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 2 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, while shown as flaring into actual warfare at the end of Henry VI, Part 2, 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 Richard was deposed in 1399 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, in particular, 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 close 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 kind of 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 the fact that because the plays covering the later portion 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 began placing 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 written as a kind of prequel to 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.

  Henry VI, Part 2:

  A Modern Perspective

  Nina Levine

  Henry VI, Part 2 presents a medieval past utterly devoid of nostalgia. There are no battlefield heroics, no patriotic rallying cries, no famous victories or imperial conquests. What the play offers instead is a chilling documentary of a nation’s descent into civil war. The action opens with aristocratic rancor over the king’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou and closes with armed conflict at St. Albans between the rival houses of York and Lancaster, marking the start of the Wars of the Roses. In the space between, Shakespeare probes the causes and consequences of civil dissension along a trajectory that extends from seditious rhetoric and political intrigue in the first half to open rebellion and civil warfare in the second. At the play’s center, and prologue to the butchery to follow, is the arrest and murder of the “good Duke Humphrey,” England’s lord protector. The sorrowful king likens Humphrey’s arrest to an animal’s being led “to the bloody slaughterhouse” (3.1.213), and for once Henry gets it right, invoking with grim accuracy the bloodbath of murder, revolt, and war to follow. With mangled corpses and decapitated heads to rival Titus Andronicus, 2 Henry VI is unusually brutal. Medieval England is not so far from ancient Rome, it seems, and political history not so far from popular revenge tragedy.

  The capacity for sadistic violence and civil butchery is not limited to ambitious nobles or aspiring churchmen, however. What most unsettles modern audiences and critics is the play’s insistence on making women and commoners instrumental to the carnage. Queen Margaret is the first to threaten outright violence when she accuses Gloucester of crimes that, “If they were known, . . . Would make thee quickly hop without thy head” (1.3.139–40); and she again takes the lead at his arraignment, insisting that “This Gloucester should be quickly rid the world” (3.1.235). Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester, adopts a similarly bloody rhetoric as she imagines her path to the throne with a violence worthy of Lady Macbeth: “Were I a man, a duke, and next of blood, / I would remove these tedious stumbling blocks / And smooth my way upon their headless necks” (1.2.65–67). It is Jack Cade’s uprising, though, that unleashes the play’s most horrific scenes of mayhem. The land now runs with blood, a point of pride for Cade, who delights in the gruesome craft of his artisan rebels. “They fell before thee like sheep and oxen, and thou behaved’st thyself as if thou hadst been in thine own slaughterhouse” (4.3.3–5), Cade says of Dick the butcher’s handiwork. For Elizabethans, these rebellious artisans and unruly wives would have recalled popular emblems of disorder, signs of the causes and consequences of civil chaos. But stereotypes resist familiar political and moral formulations in 2 Henry VI. Pawns and players in the proliferating power struggles, women and commoners assume unusual prominence here, contributing to a new and complex political history that far exceeds predictable patterns or traditional expectations—for Elizabethans and perhaps for us.

  One could argue, of course, that the story was in some sense ready-made, popularized by the Tudor chronicles of Edward Hall (1548) and Raphael Holinshed (1577, 1587). And it was in these well-known sources that Shakespeare found the portrait of the virtuous but weak king overruled by powerful barons and a “manly” queen. The young playwright would also have found a starting point in the royal marriage, which, according to Hall, “semed to many, bothe infortunate, and unprofitable to the realme of England.”1 Shakespeare goes beyond his sources, however, in portraying these costs in explicitly gendered terms, setting up an equation between the loss of empire and a loss of valor and manhood that cuts to the heart of English patriarchy. Just as the royal marriage renders the king fond and foolish—Margaret’s presence makes Henry “from wond’ring fall to weeping joys” (1.1.37)—so too does it emasculate the realm, as Gloucester sternly warns the court:

  O peers of England, shameful is this league,

  Fatal this marriage, cancelling your fame,

  Blotting your names from books of memory,

  Razing the characters of your renown,

  Defacing monuments of conquered France,

  Undoing all, as all had never been!

  (1.1.103–8)

  The shameful terms of Henry’s marriage soon become the play’s common refrain, on the tongues of commons and nobles alike, shorthand for England’s loss of territory, national unity, and manhood. As Cade bluntly puts it in Act 4, the losses have “gelded the commonwealth and made it an eunuch” (4.2.162–63).

  For the play’s audiences, then and now, Gloucester’s rhetoric registers more than outrage over Suffolk’s sale of Maine and Anjou to France. It also defines the nation’s past as a patriotic story of glorious conquest and reminds us of history’s role as a model for present and future generations. Writing in 1592, in a passage scholars believe makes reference to Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, Thomas Nashe made similar claims about history plays. Celebrating “our forefathers valiant acts,” these plays offered a “rare exercise of vertue,” Nashe declared, and sharp “reproofe to these degenerate effeminate dayes of ours.”2 For Nashe, English history is a decidedly masculine narrative of valiant conquest, and his remarks, like those of Gloucester and Cade, powerfully underscore 2 Henry VI’s failure to deliver this narrative on stage. Hardly a dramatic weakness, this failure is absolutely central to the play’s theme of loss and degeneration. In the wake of England’s defeat in France, the heroic exists only in the collective memory, in the national mythology invoked by the name of Henry V. Gloucester himself sounds these plangent notes at the start of his peroration—“Did he so often lodge in open field, / In winter’s cold and summer’s parching heat, / To conquer France, his true inheritance?” (1.1.85–87)—memorializing the former king as the apotheosis of the chivalric warrior and a spur to England’s peers to unite in the recovery of the nation’s former glory.

  If Shakespeare’s audiences looked to the past for lessons about the present, as Nashe and Gloucester suggest, what instruction would they have taken from this brutal story of conspiracy, treason, murder, and revolt? Or, as viewers today might ask, what are the play’s politics? Not surprisingly, the question has prompted much critical debate between those who see 2 Henry VI as a conservative staging of English history, designed to solidify the power and legitimacy of the Tudor state, and those who argue for a more radical position that questions as much as it affirms political orthodoxies. In replaying the horrors of civil dissension, the play certainly recalls official Tudor exhortations against disobedience and rebellion, printed in homilies and pronounced from church pulpits. Over the course of her reign, Queen Elizabeth had herself been forced to confront aristocratic revolts, assassination attempts, and numerous conspiracies, and fears of unrest troubled audiences in the early 1590s, when 2 Henry VI was first performed. So too did the threat of artisan disturbances, which sporadically erupted in Elizabethan London, often directed against alien workers. As recently as the summer of 1592, in fact, riots had broken out when clothworkers attempted to break into a Southwark prison, and some critics speculate that Shakespeare’s staging of Cade’s rebellion targets this protest.

  But while the play’s call for law and order supports government policy, its lessons apply with equal force to rulers and subjects. The portrait of the “bookish” king who brings ruin to his realm recalls the cautionary tales collected in the popular Mirror for Magistrates (1559), whose stories of “the fall of princes” reassured readers that vice would be punished and virtue rewarded, in the hereafter if not the here and now. With the possible exception of Cardinal Beaufort’s sudden demise, however, 2 Henry VI offers no such assurances. Concerned more with historical causation than didactic moralizing, the play eschews traditional providential history for a more radical model of political history.3 The pious Henry may be fond of invoking the heavens, for example, yet his prayers and prophecies seem powerless and off the mark. The “miracle” of Simpcox, praised by the king as God’s work, turns out to be a hoax, and Horner’s death by combat remains an ambiguous verdict at best, despite Henry’s certainty that “God in justice” (2.3.104) has prevailed. In place of a divinely ordered universe, Shakespeare details a secular world of political complexity reinforced by an episodic dramatic structure whose open-ended conclusion refuses to mete out justice—unless we take Henry’s losses at St. Albans as a sign of divine punishment, as he himself seems to. “Can we outrun the heavens?” (5.2.74), the king asks Margaret in the play’s final moments, ready to cede the kingdom to the Yorkist rebels. But even this tragedy must wait for its conclusion in another play.

  For modern critics, 2 Henry VI is politically provocative not only because it demystifies royal power and privilege but because it explores an alternative model of governance in the idealized commonwealth represented in the play by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. Though hardly democratic by our standards, Gloucester’s humanist values show a progressive concern for equity and justice that involves commoners as well as elites. Gloucester’s trust in the legal system is absolute if not politically naive, so confident is he that an unbiased judiciary will safeguard the innocent. “I must offend before I be attainted” (2.4.60), he assures his wife, even as she is being taken off, under guard, to a life of exile. As his enemies complain, the good duke is much beloved by “the common people” (1.1.165), and it is worth noting that commoners first enter 2 Henry VI not as a rioting rabble but as “poor” petitioners seeking redress from the lord protector. Like Gloucester, the petitioners hold much faith in the equity of due process, so much so that they seem unafraid to come forward with complaints against their social betters—witness the petition against Suffolk on behalf of the “whole township” for “enclosing the commons of Melford” (1.3.26, 23–24). The complaint about enclosures is especially resonant here, not simply because it names Suffolk but because it indicts him as a direct contributor to the abject social conditions that will ignite in open rebellion later in the play.4 When the inexperienced petitioners deliver their complaints to the wrong man, mistaking Suffolk for the Lord Protector, the calls for redress go unanswered. Indeed, the results are lamentably predictable: all charges are dismissed except the apprentice’s complaint against his master’s treason, which Margaret and Suffolk will exploit to undermine York’s rising power within the court.

  For self-serving nobles such as Suffolk and Margaret, as for the upstart Cade, the law represents an expedient means to power, and treason charges are the weapon of choice. The case against Eleanor Cobham establishes the model. As a participant in treasonous necromancy, the ambitious duchess is certainly complicit in her downfall, but she is also a victim of what we might call political entrapment. Suffolk admits as much when he assures the queen that he has “limed a bush for [the Duchess]” (1.3.91), an assurance confirmed by the double-dealing Hume’s report that the cardinal and Suffolk, “knowing Dame Eleanor’s aspiring humor, / Have hirèd me to undermine the Duchess / And buzz these conjurations in her brain” (1.2.100–102). As York slyly observes, the scene of Eleanor’s arrest is a “pretty plot, well chosen to build upon” (1.4.60), and in the end it is the machiavellian York, rather than Suffolk and the cardinal, whose careful plotting will “reap the harvest” (3.1.386).5 Immediately following Eleanor’s sentencing is the equally unsettling scene of Horner’s treason trial, and again political ambitions compromise our sense of justice. Fought before a crowd of prentices and neighbors, the lowly combat between the drunken armorer and his fearful apprentice seems a mockery of chivalric justice despite Horner’s dying confession and the king’s confidence that truth has prevailed. York’s more pointed comment—“Fellow, thank God and the good wine in thy master’s way” (2.3.98–99)—may be closer to the mark.6

  The most egregious abuse of judicial process comes with Gloucester’s hastily convened treason trial in Act 3 and marks the play’s turning point. Led by Suffolk and Margaret, the scheming nobles operate here under the pretense of protecting the king from “treason’s secret knife” (3.1.175), but the scene is as much a referendum on Henry’s power as it is on Gloucester’s. Predictably, the king abdicates his authority early in the proceedings, instructing the court to do “what to your wisdoms seemeth best” (196). Henry excuses his own failure to act by casting himself as an “unhelpful” victim along with his uncle, claiming that he cannot do Gloucester “good, / So mighty are his vowèd enemies” (219, 220–21). Henry then leaves the stage and the court to its bloody work. Seemingly unconstrained by law, the nobles agree at once that Gloucester must die, although the cardinal cynically reminds them that they lack “a color for his death. / ’Tis meet he be condemned by course of law” (238–39). They have “but trivial argument” (243), Suffolk admits, but, not to be hindered by a lack of evidence, the conspirators quickly find their way to a logic that bypasses legal procedure altogether. Sanctifying murder as a form of “meritorious” execution, they determine to kill Gloucester not for crimes he has done but for what he might do. “No, let him die in that he is a fox, / By nature proved an enemy to the flock” (272, 259–60), Suffolk resolves, as if this argument were legally or morally defensible.