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The war, the fall, the chaos...
Ralph Williams
Professor of English
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
It is the audacity of the project which first astonishes. That the young Shakespeare should conceive—at whatever point he did so—of making a sustained dramatic series of the shuttling violence which loomed the fabric of fourteenth and fifteenth-century English history was unprecedented, fresh. For structures of meaning he could draw on chronicle, on the codes of Romance and chivalry, on Roman histories and epic, and on the Biblical accounts of primal human history, Israel’s experience, and the life of Jesus.
These, variously deployed by the characters in the plays and by the dramatist, serve to suffuse the murky confusions of everyday life with the clarity of the abstract and the principled and to allow glimpses behind all apparent chaos—of the providential will of a just God.
So oriented, the plays at times take on the characteristics (and deploy the resources) of the miracle and morality plays, with their stark, unsupple rhetoric and their sharp oppositions—heaven and hell; God and the demonic; sin, prophecy and grace.
But in these plays, among his earliest, Shakespeare is already Shakespeare. For, though our gaze is sometimes directed upward to heaven, we sense in them as well the huge gravitational pull of history conceived as an immanent struggle for power, where desire for possession and dominance, sexual and political, is the source of all values and of whatever patterns human lives display. In such a situation, both the malevolent and the benevolent are essentially isolated, individual: Richard, as Duke of Gloucester, hits the keynote:
I had no father, I am like no father;
I have no brother, I am like no brother...
I am myself alone.
What we are given in these dramas, then, are pulsing images of history conceived either as a structure of grace, or, alternatively, as a tableau mourant, in which humans batten and die, often feeding on one another like monsters of the deep. The dramas, then, become the site of a necessary choice of meanings by which we may try to live and succeed, and for which we must take responsibility. The equipoise, if one considers these plays deeply, is almost perfect, the doubleness irresolvable through inference from facts given. Faced with one and then the other understanding, a viewer is likely to say of each, in the words of Lear’s Gloucester, “And that’s true too.”
Shakespeare presents his characters, never more clearly than here, confronting their choice (as we do ours) bearing history within them as well as seeing it before them. Henry VI inherits the role of Caesar, and would rather be Christ. He is, as we are, haunted by the enduring presence of the apparently past and seemingly departed. He is haunted by his deceased father, already a legend of greatness with which the young Henry could not compete, even had he wished just that style of greatness. He is haunted, too, by the figure of his grandfather, whose usurpation of the throne destabilizes Henry’s every attempt at secure authority. More: the highly motivated Margaret of Anjou supposes (1 Henry VI) that she is to marry a double of the sexually charged cavalier man she sees in Suffolk. She is wed instead to a devout Henry VI, who wishes to kiss, indeed, but only if it is to be done high-mindedly and holily. The wife of a King, but the mistress of her lover, she loses first the lover (2 Henry VI), whose severed head she cradles, though she loses forever the body she would embrace, then—to a violent death—her son (3 Henry VI), and finally her husband (3 Henry VI). It is the bearer of these memories that we must see and hear in the shrill, sybilline Margaret whom we meet in Richard III. Only when we see these plays as a series can we hear with understanding the haunting in that voice.
At the conclusion of Richard III, the last play in this tetralogy, a peace is declared, but it is not yet lived. The mood and mode are less assertive than optative; “That [peace] may long live here, God say, Amen.” God may indeed, say “Amen.” Shakespeare, however, leaves open the question as to whether the Elizabethan English, and we, his audience in any generation, born to our places and times and haunted by our own personal and social histories, will likewise say—and live—that final “Amen.”