Shakespeare's First Tetralogy

It's simply not disputed that the second tetralogy (considered in terms of composition, not historical chronology) is stronger than the first, but the first -- Parts 1, 2, and 3 of Henry VI and Richard III -- is not without great merit.  The three parts of Henry VI -- of which Part 1 may actually have been composed last -- are sloppy, sprawling, and glorious.  They are, to my mind, among the most purely entertaining of Shakespeare's plays.  The winner at the end of Part 3 -- only a temporary winner, as the play makes quite clear -- is King Edward of the Yorkist faction, and upon his triumph he sums up the long list of the defeated quite well:

          What valiant foemen, like to autumn's corn
          Have we mown down in tops of all their pride!
          Three dukes of Somerset, threefold renowned
          ... Two Cliffords, as the father and the son;
          And two Northumberlands; two braver men
          Ne'er spurred their coursers at the trumpet's sound.  (5.7.3-9)

This is just a partial list, of course, of defeated Lancastrians -- just the names that have come in multiples.  There's also murdered King Henry and his murdered son, Prince Edward, who is not to be confused with Edward of York (now king), and who may or may not be King Henry's son, anyway, given good Queen Margaret's long-term love for the Duke of Suffolk (who is also dead now).  We have seen multiple Gloucesters, who stand out in sharpest contrast.  Take good but ill-fated Humphrey, brother of the late Henry V and one of the very few characters in this series who can simply, unequivocally be called good.  Then take, by contrast, that other Gloucester: crookback Dickie, who slashes his way to the throne in the last title in the tetralogy, the one that bears his name.

Richard III is often cited as Shakespeare's first great creation, and it is true that he bears a certain charisma.  More and more, he comes to dominate 3 Henry VI, making him inevitably the focus of its sequel.  Is Richard the first likeable slasher in the history of literature?  We know he's evil, but he's got such a charm about him in knowing who he is.  In an odd way, he is honest in his dishonesty, in the sense that he is true to himself.  And he is true to us, to his audience, speaking to us so frankly in his soliloquies, delightfully sharing with us his plans to murder anyone who comes between him and the crown, be they the bearers of his own family's blood or no.  We've seen killers, murderers, rapists, raving warriors before, but Richard might be our first true psychopath in all of literature.  He has no remorse, little feeling, nothing that resembles what we call conscience, until it comes to him in a dream near the very end.  He seems eerily, frighteningly real, nonetheless, frighteningly human.  He's not the bogeyman; rather, his humanity, as limited as it is, is on full display.  Richard is the medieval vice character, but with a depth that makes him more than just a prop or a walking idea.  In that respect, the invention of his character is utterly brilliant.  If Richard II was the poet-king, elegist for a vanquished sense of national unity, Richard III is the actor-king, one who can play any part that it takes to get to the top: the victim, the lover, the loving brother and uncle, the wounded soul, but above all the killer.  His seduction of Lady Anne is masterful, an achievement that would be worthy of even Iago's admiration, and I wonder if perhaps Richard isn't the slicker and more subtle of the two.  Richard's post-nightmare soliloquy in Act 5 is another achievement on Shakespeare's part.  Is Shakespeare telling us that there is not a man alive, no matter how vile, who cannot feel the stab of remorse?  Here we have Richard talking to himself, a fragmented conscience.  This final soliloquy is not directed at us, but rather at himself.  It's a remarkable innovation, with language that is blurred and elliptical to match his state of consciousness.  Richard is never more alive than in this penultimate moment.

In the final analysis, however, Richard is unequivocally evil, but other characters tend to fall into a grayer moral domain -- or at least they weave in and out between the audience's moral censure and the audience's sympathy.  We side first with one character, then with another.  Richard of York (father of Edward, his eldest son who becomes king, and of crookback Richard, younger son but nonetheless the father's namesake) is despicable at times, such as when he contributes to the plot against Humphrey of Gloucester in Part 2, but admirable at other times, and never more so than when he falls victim first to Queen Margaret's scorn in Part 2, and then to her blade.  As 'tis said multiple times in the series, the manner of his dying, the tears he sheds at the news of his youngest son Rutland's death, the wicked way that Queen Margaret and Lord Clifford rub -- literally -- Rutland's blood into him, all of that is enough to bring his own enemies, such as that Northumberland who is present, to tears. 

That is, it will bring any enemies who have human hearts to tears -- Clifford seems to have lost his own heart in revenging his father's death, and Margaret's heart may well be less than fully human.  Queen Margaret is one of Shakespeare's boldest, most audacious women, and famously the cause of the writer's first notoriety -- earning him a mention in Greene's Groats-worth of Wit (1592).  York, in his final moments of defiance before he is slain, effectively sums up her character: "tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" (1.4.140).  As a character who appears in four separate plays, Margaret is distinctive in the Shakespearean canon.  It's hard to find much sympathy for Margaret -- she borders on psychopathic herself -- but for the general fact that this life as queen was not one she chose for herself.  Had her husband made a stronger king, she might not have to go to such lengths she goes to in order to secure his throne and to secure a royal future for her son.  Unlike Queen Elizabeth, who made a battlefield appearance at Tilbury as a motivational gesture, Queen Margaret actually leads her army into battle, wielding a true sword.  One cannot help but be fascinated by her character, whether you can find any cause to admire her or no -- rather, it's simply the idea of it, that a woman could be so remorselessly bad -- and so bold.  In battle, she's more a man than her husband, whose effeminate nature brands him incompetent to rule, and who sits by haplessly, disinclined to join the fray. 

How could that paragon of virtue, King Henry V, have borne such a son, so unfit to govern that he loses the English territories in France, sees the nation divided to its very core, and ultimately loses his own kingship (multiple times)?  Hapless and hopeless, Henry himself makes clear to us throughout the plays that bear his name that he would make a better tender of sheep -- that is, real, live, bleating, wool-bearing sheep -- than he makes tender of the imperial flock.  His weakness is in no small part the cause of the whole bloody debacle here.  Yet he bears a meekness, a mildness, a gentleness of character that sometimes wins us over.  He is too good to be king, perhaps, but he would have made a right honest clergyman.  His death is positively Christ-like.  And he is, after all, the king, for those who still believe in that sort of thing.

The quality of writing throughout this tetralogy varies widely, and most scholars agree that Shakespeare was not likely to have been the sole author of 1 Henry VI, which is particularly inconsistent.  Whether Shakespeare revised someone else's work or collaborated, we cannot know.  I myself am not past the idea that Shakespeare, a newly minted writer at this point, simply had not mastered the art of consistency yet.  I have no doubt that Shakespeare could have written the weakly developed Act Five of 1 Henry VI.  Maybe his boss just said to him, "Hey, kid, I like the material, but this Joan of Arc chick, she's gotta be bad in the end.  Real bad, I mean.  For Chrissakes, you gotta give us a reason to burn her at the stake."  And sure enough, Shakespeare does just that.  We have a conjuration of demons and Joan's own damning self-indictments to assure audiences that she is a witch and no maid by far.  (She tells the English that they cannot burn her at the stake because she is pregnant, though with whose child she cannot offer an answer with any certainty.  They burn her anyway.  They are English, after all.)  What had been a compelling and complex character study deflates in seconds flat. 

Nevertheless, it's all quite entertaining, even Joan's conjuration of demons.  It could give The Tudors a run for its money.  Imagine -- a historical soap opera with the requisite HBO-ready "boobs and blood" that go along with the genre -- but with good dialogue.  I'd pay to see it.

Richard III is sometimes considered Shakespeare's first great work of literature.  True, it's ultimately the best of these plays, but it's also so clearly a continuation of them, almost a Part 4 to the Henry VI plays, which are not without their charms, primarily the fact that they are so brisk and entertaining, but also the sense that they convey a world that rings true politically and characters who generally possess a realistic depth.  Together, these plays constitute a dramatically thrilling but politically demoralizing chapter in British history, a time when the political system had failed and English identity itself was at stake.  True, in the end you can't remember the difference between the first Somerset and the second one, but the sense of movement still sweeps you along.  This is exciting stuff to read.  Whether he wrote it all or not, it's still Shakespeare.