What, is my Lord of Winchester installed

  And called unto a cardinal’s degree?

  Then I perceive that will be verified

  Henry the Fifth did sometime prophesy:

  “If once he come to be a cardinal,

  He’ll make his cap coequal with the crown.”

  (28–33)

  Because this explanation of Beaufort’s position is possible, we do not see the change of speech prefix from “Win.” to “Car.” that takes place in the First Folio (5.4 in modern texts) as representing a necessary change in this character’s status. Thus, we do not alter the dialogue in 1.3, nor do we follow the Folio in giving Winchester a new speech prefix in our edition in 5.4.

  It is, of course, quite possible that the seemingly sharp discrepancy between the language in 1.3 and 5.1 is instead the result of multiple authorship of the play, with a failure of communication between the authors of 1.3 and 5.1. In this scenario as well, we would choose to follow the Folio dialogue and to regularize the speech prefixes according to our normal procedure.

  1.4.50. fear of my name: In Geoffrey Whitney’s Emblemes (1586), the poem accompanying the emblem for the motto “Vel post mortem formidoloi” (those terrifying even after death) concludes with the stanza:

  So, Hector’s sight great fear in Greeks did work,

  When he was showed on horseback, being dead;

  Huniades, the terror of the Turk,

  Though laid in grave, yet at his name they fled;

  And crying babes, they ceasèd [i.e., stopped

  crying] with the same,

  The like in France, sometime [i.e., in the past] did

  Talbot’s name.

  2.1.24–26. Pray . . . begun: These lines have been interpreted by editors as sexual quibbling, with line 24 referring to Joan “having sexual relations with men” or to her “becoming pregnant,” and with sexual puns (in lines 25–26) on standard (as “that which stands up,” “penis”) and carry armor (“bear the weight of a man”). It seems just as likely, though, that the lines mean instead “Pray God she does not become a male, if, as a French soldier, she continues to fight the way she has done so far.” According to the OED, prove can mean “to come to be, become,” and the first meaning of masculine is “belonging to the male sex; male.”

  2.3.9–10. Fain . . . reports: These lines, together with line 70, have suggested to Naseeb Shaheen (Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays) that this scene specifically recalls the biblical meeting of Solomon and the queen of Sheba. “And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon, she came to prove Solomon with hard questions. . . . And she said to the king, It was a true word which I heard . . . of thy wisdom. Howbeit I believed not their report, until . . . mine eyes had seen it: and, behold, . . . thou exceedeth the fame that I heard” (2 Chronicles 9.1, 5–6).

  2.4.87. the place’s privilege: There is disagreement among editors about whether there was a prohibition against violence at the Inns of Court. Perhaps this disagreement arises from changes in the rules governing student conduct there that took place between the late Middle Ages, when this play is set, and the time at which it was written—around 1590, over a hundred years into the next historical period, the English Renaissance. In The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640, Wilfrid R. Prest writes that “while assaults and brawls at the late medieval–early Tudor inns were punished as they occurred, the benchers seem to have been prepared to accept a high level of interpersonal violence within the societies.” However, “penalties for acts of casual violence within the societies . . . escalated sharply in the later sixteenth century. . . . [P]ermanent expulsion had also become a standard punishment” (pp. 95–97). It is impossible to tell, then, if Plantagenet is referring to the actual privilege that would have protected students at the Inns of Court from violence at the time the play was written, or if he is being made to speak in his own historical time and thus fabricate such a privilege as a way of excusing himself from retaliating against Somerset for insulting him.

  2.5.82–91. Long . . . beheaded: In Henry V 2.2, the Earl of Cambridge is exposed as a traitor and sentenced to death by Henry V for treason, but not because he levied an army on Mortimer’s behalf. Instead, Cambridge is accused of plotting Henry’s death in exchange for French money. He claims that he had additional reasons for his treachery (lines 162–64), but does not specifically mention Mortimer.

  3.1.44. bastard of my grandfather: John of Gaunt was not married to Catherine Swynford when Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, was born. (John and Catherine were later married.) Gloucester was the youngest son of Henry IV, who descended from John of Gaunt’s first marriage to Blanche of Lancaster. See English Ancestry of King Henry VI.

  3.3.30 SD. sound an English march: Some editors suggest that the difference between the so-called English march and French march may have been in the instrumentation. There is evidence, though, that the “French march was slower than the English.” So writes Michael Hattaway, in his Cambridge edition of the play (1990), noting that “Dekker wrote of the gentleman who ‘comes but slowly on (as if he trod a French March).’ ” In any case, here the “French march” signals the presence of Burgundy’s army, not the French army.

  3.4.38. law of arms: Editors do not agree about how to read this phrase. At the simplest level, this law forbids violence in the context in which this scene is supposed to be occurring. The debate arises over which particular context here is the operable one. Some editors relate this law of arms to laws forbidding violence near the king or his residence. Others suggest that the context is that of war, in which soldiers on the same side are not allowed to fight each other, on pain of death.

  5.3.6. lordly monarch of the north: The link between “monarch of the north” and Lucifer is found in Isaiah 14.12–13, where “Lucifer, son of the morning,” says of himself: “I will ascend into heaven, and exalt my throne above beside the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation in the sides of the north.” Scholars today argue persuasively that the link supposedly made here with the fall of Lucifer is due to mistranslation and a false reading of Isaiah in the light of the Christian story. However, for an English writer in the later decades of the sixteenth century, it would be natural to link Joan’s devotion to the devil with a passage in Isaiah in which the then-current English translation has Lucifer/Satan place himself in the north.

  Appendices

  Authorship of Henry VI, Part 1

  Henry VI, Part 1 was first published in 1623, together with thirty-five other plays, in the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays to be issued in a single volume—the book we now call the Shakespeare First Folio. Until Lewis Theobald in 1734, no one suggested that any of the play was the work of someone else besides Shakespeare. After Theobald expressed skepticism about Shakespeare’s sole authorship, a great many editors and scholars have echoed his doubts, most influentially the renowned Shakespeare editor Edmond Malone in 1787. Others have contested Theobald’s doubts, including the respected Samuel Johnson. Beginning with Jane Lee in 1876, a number of investigators using various methods have attempted to discriminate between those parts of the play to be credited to Shakespeare and those parts to be attributed to other named playwrights of the period, including Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele, or to anonymous writers. These scholars have arrived at no agreement about exactly who wrote which parts, although there is now a growing consensus about Nashe’s likely authorship of the first act.

  We do not think it impossible or even improbable that other hands may be represented in the play. It is conservatively estimated that at least half the plays from the public theater of Shakespeare’s time were collaborative efforts. We respect the labor expended and skill exhibited by attribution scholars, and, at the same time, we take seriously the limitations that they acknowledge necessarily attend their efforts. On this basis we simply set aside the question of whether Greene, Nashe, Peele, or others wrote some of Henry VI, Part 1 and contest neither those who have argued for collaboration nor those who have claimed the play for Shakespeare.

  We treat the play in the same way as the others published in the Shakespeare First Folio, referring to it for convenience as a Shakespeare play. In doing so, we fully recognize that the theater is always the location of collaborative creation, not just among named dramatists but also among members of acting companies and their employees and associates. We are aware of documentary evidence of other hands reaching into dramatic manuscripts in the course of their annotation or transcription, and we suspect that Shakespeare’s words could not possibly have commanded in their own time the same reverence they have been accorded in later times. Such circumstances attach to all the Shakespeare printed plays that come down to us. In calling Henry VI, Part 1 Shakespeare’s, we are simply acknowledging its inclusion in the 1623 First Folio.

  Shakespeare’s Two Tetralogies

  When Shakespeare’s plays were collected and published in 1623, the volume included eight plays that together dramatize the “Wars of the Roses.” This name has been given to a period in English history that arguably stems from the death of Edward the Black Prince in 1376 and ends when Henry Tudor is proclaimed King Henry VII in 1485. Edward, the oldest son of King Edward III, was a valiant warrior and skilled diplomat who held out the promise of continuing his father’s rule over England and much of France. When, however, the Black Prince predeceased his father, his infant son Richard became heir to the throne, and, on Edward III’s death, was proclaimed King Richard II. His royal uncles began to compete for power, and in 1399 Richard was deposed by his cousin Henry, son of the Duke of Lancaster. In the following years, the descendants of Edward III divided themselves into two factions—those who sympathized with the deposed and murdered Richard II and his Yorkist supporters, and those who followed the Lancastrians. The factions battled each other for the nation’s throne with increasing ferocity, with first one faction then the other in the ascendancy. In 1485, Richard III, the last of the Yorkist kings, was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field. His opponent, Henry Tudor, a descendant of the Lancastrians, married Elizabeth York and thereby brought together the two battling family lines and brought an end to the Wars of the Roses.

  The four plays that dramatize the period between 1422 (the death of Henry V) and 1485 (the death of Richard III and the proclamation of Henry VII as king) were written in the late 1580s or early 1590s. Three of them cover the tumultuous reign of Henry VI, who, like Richard II, was named king when yet a child. During the years covered by the three Henry VI plays, England was caught up not only in the struggles between the Yorks and the Lancasters but also in an ongoing war to hold on to, or to regain, lands in France. The fourth of these plays, Richard III, shows Richard’s violent climb to the throne and his equally violent ejection and death. All four plays were published as Shakespeare’s in the First Folio, though there is ongoing debate about how much of Henry VI, Part 1 was actually written by Shakespeare, and though there are many scholars who argue for other authorial hands in Parts 2 and 3 as well.

  The four plays that dramatize the earlier period in this saga, which begins in 1398 near the end of Richard II’s reign and ends in 1421 with Henry V in triumph, were written in the late 1590s, and three of them—Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV, Part 2—were printed numerous times in individual quarto editions beginning in 1597, 1598, and 1600. (Henry V did not receive a full printing until it appeared in the First Folio.) These four plays are generally accepted as not only written by Shakespeare but as being the very best of his history plays. They have a complex and confusing relationship to the plays written earlier, to which they provide a prequel, as is acknowledged in the Chorus that closes Henry V:

  Small time, but in that small most greatly lived

  This star of England. Fortune made his sword,

  By which the world’s best garden he achieved

  And of it left his son imperial lord.

  Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned King

  Of France and England, did this king succeed,

  Whose state so many had the managing

  That they lost France and made his England bleed,

  Which oft our stage hath shown.

  Henry V, Epilogue, 5–13 (emphasis added)

  Part of the complexity of the relationship between the two tetralogies arises from differences in the ways the two sets of plays present certain moments in history. Mortimer, for example, in Henry VI, Part 1 2.5, tells Richard Plantagenet that “the Percies of the north” went to war with Henry IV in order to place Mortimer on the throne, that they lost their lives on his behalf, and that the Lancasters continued to imprison Mortimer because he threatened their hold on the kingship. This version of the story is markedly different from the version presented in Henry IV, Part 1, where Mortimer is, indeed, a theme of contention between Henry IV and Hotspur, but where placing him on the throne is merely one of Hotspur’s wilder threats (Henry IV, Part 1 1.3.138–40), and where the last we hear of Mortimer is that he failed to show up to support Hotspur and the other rebels at the Battle of Shrewsbury (4.4.23). His name is never mentioned in Henry IV, Part 2 or in Henry V, nor is there any mention in this tetralogy of his being imprisoned or considered a threat. (For another discrepancy between the two tetralogies, see the longer note to 2.5.82–91.)

  An added complication is that because the plays covering the later part of the period were written first, editors from the mid–twentieth century onward began calling them “The First Tetralogy” (i.e., the first-written tetralogy). These editors place the First Tetralogy in collected editions before the four plays that depict the earlier years, rather than putting all eight plays in the order in which their historical figures lived, as did the First Folio of 1623. Thus “The Second Tetralogy” refers to the set of plays that depict action that precedes the story told in what we now know as “The First Tetralogy.” As a consequence, few readers today, trained to read the plays in the order in which they were written, would ever encounter the eight plays by beginning with Richard II and reading through to the end of the saga with Richard III’s death and the proclamation of the reign of Henry VII. Thus the full story of this turbulent period of English history as depicted in these eight plays—the fall of Richard II, the rise of Henry IV, and the subsequent violence between Edward III’s royal descendants—is rarely experienced with its full narrative force.

  Joan la Pucelle, or Joan of Arc

  A principal difficulty with the text of Henry VI, Part 1 concerns the sharp difference in the characterization of Pucelle between the first four acts and the fifth. In the first four, her characterization is complex; she is one thing for the French, quite another for the English. In the fifth act, her complexity disappears, and Pucelle is flattened into an embodiment of the insults that the English have hurled at her for the first four acts.

  In those first four acts, the division in her characterization is a deep one. For the French she is a “sweet virgin” (3.3.16), a genuinely holy and chaste woman, who is also a great military leader and strategist: “Divinest creature, Astraea’s daughter, . . . glorious prophetess,” in the words of Charles the Dauphin, who says “No longer on Saint Dennis will we cry, / But Joan la Pucelle shall be France’s saint” (1.6.4–8, 28–29). Nothing could be further from the English perception of her. The first Englishman to encounter her is Talbot. He immediately accuses her of being the “Devil or devil’s dam, . . . a witch . . . [and] strumpet” (1.5.5–12). Thus, from the beginning the French and English have opposite views of Pucelle’s spiritual and moral nature.

  Of course, this difference of opinion between the English and French about Pucelle also arises regarding other characters. Talbot himself is an example. For Salisbury, Talbot is “my life, my joy” (1.4.23), and, for Henry VI, a “brave captain and victorious lord” (3.4.16). Just as Pucelle claims that her power comes to her from the Virgin Mary, whose “aid . . . promised and assured success” (1.2.83), so Talbot is confident that “God is our fortress” (2.1.28). Yet for the French, Talbot is “a fiend of hell” (2.1.49) and a “bloodthirsty lord” (2.3.35). In the words of the General of Bordeaux, he is the “ominous and fearful owl of death, / Our nation’s terror and their bloody scourge” (4.2.15–16). It is clear that the opposing views of Talbot arise from the difference in national interest between the French and the English, and it would seem reasonable to assume that the two nations’ opposite conceptions of Pucelle have the same origin. Yet Talbot is never flattened into a caricature.

  In the fourth act, Talbot dies as a mere mortal, struck down by the French army he has been fighting, but he remains a hero to the English and a hated enemy to the French. In the fifth act, when Pucelle is being taken off to be burned at the stake by the English as a haughty and promiscuous witch, she will not even acknowledge her own father when he visits her before her death. Now the play itself, rather than simply the English in the play, makes her into everything the English have accused her of being. Act 5 has her conjuring up fiends to aid her in defeating the conquering English forces—openly and, to her greater embarrassment, fruitlessly practicing witchcraft among demons who now refuse to abide by her will. She even desperately offers to “lop a member off and give it” to her recalcitrant familiars (5.3.15). When the English capture her and call her “ugly witch” (5.3.34), their words are no longer an insult motivated by nationalism but a statement of what the play has made, within its fiction, fact. In 5.4, the other English insult, “strumpet,” is also validated by the play’s action when Pucelle attempts unsuccessfully to escape her torture and death at the stake by claiming to be pregnant, naming first Alanson and then Reignier as the father of her unborn child. When the English call her “Strumpet” again (5.4.85), they can be heard not so much to insult her as to identify her.