Henry VI: Parts One, Two, and Three (Bantam Classic) - Softcover

Shakespeare, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553212850 ISBN 13: 9780553212853

Verlag: Bantam, 1988

Inhaltsangabe

Displaying the bold vision and growing skill of a young playwright, these are Shakespeare’s first three history plays, covering some sixty tumultuous years of English history. Their pageantry, violence, and stirring speeches excite audiences with action as well as character, and midway through the final play in this trilogy, a shocking, clever, inimitably evil new voice is heard—that of Richard of Gloucester, destined to become England’s most fearsome and hated ruler of all time, Richard III.

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William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, and his birth is traditionally celebrated on April 23. The facts of his life, known from surviving documents, are sparse. He was one of eight children born to John Shakespeare, a merchant of some standing in his community. William probably went to the King’s New School in Stratford, but he had no university education. In November 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna. She was born on May 26, 1583. Twins, a boy, Hamnet ( who would die at age eleven), and a girl, Judith, were born in 1585. By 1592 Shakespeare had gone to London working as an actor and already known as a playwright. A rival dramatist, Robert Greene, referred to him as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.” Shakespeare became a principal shareholder and playwright of the successful acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later under James I, called the King’s Men). In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men built and occupied the Globe Theater in Southwark near the Thames River. Here many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed by the most famous actors of his time, including Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, and Robert Armin. In addition to his 37 plays, Shakespeare had a hand in others, including Sir Thomas More and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and he wrote poems, including Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. His 154 sonnets were published, probably without his authorization, in 1609. In 1611 or 1612 he gave up his lodgings in London and devoted more and more time to retirement in Stratford, though he continued writing such plays as The Tempest and Henry VII until about 1613. He died on April 23 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. No collected edition of his plays was published during his life-time, but in 1623 two members of his acting company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, put together the great collection now called the First Folio.

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An exciting new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare with these features: Illustrated with photographs from New York Shakespeare Festival productions, vivid readable readable introductions for each play by noted scholar David Bevington, a lively personal foreword by Joseph Papp, an insightful essay on the play in performance, modern spelling and pronunciation, up-to-date annotated bibliographies, and convenient listing of key passages.

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new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare with these features: Illustrated with photographs from New York Shakespeare Festival productions, vivid readable readable introductions for each play by noted scholar David Bevington, a lively personal foreword by Joseph Papp, an insightful essay on the play in performance, modern spelling and pronunciation, up-to-date annotated bibliographies, and convenient listing of key passages.

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Part One

Introduction


Throughout much of the fifteenth century, England had suffered the ravages of civil war. From the long struggles between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists, the so-called Wars of the Roses, the country had emerged in 1485 shaken but united at last under the strong rule of the Tudors. To Elizabethans, this period of civil war was still a recent event that had tested and almost destroyed England’s nationhood. They were, moreover, still troubled by political and dynastic uncertainties of their own. Queen Elizabeth, granddaughter of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, was unmarried and aging, and her successor unchosen. Her Catholic enemies at home and abroad plotted a return to the ancient faith renounced by Henry VIII in his reformation of the church. Spain had attempted an invasion of England with the great Armada in 1588, perhaps two years before Shakespeare began writing his Henry VI plays. It was in such an era of crisis and patriotic excitement that the Henry VI plays first appeared. Indeed, they helped to establish the vogue of the English history play, which was to flourish throughout the 1590s. England’s civil wars could be studied and analyzed now, from a perspective of over one hundred years later, and perhaps could provide a key to the present time. At hand was a new edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1587, along with the earlier chronicle writings of Robert Fabyan, John Stow, and Richard Grafton, as well as Edward Hall’s Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Families of Lancaster and York, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of Martyrs, and A Mirror for Magistrates.

How had these wars begun? Elizabethans searched for an answer, not in economic or social terms, but in religious and moral ones. According to a traditional and government-sponsored explanation, reflected to a large extent (though with many contradictions) in the chronicles of Edward Hall, and familiar to Shakespeare whether he agreed with it or not, the Wars of the Roses were a manifestation of God’s wrath, a divine punishment inflicted on the English people for their wayward behavior. The people and their rulers had brought civil war on themselves by self-serving ambition, arrogance, and disloyalty. King Henry VI’s grandfather, Henry IV, had come to the throne in 1399 by deposing and then executing his own cousin, Richard II (a momentous event, to be portrayed by Shakespeare in a later history play). Henry VI was himself an infant when he succeeded to the throne in 1422, owing to the untimely death of his father, Henry V. Too young at first to rule and never blessed with his father’s ability to act decisively, Henry VI was utterly unable to halt the struggle for power that developed among members of his large and discordant family. Ultimately, his very title to the throne was challenged by his kinsman Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, who claimed to be rightful king by virtue of his descent from Henry IV’s uncle Lionel, Duke of Clarence. The Yorkist faction marched to battle against Henry VI’s Lancastrian faction (so named because for gen- erations the family had been possessors of the dukedom of Lancaster), and the war was on.

The providential view of these events was never wholly endorsed by the chroniclers and certainly not by Shakespeare. Edward Hall’s overall scheme is undeniably providential, and yet, as a historian, he presents a multiplicity of detail that cumulatively raises difficult issues of interpretation. At the same time, the providential view made good propaganda for the Tudor regime, and as such it gave widespread currency to the theory of God’s anger toward a rebellious people. The outcome of the war seemed to confirm this pattern: universal devastation and the deaths of those most responsible for the conflict led eventually, according to the theory, to appeasement of God’s anger and a restoration of order. Richard Plantagenet died in the struggle, as did Henry VI, Henry’s son Edward, and much of the English nobility. Richard’s son Edward survived to become Edward IV, but his manner of obtaining the throne was so manifestly offensive to Providence that (according to the theory) he suffered a retributive death at the hands of an angry God and was succeeded by his younger brother, Richard III. This last Yorkist ruler governed only two years, 1483–1485, and it was through Richard’s insane vengeance that God finally settled all his scores against the wayward English people. Having completed this purgation, God chose as his instrument of a new order Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, Henry VII. Although Henry’s return to England and defeat of Richard at the battle of Bosworth Field might outwardly resemble Henry IV’s seizure of power from Richard II, the difference was crucial to Tudor apologists. Richard III had to be seen, from the Tudor point of view, not as a flawed legitimate monarch, but as a mad usurper and tyrant; his defeat was not the disobedient act of one man but a rising up of the entire English nation at the prompting of divine command. Henry VII’s accession to power was officially viewed not as a precedent for further rebellion but as a manifestation of divine will without parallel in human history.

The essence of this providential view of events was that divine retribution and eventual reconciliation revealed themselves in the history of the war. The theory, of course, served the interests of the Tudor state and was in part a propaganda weapon calculatedly employed by the ruling class. Shakespeare’s commitment to it should not be taken for granted, and indeed a number of recent studies have expressed a profound skepticism toward the theory as the basis of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. Especially in his later tetralogy, or four-play series, from Richard II to Henry V, Shakespeare reveals considerably more interest in the clash of personalities than in patterns of divine retribu- tion. Shakespeare does not endorse the orthodox view that Bolingbroke’s seizure of the throne is a violation of divine purpose for which he and England must be humbled; instead, Shakespeare portrays the issues as many-sided and subject to varying interpretations.

Throughout his history plays, indeed, Shakespeare avoids expressing the Tudor view of recent history through didactic narrators or chorus figures who might seem to represent the point of view of the entire plays; instead, he puts this interpretation into the mouths of avowedly biased and self-interested characters whose motives and testimony the audience can then evaluate as it sees fit. In 1 Henry VI, for example, the most detailed exposition of the official historical view is given to Mortimer (2.5), whose interpretation, though given special authority by the fact that a dying man is speaking, is self-interestedly consistent with his own frustrated claim to the English throne. His nephew, Richard Plantagenet, who of course endorses the anti-Lancastrian logic of Mortimer’s speech, is portrayed as consumed with ambition for the crown. In Shakespeare’s depiction of the Lancastrian-Yorkist conflict, neither side maintains a consistent ideological position but, instead, shifts argument as required by the expediency of the moment. Although in his earlier tetralogy from 1 Henry VI to Richard III Shakespeare does sometimes allow his contending characters to hearken back to the deposition of Richard II in order to explain the misfortunes of England’s civil wars, those characters often speak from self- interest and interpret history to their own advantage.

The individual plays of this earlier tetralogy, if seen or read separately, do not consistently comfort the spectator or reader with an assurance that all is working out according to God’s plan. The events themselves, seen from the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bantam
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1988
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0553212850
• ISBN 13: 9780553212853
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 608
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar