Harris, Laurie Lanzen, and Mark W. Scott, eds. “Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3.” In Shakespearean Criticism: Excerpts from the Criticism of William Shakespeare’s Plays and Poetry from the First Published Appraisals to Current Evaluations, 3:11–164. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986.

  This volume presents significant passages from published criticism on the three parts of H6. The set of passages is introduced by a brief discussion of the “date,” “text,” and “sources,” followed by a longer discussion of the “critical history” of the plays. Each entry, beginning with Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1592) and ending with Marilyn French’s Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (1981), is prefaced with a brief historical overview that places the excerpted document in the context of responses to the play. Of the almost sixty entries, early commentary derives from Thomas Nashe (1592), John Crowne (1681), Gerard Langbaine (1691), and such eighteenth-century editors as Nicholas Rowe, Lewis Theobald, Edward Capell, Samuel Johnson, and Edmond Malone; nineteenth-century critics are represented by such figures as William Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hermann Ulrici, and Georg Gottfried Gervinus; entries from the twentieth century include excerpts from the writings of Carolyn Spurgeon, E. M. W. Tillyard, Hereward Price, Wolfgang Clemen, Muriel C. Bradbrook, Harold Goddard, David Bevington, Irving Ribner, Robert Ornstein, Michael Manheim, John Cox, and Larry Champion. A briefly annotated bibliography of fifty-five additional items concludes the section. A subsequent volume, edited by Michele Lee (2002), updates the criticism through the 1990s under such headings as “Character Study,” “Henry VI as Comedy,” “Playing with History,” and “Unity and Design” (63:113–218).

  Hodgdon, Barbara. “Enclosing Contention: 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI.” In The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History, pp. 44–99. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

  Combining performance criticism (mostly of RSC productions) with study of the play texts, Hodgdon explores “closural strategies” in the three parts of H6. She begins her commentary on Part 3 (pp. 68–76) by noting the connection between the last scene of 2H6 and the first of 3H6, a linkage closer than that between Parts 1 and 2. “Blurring distinctions between beginning and ending, [3H6] opens by stressing the mutability of both, querying its own discrete form.” Severely patterned alternations between Lancaster and York shape the play’s narrative strategy and serve as the mechanism “through which each broken oath, each betrayal, each instance of blood revenge breeds the next, as though ironically imitating the generative process.” The result is a “particularly subversive revenge comedy of succession . . . that recirculates and intensifies the festival inversions and transgressive family relations of the earlier plays. For [3H6] represents England’s civil war as a conflict between patrilineal and matrilineal power.” Shakespeare’s exploitation of the civil war along gender lines continues even after the battle of Towton, no longer the decisive marker of Yorkist victory it is in the source, Edward Hall’s Union. As Richard of Gloucester “relocates Joan’s witchcraft [from 1H6] in his mother’s womb [3H6 3.2.155–64], he absorbs some of Margaret’s . . . more potentially threatening attributes . . . [thereby becoming] her antithetical double.” In the penultimate scene, which enacts both the murder of King Henry and the “re-representation of [Richard’s] birth” (5.6.69–94), Richard repeats his earlier displacement of his deformities onto his mother; he also “subverts the myth of succession” (i.e., “The King is dead. Long live the King”) by beginning his erasure of Edward IV’s reign. This “perverse parody of generation and succession” continues in the final scene’s signals of comic closure, most notably the “generat[ion] of a new—and complete—family.” Margaret’s “monstrous female misrule” has been suppressed, but Richard’s Judas kiss (5.7.32–35) and “ironic gaze toward the future” qualify the generative promise of the newly established family unit and thus compromise the audience’s “absorption within this spectacle of comic closure.” Hodgdon concludes with a discussion of the “interrelations and variances” within closural sequences found in the productions of Peter Hall and John Barton (1963–64), Terry Hands (1977–78), Michael Bogdanov (1987–89), and Adrian Noble (1988–90) (pp. 76–99).

  Jones, Emrys. “3 Henry VI: Civil Swords.” In The Origins of Shakespeare, pp. 179–92. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

  Jones attributes the “slight imaginative malaise” afflicting 3H6 to its “living off [the] inherited capital” of Part 2. Nevertheless, he argues for greater artistry in the ordering of scenes, taken both individually and in sequence. Choosing not to disguise the disorderliness of the historical events found in his sources, Shakespeare puts on the stage an England without a king, thereby making disorder his theme. The author focuses on what he sees as 3H6’s bipartite structure, the division coming after Act 2. Warwick’s switching his allegiance from the House of York (Acts 1 and 2) to the House of Lancaster (Acts 3, 4, and 5) is a major sign of this division. With different ends in view, each part has its own emotional range and tempo. The intense savagery of the first part, with its two climactic scenes at Wakefield (1.4) and Towton (2.5), points up the barbarity of civil war and is marked by an acutely felt revenge ethic. The second part—where there are two crowned kings—is governed by the “giddying instability” of Fortune. Fittingly, the “turncoat Clarence” replaces the “butcher Clifford” as the typical figure of this later sequence. Not as moving as the first, the second part is “plotted so as to make the most of its ironical possibilities”: “kings come and go, now captive, now free,” until the recapture of Henry (4.8), which sets the stage for the business of Act 5: the diffusive, piecemeal destruction of the House of Lancaster (first Warwick, then Margaret and Prince Edward, and finally King Henry). Even Henry’s death hardly seems climactic, since he “has abdicated, if not from his throne, in effect from his trilogy, long before its inconclusive close.”

  Lee, Patricia-Ann. “Reflections of Power: Margaret of Anjou and the Dark Side of Queenship.” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986): 183–217.

  Lee compares Shakespeare’s depiction of Margaret of Anjou in 2 and 3H6 and R3 with depictions of the historical Margaret found in letters and other documentary records. The queen who appears in the plays as pitiless and cruel but also determined and vigorous shares much with her historical counterpart; the theatrical image, however, was “overlaid” with years of cumulative bias and myth that had already made Margaret “the symbol of a particular kind of female ruler and a pattern of negative feminine power.” Shakespeare’s “archetypal villainess”—the product of both his own artistic creativity and a tradition established by generations of propagandists and chroniclers—serves as a commentary on feminine rule. In the final pages of the essay, Lee discusses how the malignity, evil, and revenge ethic that Margaret reveals after the death of Suffolk in 2H6 intensify in Part 3, where she proceeds to “act the man[,] . . . becom[ing] truly manlike, but only by adopting the most debased and violent masculine traits.” The author singles out her behavior at Wakefield and her martial vigor elsewhere in the play to demonstrate the character’s violation of “right order,” the fierceness of her nature, and her lack of royal dignity. To have depicted such a negative view of queenship while a queen occupied the throne of England would seem to have been a risky endeavor on Shakespeare’s part; but because Elizabeth I had successfully “turn[ed] her femininity to positive purposes” in a careful construction of androgynous power, thereby reversing the dark images associated with female rule, Shakespeare’s depiction of Queen Margaret and her illegitimate queenship posed no practical threat to either Elizabeth or the playwright. (For a more positive reading of the character, see Levine, below.)

  Levine, Nina. “Ruling Women and the Politics of Gender in 2 and 3 Henry VI.” In Women’s Matters: Politics, Gender, and Nation in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, pp. 68–96. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998.

  While Shakespeare’s early histories (1, 2, and 3H6, R3, and John) rewrite the Tudor chronicle record so as to acknowledge the importance of women in ensuring patrilineal succession, Levine contends that they also “generate a critique of patrilineal inheritance and legitimacy” that speaks to the Elizabethan present in which the plays are “situated.” The author is especially interested in how the H6 trilogy uses political contexts—“both on- and offstage”—to frame and qualify negative stereotypes of women. In the section on 3H6 (pp. 87–96), Levine argues that unlike the treatment in his chronicle sources, Shakespeare’s depiction of the queen in three scenes (1.1, 1.4, and 5.4) interrogates “gendered attacks on women rulers and calls instead for a political ethos based on the nation’s welfare.” “Rehabilitated as a mother,” and no longer the adulterous queen of 2H6, the aggressive Margaret of 1.1 is not out to subvert male rule. That is York’s doing, as signaled by his presumptive occupation of the throne. On the contrary, her goal as brave warrior is to preserve the patrilineal inheritance of her son. The chief difference between her and the cross-dressed, martial Joan la Pucelle of 1H6 is that the Margaret of Part 3 “fights for, rather than against, England, while her aristocratic male opponents stand for rebellion, disorder, and the inversion of patriarchal ideals.” Although such a distinction “boldly refigures the gendered conflicts” informing the first two parts of the trilogy, “misogynistic stereotypes continue to erupt onstage,” most notably in the torment inflicted on York in 1.4, where Margaret’s role as mother “lends an ambivalence to her actions”: motherhood both “authorizes her aggression [against York] and . . . intensifies the horror of her taunts.” But even at Wakefield, Shakespeare places Margaret’s behavior within a broader political context—namely, York’s oath breach—thus allowing for an alternative reading of the episode. Finally, at the battle of Tewkesbury (5.4), where the queen’s martial rhetoric recalls Elizabeth I’s Armada speech before the troops at Tilbury in 1588, Margaret appears impressive, not unseemly. All three scenes invite the audience “to revise traditional assumptions about women, power, and the nation-state.” In the concluding “image of brother against brother [5.6.81] and uncle against nephew [5.7.32–35] . . . set against the figure of the heroic mother” at Tewkesbury, Levine finds an anticipation of both “the anxieties about the succession that will [become] prominent . . . in R3 and John, and also the role that women will play in these plays as defenders of the nation-state.”

  Liebler, Naomi Conn. “King of the Hill: Ritual and Play in the Shaping of 3 Henry VI.” In Shakespeare’s English Histories: Quest for Form and Genre, edited by John W. Velz, pp. 31–54. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996.

  Mindful of the dominance of ceremony and the playful forms it frequently assumes in Shakespeare’s two tetralogies (e.g., the rhetorical serve and return serve of the tennis ball insult in H5 1.2.254–310), Liebler reads 3H6 in light of “ritual and its parallel mode, the ludic,” with the intent of bringing sense to what some critics regard as a “mere welter of carnage.” Applying Johan Huizinga’s theory of the ludic to the play’s structure and scenes of violence, she demonstrates how Shakespeare used familiar forms of ritual, game, and play as structural and thematic elements, “sometimes as reciprocal metaphors and sometimes as antitheses,” to shape both the anarchy central to the narrative and the audience response to it. In 3H6, “the game is government, war, legitimacy, the totality of the play’s concerns.” Without one moment of political stability, Part 3 develops like a game in which “alternate control of the prize”—i.e., the crown, repetitively passed back and forth between Henry and Edward—“is the essential dynamic,” much like the children’s games Capture the Flag or King of the Hill, neither of which ends with the first victory and both of which last as long as the players are willing to play. The gamesmanship of the early scenes is “an inverse or reverse structure of adults behaving like children when children behave badly.” Such is the case in the “paper crown” episode (1.4), the “most powerful moment of formalized play” in Part 3. Whereas the chronicle accounts of Hall and Holinshed have Clifford killing York and placing a paper crown on his severed head, Shakespeare gives the crown business to Margaret, who cruelly “plays” with York in order to “carnivalize and debase” him. The real action of 3H6 is “not the uncrowning of the king, but the uncrowning of the crown[,] . . . emptied of . . . meaning and turned into a toy.” In Liebler’s reading, the “contextualization of ritual in play and of it as play” leaves the audience with “a picture of cultural and political implosion, collapsing in on itself with all of its accustomed structures” ultimately rendered meaningless.

  Martin, Randall. “Catilines and Machiavels: Reading Catholic Resistance in Henry VI, Part 3.” In Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, pp. 105–15. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

  In 3H6, two topical allusions may shed light on Shakespeare’s religious attitudes and his Catholic connections. Noting the classical references and choice of the word “Machiavel” in 3.2.190–95—the octavo True Tragedy has “Catiline”—Martin discusses verbal similarities between the two versions of the play and a 1572 pamphlet titled A Treatise of Treason Against Queen Elizabeth and the Crown of England by the Catholic polemicist John Leslie, bishop of Ross. (Leslie uses “Machiavel” and “Catiline” interchangeably as terms of abuse for two powerful members of Elizabeth’s inner circle, Sir Nicholas Bacon and William Cecil.) Contemporary accounts indicate that the anonymously published pamphlet was “exceptionally seditious, particularly in the context of the Jesuit missions and new government measures against recusants in the early 1580s.” It is likely that Leslie’s Treatise was among the books consulted by the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion during his 1581 visit to Houghton Tower in Lancashire, home to a prominent Catholic family. If Shakespeare can be identified as the “William Shakeshafte” who was commended by Alexander Houghton in his will of that same year, the probability of the future dramatist’s access to the Leslie document increases. A second, possibly stronger, Catholic association appears early in Act 5, when Somerville corrects Warwick’s assumption that Clarence is soon to arrive in Coventry (5.1.7–15), a location near Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon. Since no historical Somerville can be connected with the scene—a “personal memory-site” for the dramatist because of its several references to Warwickshire place-names—one can assume that the choice of name was deliberate, Shakespeare intending his audience to recall two Catholics from the area condemned as traitors: Thomas Somerville and his father-in-law, Edward Arden (a possible relation to Shakespeare’s mother), whose heads were placed on London Bridge in 1583. Their deaths caused an outcry among both Catholics and Protestants because the evidence against them appeared defective. The author views Shakespeare’s positive portrayal of “Somerville” (“locally well-informed” and prudent, in contrast to Warwick) as a response to the playwright’s recently disgraced Catholic relations. When taken together, the two allusions underscore Shakespeare’s “use of, and participation in, a range of Catholic oppositional discourses.”

  Martin, Randall. “The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and 3 Henry 6: Report and Revision.” Review of English Studies 53 (2002): 8–30.

  For much of the twentieth century, textual scholars considered certain pre-1623 quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays to be reports of the First Folio texts as reconstructed by actors from their memories of performance. Recent textual critics have challenged this assumption to argue that these quarto texts represent “earlier or alternative play-scripts” later revised by Shakespeare. With respect to the Folio 3H6 and the octavo True Tragedy (1595), the prevailing view has been that the latter falls under the category of a memorial reconstruction. Martin’s experience in editing the Oxford 3H6, however, led him to find “some heuristic value” in both “report and revision” theories as a way of explaining True Tragedy’s “wide range of anomalies and variants.” On the basis of his examination of the two texts, he concluded that True Tragedy “is an earlier and often conceptually different version of the play which Shakespeare later revised, but that its text was also memorially reported [as suggested by internal repetitions indicative of faulty memory] by players who originally performed it.” Variant passages, moreover, suggest that Shakespeare’s revision of True Tragedy “was associated with an interpretive shift away from Hall and towards Holinshed—a change that in wider terms accords with his evolving career as a playwright and with the English history plays in particular.”