Martin, Randall. “ ‘A woman’s generall: what should we feare?’: Queen Margaret Thatcherized in Recent Productions of 3H6.” In Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Performance, edited by Edward J. Esche, pp. 321–38. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000.

  Martin examines how five recent British stage and television productions of 3H6 have dealt with Queen Margaret; he focuses on Part 3 because of the introduction of a new aspect of the character—the role of mother—that “stands apart from the sexually defined continuum of her roles as French maiden-princess [1H6], ambitious and sorrowful lover [2H6], avenging she-wolf [3H6].” The directors and productions discussed are Terry Hands, RSC (1977); Jane Howell, BBC (1982); Adrian Noble, The Plantagenets, RSC (1988); Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington, The Wars of the Roses, English Shakespeare Company (1987–89); and Katie Mitchell, RSC (1994). Martin focuses on the cuts and abridgments made in speeches by and about Queen Margaret to argue that they marginalize the character, robbing her not only of stage time but also of complexity. Specifically, by omitting or abridging speeches related to Margaret’s “intimate and maternal self” (e.g., 1.1.222–33; 5.5.51–67), all five productions, in varying degrees, lost sight of Shakespeare’s “fashioning [of the queen] as fierce amazon and aggrieved mother.” The author relates this unwillingness to recognize Margaret’s “transgressive hybridity” to the fact that four of the five productions examined date from the 1980s and ’90s, and presented the queen “in ways distinctly recalling” Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” who served as British prime minister from 1979 to 1990. Portrayed in the media as a bellicose Amazon, Thatcher was abhorred by the theater world because of her cuts in funding for the arts. The “cultural domination” of such a female political figure “seems to have made it difficult for English theatre companies to imagine presenting Shakespeare’s warrior queen with any convincing degree of integrity as a mother, or even a woman.” In each production, the deletions or abridgments of passages exemplifying Margaret’s “multiple selves[,] . . . evolving subjectivity[,] . . . [and] heroically oriented role as militant mother” ultimately worked “against opening up Shakespeare’s text to plural interpretation or wider cultural debate.”

  Pearlman, E. “The Invention of Richard of Gloucester.” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 410–29.

  Pearlman traces Richard’s genesis through 2 and 3H6 to argue that the character is a work in progress who undergoes a radical metamorphosis in the major soliloquy that begins “Ay, Edward will use women honorably” (3H6 3.2.126). In the “shift from a descriptive to an etiological psychology,” Shakespeare fuses the naturalistic (Richard as conscious of the deformity that causes his villainy) and the symbolic (Richard as Vice) to reveal for the first time the “ironic, leering, self-conscious, and devilish” character familiar to audiences of R3. The transformation of Richard from the flat character introduced at the end of 2H6 (“little more than ugly and audacious”) to the reconceived figure of dissimulation and strategic resolve in 3.2 culminates a series of experiments with a “variety of tongues” echoing Seneca, Marlowe, Kyd, and the traditions of epic and sonnet (e.g., 3H6 1.2.22–34; 2.1.9–24, 79–89; and 2.3.14–22). Shakespeare amplifies the transformed Richard in subsequent scenes (notably his soliloquy in 5.6 following the murder of Henry, especially lines 81–84) so that the character is “fully realized” by the time he speaks the opening soliloquy of R3. A line from that speech—“I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks” (1.1.14)—is “the great discovery” of Richard’s soliloquy in 3H6 3.2. Pearlman concludes that Richard’s “transitional soliloquy” carries further implications for the play’s thematic shift from conflict between generations to conflict among brothers.

  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 the author’s 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. The opening sequence of 3H6 reveals an image of heroic character markedly different from that found in the first two parts of the trilogy. The confrontation of Westmorland, Northumberland, Young Clifford, and Warwick (1.1.90–104), so soon after the initial emphasis on slaughter (1.1.10–20), transforms what was the open, chivalric trial by combat in the original encounter between York and Old Clifford (2H6 5.2.19–30)—and, by extension, the entire first battle of St. Albans ex post facto—into a “personal tragedy involving the violation of family pieties.” Despite its obsession with the bloodlust of revenging sons, Part 3 does not “degenerate into a pseudopolitical revenge tragedy,” primarily because its major characters have double roles: as “member[s] of an aggrieved family and as . . . participants in a complex political struggle” that mirrors the early modern transition from the heroic ideals of a feudal world to the Tudor politics of a Machiavellian one (see, e.g., Northumberland’s advice to Young Clifford at 1.4.59–60: “It is war’s prize to take all vantages, / And ten to one is no impeach of valor”). Richard of Gloucester’s language in 3.2.188–97, like that of Tamburlaine, shows him emerging from a world of heroic tradition. Speaking as a Renaissance prince who evokes ancient myth and the language of epic, Richard turns the “very formulas of rhetorical invective to his own advantage, [to argue] that it is precisely those qualities which make a man despicable in the world of copybook humanism that best qualify him for an early crown.” The new “prince” of policy thus gives one last “ironic turn of the screw to the humanistic pursuit of fame and honor.” In 3H6, Shakespeare “pictures human history as the visible effect of uncontrolled revenge and cynical Machiavellian ambition, a final anarchic distortion of heroic ideals.” The choric figure of Henry VI offers a melancholy counterpoint to these themes.

  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.

  The author discusses 3H6 under the heading “Edward IV, 1461–1471” (pp. 138–55). Unlike Part 1, with its radical rearrangement of chronology, the third part of the trilogy is similar to Part 2 in its extensive exaggeration of the historical record, especially with respect to 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.” In 3H6, which covers the years 1455–71, Shakespeare “elides and omits” fewer historical facts than he does in the first two parts of the trilogy. When he does omit and compress, it is usually for dramatic effect: e.g., the omission of the battle at Mortimer’s Cross (saving the meteorological event of the three suns [2.1.25–32]) and the reporting of the second battle of St. Albans allow the emphasis to fall on the more significant battle of Towton; the focus on Edward IV’s marriage to Lady Grey at the expense of foreign policy disputes as the sole reason for the gradual estrangement between Edward and Warwick streamlines the action by avoiding unnecessary and, from a dramatic perspective, tedious detail. Some changes seem intended to increase the pathos of a scene (e.g., Rutland is made a child rather than the seventeen-year-old soldier he actually was; and Prince Edward, who died in battle, is brutally stabbed by the Yorkist brothers). The most significant departure from the sources, however, has to do with the “sheer invention” of the future Richard III (only two years old in 1455) as a young man actively engaged in pursuing revenge and his own ambitions. Most historians reject the idea that he murdered Henry VI, claiming instead that the order was probably given by Edward IV, with Richard, as constable of England, having the responsibility to see that it was carried out.

  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.

  Beier, A. L., and Roger Finlay, eds. London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis. New York: Longman, 1986.

  Focusing on the economic and social history of early modern London, these collected essays probe aspects of metropolitan life, including “Population and Disease,” “Commerce and Manufacture,” and “Society and Change.”

  Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.

  Analyzing in great detail the scant historical data, Chambers’s complex, scholarly study considers the nature of the texts in which Shakespeare’s work is preserved.

  Cressy, David. Education in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Edward Arnold, 1975.

  This volume collects sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and early eighteenth-century documents detailing aspects of formal education in England, such as the curriculum, the control and organization of education, and the education of women.

  Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010.

  This biography, first published in 2001 under the title Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life, sets out to look into the documents from Shakespeare’s personal life—especially legal and financial records—and it finds there a man very different from the one portrayed in more traditional biographies. He is “ungentle” in being born to a lower social class and in being a bit ruthless and more than a bit stingy. As the author notes, “three topics were formerly taboo both in polite society and in Shakespearean biography: social class, sex and money. I have been indelicate enough to give a good deal of attention to all three.” She examines “Shakespeare’s uphill struggle to achieve, or purchase, ‘gentle’ status.” She finds that “Shakespeare was strongly interested in intense relationships with well-born young men.” And she shows that he was “reluctant to divert much, if any, of his considerable wealth towards charitable, neighbourly, or altruistic ends.” She insists that his plays and poems are “great, and enduring,” and that it is in them “that the best of him is to be found.”

  Dutton, Richard. William Shakespeare: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

  Not a biography in the traditional sense, Dutton’s very readable work nevertheless “follows the contours of Shakespeare’s life” as it examines Shakespeare’s career as playwright and poet, with consideration of his patrons, theatrical associations, and audience.

  Honan, Park. Shakespeare: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

  Honan’s accessible biography focuses on the various contexts of Shakespeare’s life—physical, social, political, and cultural—to place the dramatist within a lucidly described world. The biography includes detailed examinations of, for example, Stratford schooling, theatrical politics of 1590s London, and the careers of Shakespeare’s associates. The author draws on a wealth of established knowledge and on interesting new research into local records and documents; he also engages in speculation about, for example, the possibilities that Shakespeare was a tutor in a Catholic household in the north of England in the 1580s and that he acted particular roles in his own plays, areas that reflect new, but unproven and debatable, data—though Honan is usually careful to note where a particular narrative “has not been capable of proof or disproof.”

  Potter, Lois. The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

  This critical biography of Shakespeare takes the playwright from cradle to grave, paying primary attention to his literary and theatrical milieu. The chapters “follow a chronological sequence,” each focusing on a handful of years in the playwright’s life. In the chapters that cover his playwriting years (5–17), each chapter focuses on events in Stratford-upon-Avon and in London (especially in the commercial theaters) while giving equal space to discussions of the plays and/or poems Shakespeare wrote during those years. Filled with information from Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical worlds, the biography also shares frequent insights into how modern productions of a given play can shed light on the play, especially in scenes that Shakespeare’s text presents ambiguously.

  Schoenbaum, S. William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

  Schoenbaum’s evidence-based biography of Shakespeare is a compact version of his magisterial folio-size Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Schoenbaum structures his readable “compact” narrative around the documents that still exist which chronicle Shakespeare’s familial, theatrical, legal, and financial existence. These documents, along with those discovered since the 1970s, form the basis of almost all Shakespeare biographies written since Schoenbaum’s books appeared.

  Shakespeare’s Theater

  Bentley, G. E. The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

  Bentley readably sets forth a wealth of evidence about performance in Shakespeare’s time, with special attention to the relations between player and company, and the business of casting, managing, and touring.

  Berry, Herbert. Shakespeare’s Playhouses. New York: AMS Press, 1987.

  Berry’s six essays collected here discuss (with illustrations) varying aspects of the four playhouses in which Shakespeare had a financial stake: the Theatre in Shoreditch, the Blackfriars, and the first and second Globe.

  Berry, Herbert, William Ingram, and Glynne Wickham, eds. English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

  Wickham presents the government documents designed to control professional players, their plays, and playing places. Ingram handles the professional actors, giving as representative a life of the actor Augustine Phillips, and discussing, among other topics, patrons, acting companies, costumes, props, playbooks, provincial playing, and child actors. Berry treats the twenty-three different London playhouses from 1560 to 1660 for which there are records, including four inns.