'for the vulgar, who are better delighted with that which pleaseth the eye, than contenteth the ear.' This view had a long theoretical backing. Philip Sidney's An Apology for Poetry, published in 1579 and drawing on the work of Horace, criticised Gorboduc for staging too much violence when verbal representation would have been more artistically dignified. The argument was that any play which showed violence appealed to the ignorant masses and therefore counted as low art.

  Critics including E.M.W. Tillyard, Irving Ribner and A.P. Rossiter applied this standard to 3 Henry VI and found it wanting. With four on-stage battles, multiple murders and a torture scene in which York is made to stand on a molehill, crowned with paper and mocked with a handkerchief soaked in his murdered son's blood before being stabbed to death, the play seemed to them evidence of Shakespeare's artistic immaturity.

  Other voices disagreed. Thomas Nashe, writing in Piers Penniless his Supplication to the Devil in 1592, argued that plays depicting martial action served a didactic purpose, teaching history and military tactics while rekindling patriotic spirit: 'our forefather's valiant acts (that have lain long buried in rusty brass and worm-eaten books) are revived.' Thomas Heywood, in An Apology for Actors published in 1612, described the transformative power of 'lively and well-spirited action' on an audience.

  The comparison between the True Tragedy and 3 Henry VI has added a new dimension to this debate. The True Tragedy, the earlier text, is actually more explicit in its stage violence: its Act 2, Scene 6 direction specifies that Clifford enter 'with an arrow in his neck,' whereas 3 Henry VI simply says 'wounded.' Its depiction of the Tewkesbury victory in Act 5, Scene 5 calls for alarms, soldiers fleeing and returning, a great shout of 'For York, for York,' and a full theatrical procession. The equivalent direction in 3 Henry VI is a plain entry of the king and his brothers with their prisoners. The argument that has emerged from this comparison is that Shakespeare, revising the play, deliberately toned down the spectacle, producing a work 'whose attitude to war is more rueful.' Productions by Peter Hall and John Barton in 1963-64, Terry Hands in 1977, Michael Bogdanov in 1986, and Michael Boyd in 2000 and 2006 have all helped to demonstrate that the play, read as a complete dramatic text rather than a string of battle scenes, sustains precisely the kind of moral complexity its early detractors denied it.

• 7. The Montague Problem

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  One of the most technically complex puzzles the play presents to directors and scholars is a single character named Montague. In Act 1, Scene 1, he arrives with York's victorious party from St Albans, and both Montague and York refer to each other as 'brother' at three separate points across Act 1, Scenes 1 and 2. If Montague here represents Richard Neville, the Earl of Salisbury, that makes sense: Salisbury was York's brother-in-law, since York had married Salisbury's sister Cecily Neville.

  But in Act 2, Scene 1, Warwick re-introduces Montague as his own brother: 'therefore comes my brother Montague.' He is also called Marquis for the first time. Neither description could apply to Salisbury, who was Warwick's father. From Act 2 onward, the character seems to represent John Neville, 1st Marquis of Montague, who was Salisbury's son and Warwick's younger brother. The character has effectively changed identity in the middle of the play.

  The True Tragedy handled the character differently, presenting him as one consistent figure throughout. In that text, Richard reports that Salisbury died in battle with the words 'Warwick revenge my death.' In 3 Henry VI, the equivalent passage replaces Salisbury with Thomas Neville, a brother of Warwick who never appears as a character in any of the Henry VI plays, and who is otherwise absent from the drama. Why Shakespeare made this change has no agreed explanation.

  The 1981 BBC Shakespeare adaptation took a practical approach. In Act 1, the character of Montague is simply absent, and his lines are redistributed. When Montague is reintroduced in Act 1, Scene 2, he is played by Michael Byrne as a consistent figure throughout the rest of the production. York's references to him as 'brother' are changed to 'cousin,' establishing him as York's cousin and Warwick's brother, which is the historical identity of John Neville. The report of the death in Act 2, Scene 3 is then altered to name Salisbury instead of Thomas Neville, stitching the two threads together into one coherent figure.