William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595)

Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting in Franco Zefferelli's 1968 movie

Is it e'en so? Then I defy you, stars!

There is a tragic point at which all common sense says: it's a million to one against, so you might as well give up.

This is the moment when love has to depart from this common sense, whose negative conclusions are death warrants.

When only a miracle can restore what you love, it becomes necessary to set about creating the conditions for a miracle.

And "Nede hath no lawe".

*

- Ese problema… ¿no será el de “Romeo y Julieta”? ¿Es que sus familias no están de acuerdo en esa boda?

The “situation” in Romeo and Juliet is a formidable statement, with the force of folktale, but it belongs to a much larger class of stories of in which social forces stand in the way of a wished-for marriage between two lovers. In most cultures parents have wished to have a say in their child’s choice of a mate. Perhaps the most usual case in real life is when there is some perceived difference in social class, when B is “beneath” what is due to A’s family. In that respect  Romeo and Juliet idealizes. Here, so far as class goes (“both alike in dignity”) the pair could hardly be more eligible for each other. They are perfectly matched in every respect but one, a historic enmity whose details never concern us – an arbitrary enmity. This is difficult for us to relate to, and Jerome Robbins was the visionary who in 1949 saw that the story could be about a cultural and ethnic clash: originally, he imagined a Roman Catholic Tony and a Jewish Maria, but as West Side Story developed the Jets became N. European-American and the Sharks Puerto Rican. This is such a natural transformation of the story that we tend to try and retro-fit it to Romeo and Juliet, but Shakespeare follows Brooke in making both families entirely Veronese (whatever unspecific thing this evoked for him) – though Tybalt does say, intriguingly, “This by his voice should be a Montague”.   

The enmity between the Montagues and the Capulets lacks the drive of ethnic/cultural antipathy; it also lacks an economic angle (such as we learnt to enjoy in that child of West Side Story, The Godfather). The family hostility imagined by Shakespeare is very unlike a feud or a vendetta, which would be patriarchally driven and enforced as duty. Here, on the contrary, old Capulet and (probably) old Montague are merely embarrassed by their legacy. Where the hostility still flourishes is among the younger men and the junior followers. It's far more like urban tribes than we might have expected. Some have inferred conclusions from this that tend to disparage the actions of the lovers and their unfortunate outcomes; they say that the lovers should not have acted against their families, that everyone would have come round in time. This is to revert unexpectedly to the moralistic stance of Brooke’s preface of 1562:

A coople of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authoritie and advise of parents and frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes, and superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instruments of unchastitie) attemptyng all adventures of peryll, for thattayning of their wished lust, usyng auriculer confession (the kay of whoredome, and treason) for furtheraunce of theyr purpose, abusyng the honorable name of lawefull mariage, the cloke the shame of stolne contractes, finallye, by all meanes of unhonest lyfe, hastyng to most unhappye deathe.

This is not where Brooke’s poem intends to leave us: he leaves a mixed impression, which is what Shakespeare also achieves, though with much greater subtlety. In Shakespeare’s play the dazzle of summer energies produces a range of flowers, of which love is one and violence another; it is truly about society but not in the same sort of way that West Side Story is.

*

In Act I Scene 2 Capulet advises Paris to contemplate the other beauties at his soirée, not just Juliet; later in the scene Benvolio gives similar advice to Romeo: don’t just mope after Rosaline, but take a look around. Capulet is not a tyrannical father (“My will to her consent is but a part”); Lady Capulet in Scene 3 is considerably more pushy, but Juliet – with no feeling of love in her breast, as yet, -  emphasizes her dutiful obedience as a pretext for holding herself back:

But no more deep will I endart mine eye

Than your consent gives strength to make it fly.  

However, love is in the air. The parents have in effect licensed it, and Juliet allows that license to open her heart, though not in the direction that her parents plan.  In Love’s Labour’s Lost a similar seasonal, masquing impulse had caused all the young men and young women to fall in love, very neatly into non-overlapping couples. Here, however, an older set look back on love: the Nurse, Lady Capulet, the worldly-wise Mercutio, Capulet sentimentally (“’Tis gone, ‘tis gone…”). Everyone’s talking about it, but where, for this pair of youths, is the real thing? Society, right down to the serving-men, is busy with the apparatus of a setting for love. Tybalt understands the solemnity as a distinctly family affair, a social ritual that a hostile outsider would naturally scorn; in effect, he betrays his consciousness of its intimacy. But Romeo sees himself, self-conscious lover, as different from the “light of heart” who will enjoy a dance. Mercutio wittily discountenances Romeo’s foreboding dream.  

So what happens to Romeo and Juliet is the old old story, across a crowded room, love in the air, all those clichés, but it is in contrast to the simulacra of love that the story surrounds them with, for them it is specific, it is love for a particular person.

But love is a funny thing because the person you care about doesn’t mean anything like the same to the people around you. Unsurprisingly, we older readers (and most of us are going to be older than Romeo and Juliet) end up, in a way, dissing the centre of the story, them. We take more interest in the other characters, we look elsewhere for our involvement, because these lovers are set against this background of older people and of society in motion. Some are more interested in the (entirely self-invented) story of Romeo’s search for the lost father-figure/moral-authority Mercutio than in Romeo’s current love interest – as if Juliet is just the new Rosaline or whoever.

When Romeo says “He jests at scars that never felt a wound”, we take it with a trace of irony against the speaker, we think he does not know anything about other people’s scars, and we note avuncularly the self-absorption of the young. We see him instead as the exercise of the will in a particular phase of a larger, seasonal, cosmic pattern:

The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb:

What is her burying grave, that is her womb;

Or

Two such opposed kings encamp them still

In man as well as herbs: grace and rude will;

Listening to Friar Lawrence, we place Romeo among these generalities. When Mercutio ribs Romeo in his social role merely as a devotee to Love, but is indifferent to (and, in fact, mis-identifies) the individual whom Romeo loves, then we see how this generalizing becomes wrong and irrelevant.

It’s not like any other love,

this one is different, because it’s us.

Much of Romeo and Juliet is about carving out that individual space within an indifferent society.

*

Or rather, failing to carve it out; but the lovers in the story are doomed, not so much by compelling circumstance as by the pre-existence of the story, which ends with their deaths. Most of Shakespeare’s plays have a source-text, but none follows its source more closely than this one. And Brooke’s poem belongs to the mid-century in spirit.

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

This is true. The sheer bad luck of Romeo not receiving the vital message and of killing himself just before Juliet wakes is heart-wrenching, because of our poignant awareness that his soul trembles on the brink, (if only Juliet would wake up NOW), of a bliss as seeming-miraculous as Leontes’ when the statue of Hermione comes to life. Instead, the lovers are united not in bliss but in despair, having the rare distinction of each being able to die heart-broken for the other’s death.

However, this extremity of woe and the prettily contrived situation that produces it belongs to a literary taste that Shakespeare was fast outgrowing. Brilliantly as he manages the final scene, you can detect a tension between Shakespeare and the story, very easily of course in hindsight when the play of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes hilarious mockery of this very artifice. We don’t quite believe that the deaths of these young lovers would really heal up mutual distrust between two families – it would be more likely to inflame it, each blaming the other.

Shakespeare’s main addition to the plot of this final scene is Romeo’s killing of Paris. Romeo, not knowing who Paris is, does try to spare him. But he calls himself a madman, and before that “savage-wild”. Woe is not wholly an appropriate reaction to a scene of wild exaltation in which each lover responds to the silent summons of the other, and in which both Tybalt and Paris are generously invited to participate in a fatal fruition of youthfully savage passions. Their story, Romeo's and Juliet's I mean, remains distinct and isolated from the woeful matter that the two families will remember.

*

As everyone knows, youth and age are central themes in Romeo and Juliet, and Shakespeare makes Brooke’s young Juliet two years younger still, to ensure we take the point. To accuse these lovers of lack of judgment is inappropriate. Nor do they have much to say to each other; or rather, they have a great deal, but Shakespeare adapts for them a sonnet language which registers emotions and does not pretend to be naturalistic. When it comes to talking about something the lovers revert flatly to practicalities. They are not chockfull of learning or philosophy or small-talk. They do not debate or discuss.

Hence Shakespeare simply glides past the one point in the action when they have something very serious to discuss, i.e. when Romeo has just killed Juliet’s cousin. The next time we see them together (III V), they have already said whatever needed to be said, and now are once more united in love and in suffering a parting. In fact throughout the play their conversation (which is really not the right word for it) is remarkably restricted.

First, there are the 18 lines of their meeting in I V: trance-like, magical, formal. Then, the great duet when time seems to stand still in II II – 193 lines, of which 135 are actual conversation, because the early part is Romeo hearing Juliet covertly. Third, the brief meeting before their marriage in II VI, around 20 lines in Friar Lawrence’s presence, of which only 11 involve directly speaking to each other. And finally the too brief aubade of III V, which ends so swiftly and in such painful contrast to the balcony scene – “Dry sorrow drinks our blood. Adieu, adieu” (III V 59).  In all, less than 300 lines from a total of nearly 3,000. Obviously, the lovers find it hard to meet. But besides, there is nothing they really have to say – not even that they love each other, because that announces itself just in the atmosphere they inhabit when they're together. Shakespeare did not know the metaphors of electricity or chemistry, but he knew about the thing they refer to.

The long conversation in II II is much concerned with the name Romeo, Romeo’s daring, Romeo’s danger. Juliet manifests her love for Romeo in trustingly using his name; she thus accepts him as a close presence in her life, as close as her family. Romeo on the other hand does not call her by her name at all; that name is for soliloquy. His awed respect instead comes out as “fair maid”, “Lady”, “love” – even in that last, with a faint tincture of possession. When, about to be married, he calls her “Juliet”, there is a slight awkwardness in the speech, which she reacts to. In their final conversation, both already harrowed by misfortune, their use of “love” to each other loses all sense of proprietary ownership. They know themselves to be, though married, quite outside the social structures of possession. They now seek only the security of companionship on a dark journey that will not end in this world. 

These notes on Shakespeare: full list

trippel deckare - touring Sweden with Olle Villner

I'm reading a "deckare" (i.e. whodunnit) by Stig O Blomberg (1922-99), to brush up on my Swedish. Blomberg was a reporter and 1950s crime novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Olle Villner.

In fact this is an omnibus triple published by Semic. (Incidentally, I have noticed this book in IKEA bookshelf displays.)

In the later crime novels published under his own name, such as Dödens Pilar (Death's Arrows) (1987) - which is the one I'm reading now - Olle Villner has morphed into the fictional hero: a former reporter and crime novelist, now the author of non-fictional books about Provence.

Anders O Blomberg has put up the following web page about his father, with some fantastic images of the jackets of the earlier books.

http://www.epx.se/stigo/


Dödens Pilar (1987) is set in a guest-house in a small  fishing village on the coast of Bohuslän. (Olle Villner has decided to take a relaxing holiday break....)

Bohuslän is apparently a good locale for crime stories. Camilla Läckberg comes from Fjällbacka and her books are all about the "Tanumshede" force and are usually set in these parts. The appeal might have something to do with Bohuslän being the closest part of the west coast to Stockholm, a natural and scenic destination for week-ends away.

But back to Blomberg's book. In the early pages Villner makes friends with another guest, the elderly Hilding Sand. Good chance to witness old-style Swedish manners at work. The pair meet in the corridor and go down to lunch together, each addressing the other in the third person  (If Min Herre has no other plans, may I suggest a walk to the harbour?). Sand becomes quite confiding, but the third-person form is retained all through lunch. Afterwards, when he comes down to the garden after changing his shoes, he says formally: "As the eldest, may I propose that we lay aside titles?" After that they talk normally. This is about two hours after their initial meeting.

Dödens Pilar just about predates the mobile phone and the PC. This makes quite a big difference to the feel of it.  The world is considerably more spacious. It's much easier to "disappear": just walk out of your door. It's impractical to gain information about lots of things. The other thing that stands out to me is that everyone is reading books and magazines. (Though as the tension mounts, they are sometimes only pretending to read them.)


*


I've now read the other two novels in this omnibus. It's clear that in Blomberg's maturity the Olle Vilner novel has become a highly formulaic vehicle. But in a good way, I think.

Olle is the hero and gets involved in investigating a murder that happens to occur in some interesting part of Sweden that he happens to be visiting. He isn't a policeman himself, but he's first on the crime-scene and gets involved in investigating it. By around the half-way mark he's calling in his good mate Kent Alm, who's a senior detective in Stockholm. In  each book Olle meets a different good-looking girl; and through a series of shared scrapes and adventures they inevitably get close and are in full-on relationship mode by the time the novel ends. But each girl disappears in the gap between books, clearing the way for a new pursuit.

So we get the eternal story with eternal freshness, like a mummer's play or a James Bond movie. Olle gets to discover the new location and the new woman, both of whom tend to be rather more interesting than the murder mystery itself.

Brottplats Bergslagen (1989) is set in the distinctive mining area of Bergslagen (it traverses several county boundaries) north of Lake Mälaren. Murders in a secretive technology factory deep in the woods. Girl: red-haired, judo expert, police. This one is excellent, even better than Dödens Pilar.

Döden tar studenten (1988) is set in Uppsala on Valborgsafton (the spring festival; it takes place on April 30th). Endless night of student celebrations (plus a murder) in Olle's old stamping ground. Girl: trainee doctor. It's great fun to visit Uppsala in Villner's company; this, by the way, is the iconic picture-postcard Uppsala and is thus in amusingly stark contrast to Kjell Eriksson's Ann Lindell novels, also set in Uppsala but on the other side of the tracks.  But Villner's Uppsala novel makes the mistake (in my view it's a mistake) of drawing attention to its own conventions. We meet Olle looking back with some melancholy fondness to his student-days of 20 years ago; hence we're made uncomfortably aware of the age-gap between him and his new girlfriend, who is (as she remarks) young enough to be his daughter. When Kent Alm arrives, he jokes that Olle is never far away from the prettiest girl in the place. I think Kent intended a clumsy compliment, but the girl not unnaturally starts to wonder what kind of serial womaniser this Olle must be. Meanwhile, Kent starts to probe Olle about what the girl is doing in the story at all? How come she's helping to clear up a mystery that she isn't even connected with? Is she, perhaps, playing a double-game?  It doesn't take much of this prodding before Blomberg's fictional construction begins to totter.


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http://www.dast.nu/artikel/stig-o-blomberg-okanda-deckarveteran-med-stora-upplagor

Interview with the author, from 1998. In which he speaks out against immigrant hostility, already a disturbing and exploitable reaction of some elderly Swedes. (Optimistic predictions that such attitudes would disappear naturally along with the older generation seem to be contradicted by their subsequent spread across the western world.)

home - leaving Norrland

The day of sun developed; the wooden church
(6)                               spires
the faint sighs of cloud in
                                    a clear blue sky,
the chorus of trees waiting to begin
                                    the concert.
Where does the sea find its home?
Where does the beetle in the pit find
                                    its home?
Where do the racing insects of a
                                   day
return, but to now and its noise,
like the squeaking of a carriage?  
                                    
 

William Shakespeare: Love's Labour's Lost (1593-94, revised 1597)

Perhaps this play has only a shadowy existence for the general reader. Nevertheless, it's commonly found on Shakespeare university courses, because the teachers want to expose students to Elizabethan convention, artificiality and wit.

As a child my only glancing contacts with it were A. Practising saying the word Honorificabilitudinitatibus (mentioned in the Guinness Book of Records) B. Singing the incomparable Winter song about "Dick the shepherd blows his nail" in the school choir. (What the tune was I don't remember: I doubt it was Hubert Parry, and it certainly wasn't Johnny Dankworth or Einojuhani Rautavaara.)

This song was probably added in the 1597 revision, most likely for the performance for Queen Elizabeth in Christmas 1597. (These are plausible scholarly guesses. where nothing is certain.)

The quarto title-page describes itself as “Newly corrected and augmented” and this seems to imply that there was an earlier “bad” quarto. (Compare the good Q2 of Romeo and Juliet, which describes itself as "Newly corrected, augmented, and amended", or Q2 of Hamlet, which is “Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect coppie.”)

Love's Labour's Lost, Title page of the Quarto

That the hypothetical bad quarto of LLL is not extant is not especially disturbing: after all, the bad quarto of Hamlet survives in only two copies, and was not rediscovered until 1827; and it was only in 1905 that a single copy of the 1594 quarto of Titus Andronicus, the earliest appearance of a Shakespeare play in print, turned up in Sweden.  It strikes me that there's something oddly polite about these good quarto references to their bad quarto predecessors. The Folio roundly describes all its quarto predecessors as "stol'n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors". Given the Elizabethan taste for invective, you might have expected the good quartos to make a good deal of their own authoritative excellence and of their predecessors’ wicked incompetence: to describe themselves, instead, merely as “corrected” is in some degree to legitimize the earlier publications. Perhaps the former were not quite so illegitimate, or the latter not quite so legitimate, as we might suppose.

In the case of LLL the Folio merely reprints the surviving Quarto. It’s a good text, but the revision mentioned above is attested by several happy accidents which result in the inclusion of two versions of the same passage. Furthermore the spring song at the end uses Gerard's Herball of 1597. But the Navarre setting must, one would suppose, originate from the time of England's alliance with Protestant Navarre, which came to an abrupt end in July 1593 when Henry of Navarre decided that Paris was rather a mess.  (Compare Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris (1592) in which Henry is the Protestant hero.)  Allusions to Pierce's Supererogation and The Shadow of Night point to the end of 1593 or early 1594. The dates don't come together perfectly, but when you consider the text's numerous connections with the early sonnets and the generally early feel of the play, some time around 1593-94 must be right for the bulk of the play as we know it.     

The title refers to the ending of the play, to "Jack hath not Jill". I'm not sure what justifies the apostrophe in "Labour's" - this word could just as well, or more likely, be a plural. The Quarto merely calls it "Loues Labors Lost", a 1598 reference calls it "Loues Labour Lost".

There is evidence for a play Love’s Labour’s Won that Shakespeare wrote soon afterwards and that was apparently published in quarto, but we don’t know anything else about it. The inference that it might have picked up from the unresolved ending of LLL (and thus be a sequel in more than name) is obvious, perhaps a little too obvious. It would have been such an easy thing to resolve LLL in the first place, if that’s what Shakespeare had wanted to do. But everyone prefers LLL the way it is. The artificiality, playfulness, and lack of dramatic momentum are all redeemed by the unexpected bittersweetness of the close. An orderly working-out of artificial weddings between characters who resemble strophes more than individuals would be a bit boring.  You can see too how the sudden change of mood first essayed in LLL connects with the emphatic reassertion of a tragic mode in Act III of Romeo and Juliet.

Act 5 Sc 2, engraving by J. Heath from painting by Thomas Stothard, 1802

For better reproductions of this and a whole lot of other early illustrations, head straight for the Folger Shakespeare Library:

http://picturingshakespeare.folger.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/p252501coll1/id/4502/rec/25

http://picturingshakespeare.folger.edu/cdm/search/searchterm/s%20labour'/mode/exact/page/2

(2009, 2014)

These notes on Shakespeare: full list

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 81

(first appeared in Intercapillary Space)

Or I shall live your epitaph to make,

Or you survive when I in earth am rotten,

From hence your memory death cannot take,

Although in me each part will be forgotten.

Your name from hence immortal life shall have,

Though I, once gone, to all the world must die.

The earth can yield me but a common grave

When you entombèd in men’s eyes shall lie.

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,

Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read,

And tongues to be your being shall rehearse

When all the breathers of this world are dead.

You still shall live – such virtue hath my pen –

Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

By this stage in the sequence the general form of the argument is familiar: we have exulted in many such resounding claims for the life-giving power of the author’s verses – the theme emerges first in Sonnets 15-19. Yet there is a difference here. The author is, at this moment, somewhat annoyed with his friend: because of the encouragement given to those rival poets. He finds himself almost arguing: I grant this, I grant that... (79, 82); he conceives himself as a plain-speaking, “true-telling” friend; and in due course he comes out with a pretty sharp rebuke at the end of Sonnet 84. The general form of all the sonnets to the young man is “how very, very much I love you” but here we are quite a long way from the tranced ecstasy that you can see at its very height in, say, Sonnet 31.

In Sonnet 81 Shakespeare is not ready to voice his resentful feelings. But it’s no accident that the first line of Sonnet 81 uses a form of words that in a different context could easily be a threat; no accident, either, that he flings so grim an idea as “rotten” into the mix – his over-emphatic self-abnegation (Oh I, I’m nothing, I’m food for worms) is just the kind of thing you say when you intend your lover to receive it as an accusation. He’s upset.

And there is something blurry in the sonnet’s words. The phrase “from hence” begins line 3, and then recurs in line 5, but the reader trying to make the two phrases parallel belatedly discovers their disparity: take from is a regular English expression, but have from isn’t, so then you have to go back on yourself and reinterpret what’s being said. Later in the sonnet Shakespeare uses “breathers” to refer to people alive in 1595; two lines later he is speaking about breath in the context of people living in the distant future. Throughout the octet our general belief that Shakespeare is referring to his sonnets is troubled by uncertainty about whether in fact he might be talking about the friend’s yet-unwritten epitaph, the pompous yet-unbuilt tomb, or even the rhetorical praise of his rivals. Only in line 9,

           Your monument shall be my gentle verse, 

is the expected statement perfectly explicit.

Explicit – but now problematized, as it never was in the mighty boast of Sonnet 19, nor in the frail hope of Sonnet 60. In these poems, as different as they are, we don’t really get involved in discussing the convention itself. Of course (we agree unthinkingly) verse confers immortality. Shakespeare’s verse does, anyway! But now we think: – Well, does it? What kind of immortality? How could it do that?        

Line 5 says that the young man’s name will have immortal life. That’s one of the things that provokes uncertainty about what we’re talking about here. The Sonnets, of course, do not name any names – you never used real names when you were writing sonnets. Perhaps Shakespeare supposed that the identity of his friend would be well-known enough anyway. Simple readers have spent a lot of effort trying to clear this up. Then began a fashion of rebuking simple readers for this shameful interest, which no true lover of the sonnets should ever possess – I think Auden did this the most stridently, and with least pretence of an argument. 

But let’s concede this much: that the kind of immortality of the name that is conferred by an epitaph or a tomb inscription is not the thing that Shakespeare hoped to give. There are plenty of poems from that time where the subjects are named: all those dedicatees, all those dusty nobilities with their manifold virtues who, for example, are forgettably roll-called in the poems of Jonson. I mean no slight to some brilliant poems, but, does Sir Lucius Cary “ever live young”? Or even the Countess of Pembroke?    

Nor, probably, should we be thinking of that immortality conferred by biography: the initimate peculiarities of the famous. Sixteenth-century Lives evince no interest in those aspects of personality – though this particular author’s plays patently do exactly that. But the Sonnets do not tell us what the young man said or what he liked to wear or what time of day he got out of bed. It’s tempting, perhaps, to go to the other extreme: to understand the Sonnets’ promise of immortality as profoundly ironic in effect, to suggest the young man completely disappears, is reduced to a pure instrument for Shakespeare’s poetic virtuosity, the expression at most of the artist’s own feelings, a device for promoting the artist’s own immortality. The gazed-at as mere object, the gazer dominant and luxuriating in his own power – well, you’ve read it all before.

Shakespeare himself refers us not to a kind of literature that had hardly come into existence but on the contrary to a kind of literature that was already extinct, the Arthurian romances.

When in the chronicles of wasted time

I see descriptions of the fairest wights... (106)

Did he conceive of the young man immortalized in his verses somewhat like those ever-fresh faces of Galahad and Guy of Warwick? Perhaps he supposed Stella and Delia, in like manner, immortalized, as eternal images of incomparable beauty? Immortalized but not particularized: just as Shakespeare would pick up those expressions of an antique pen and transfer them – or it might be Adonis, or Helen (53) – to his own experience of the young man, so later lovers (as in Sonnet 55) would adapt his own verses to their own loves. A prophecy amply fulfilled in fact – but inasmuch as this is the poetic of the sonnets that is imaged within the sonnets themselves, it supplies a very reductive account of what the sonnets really achieve. And it doesn’t content me, because the author is much too stressed (for example, in Sonnet 81) about this matter of immortality, a stress that can’t be accounted for if the immortality is something that is a very well understood mechanism that a poet of Shakespeare’s mettle could hardly fail to deliver on.

“Fair, kind, and true”, the poet sums up in Sonnet 105, as the relationship moves towards a stasis after three years, and inevitably dims – enlarges – into serene generality. And we think: fair, definitely; kind, on the whole; true, you have to be joking. But the poet isn’t lying: he perceives as mature lovers do, celebrating a total image that is not refuted by instances of ugliness, cruelty and betrayal. It’s miraculous – the way writing is miraculous ­­– but though we can’t get at the young man directly, we do know him. Not because Shakespeare describes him – a description is anyway always motivated, suspect, unverifiable – but because the Sonnets, at the very extreme of their creativity, are helplessly candid: This is what he made me write. In Sonnet 81 a Shakespeare with the cunning of low self-esteem speaks (in verse that is far from gentle) of “my gentle verse” – he means us to think, not rhetorical, not stately, not coloured; but since his verse has plenty of all those things, how does he differentiate himself from (if it’s them he means) Chapman and Marlowe? To me the gentleness is not about low-key emotion, far from it, but about total flexibility – more specifically, responsiveness to whatever is flying about. His faith in his verse – painfully insecure as it is – rests on brilliance of execution, yes, but also on the intimacy of his knowledge of the young man. And what is the relevance of intimacy? I mean, if we’re not talking about biographical details? I believe we are dealing with, that despised word, sincerity. 

(2007)

*

A Note on: Thomas P. Roche, "Shakespeare and the Sonnet Sequence" (1970, in the Sphere History of Literature in the English Language: English Poetry and Prose 1540-1674, ed. Christopher Ricks).

Historically, this elegant essay will be mainly remembered for its contribution (arguably, the key one) to recognizing the shape of a "Delian" tradition in the 1609 volume. This was one of those big discoveries that still crop up, improbably, in the most crowded sea-lanes of literature. The ultimate inspiration was a throwaway remark by Edmond Malone that lay unattended for nearly two centuries. After Roche, the theory was filled out by Katherine Duncan-Jones (RES, 1983) and was one of several things that made John Kerrigan's 1986 edition for the New Penguin Shakespeare so eye-opening.   

But revelatory as it was this discovery cannot be used to dispose of a biographical reading; the Sonnets are too different from their predecessors, and specifically in being more dramatically personal. No-one tries to read Delia in this way, nor The Rape of Lucrece. Trying to infer the meaning of the Sonnets from a generalized meaning of the sonnet tradition is unwise: as here, when Roche claims: "Most of the sonnet sequences seem not merely to depict but to comment on the love: Go and do not likewise". That simple moral is very much a lowest common denominator, and not even the most important one. That it is somewhat relevant to aspects of many sonnets, including Shakespeare's, was already sufficiently clear; casting it into undue prominence (at the expense of all the more subtle play of morality that overlays it) is a distortion, akin to those knockdown arguments from historical etymology that impede discussion of what a word means to those who use it.

Or Roche says: "Our infatuation with our own experience makes us see 'beauty making beautiful old rime/ In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights', but we do not believe it except as an act of reading, a prefiguration in poetry but without warmth." I don't want to overstate in the opposite direction, but I think warmth is generally a good quality when it comes to reading poems such as the Sonnets; indeed I don't see how else we are going to understand what's going on.

Roche comments interestingly on some individual sonnets.

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

[             ] these rebel powers that thee array,

Of 146 with its famous missing-two-syllables at the start of the second line, he argues that the first two lines together ought to connect with line 9 (as the lines in the sestet make successive replies to the preceding octet). That's not a certainty but it does focus attention on the whole progression of the poem. The trouble is that while the originally printed lines certainly conceal a problem

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

my sinful earth these rebel powers that thee array

it's impossible to feel confident about where the patching ends and where good text begins. Is "these", for example, really likely as part of the original text? I feel it implies a dramatized context, as if line 2 would have to be a question or an order, not a descriptive phrase as produced by most of the proposed emendations ("Lord of", "Pressed by", etc).

Looking at the rest of the sonnet and ignoring the first two lines, it strikes me as one of the sonnets that works through an extended metaphor, a bit like Sonnet 4. And this extended metaphor concerns a householder, a propertied gentleman, a lord of the manor. You would expect this mini-narrative to begin in line 1 - but it doesn't. And you wouldn't expect the "rebel powers" of line 2, which introduce a civil-war metaphor of which the rest of the poem shows no cognizance. What I'm suggesting, unwillingly, is that not much of the first two lines are authentic at all.

Of Sonnet 73 Roche says that the word "leave" in the last line should not be taken to mean "forego" - that is, the end of the sonnet turns to consider not the poet's mortality, but the young man's mortality. I think he's wrong, though a better paraphrase would be "take leave of". The poet's decease is continually the theme of 71-74, and all the metaphors in the first twelve lines are about the poet's greater age. Roche has talked himself into this forced reading because he's worried that the drift of those twelve lines, without some corrective, are, no matter how poignant, "sentimental". Indeed he drifts into biographical tendencies himself when he argues that the self-pitying author, after all, must be no older than forty-five! (In all probability, about thirty..) The problem is self-induced, really. The playfulness, obvious generalizing power, and complexity of effect quite do away with any spectre of "sentimentality", even were we to concede the unacceptableness of that hard-to-pin-down quality.

Roche is particularly unenthusiastic about the much-praised Sonnet 94 and I rather share his frustration, though I don't agree that the problem is about abstractness of diction. On the contrary, the poem flings out a sequence of brilliantly vivid lines and images; but does not feel inclined to reconcile their contradictory feelings; the poet is simultaneously bothered about the young man's cold slowness to temptation and about him having very likely yielded to temptation, about barren chastity and about inner corruption.

(2008)

These notes on Shakespeare: full list

Near the Heyl

Early Forget-me-not (Myosotis ramosissima)

In Cornwall the Hayle Estuary is as tautological as the River Avon is elsewhere. The photo was taken near the West Cornwall golf links, where the footpath crosses down from St Uny Church Lelant. This is on the pretty west side of the estuary, where a popular branch line runs up to busy St Ives. 

This is the tiny deep-blue forget-me-not that you always find growing on sand dunes in April.

*



 The currents and whirlpools in the Heyl are unusual and sometimes deadly.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2332714/Fears-swimmer-Jacob-Cockle-drowned-body-Hayle-whirlpool-zone-Cornwall.html

*

Hayle and its harbour (on the less sheltered east side) comprise a gappy working town in perpetual almost-regeneration, with various supermarket proposals circling offshore.


*

St Uny = St Euny, also the patron saint in Redruth, where the church guide explains that Uny was a Celtic missionary from the post-Roman period.

"Euny (or Uny) was one such missionary. The story is that he came from Ireland with Ia and Erth and that the three of them established churches and communities of monks or nuns in places that still bear their names (Lelant has St Uny church, St Erth is near Hayle, and St Ia is St Ives)."

More elaborated stories say that he came from a royal family in Ireland, was abducted to Wales by heathens, educated at St David's, made landfall at the Hayle Estuary and lies buried at Lelant. 

The feast of St. Euny (February 1st) was at one time the occasion for significant local merry-makings.

St Euny's name has also become attached to Carn Euny, a late Iron-Age site (c. 200BC-100AD) near Sancreed.

Dove's-foot Cranesbill (Geranium molle)

Evert Taube, Sommarnatt / Summer Night

Sommarnatt

Skärgårdsvals.




A
Kom i min famn och låt oss dansa här en vals, min Rosmari!
A
Natten är ljuv, le blott och dansa!
D
Lekfullt och lätt du svävar än som fjäril väckt av sommarvind
D                                A
än som den skyggaste hind.  
 [ NB Often quoted as "skygga hind", but I think "skyggaste" is Taube's original.] 
(f) A
   Stödd mot min arm du böjer nätt ditt huvud och ditt gyllne hår
A                 A7                  D
lyser av ungdom och doftar vår,
D                                  A
tvekande ler du åt de bevekande tonerna,
             E7                  A
lätt och lekande valsen går.


(a-e-f#-g#-a-b)

A
Fönsterna öppnas mot sommarnatten
Bm             Bm/A      E7/G#   E7
blommorna dofta och fjärdens vatten
A                                               F#m
speglar den stigande månen som röd över
E        B7       E      (g#-e-f#-g#-a-b)
Ingaröskogen står.
A                             F#m      C#7
Vinden har somnat i båtarnas segel,
C#7                               F#m
ut över Baggensfjärdens spegel
D
tonerna ila,
A
måsarna vila
E7       E9 E7  A
tysta, i månens ljus.



        Bm  Bm/A Bm/G#   Bm/F#       E7                  A
Vad vore livet,   Rosma - ri,       för - utan sång och dans?
A                   E/A          Bm7         E
I sommarnattskymningen ljuvlig och sval,
  Bm7         E       D/F#           A
i toner som locka förföriskt till bal,
  Bm      F#7/C#     Bm/D    Bm/A  G#7
i dans, i dans       vi glömma tid och rum!
G#7   C#7   F#m4  F#m
Kom, låt oss far  -   a
  D             A         Bm
i blomdoft, ljus och toner
D        Db5        E7  A
hän till drömm - ars  land!


SUMMER NIGHT   (singable free translation)

Skerry Waltz

D
Come to my arms and let us dance a waltz together, Rose-Marie!
Soft is the night, just smile and dance now!

G
Playful and light you flutter like a butterfly in summer breeze,

                                       D  (b flat-a)
shy as the deer in the trees.

D
Here in my arms, you bow your head and lean your lovely golden hair,

D                     D7                  G
fragrant with youth and the fresh spring air.

G                                                 D                             
Smiling, you hesitate at the beguiling 

                                     A7                  D  (d-a-b-c#-d-e)

tones of the waltzing violin's harmony.

D
Windows wide open to summer evening,

Em               Em/D           A7/C#         A7
scent of the flowers, and bay-waters gleaming,

D                                     Bm
showing the path of the moon rising over the

A                     E7                 A     (c#-a-b-c#-d-e)
woods of the neighbouring isle.

D                                       Bm         F#7
Windless the sails of the scattered flotilla,

F#7                                       Bm
all of the bay is as still as a mirror;

G
music comes creeping,

D
seagulls are sleeping,

A7           A9   A7    D
silent in pale moonlight.

           Em            Em/D    Em/C#   Em/B     A7                 D
What would our lives be, Rose-Marie, without a song or dance?

D                          A/D           Em7          A
In summer-night twilight so clear is the call,

      Em7                A              G/B            D
the sounds that entice us to come to the ball.

        Em           B7/F#       Em/G     Em/D     C#7        F#7          Bm4  Bm
The dance, the dance, we lose our sense of  time and space, let's wander

         G              D             Em      G       Gb5    A7    D
with fragrance, light, and music, in the land    of     dreams!





This ought to be a public service, because the guitar chords of Evert Taube's loveliest song aren't available anywhere else (the attempt on chordie.com is a botch).  Above, I give the Swedish text with the chords in A, which is the key of the piano transcription in Hjärtats nyckel heter sång.  (NB The lower-case letters represent single notes picked out on whatever instrument you're using to accompany the singer.)

But A was far too low for my own voice, so I transposed the chords to D, as shown for the English translation. (And in fact when I perform the song I use a capo at the second fret, so I'm actually singing in E.)

[Please note, the third-to-last chord in the last line is D (or G) major with a flattened fifth, not D (or G) flat major! I've noticed that online chord dictionaries will usually (and wrongly) give you the latter, unless you search for "d major flat 5th" or similar. (If you want to specify D flat with the fifth as the bottom note, you should write Db/Ab, not Db5!)] 

The song was apparently written in 1928 (1927 according to Svenska Akademien Ordbok); it is often called "Rose-Marie" or "Kom i min famn". It was published in the 1936 collection Ultra Marin. Each of the three verses has different music, and the lyrics follow this spontaneous flow of melody and deploy rhyme capriciously or not at all; it manages to sound like a flowing casual speech as well as a waltz that starts from the gentlest birdcalls and ends in giddy ecstasy. The third verse is usually given twice.

[In Abba's barn-storming show tune "Thank You For The Music", the chorus runs (in part):

Who can live without it
I ask in all honesty
What would life be
Without a song or a dance what are we?
So I say Thank you for the music, for giving it to me...

The italicised words are a very overt tribute to the climactic line in "Sommarnatt".]

Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa)

Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa)

Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa). Photo taken in a woodland ride in Great Wood, Battle, E. Sussex on 19/10/13.

Folk-poetry - another point about relativism

I've been reading the Kanteletar recently. Specifically, I'm talking about Keith Bosley's translation of (I think) about a quarter of the collection, which was published in the Oxford World's Classics in 1992. The collection was put together by Lönnrot as a companion to the Kalevala. These are the short songs and ballads of the oral Finnish tradition.

Of course they have been through quite a bit of literary transformation - both Lönnrot and Bosley took quite a creative hand - but that's a complication I ask you to set aside for the purposes of this note. Just take it that I'm reading folk-poetry (or folk-lyrics i.e. the words of folk-songs - there's no real distinction in this case).

I have hugely valued (and in that sense enjoyed) my copy of the Kanteletar in the twenty years since I got it. I have, as you know, a strong not to say obsessive allegiance to all things Fennoscandic. And I've dipped into it dozens of times. But the dips were always pretty short. And basically, it's only now that I'm reading it. And, no great surprise, I'm loving it.

Image from http://luovaapuuhastelua.blogspot.co.uk showing two pages from a collection of Kantetetar poems for children, with illustrations by Kirsti Gallen-Kallela.


 *

Anyway it's started me thinking about art-relativism again. In previous notes I've spoken about a basic distinction between inner and outer audiences. The inner audience is e.g. film fans, and the outer audience is e.g. people who don't give a stuff about films, don't go to the cinema, and usually change channels when a film comes on the telly. The point I made then was that arguing about the merits of The Wolf of Wall Street only makes sense within the inner audience. So far, so obvious.

I don't know if I stated, but I certainly implied, that the enjoyment of art only took place within the inner audience. The arguments about the merits of such-and-such a film matter because all  the audience members know what it's like to enjoy a decent film.

As for the people in the outer audience, I took it as definitional that they could look at and enjoy a whole load of other things (perhaps the film posters, the music, the popcorn, people-watching...), but not the artefact in question.


I now realize that this is too simple. (By the way, you can forget about films from here on in.) I realize, because I'm experiencing it, that there is a pleasure in stepping back from the bull-pit of that inner audience. And that  it can become habitual. And this is what happens when you become a  student of folk-poetry.

You are, almost certainly, only distantly part of the inner audience for which the folk-poetry came into existence.

Basically, you decide to view art as nature. In normal circumstances you no more think of debating the relative merits of Kanteletar 2:220 and 2:234  than you debate the relative merits of a teazel and a dandelion. There's no-one to debate it with, for a start. Instead, your general premise is, that if a folk-poem is available at all, it is in the world of nature and justifies your interest. 

Does this mean that there is no enjoyment in reading the Kanteletar? Well, a doubt about that probably does explain why I've left it twenty years to really settle down and read it. I sensed the need, if I was going to read the Kanteletar, to put a different hat on, to be no mere voluptuary.

There's a certain one I know
a honey-berry I like
a pet bird I'm attached to
a wild duck I hold on to
   who is keen on me
   and I'm keen on him.

   He has lovely eyes
   I have a warm heart;
he has not thrown me over
nor left me alone: he has
taken me to be his own
  called me his treasure
looked me out as his fair one
chosen me as his white one.

   I'll hang on to him
   both hang on and swing
like a bird in a green tree
a squirrel on a spruce bough.

(Kanteletar 2:31, trans. Keith Bosley)

NB "honey-berry" = literal translation of Mesimarja, the Arctic Bramble (Rubus arcticus), most esteemed of northern berries.

(Rubus arcticus, image from http://www.luontoportti.com)

[Rubus arcticus formerly grew in Scotland  but has not been seen there since 1841. E.g. Thomas Walford recorded it in his checklist of rare plants in The Scientific Tourist Through England, Wales and Scotland  (1818): "Rubus arcticus. Dwarf Crimson Bramble. - Perth." .... "high regions of Ben-y-glo at Blair.".... i.e. the 40 km2 triple-Munro mountain of Beinn a’ Ghlò.]

Of course there is enjoyment. You can love spending time with a folk-poem, you can love a folk-poem, you can even appreciate what it's possible to glimpse of the folk-poem as an artwork, which it certainly is. But in a way these matters are secondary. The enjoyment is not isolated from interests whose tendencies are all outbound: understanding the common ways of life, discovering how the Finnish folk lived, learning how to play the melodies, savouring the marked differences (and occasional resemblances) between Finnish folk-expression and the Swedish and English folk-cultures in which I grew up. The enjoyment is as it were dispersed; it is not so much an appreciation of the folk-poem itself as an enjoyment of occupying the same world in which the folk-poem exists.

The quality of audience that I'm talking about here has, of course, far wider ramifications. We could call it "student" - it seems to me that a lot of students of classics are more often in this state of mind than in a traditional poetry-reader's world. They've left behind matters of literary value. Homer and Hesiod matter to them just because they exist.

You can see why, for some poetry-readers, this cooler but perhaps more integrated engagement with poetry begins to take over from the fan-fervour with which most of us begin. It draws some people away from controversy towards translation, or from poetics to literary history.

But "student" really breaks my binary paradigm of  "inner" and "outer", which however I'm unwilling to give up. I think what I would now say is that inner and outer are the poles of a spectrum of natural responses. This picture of inner and outer audiences arose, not from movies (I'm afraid I've always been rather in the outer camp when it comes to movies) but from formative experience of the art that mattered most to my generation in its teens, pop music. E.g. puzzling over why the value-difference between Stealer's Wheel and the New Seekers was a matter of intense significance to me when it was a matter of complete indifference to my mum and dad.  In those days the true "student" position, as defined here, hardly existed vis-a-vis pop music, at any rate it was hardly visible to us teens.

The point is, there's a lot of attractions that draw me towards the "student" position. But still, it is not natural. And to move away from nature, though it gives us a steadier view, always exacts a cost. So I won't be permanently spending my time with the Kanteletar. We need a living involvement with art. Tomorrow I'll be back with Tim Allen's poetry, and a controversialist once more.

William Shakespeare: Richard III (1591)

Lawrence Olivier as Richard, in the 1955 movie

Most of Richard III takes place in a peacetime that slowly but steadily goes rancid. When Richmond finally appears, war - a little "sharp" war for a great "perpetual" peace - is vindicated by contrast with the diseased peace in which Richard has had his own way until he even loathes himself. There's a freshness about Richmond's perspective, too:

That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines (V.2.8)

True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings (V.2.23)

So Richard is a boar among the summer vines, not on the battlefield but domestically, among ladies and children and courtiers who in various ways bend over backwards to connive in not seeing what is happening; as it were in their very midst, although (so far as the actual executions are concerned) principally offstage. It's a peacetime society from which people disappear. 

Act I is brilliant from its opening words, and has sometimes seemed to unbalance the rest of the play. Here the dramatic argument is irresistible, and the scene that caps Act I is, unusually, a scene in which Richard is not present.

Elsewhere, for all the large swathes of Senecan rhetoric, it's the cynically vigorous language of the secret performers that stays in the mind (mainly Richard, but ably assisted by his sidekick Buckingham). Generally they explode in small bursts, not aphoristic but with the knee-hugging rightness of aphorism.

Why, madam, have I offered love for this,

To be so flouted in this royal presence?

Who knows not that the gentle Duke is dead?

Richard's delight in giving pain, the sharpness of his timing, makes us draw breath in an unholy joy of sheer admiration. So this was what drama was capable of. Only Chaucer, centuries previously, had a comparable command of pace.

Or Buckingham, greeting the Mayor with a perfectly-pitched performance:

Welcome, my lord: I dance attendance here.

I think the Duke will not be spoke withal.

Surprisingly it's only when these supreme performers are playing a part that we suddenly hear an exquisite naturalism, in contrast with the constrained rhetoric of Rivers, Grey, Duchesses and Queens.

*

Richard III has a pervasive vein of peasant morality.

Loyalty to party or to a party's discredited ideals has broken down. In that respect Richard is at one with the society that he gores, and so to an extent is his nemesis Richmond. This is why there is not the least irony in Richard's address to his troops at Bosworth; he does it unexceptionably well. At this point in the play the peasant morality is seen in its reassuring aspect. That's why there's so much emphasis on getting up early in the morning!

Elsewhere in the play we see other manifestations, for example implacable vengefulness, as in old Queen Margaret. Here, as in Richard himself, peasant morality is exposed as a bedrock worn bare by civil war.

And the counterpart of implacable vengefulness, which is indifference to past loyalties: something that may look like forgiveness, though it is not. This is what lies behind the long debate between Elizabeth and Richard in IV.4; that it is possible for Elizabeth, that it may even be acceptable, out of sheer awareness of changed circumstances, to take up with the murderer of her own children, no other shelter being on offer. 

And this too, dogged willingness to carry out a grim task if it's part of an assigned job.

1 M. What we will do, we do upon command.

That magnificent scene with the murderers and Clarence is where this element in the play is given its most intuitive outing, and where the character of Richard is summed up, not without admiration.

            Cla. O, do not slander him, for he is kind.

            1 M. Right, as snow in harvest.

            Come: you deceive yourself...

Note 1 - The Text

This note really carries on from some of the speculations in Note 1 on 3Henry VI. The first Quarto of Richard III was published in 1597 - seven more were to follow. Its text is rather a puzzle. It's close to F but differs in hundreds of trifling details, readings that are predominantly but only mildly inferior. The explanation that has been generally accepted (D.L. Patrick, 1936) is that Q is a memorial reconstruction: it is not trying to improve on F, it is trying to reproduce it in its absence. But in what circumstances? The problem is that Q is so nearly successful compared e.g. to the octavo of 3 Henry VI. The common theory goes that, for some reason, Shakespeare's own company needed to reconstruct an absent prompt-book, and they fortunately had the means to do so because the company had only just performed the play and the lines were fresh in their minds. As is usual in these theories of memorial reconstruction (it's almost a trope), it turns out that certain parts (e.g. Buckingham's) are remembered distinctly less well than others (e.g. Richard's). Perhaps this act of reconstruction took place during a provincial tour. The manuscript that, a quarter of a century later, would form the basis of F, was on this theory temporarily unavailable to them. A priori this all seems quite unlikely, and I repeat the remark made in my earlier note: there's something about the sociology of the Elizabethan theatre that we don't fully understand. Could it be, for example, that the Chamberlain's Men did not have access to early plays that Shakespeare had written for another company, but were compelled to make new texts if they wanted to carry on performing a proven success such as this? Or could it be that theatre companies would not allow a master prompt-book out of their hands (which would be necessary if it was going to be set up in the print shop), but were less concerned about accidental loss of a spare copy that had, perhaps, originally been put together for a provincial tour, sometimes by partly memorial methods?

Note 2 - Marlowe's Edward II

Marlowe's 1592 play owes a massive debt to the first tetralogy and to Richard III in particular. (Though in return, Shakespeare was to learn from it when he came to write Richard II). As to Richard III, the debt lies chiefly in the unexpected transformation of Mortimer's character towards the end of the play, and in the scenes leading up to Edward's murder (with Marlowe contributing his own distinctive way with sadistic situations). It's the most painful, but also much the most interesting, part of the play -- perhaps Marlowe had already written the rest before he saw Richard III and was inspired by the Clarence scene.  

(2010, 2014)

These notes on Shakespeare: full list

C minor

Tangle of mainly cocksfoot under sodium light in Manor Rd Ind Est, late on Christmas Eve.

midwinter fungi

These photos were taken on 6th January. This was growing in my new garden in Swindon out of a bit of sacking that turned out to be hiding a tree stump. I don't know why you'd want to hide a tree-stump, perhaps stumps are health hazards or something, but anyway this rather gives the game away. The caps were as shiny as jellyfish.

I think it is the edible mushroom Velvet Shank (Flammulina velutipes) . According to this excellent site, Velvet Shank grows during warm spells in winter. Our winter has been nothing but one long warm spell so far, so that would figure.

But all I'm going on is the unusual date plus the dark stems and uncrowded gills and slimy cap and a general resemblance to other internet pix of F. velutipes. I'm totally not a mushroom expert so if you think it's something else please tell me!

Facebook consensus is that I've got the ID right. Here's another good article (definitely a site to bookmark if you interested in wild food) :
 http://www.gallowaywildfoods.com/?page_id=883

William Shakespeare: Henry VI Part III (c. 1590)

Title Page of the Octavo

Up until now I have only ever thought about this play as one station in a larger progress, the great theatrical chronicle that, so far as we can see, established Shakespeare’s reputation as an important player among players.

But 3 Henry VI must have been performed, as it was first published, as a separate piece intended to captivate and satisfy an audience on the night. It has its own identity, and since it happens that I’m re-reading it in separation from its invariable fellows, this seems an opportunity to look at it in a different way.

It’s a packed chronicle, unflaggingly vigorous and very fast-moving. In certain respects there’s a bludgeoning repetition: In Act I Wakefield (Lancaster win), in Act II Towton (York win), in Act IV Warwick (Lancaster win), in Act V Barnet and Tewkesbury (both York wins). Some producers have therefore sought to emphasize a spirit of weariness, a war that goes on too long, battles that become increasingly automatic and senseless. That testifies to a very humane distaste on the producer’s part, but it misrepresents the unflagging vigour. If the young Shakespeare gives us too many battles, that’s because everyone wanted to see battles on stage, not because everyone hated to see them. It was terrifyingly exciting. It’s when you cease to fear civil war that you become concerned with disapproving it.

To view these affairs in a coarser and more sporting spirit, the Lancastrians’ eventual defeat depends on the fatal weakness of their behaviour when they’re on top in Act IV: they needed to kill Edward, not imprison him. All the other battles end in some atrocity, but on this occasion the Lancastrian side is without its dependable killers; Clifford is already dead, and Margaret is still in France. So Warwick only deposes Edward – and feebly lets his brothers escape. And Edward rather gets away with the political errors of Act III.

Nevertheless, the play ends in only formal triumph for the Yorkists. Edward’s closing lines are dramatically hollow. We have just seen the three brothers  surround and slaughter Henry’s son; then we’ve seen Henry himself being murdered by Richard. This is not a happy foundation for triumph.

Besides, these brothers are by now individualized in ways that create deep fault-lines between them. In Henry’s son’s words:

Lascivious Edward, and thou, perjur’d George,

And thou, mis-shapen Dick...

They began as a loyal team, formidably assisting their father; they end as a crew.

In one respect, however, these glorious suns of York were never quite a team of equals. From the first, Richard is marked out. In the opening moments of the play there is a polite competition in bloodletting –

Edward (York’s eldest son):

Lord Stafford’s father, Duke of Buckingham,

Is either slain or wounded dangerous:

I cleft his beaver with a downright blow;

That this is true, father, behold his blood.

Montague (York’s brother):

And, brother, here’s the Earl of Wiltshire’s blood,

Whom I encounter’d as the battles join’d.

Richard (York’s third son):

Speak thou for me and tell them what I did.

[Throwing down the Duke of Somerset’s head.]

York:

Richard hath best deserved of all my sons.

This last line must even in Shakespeare’s time have formed an ironic contrast with the barbarity of Richard’s coup de theâtre. But it acknowledges his pre-eminence. Richard is his father’s favourite, and more importantly the dramatist’s favourite.

The same three people, Edward, Richard and their uncle, have another polite dispute in the second scene of the play. Which of them is to urge York to break the pact that he has just made with King Henry? At first the brothers speak in concert, but York is unconvinced.

             

York:

I took an oath that he should quietly reign.

Edward:

But for a kingdom any oath may be broken:

I’d break a thousand oaths to reign one year.

Richard:

No; God forbid your grace should be forsworn.

Richard sees, and we see, that Edward has set off on a wrong course. I mentioned “killers” in the play; but the elder York is not one of them. Ambitious self-seeker as he is, he subscribes to certain codes of conduct that must be flattered; Warwick is cast in the same mould; both carry with them some remnants of the ethos that still existed, though already much troubled, in 1 Henry VI. Richard easily steers his father to the desired resolution without the unacceptable suggestion that – God forbid! – he should break his word. We digest the implications of this little episode: the mis-shapen Richard is smarter than Edward, as well as more brutal.

These subtle emphases on Richard, however, are not very disruptive. In the first two Acts his role is as a prominent team member with notable talents. We need to believe in his loyalty to his own side, his love for his father, his desire for Edward to be king, his enthusiastic participation in the vision of the triple sun, his genuine desire to take revenge on Clifford for the deaths of Rutland and his father.  

In Act III Scene 2, Edward (now king) commands his brothers to go along with him on some trifling piece of business about Henry’s re-capture, and everyone troops off stage. Except that, we blink and discover that - for no accountable reason  – Richard’s still there, alone. It’s a great dramatic moment, and all the subtle emphases mentioned above suddenly coalesce into a feeling of expectation, exultation, liberation... And then follows Richard’s great soliloquy, his assertion of himself and his own agenda, and the marvellous image in which he imagines himself cutting through the complexities of historical process and emerging as a different kind of presence:

For many lives stand between me and home,

And I, like one lost in a thorny wood,

That rents the thorns and is rent with the thorns,

Seeking a way and straying from the way,

Not knowing how to find the open air,

But toiling desperately to find it out,

Torment myself to catch the English crown:

And from that torment will I free myself,

Or hew my way out with a bloody axe.   (3.2.173-81)

Though Richard will still be part of the Yorkist team he has now definitively risen to a new dramatic sphere in which his only combatant (of sorts) is the other soliloquiser, Henry. (True, there are other soliloquies - York, Warwick and Clifford - but these all occur in the thick of battle and express reaction to events; the speakers are worn out or wounded. This is a different thing altogether.)

It is a curious achievement of Shakespeare’s that he manages to make Edward IV’s reign seem such an insignificant episode and to make all of us think only of Richard’s road to power. I must add that I think the thrilling emergence of Richard is best handled in this play – in fact, I think it’s the best of the tetralogy, the point where chronicle drama is held in strongest tension with another kind of drama in which individual character begins to dominate. In Richard III, I can’t help feeling that Richard begins to camp it up too much.  The sense of seriousness in the account of national struggle is dimmed.

Richard’s soliloquy is only one of the great moments in this play. Henry’s great, formal lament with the two pitiable soldiers is another. The most powerful scene of all may be the one in which York is taunted before his death, though the equally atrocious killing of Margaret’s son Prince Edward is not far behind.

*

Queen Margaret is as ruthless as Richard or Clifford, but not for herself. Everything she does is for her son. In this turmoiled struggle, survival revolves around the terrible arithmetic of children and killings, birth and death.

Shakespeare’s theatre was unable to bring us the living presence of very young children – those “babes” who are named in Macbeth mainly to be killed.  In The Winter’s Tale the new-born Perdita is brought on stage as a mute doll; her doomed brother Mamillius is, we must assume, around ten years old – as young as a speaking part in Shakespeare can feasibly be (perhaps also the son and daughter of Clarence who appear in Richard III 2.2).  There remains, however, a fair period between this and manhood. Shakespeare portrays a number of characters as boys, that is, as males not yet able to play a full part in the business of mankind. There was no shortage of boy-actors, after all. In 3 Henry VI, both Rutland and Prince Edward fall into this category. The killing of these two boys is a matched pair that connects Act I to Act V. (Historically Rutland was in fact older than George or Richard.) As others have pointed out (e.g. Peter Saccio, 1984), there is very little fighting (on stage) in 3 Henry VI – I think the only real fight is Richard against Clifford. But there is a lot of killing. Atrocity is the play’s dominant image.

            You have no children, butchers!

says Margaret after her own son has been slaughtered. In fact King Edward does have a sprinkle of illegitimate children, as he complacently admits in 3.2. Biology is important, but lineage is more so; it’s the legitimate children that are precious, vulnerable and dangerous, depending on how you look at it.

In view of her earlier treatment of York, Margaret does not win much sympathy; even less if we recall from earlier in the chronicle her adultery with Suffolk and her part in the murder of Humphrey of Gloucester. But she is a profoundly impressive figure; by now a battle-scarred veteran, both a cause of civil war, and its victim. 

 

In contrast to Margaret, Henry is no parent – well, he is, literally, but he gives away his son’s inheritance - and Henry is therefore always seen as something less than a man. Henry’s impotence give him a certain status. It lifts him out of the quagmire of struggle, yet he carries with him an over-arching responsibility for the whole bloody spectacle, and his death sets a term on it, at least in this play. Having yielded up his active involvement in this life, his vatic powers look beyond it, and principally in the words he speaks over another young boy, Henry Richmond.     

Throughout the three parts of Henry VI, Henry has acted with an infuriating lack of political nous. But when, during the battle of Towton, he shows no prejudice towards his own side and blankly says:

            To whom God will, there be the victory (2.5.15)

we understand that he does conceive his majesty as involving a sense of kinship with his whole nation, even when its parties are slaughtering each other. He speaks of “our striving houses” as if he has still not grasped that he is implicated in the fortunes of one of them. We might reasonably feel that Henry has no right to claim that his own sorrows are ten times worse than the soldiers who have mistakenly killed their loved ones, and we might also feel that to say

            Oh that my death would stay these ruthful deeds! (2.5.95)  

represents a light dismissal of a course he should seriously consider if he really wants to be of some help. 

But Henry is an easy target. Despite – or because of – his egocentricity, here and in 3.1 and in his death-scene 5.6, he alone offers a competing perspective to the mire of political involvement. For the other principals, the horrors of civil war seem to be invisible – they are too engaged in it. His imagination, above all in the lines

            So many days my ewes have been with young,

            So many weeks ere the poor fools will ean,  (2.5.36-37)

and

            His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle   (2.5.48)

reflects not only a foolish personal envy* but a broader feeling for the realities of common life. Henry’s career is a disastrous failure, but Shakespeare’s career would turn that broader feeling into something incalculably potent.  

*(On the other hand Oliver Cromwell, we suppose, knew what he was talking about when,  in reply to accusations of personal ambition re the Lord Protectorate, he said that he hated the burden and wished he’d lived under a wood side and kept a flock of sheep. Cromwell was referring to his own background as a gentleman-farmer, not a landless shepherd. Yet though he meant his remark literally it illustrates the sort of inevitability with which people’s thoughts align themselves with available cultural expression. Cromwell ended up saying exactly the same sort of trite thing as the whole line of European monarchy from Shakespeare’s Henry to Marie Antoinette.)

*

If we are honest, the packed chronicle is a little over-packed. From 3.3, we can't help feeling that the author is rushed. When Warwick switches sides in that scene, the potential weight of dramatic irony is undercut by the tempo of farce. We start to notice the ever more bare presentation of the battles, the stereotypical reversal of fortunes induced by a  post or unlooked-for arrival (3.3, 4.1, 4.6, 5.1, 5.4), etc. 

For all his considerable alterations and excisions, the young Shakespeare (or whoever) was evidently pretty conscientious about presenting Hall's story to his audience. Much of the verse in these hurried chronicle scenes is functional and not much more: there's so much history to get through. Even Richard and Henry often revert to being mere carriers of the narrative. From the aesthetic or dramatic point of view, we may wonder if the play really needs to spend time on Henry's choice of Protectors (4.6), Montgomery's insistence on Edward's royal claim (4.7), or the arrivals of Warwick's allies at Coventry (5.1).  Apparently the players thought it did. The public, apparently, wished to be instructed in these minor details of the national history. 

The great scenes of atrocity, the great scenes with Richard and Henry, leap out of this humble matrix with unexpected force. Warwick has a lot of lines, but never comes to life in the same way, nor does Margaret demand our attention throughout, only in those great scenes. This might be an argument for multiple authorship, but I'm not sure if it's a valid one. Given the brief (present the full story), wasn't it inevitable that the author would often have to rein in the artistic fires and be content to spell out details?

*

Note 1 – on the texts.

All reader’s editions are based on the Folio text of 1623 (F), a text of over 3000 lines, all in verse. An octavo version, entitled The true Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, and the death of good King Henry the Sixth, had appeared in 1595 (O). (F’s full title is The third Part of Henry the Sixth, with the death of the Duke of York. Both titles therefore allude to what was surely felt to be the most powerful scene in the play, the torturing of York at the end of Act One.)

Though there are thousands of differences between O and F (O is about 900 lines shorter), the effect of these differences on the total dramatic image is surprisingly minor. O contains every scene and virtually every character who is remotely individualized. And 3 Henry VI has a great many of both.

The most detailed discussion of the relation between the texts is the 2nd Arden edition (Cairncross, 1964). This is not superseded by the 3rd Arden edition (Cox and Rasmussen, 2001), which opts for the now-usual approach of agnosticism, a reluctance to emend the original texts, and a preference for offering them both (as per Lear, Faustus, etc.). [It is patent that the Arden 3rd editions are aimed at a very different audience from the 2nd editions.] Behind this approach is an insecurity about the concept of authenticity, and a reluctance to depart from the relative (but secure) validity of the “playtexts” (a felicitous term of Barbara Hodgdon that I am probably misusing) in pursuit of a collation that might possibly be closer to Shakespeare’s intentions. Most modern readers, I think, have shared the sense of incredulity that arises from reading an edition that contains lots of conjectural emendation; a sense that, though the editor might on occasion luckily (but unverifiably) hit on original Shakespeare, the accumulation of such conjectures must produce many new errors, and in all probability leave us with a worse witness than the one we started with.

Thus, when Cairncross in the first scene intuits that Montague’s brief part was originally intended for a different character from the chronicles, Falconbridge, he changes the speech prefix. Suppose his intuition is right. But even so, what is he actually trying to achieve here? It’s quite right that a play such as this must have begun with some sort of manuscript by some sort of author (Shakespeare, I’ve no doubt). Is the idea to get back to that? But is it where we really want to get to?  Perhaps changes that arose subsequently, during rehearsal or performance, were Shakespeare’s considered changes, originated by him or at any rate meeting with his thorough approval. A significant part of the composing process may have occurred during the early history of the play.  And do we really know that “Falconbridge” was the name in that first manuscript? Perhaps it was something tried out and altered in draft, long before the play first met the company’s eyes? In trying to “get back” to the “original”, we may actually be overshooting it and disappearing into the chaotic fog of ideas and influences that underlie any work of the imagination.    

So the 3rd Arden usefully reproduces the whole of O, but is un-usefully very shy of accounting for it.

The Cairncross edition represents (and expands on) the tradition that really began with Peter Alexander in 1929. Its conclusions are roughly as follows:

F gives a fair representation of the play as first written, around 1590. It derives from copy that may be close to an authorial ms. ( - although some use was made of later quarto editions of O. Compositors always preferred printed copy to manuscript, even if this required a lot of emendation on the page. But of course this practice led to mistakes, and some O readings therefore sneaked into F, displacing authorial readings.)

The original (laying aside doubts about what exactly that ought to mean – see above) was close to F, and closer still to the ms copy from which most of F was set. O, in contrast, is derivative. It witnesses to purposive cutting with the aim of producing a shorter play. The text is also corrupt in ways that suggest memorial reconstruction – in other words, at some stage in the reporting chain, someone did not have full access to original text.

Signs of memorial error and reconstruction include:

1. Lots of semi-metrical text in place of a metrical original. E.g. Sir John Montgomery’s speech:

What talk you of debating? In few words,

If you’ll not here proclaim yourself our king,

I’ll leave you to your fortune and be gone

To keep them back that come to succour you.

Why shall we fight, if you pretend no title? (F, 4.7.53-57)

What stand you on debating, to be brief,

Except you presently proclaim yourself our king,

I’ll hence again, and keep them back that come to

Succour you, why should we fight when

You pretend no title? (O) 

2. Mishearings, whether actually aural or apparently so:

O, ten times more than tigers of Hyrcania. (F 1.4.155)

O ten times more than tigers of Arcadia. (O)

(Also “clamor” for “cannons”, “famous” for “foeman’s”, etc.)

3. Incomplete memory leading to text that makes less sense:

And that I love the tree from whence thou sprangst,

Witness the loving kiss I give the fruit. (F 5.7.31-32)

And that I love the fruit from whence thou sprangst,

Witness the loving kiss I give the child (O)

The Scales and Hungerford marriages (4.1.46ff.) are terribly confused in O.

4.  Fresh recourse to the chronicles to locate details that were not exactly recalled. E.g. some of the figures given for the size of armies are more accurate in O than in F – because Shakespeare was creatively modifying throughout, but the producers of O took their figures direct from Hall.

5.  Recycling text, e.g Warwick’s three lines in O’s rendering of 5.2 which are almost a copy of his earlier lines in 2.3.

6. Phrases borrowed from other plays, e.g. from 1 Henry VI.

Details can be argued over (F’s “Is this our foeman’s face” (2.5.82) makes much less sense than O’s “this is no famous face”.) But the cumulative case is convincing, though what isn’t so clear to me is whether the purposive cutting preceded the reconstruction (as Cairncross seems to assume) or accompanied it, or came later. 

Exactly why there is so much garbled reporting (or apparently garbled reporting) in Elizabethan play-editions is still disturbingly unclear; I get the feeling that I don’t fully grasp important aspects of the sociology of Shakespeare’s theatre. (A fairly cursory survey confirms the notion that the speeches of Clifford, Warwick, and what remains of Margaret, are noticeably closer to the presumed original than the rest.) But overall this is certainly a very well remembered play compared to e.g. The Taming of A Shrew. Even to remember all the scenes and all the characters, never mind their words, would have been a prodigious feat (I wonder if the reporters may have had access to a "theatre plot" - a list of scenes, characters, entries and exits). Whoever did the cutting, at any rate, must surely have had script to work from. 

There is some re-ordering in Act IV. The scenes 4.4 and 4.5 change places in O, and 4.7 precedes the remnant of 4.6, which is effectively amalgamated with 4.8. I think all of this springs from the same motive: to drastically reduce 4.6 (dispensing with the role of the Lieutenant in the process) and to merge what little remains – chiefly, the prophecy about Richmond – with the next scene in which Warwick and his party appear (4.8). This could not be achieved without  making  further changes since it left 4.7 right next to 4.5, and that didn’t work out; Edward is on stage in both but there is a time-gap between the two scenes.**  So 4.4 was postponed in order to act as a buffer between them, though not without awkwardness; the Queen and Rivers are now seen reacting to a situation (the capture of Edward) that the audience has already left behind. Moreover, this now brings the exit of Edward in 4.3 uncomfortably close to his re-entry in 4.5 (for again, there must seem to be a significant time-gap). It must be for this reason that O drops Edward’s farewell lines in 4.3 (to get him off stage more quickly) and, most unusually, adds some extra lines – some padding by Clarence and two lines by Warwick (“Come let us haste away, and having past these cares / I’ll post to York and see how Edward fares”) which quite skilfully import the suggestion that Edward – whom we have seen leaving the stage only moments before – is already ensconced in his Yorkshire prison. 

[** Not that I'm totally sold on the theory that Elizabethan plays don't allow a character to leave the stage at the end of one scene and come back on at the start of the next. That's pretty much what happens at 5.1-5.2 (Edward, admittedly preceded by "excursions")  and at 5.6-5.7 (Richard).]

Some of the other cutting seems to have had the intention of reducing the number of separate speaking parts. The Watchmen are entirely omitted from 4.3 (leaving a trace of their presence in the text, in Oxford’s “Who goes there?”). Similarly in 3.1, a drastically reduced scene, though two Keepers are mentioned in the SD there is no conversation between them and all the speeches assigned to Keeper could be spoken by one man, the other remaining mute. Somerset loses his two lines in 4.1 and his one line in 4.3 (sheer efficiency, this. To keep a minor actor hanging around to deliver one or two lines is just asking for a lapse of concentration.) *See note 4.  The Lieutenant is omitted from what remains of 4.6, as mentioned above.

But the majority of the cuts seem designed not to reduce the number of roles but to speed up the action (and shorten the performance-time). The parts most affected are those with long speeches, such as Margaret and Henry, who lose more than 150 lines each.

A variant in O that I like is Richard’s

To dry mine arm up like a withered shrimp 

(Compare F 3.2.156: To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub)

But it’s probably another memory of 1 Henry VI, where the Countess describes Talbot as “this weak and writhled shrimp” (2.3.22). – Cairncross supposes that the same (terrier-like?) actor played both Talbot and Richard, which is certainly very likely since Talbot’s role ends in Part I and Richard’s does not begin until Part 2. The other senior men’s roles (Henry, York, Warwick) are carried through all three parts.

*

Note 2 – on the tetralogy.

If Cairncross’s detailed arguments are accepted, then Shakespeare, near the beginning of his career as a writer, conceived and triumphantly delivered a massive opus in the form of four plays, the whole sequence written in 1590-91* [See end of note!]. Nothing like this had ever been written before. The only known chronicle play before this date is the Famous Victories of Henry V, which existed in some form by 1588 (the surviving text is later and mutilated) -- but see also my comments, elsewhere, on Edward III. The main inspiration, theatrically, can only have been the two parts of Tamburlaine. The idea for a vast historical enterprise would have arisen naturally enough from such works as Hall, Holinshed, and the Mirror for Magistrates; Shakespeare had an audience who were intensely interested in the history of the previous century. For the sheer ambition of Shakespeare’s work, inspiration could have come from The Faerie Queene -- Spenser had just published the first three books of what was clearly going to be the biggest English poem anyone had seen. 

Another factor, which it’s hard to weigh, was the continuing prominence of noble families in Shakespeare’s own time. Some (e.g. the Lords Cobham ex Oldcastle) were still significant parts of the national landscape and they were interested enough in the portraits of their own ancestors to have an impact on Shakespeare’s work, i.e. through censorship and consequent re-writing. Samuel Daniel was tutor to Lady Anne Clifford, only daughter of the current Earl of Cumberland. I can't imagine them being much gratified by the portrait of their forebear in 3H6. Anyway, clearly the material of the tetralogy was not felt to be “remote”.

The tetralogy is a large-scale instance of Shakespearean double time. In the chronicles time is passing slowly, but on stage it flies by. The actor of each role doesn't age perceptibly, nor does his character alter drastically, so we don't really feel that e.g. 26 years lie between Henry's marriage to Margaret in 2H6 and Henry's death in the tower in 3H6.  The First Duke of Buckingham in 2H6 is actually the grandfather of the Second Duke of Buckingham in R3 , yet Richard of Gloucester encounters both and doesn't seem so very much older in the later play. (In reality he was only 7 at the time of the first Duke of Buckingham's death.) 

A dramatic sequence on such a scale must arouse curiosity about how such an ambitious project could ever come to fruition. Some company must have had immense faith in the idea. If 1 Henry VI* was originally in much the same form as we know it from the Folio, then it was dramatically inconclusive and pointed straight on to its successor (just like the second and third parts do). Was it feasible to rehearse a company to perform the plays in rapid succession, like Wagner’s Ring at Bayreuth? Or should one think rather that each play was intended to be performed in isolation, but its inconclusiveness and promise of serial entertainment was perceived as a commercial advantage, arousing an expectation for a sequel that was several months down the line?  That might make sense in London, but could hardly have done so in a touring context.

According to Nashe, 1 Henry VI attracted huge audiences. And perhaps it really was a collaboration. That might go some way to explaining the sequels.  It's hard to see the young Shakespeare being able to sell the idea of a tetralogy, but it's possible to imagine a kind of unspoken wider commitment to a project of chronicling English history, and the more so if various established London authors were involved -- Nashe, Kyd, Greene or whoever. Shakespeare as the most junior author might from the start have done most of the work, and then -- when that work turned out to be brilliant -- increasingly found himself holding the baby. That would be a little reminiscent of how the young Dickens, supposed to be the junior subordinate, took control of the Pickwick Papers. 

Like Wagner, Shakespeare was extravagant with his demands. The cast of each of these plays is large. Big roles would seem to require top-quality actors, yet look at how Shakespeare treats, e.g. Suffolk in 1 Henry VI.* Suffolk first appears in the Temple Garden scene (2.4) where he has a handful of powerful lines. He then re-appears, but only as a mute, in three scenes (3.1, 3.4, 4.1). Then, in 5.3, his part suddenly becomes critical. He shares the long dialogue with Margaret, and he dominates the final scene of the play (5.5). The actor who played Suffolk, therefore, must have been one of the top men in the company (especially if he was also intended to play Suffolk in 2 Henry VI), yet Shakespeare keeps him hanging around with virtually nothing to do until nearly the end of the play. The only substantial part in 1 Henry VI that the actor could conceivably have doubled is the younger Talbot. If (as seems to be thought) he also played Clifford, his part in 3 Henry VI is over by the end of Act II.

A similar profligacy affects the use of the actor who would play Richard of Gloucester. He could have  played Talbot in 1 Henry VI* (see above), but there is no obvious role for him in the bulk of 2 Henry VI, and he may have just made a brief, colourful splash as e.g. Jack Cade (I think this is how it worked out in the ESC production). In short, if Shakespeare wrote his tetralogy with a company in mind, he must have relied on a sufficiently large number of competent actors to be able to rest his big hitters for large portions of some plays.

Shakespeare evidently had great faith in the boy-actors, too. They had to act not only boys but all female ages from ten to eighty (e.g. Clarence’s daughter and the Duchess of York in Richard III). They also had to bring off the challenging ensemble scenes of Richard III, in which three or four mature women compete in lamentation over their children and husbands. These were not “boyish” roles of the Rosalind type, such as any fresh-faced sixteen-year-old could make sexy just by being themselves. And some female roles in the tetralogy, above all Margaret, would seem to call on the boy-actor to make a very forceful impact. Perhaps this was realistically achievable only if the style of acting was highly formal and did not venture on naturalism. 

[That tends to be confirmed by two things: first, that other plays of this era - just prior to the closure of the playhouses - are also notable for very large casts (compared to the plays that came later). Also, the sheer number of plays that were performed. e.g. according to Henslowe, the Lord Admiral's Men in 1594-95 performed 38 plays, of which 21 were new. That's a staggering number of lines to learn, but it doesn't suggest much detailed meditation of character-details and of how to play key moments in a scene - more like the hasty preparation of a play-reading: e.g. your part requires you to be kingly and solemn, or clownish and comic.] 

The main practical analogy for handling this kind of multi-part theatrical enterprise was the still-living memory of the mystery cycles. But the actors in these spectacles were not professional, and a high level of virtuosity was not required. If something like this was also true of the Henry VI plays, then Richard III (following hard on Faustus) set a new course, in which plays would showcase the talents of outstanding individual actors.     


[*Since I wrote this note, Paul J. Vincent's thesis has belatedly convinced me that 1H6 was written after the other three plays, and not originally by Shakespeare. It was a conscious "prequel" composed for a rival company (Lord Strange's Men) in 1592, probably by Thomas Nashe and one other (unidentified) author, and subsequently acquired by Shakespeare's company. It was at this time (c. 1594) that Shakespeare revised or added several scenes. See this post:

http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/01/william-shakespeare-kind-of-1-henry-vi.html


I have not tried to correct what I have written above, though my references to 1H6 are of course impacted. I would emphasize, though, that Shakespeare's (? and others') 1590-91 sequence, even when reduced to three plays, remains unprecedented. The first part of Tamburlaine had been complete in itself. The second part of Tamburlaine had been an unplanned afterthought. This is not to deny that the two-part Tamburlaine, as it came to be, might have been inspirational to Shakespeare, if only as suggesting how it could be done better.  For 2H6 (presumably then titled The First Part of the Contention) was consciously both a complete play in length and yet only the first episode of something bigger. It goes out of its way to whet our appetite for what's coming next. 3H6 does the same. And this was an entirely new thing.]

*

Note 3

Stuart Hampton-Reeves’  Alarums and Defeats: Henry VI on Tour  speculates interestingly on how far Henry VI and other plays of the time were designed in the context of touring companies. He notes, for example, the interest that 3 Henry VI  must have held for audiences in York and in Coventry, both of whom saw performances (very likely, he suggests, of this play) during the ill-fated tour of Pembroke’s Men in 1592-93.

It’s certainly a neglected context for Shakespeare’s early career – the brilliant Warwickshire Induction of The Taming of the Shrew (complete with touring players) is another place where this background is relevant.

Nevertheless, I’m not wholly convinced. London must have been where the Henry VI plays achieved the fame that is attested by Greene’s well-known attack; and London audiences may have appreciated the Parliament and Tower scenes in 3 Henry VI just as much as the provincial audiences appreciated the dramatic portrayal of their own cities. And while passages such as York’s otiose remarks on the Kentishmen – “Witty, courteous, liberal, full of spirit” – might well have drawn applause on one leg of the provincial tour, they might equally have raised a few shouts from a London audience, too; especially south of the river. Provincials (like Shakespeare himself) were being drawn to the capital in ever-growing numbers.  

Besides, one must add that in respect of the very large number of characters, the Henry VI plays are peculiarly unsuitable for touring.  With optimal doubling, the sixty-seven roles in 3 Henry VI  would require twenty-one adult actors (around twelve of them with lines to speak) and at least four boys; around 16 speaking parts in all. What is known of touring companies suggests they were generally if not always smaller than that, but perhaps the Pembroke tour might have been envisaged on a larger scale for the very reason that they planned on performing Henry VI as a centrepiece. Perhaps that’s why it lost money.

What was indubitably true was the success of the ESC’s provincial tour of the History cycle in the 1980s, which is the occasion for Hampton-Reeves’ essay. By a curious chance I not only saw all seven plays (Henry VI was conflated into two), but I had also seen Terry Hands’ RSC production at Stratford in the 1970s. Anyone would think I was a regular theatregoer.             

Note 4. – “Somerset”.

In the 3rd Arden edition the editors decide to distinguish the Somerset of 4.1 from the Somerset of 4.2-5.5. Historically, it is true, there were two different dukes (Henry, the Third Duke, and his younger brother Edmund, the Fourth Duke), both sons of the one whose head makes such a spectacular prop in 1.1.  The Third Duke was briefly of Edward’s party (4.1) and the Fourth was killed at Tewkesbury (5.5). But in the play, Shakespeare clearly conflates the two. The one who is seen abandoning Edward and stalking offstage with Clarence in 4.1 is obviously – in the play – the same individual who, in the very next scene, arrives alongside Clarence to take up arms for Warwick. A very sharp observer might indeed wonder about Richard’s and Edward’s references to three Dukes of Somerset, when only two have been seen on stage. But splitting Shakespeare’s conflated character back into two would make no theatrical sense, and is a blatant instance of conjecture overshooting the original, by the very editors who have been most fearful of that danger.  

Note 5. – Sanctuary.

There is a human right that was allowed to the most degraded members of medieval society - criminals, refugees and homeless vagabonds - yet which is denied to us. I am of course talking about sanctuary.

Well, I am probably idealizing. Sanctuary perhaps did not cut much ice unless you were well-born. Superior force might not choose to recognize it. It is said that at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, some of the despairing Lancastrians fled the Bloody Field to take sanctuary in the abbey: so they were slaughtered there instead. If Shakespeare knew of this story, he didn't use it; he had enough atrocity for his purposes in the killing of the young Prince Edward.

Sanctuary had been recognized in pre-Christian times. In Euripides' Ion, Creusa takes sanctuary at Apollo's altar after her plot to kill Ion has been discovered. The baffled Ion grumbles:

What a state of affairs! How terrible it is when the laws the gods have made for men are made neither well now wisely! The criminal should be driven from the altar, not granted its protection. It is an offence that something holy should be touched by criminal hands; only the just have this right. It is the victim of wrongdoing who should receive the privilege of sanctuary; the good man and the bad when they seek refuge should not be given equal treatment by the gods.

Ion's reasoning, as throughout the play, is fresh but naïve. The problem is that to vengeful pursuers the supplicant is always going to be a criminal, never a victim of wrongdoing. I suppose it would work if the gods actively intervened (perhaps they could give the true criminals an electric shock), but then their altars would no longer be sanctuaries as we understand them. In this play, sanctuary does everyone a service, because Creusa and Ion are about to find out that they are mother and son. 

When, in 3H6 4.4, Queen Elizabeth (formerly Lady Grey) says of taking sanctuary, "There shall I rest secure from force and fraud", Shakespeare is setting a long-distance time-bomb. She may be right in the present instance, but in Richard III  3.1 she'll find out that a pursuer determined to override the claims of sanctuary can always find an argument. Buckingham in fact comes up with the mirror image of Ion's.

You break not sanctuary in seizing him;

The benefit thereof is always granted

To those whose dealings have deserv'd the place,

And those who have the wit to claim the place.

This prince have neither claimed it nor deserv'd it:

And therefore in mine opinion cannot have it...

Yes, you heard it right. The young Duke of York, not having done anything criminal, does not deserve sanctuary. Therefore, Buckingham tells the Cardinal, you will commit no wrong by collecting him from his over-protective mother and bringing him to us, by force if necessary (he does not add, so we can later murder him).

Shakespeare found this argument in the chronicles. In a perverse way it reflects the Christianization of sanctuary: the Christian God came into the world to save sinners and not good men, therefore sanctuary applies specifically to criminals, exactly the class of person that Ion thinks ought to be excluded. 

When I was at school, we still resorted, when finally cornered by some tough person that we had annoyed, to saying Pax! Pax! Pax! which was supposed to invoke the power of sanctuary or of being "home" in a game of It. In my own agitation I not only cried Pax but also crossed my fingers on both hands, with a confused hope that this action (primarily intended to nullify vows) could magically release me from other unwelcome consequences, too.      

[In England the right of sanctuary was definitively withdrawn by King James I in 1623. In some other countries, notably Norway and Canada, it still has force.]

   

(2004, 2010, 2014)

These notes on Shakespeare: full list