Pearlman, E. “The Duke and the Beggar in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI.” Criticism 41 (1999): 309–21.

  Pearlman observes that the “innovative” scene in which a beggar’s “miracle” is exposed as a sham (2.1) warrants more scholarly interest than it has received. With its color, bustle, and humor, the St. Albans episode performs several functions: (1) it adds welcome tonal variety to a plot dominated by factious wrangling; (2) it reinforces themes relating to issues of perception and (as one of several dramatized conflicts between rich and poor) social class; and (3) it clarifies and deepens the character of Duke Humphrey. Even more significant, however, may be the scene’s theological implications for the period’s religious conflicts. Finding the story not in the chronicles of Edward Hall or Raphael Holinshed but in John Foxe’s polemical Acts and Monuments, Shakespeare would have recognized its relevance to contemporary debates on miracles (associated with the Catholic Church) that pitted the old faith against the new faith of the Church of England, which regarded miracles as “smack[ing] of pre-Reformation ignorance.” In his praise of the duke for trying “to reforme that which was amisse,” Foxe uses the non-neutral “reforme” as a clue “that at the heart of the episode is an implicit conflict between the old and the reformed religion.” But as Pearlman demonstrates, to read the encounter in the play as simply a case of “Protestant debunking of Catholic magic” is to miss its potential for evoking a more complicated response from its Elizabethan audience. In turning to Foxe for the story, Shakespeare would have come upon a tantalizingly brief mention of Foxe’s own sources: Thomas More and William Tyndale, two warring polemicists in the first decade of the English Reformation with diametrically opposed interpretations of the sham miracle. Whether or not Shakespeare traced the genesis of Foxe’s tale thoroughly, he certainly would have known that the story was subject to different readings and, consequently, of topical value. Shakespeare, of course, may simply have “appropriated the story of the duke and beggar for sheer delight in its craft. And if so colorful a conversation happened to carry doctrinal implications that raised hackles on both sides of the aisle, why then, so much the better.”

  Pendleton, Thomas A., ed. Henry VI: Critical Essays. Shakespeare Criticism. New York: Routledge, 2001.

  The volume’s fourteen original essays include two that focus solely on 2H6: Maurice Hunt’s “Climbing for Place in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI” (pp. 157–76) and M. Rick Smith’s “Henry VI, Part 2: Commodifying and Recommodifying the Past in Late-Medieval and Early-Modern England” (pp. 177–204). Hunt discusses the motif of social climbing in the play as it relates to political and social disorder and suggests that it “may amount to Shakespeare’s response to Marlowe’s latent intermittent admiration for the ‘overreacher.’ ” Focusing on Humphrey of Gloucester and Cade, Smith examines Shakespeare’s theatrical treatment of commodified historical narratives in the context of sixteenth-century cultural commercialization. Several essays deal in part with 2H6: Steven Urkowitz’s “Texts with Two Faces: Noticing Theatrical Revisions in Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3” (pp. 27–37), Harry Keyishian’s “The Progress of Revenge in the first Henriad” (pp. 67–77), Naomi C. Liebler and Lisa Scancella Shea’s “Shakespeare’s Queen Margaret: Unruly or Unruled?” (pp. 79–96), Nina da Vinci Nichols’s “The Paper Trail to the Throne” (pp. 97–112), Frances K. Barasch’s “Folk Magic in HVI, Parts 1 and 2: Two Scenes of Embedding” (pp. 113–25), Yoshio Arai’s essay on the H6 trilogy in Japan (pp. 57–66), and Irene Dash’s “Henry VI and the Art of Illustration” (pp. 253–71). The volume also contains several essays on performance: Thomas A. Pendleton’s “Talking with York: A Conversation with Steven Skybell” (Duke of York in Karin Coonrod’s production) (pp. 219–34), H. R. Coursen’s “Theme and Design in Recent Productions of Henry VI” (with the emphasis on Michael Kahn’s and Karin Coonrod’s revivals in 1996) (pp. 205–18), and Patricia Lennox’s “Henry VI: A Television History in Four Parts” (Peter Dews’s An Age of Kings in 1960, Peter Hall and John Barton’s Wars of the Roses in 1965, Jane Howell’s BBC revival in 1983, and Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington’s Wars of the Roses in 1988) (pp. 235–52). Pendleton’s introduction provides an overview of the scholarship, especially as it relates to issues of text, authorship, date, sequence, relationship of the plays as parts of a tetralogy, and critical assessment. Much attention is paid to the providentialist views of Tillyard (Shakespeare’s History Plays, 1944), who has served “both as stimulant and irritant” and thus “has had an enormous effect” on the criticism of the H6 trilogy. The past fifty years have seen scholarly interest move beyond questions of text and authorship; as a result, the three parts of H6 are now discussed and appreciated more than at any time since they were first performed.

  Rackin, Phyllis. “Historical Kings/Theatrical Clowns.” In Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles, pp. 201–47. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

  Rackin devotes the first half of chapter 5 to 2H6 (pp. 207–22), focusing specifically on the representation of Jack Cade’s rebellion. Noting that Renaissance historiography was both an aristocratic and masculine enterprise, she examines the “discursive position” commoners shared with women in the plays. “Silenced and marginalized” by the historiographic record, both groups in Shakespeare present “a constant challenge to the mystifications” of patriarchal history. For all the similarities, however, one major difference emerges in their respective stagings. Played by male actors, speaking lines by a male playwright, Shakespeare’s female characters appear as “instruments of male ventriloquism.” The commoners, on the other hand, played by actors occupying the same social position, and delivering lines written by a commoner, “spoke with their own voices and appeared in their own bodies.” Because of this material connection between role and actor, scenes like those involving Cade and his followers constituted a potential moment of danger for the patriarchal establishment: as the rebellion’s “licensed disorder of fictional theatrical representation . . . invade[d] the actual world of the audience,” the actors threatened to produce in real time what they were portraying in fictional time. Observing how similar scenes of rebellion in Sir Thomas More were censored, Rackin conjectures that 2H6’s uprising passed the censor’s test because it seems “designed to justify oppression”: “Dissident sentiments are first evoked, then discredited and demonized as sources of anxiety, and finally defused in comic ridicule and brutal comic violence.” Even though contained, the subversive energies of the popular voice in 2H6 are not completely effaced, Rackin contends. When Cade dies at the hands of Iden, the rebel’s last words point not to patriarchal order or the chivalric code of martial valor as the cause of his defeat but to the urgent materiality of his physical hunger.

  Riggs, David. “The Hero in History: A Reading of Henry VI.” In Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition, pp. 93–139. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

  Riggs’s analysis of the three parts of H6 within the context of exemplary history and heroic drama (as defined by Marlowe’s Tamburlaine) leads him to conclude that the trilogy is crucial to Shakespeare’s developing conception of the history play as a dialectic between heroic ideals and ethical and political realities. In his anti-Tillyardian reading, the H6 plays become “an extended meditation on the decline of heroic idealism between the Hundred Years War and the Yorkist accession.” What makes 2H6 (discussed on pp. 113–27) so innovative as a history play—and for many the best of the H6 trilogy—is not only more localized settings (the battlefields of France in Part 1 give way to the “public halls and inmost recesses of the English court”) but also an “elaboration of social details” and a variety of action. The play’s portrayal of a weak king, “flanked by a loyal counselor and a set of courtly ‘caterpillars’ ” and faced with open revolt from disaffected nobles, “marks the line of development that leads from” the exotic world of Tamburlaine and Selimus to such plays as Woodstock, Edward II, and R2—dramas of “ambition and disruption that anatomize the ambivalent status of the Elizabethan peerage.” With the murder of the judicious Gloucester (3.2), the play’s dynamic changes as Suffolk and York, “drastically reduced in stature” in the first half of the play, go on to enjoy in the final acts “a renewed vitality”: the former as “an idealized and gracious amorist,” the latter “as a visible embodiment of heroic authority.” By urging York’s claim to the throne on the basis of his natural right rather than his ancestry (5.1.5–9, 97–106), and by setting Cade’s revolt “within a continuous parody of the conventional formulas for heroic self-assertion,” Shakespeare reformulates the idiom and topics of Tamburlaine to create a new type of history play.

  Saccio, Peter. “Henry VI and Edward IV: The Rival Kings.” In Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama, pp. 115–55. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

  Having devoted an entire chapter to 1H6, Saccio turns to Parts 2 and 3 in chapter 6. The author discusses 2H6 under the headings “The Disorders of the 1440s” and “The Fortunes of the Duke of York,” reserving the final section, “Edward IV, 1461–1471,” for 3H6. Unlike the radical rearrangement of chronology found in Part 1, the second and third parts of the trilogy extensively exaggerate the historical record, especially with respect to the peasants’ rebellion (risings of the commons were exceptional) and the Wars of the Roses—really nothing more than “a skirmish in 1455 (first St. Albans), six battles in 1459–1461, and three . . . in 1469–1471.” To read Parts 2 and 3 is to see the period as one of ceaseless turbulence, with widespread devastation in the land, a vision of mid-fifteenth-century England “born largely of [Tudor] propaganda,” which Shakespeare “converts . . . into eloquence.” Among Shakespeare’s specific departures from his historical sources in 2H6, which covers the years 1445 to 1455, are the following: the rivalry between Eleanor of Cobham and Queen Margaret (good from a dramatic perspective but historically inaccurate, since Eleanor’s downfall occurred four years before Margaret arrived in England), the emphasis on Gloucester’s opponents in contriving to bring Eleanor down, the image of “good Duke Humphrey” (the historical figure was just as headstrong as his fellow magnates “and more pugnacious than most”), the active role of Cardinal Beaufort in hatching malign schemes (by the early 1440s, the Cardinal was no longer actively involved in government matters), the planned murder of Gloucester (who probably died of natural causes), the love affair between Suffolk and Margaret (a Shakespearean invention “based upon a mere hint in the Tudor chronicles”), the treatment of Cade’s following as a “rabblement” (the men were actually a “reasonably well-organized group of artisans and gentry who made the standard requests of most middle- and upper-class medieval rebels”), and the “sheer invention” of the future Richard III (only two years old in 1455) as a young man actively engaged in the first battle of St. Albans. Although Shakespeare tightens the narrative sequence of events, the only major unhistorical element in the first four acts involves “an overhasty anticipation of [York’s] career in the next decade.” Shakespeare’s compression of events leading up to the first battle of St. Albans, with which Part 2 concludes, results in the omission of several of York’s military/political reversals, his first protectorate, and King Henry’s insanity from August 1453 until December 1454.

  Wilson, Richard. “ ‘A Mingled Yarn’: Shakespeare and the Cloth Workers.” Literature and History 12 (1986): 164–80. (Reprinted in Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority, pp. 22–44 [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993]; also reprinted in Shakespeare’s History Plays [Longman Critical Readers], edited by R. J. C. Watt, pp. 40–60 [London: Longman-Pearson Education, 2002].)

  Wilson disputes the modern assessment of Shakespeare’s mob episodes as demonstrating universal imperatives of law and order. On the contrary, there is nothing in the Shakespeare canon that is “more entangled with the exigencies of [the playwright’s] own time and place” than his crowd scenes, which belong “to the period of the emergence of the city mob as a force to be reckoned with in English politics.” In Shakespeare’s treatment of the Cade uprising, a “blueprint” for the playwright’s subsequent crowd scenes, Wilson finds an instance of the “brazen manipulation of documentary records practised to buttress the regime.” Although Shakespeare found the actual 1450 rebellion in Edward Hall’s 1548 Union (a chronicle glorification of Tudor rule), he chose to darken the historical Cade even further. Hall’s Cade—a man who prohibited his followers from engaging in murder, robbery, or rape, and whose advisers were schoolmasters—is “metamorphosed” in 2H6 into a “cruel, barbaric lout, whose slogan is ‘kill and knock down.’ ” By casting Cade as the enemy of literacy in general and of the law in particular, Shakespeare used this early play to show his scorn for popular/oral culture and to identify himself with an urban elite, who saw authority as belonging solely to the literate. Instead of viewing Cade as a universal embodiment of anarchy, Wilson relates the defamation of the character to a specific confrontation between prison officials and feltmakers who had gathered in 1592 to stage a play outside Marshalsea Prison. At a time when the London clothing workers were fighting a “rear-guard action against long-term structural changes in their industry,” the author finds it no accident that Shakespeare (who, documents show, had a financial stake in these capitalist developments) switched the occupation of Cade’s rioters from medieval peasants to Renaissance artisans, with Cade a shearman and many of his lieutenants weavers. Shakespeare’s treatment of Cade and his followers reveals the playwright “not as the universal genius, but as a locus of contingent intentions and desires.” Neither the playwright nor the commercial theater for which he wrote was sympathetic to popular protest. In fact, the Cade scenes illustrate Shakespeare’s “revulsion” at the voice of the people.

  Shakespeare’s Language

  Abbott, E. A. A Shakespearian Grammar. New York: Haskell House, 1972.

  This compact reference book, first published in 1870, helps with many difficulties in Shakespeare’s language. It systematically accounts for a host of differences between Shakespeare’s usage and sentence structure and our own.

  Blake, Norman. Shakespeare’s Language: An Introduction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.

  This general introduction to Elizabethan English discusses various aspects of the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, offering possible meanings for hundreds of ambiguous constructions.

  Dobson, E. J. English Pronunciation, 1500–1700. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.

  This long and technical work includes chapters on spelling (and its reformation), phonetics, stressed vowels, and consonants in early modern English.

  Hope, Jonathan. Shakespeare’s Grammar. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003.

  Commissioned as a replacement for Abbott’s Shakespearian Grammar, Hope’s book is organized in terms of the two basic parts of speech, the noun and the verb. After extensive analysis of the noun phrase and the verb phrase come briefer discussions of subjects and agents, objects, complements, and adverbials.

  Houston, John. Shakespearean Sentences: A Study in Style and Syntax. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

  Houston studies Shakespeare’s stylistic choices, considering matters such as sentence length and the relative positions of subject, verb, and direct object. Examining plays throughout the canon in a roughly chronological, developmental order, he analyzes how sentence structure is used in setting tone, in characterization, and for other dramatic purposes.

  Onions, C. T. A Shakespeare Glossary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

  This revised edition updates Onions’s standard, selective glossary of words and phrases in Shakespeare’s plays that are now obsolete, archaic, or obscure.

  Robinson, Randal. Unlocking Shakespeare’s Language: Help for the Teacher and Student. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English and the ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills, 1989.

  Specifically designed for the high-school and undergraduate college teacher and student, Robinson’s book addresses the problems that most often hinder present-day readers of Shakespeare. Through work with his own students, Robinson found that many readers today are particularly puzzled by such stylistic characteristics as subject-verb inversion, interrupted structures, and compression. He shows how our own colloquial language contains comparable structures, and thus helps students recognize such structures when they find them in Shakespeare’s plays. This book supplies worksheets—with examples from major plays—to illuminate and remedy such problems as unusual sequences of words and the separation of related parts of sentences.

  Williams, Gordon. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. 3 vols. London: Athlone Press, 1994.

  Williams provides a comprehensive list of words to which Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and later Stuart writers gave sexual meanings. He supports his identification of these meanings by extensive quotations.

  Shakespeare’s Life

  Baldwin, T. W. William Shakspere’s Petty School. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1943.

  Baldwin here investigates the theory and practice of the petty school, the first level of education in Elizabethan England. He focuses on that educational system primarily as it is reflected in Shakespeare’s art.

  Baldwin, T. W. William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944.

  Baldwin attacks the view that Shakespeare was an uneducated genius—a view that had been dominant among Shakespeareans since the eighteenth century. Instead, Baldwin shows, the educational system of Shakespeare’s time would have given the playwright a strong background in the classics, and there is much in the plays that shows how Shakespeare benefited from such an education.