Kean stands like a tower. He is "all power, passion, self-will." His insinuations flow from his lips as "musical as is Apollo's lute." It is impossible to point out any peculiar and little felicities, where the whole piece of acting is of no mingled web. If we were to single a favourite part, we should chuse [i.e. choose] that in which he parts with his son, Young Rutland, just before the battle. It was pathetic to oppression. Our hearts swelled with the feeling of tears, which is a deeper feeling than the starting of them in the eye ... His death was very great ... The bodily functions wither up, and the mental faculties hold out, till they crack. It is an extinguishment, not a decay. The hand is agonized with death; the lip trembles, with the last breath, as we see the autumn leaf thrill in the cold wind of evening. The very eye-lid dies.7
There was little in the other performances to remark upon, however, and the play failed to thrive as a star vehicle when Richard III offered far richer opportunities.
The plays appeared individually in their first outings at Stratford-upon-Avon, finally allowing each to be evaluated on its own terms. Oswald Tearle produced Part I in 1889, in a heavily cut version that excelled in its historical pageantry and magnificent settings. Most notable was the reluctance to turn Joan into a villain:
By a little clever manipulation of the text, [she] is presented not as the designing adventuress who attempts to save her life at the expense of her fair fame, that Shakespeare drew, but the noble, inspired being that we all prefer to think she was.8
Most praise was reserved for Tearle, whose Talbot "realised the grand old battle hero of both Shakespeare and history."9 A decade later, F. R. Benson mounted Part II in isolation, taking the part of Cardinal Beaufort, which allowed him a moving death scene. The text was followed reasonably closely and included the gruesome spectacle of bodies on poles for the rabble scenes. Oscar Asche quickly established Jack Cade as the standout role of this play:
The London street scenes were wonderfully effective, and in Mr. Asche Jack Cade had an appropriate exponent, a burly rebel of independent mind, whose rude but persuasive eloquence swayed the crowd readily.10
Also noted were Miss Robertson as the Duchess of Gloucester, who was particularly affecting in her scene of penance, and Mrs. Benson as an imperious and chafing Margaret. In the early years of the play at Stratford, this became the most revived part of the trilogy, appearing again in 1901 with a selection of other history plays. This time the discovery of Humphrey's murder stood out, and Mr. Weir's Apprentice was particularly praised. The variety of incident in the play worked both for and against the play's reputation, entertaining audiences while diminishing the play in comparison to more "significant" histories such as Richard II and Henry V.
In 1906, Benson became the first modern producer to stage all three parts of the trilogy, taking the role of Talbot himself in Part I. Part III, staged for the first time at Stratford and completing the Memorial Theatre's ambition to stage all of Shakespeare's plays, took place on a stage with fixed scenery and continuous action. The strongest scene was York's capture and torture at the hands of Margaret, for which Clarence Derwent's "dignity and patience left nothing to be desired."11 There were some questionable omissions, such as the scene of the French court, which makes sense of Warwick's change of allegiance, and although Benson himself took the role of Richard in Part II and Part III, he rearranged the ending for the purposes of closure, bringing on the young Prince Edward to end the play on an optimistic note. While the production was praised, it was not revived, and after one further performance of Benson's Part II in 1909, the plays did not return to Stratford until after the founding of the modern RSC.
Perhaps because of the particular association of these plays with ideas of "Englishness," and no doubt in part because of the costs of running a trilogy, the Henry VI plays have one of the sparsest international histories of the whole Shakespeare canon. Barring some festival performances in the US and Canada, the plays have struggled to find the same broad audience accorded the Richard plays and the Henry IV-V cycle. Even in the UK, perhaps as a result of war-weariness, the few productions in the first half of the century failed to make an impression, though Rutter and Hampton-Reeves note that Robert Atkins' production for the Old Vic in 1923 was the first to make a new trilogy out of a two-part Henry VI followed by Richard III. Atkins' "most significant revision was to do not with war but with gender, for he rewrote Joan's part to make her more sympathetic; in his own words, he 'thought fit to rob St Joan of Arc of all unpleasant lines.' "12 This was in line with George Bernard Shaw's feelings: in his St. Joan of the same year he attempted to answer Shakespeare by recasting Joan as a hero and Warwick as a calculating politician.
The connection between the trilogy and national pride was emphasized by the timing of the next major production, directed by Barry Jackson at Birmingham Repertory Theatre, to coincide with the 1951 Festival of Britain. Opening with Part II, and expanding to include the other two parts by 1953, Jackson's production "traded on the irresolution and fracture of a country traumatised by war and victimised by the appalling destructiveness of power politics."13 Jackson emphasized the carnivalesque elements, including a show-stopping turn by Kenneth Williams as a vaudevillian Smith the Weaver in Part II. Much was made of Suffolk, with Richard Pasco playing up the character's role as a substitute king, and John Arnott played an ambitious but noble York.
While the Royal Shakespeare Company dominated the play's performance history in the second half of the twentieth century, they did occasionally surface elsewhere. Stuart Vaughan directed a two-part The Chronicles of Henry VI in repertory with Richard III for the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1970, stressing the action and spectacle, but largely failing to give the characters color. Foster Hirsch praised "Jack Ryland's energetic, crafty Suffolk [who] provided the right contrast to the withdrawn King" and, once again, it was the character of York who provided the strongest through-line for the play.14 The growing fascination with the later parts of the trilogy meant that reviewers were beginning to pay less attention to Humphrey and Winchester, described here as respectively "bluff" and "unctuous" but peripheral, to the more interesting dynamics governing the later wars.15
In 1975-77, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival staged the three parts in succession but as individual plays without cross-casting. Alan C. Dessen reviewed all three, and was particularly disappointed by the decision to provide closure to Part II by ending it with the parley between Henry and York from the opening of Part III: "By ending the production with the acquiescence of Henry to Richard, [director Jerry] Turner missed completely the open-ended horror of Shakespeare's Part Two."16 Director Will Huddleston prioritized a declamatory style for Part I, allowing the formal rhymed couplets between the Talbots to emerge as a high point, while Turner's Part II "exploited every opportunity for spectacle, violence, and horror, presenting us with elaborate dumb shows, stirring stage combats, eerie spirits, life-like severed heads (trailing bits of esophagus), swirling mob scenes, and a Suffolk beheaded on stage."17 Pat Patton directed Part III with more attention to character, with an emotional Henry and a polished Edward IV. However, "as figure after figure was swept aside, more room was left for the daemonic energy of Michael Santo's aggressive yet controlled Richard of Gloucester," indicating the primary value of the latter parts of the trilogy was still seen to be the opportunity to glimpse the future tyrant.18
The 1980s saw two important reimaginings of the plays that finally brought them to a much wider audience. In 1983, Jane Howell directed the trilogy, along with Richard III, in full-text productions for the BBC/Time Life television series. Widely regarded as the best of the series, as well as the least conventional, Howell's approach was to assemble an ensemble cast in a black studio space, with a fixed set of a large-scale children's adventure playground. The trilogy begins with a light touch, including Humphrey and Winchester riding to meet one another on pantomime horses and the French running comically on-and offstage, arguing for the childishness of the squabbles. The initial
rose-cutting begins in a spirit of good humor, Somerset and York joking before the more serious dispute begins. As the trilogy continues, however, the tone grows gradually darker. A standout sequence sees the normally cut John Fastolfe making his escape through the carnage, winking and gasping at the camera as bloodied bodies fall around him. Across the later parts, the playground falls into disrepair, deaths become bloodier (notably that of Warwick in Part III, played movingly in close-up), and a feeling of weariness and disillusion sets in as Ron Cook's excellent, diminutive Richard of Gloucester becomes more prominent. The decline continues into Richard III, culminating in the famous closing image of Richard's mangled body being laid on top of a pile of bloody corpses played by the rest of the ensemble. Doubling is used intelligently throughout to draw links--most notably, Trevor Peacock's heroic Talbot becomes the jaded Jack Cade.
From 1986 to 1989, the English Shakespeare Company toured its seven-part The Wars of the Roses under the direction of Michael Bogdanov. The Henry VI trilogy was split across two plays, House of Lancaster and House of York, the first concluding with the death of Suffolk and the second beginning with the Cade rebellion. In House of York, special prominence was given to the Father/Son scene, used to close the first half, and the second half of this play was devoted to the rise of Richard. The production design careered through early twentieth-century history, from the Edwardian era through both world wars, emphasizing the timelessness of the civil broils. Within the context of the seven-play cycle, reviewers responded to the state-of-thenation commentary:
Mr. Bogdanov's success lies in giving the action a specific context: the original quarrel between the two houses develops between boozed, black-tied figures emerging from a good Temple dinner. Jack Cade becomes a National Front populist draping himself in the Union Jack and addressing a pathetic crowd straight out of David Edgar's Destiny and Edward IV makes a clumsy pass at the widowed Lady Grey to the accompaniment of tinkling cocktail-party music.19
In 2001, playing in competition with Michael Boyd's revival for the RSC, Edward Hall's all-male company Propeller toured the UK with a two-part adaptation of the trilogy entitled Rose Rage. The irreverent title clued up the focus on the visual fascination with violence, drawing on schlock horror to offer a grimly humorous version of the play:
We are in the abattoir. The hooks and trusses await the carcasses, rubber gloves are at the ready. The cast are fully gowned and masked. There is the sound of knives being sharpened. Be in no doubt--the slaughter is about to begin ... The violence is both precise and distanced, scary and macabre. There is a high body count, but Hall applies a grisly comic touch. Every murder is played out in graphic detail but the bodies receive no blows or cuts. Instead animal entrails are sliced and gored, giant cabbages axed and cleaved. Soon a faint, sickening smell of offal pervades the theatre. It is hard to look at what is happening on stage, harder still to avert your eyes.20
In a more cynical century, Hall's blackly comic treatment pointed to the futility and cruelty of the almost casual violence.
The critical and popular success of the RSC's 2006-08 Histories Cycle served to bring the plays to a much wider audience, and increasingly small companies are willing to take the risk of staging individual parts. The Young Rep at Birmingham Repertory Theatre staged a surprisingly sophisticated version of Henry VI Part III in 2008 which drew heavily on the RSC productions but found its own identity, particularly in contrasting a strong and frustrated Margaret with a weak and indecisive Henry, and in foregrounding Clifford and Warwick as the dominant movers in battle. In May 2011, Henry VI Part I finally returned to its original home in the first in-house production at the ruins of the Rose on Bankside. Performed in the massive cavern that houses the submerged remains of the original theater, audiences watched from a viewing platform as soldiers clashed swords in slow-motion in the shadows and Joan strode into the center of a lake to be consumed by smoke and orange light. This evocative production, with a particularly strong performance from Ben Higgins' grizzled Talbot and a compelling conflict between Oliver Lavery's moustache-twirling Gloucester and Morgan Thomas' dignified Winchester, made a powerful case for the play's strength as an independent piece, evoking the spirit of the old theater in order to make a fresh case for the play in the twenty-first century.
AT THE RSC
Three Plays Become One
In its Summer 2000 programme, the Royal Shakespeare Company announced the staging of Shakespeare's two tetralogies as a cycle called This England. The programme made a distinctive break with the past by conceding that the plays were "originally conceived by Shakespeare at different times and written in non-chronological order," but, in order to preserve the integrity of the history play cycle, the programme went on to argue that the separate plays together "form a collage of one man's insight into England's history."21
Both Peter Hall in 1963 and Adrian Noble in 1988 had the three parts of Henry VI edited and rewritten into two plays entitled Henry VI and Edward IV, and performed as part of a trilogy with Richard III. The 1963 script written by John Barton was called The Wars of the Roses and the 1988 version, originally adapted by Chris Wood but worked on by the acting company, was known as The Plantagenets. Partly to do with finances and the box office bankability of the Henry VI plays, and partly so that the entire cycle could be watched in one day as a unique experience for the audience, adaptation was considered essential. Peter Hall also felt that the plays, if performed in an unedited state, would lose their focus for a modern audience.
In many ways, Hall opened the door for directors to stage the plays in a more complete form, by reinstating these neglected works. At the time many critics regretted the fact that Hall and Barton had drastically cut and reworked the text. J. C. Trewin commented: "I regret only that we do not have the plays in full. I cannot really agree with Mr Hall and Mr Barton that, if the trilogy were unadapted, a modern audience would lose the force of its political and human meaning."22
The problem of maintaining focus and continuity was solved by rewriting these three very different plays, but it has remained an important issue for all the directors who produced the Henrys as part of a sequence. As a reaction against the Hall/Barton approach, Terry Hands in 1978 presented the plays virtually uncut, and Michael Boyd's staging in 2000 did the same to great critical acclaim: "the result is an awesome day-long event in which the actors' commitment is matched by that of the audience":23
this view of history, coloured, distorted and even invented--does make a living experience out of what would otherwise be a colossal dump of dates, battles and rulers. And seeing this living experience through at one sitting does throw an extra dimension of time over even the most superficially drawn characters. For every hour that we watch them they live through a decade and we leave them our feelings bruised by their rude experience of life.24
In 2006, this production was reworked for the Complete Works Festival and opened the Courtyard Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company's temporary home during the redevelopment of the main Stratford theaters. Michael Boyd had particularly wanted to direct all eight plays of the two historical tetralogies himself. He believed that in this later revival, the ensemble company "found more depth of characterisation" and "had time to be more daring."25
These plays which had been rarely performed since Shakespeare's day found a sympathetic audience in postwar Britain: disillusioned, cynical about the nature of men in power and the devastating effect that individual decisions can have on the lives of many, "the plays took on new meanings for a generation facing the aftermath of world war on the one hand, and the failure of the great early twentieth-century ideologies on the other."26
In his introduction to the text of his adaptation with John Barton, The Wars of the Roses, Peter Hall stated:
I realised that the mechanism of power had not changed in centuries. We also were in the middle of a blood-soaked century. I was convinced that a presentation of one of the bloodiest and most hypocritical periods in history would teach many le
ssons to the present.27
The contemporary relevance of the plays has prompted passionate and political readings. As a direct response to her experience of visiting the war-torn country of the former Yugoslavia, director Katie Mitchell uniquely staged Henry VI Part III on its own at The Other Place in 1994, retitling it Henry VI: Battle for the Throne. Plunging the audience straight into Part III of the trilogy, and therefore straight into the middle of a war, had the desired effect. Mitchell felt:
she had a moral responsibility to respond to what she'd seen. Henry VI does this brilliantly: it isn't telling us anything new about the civil war because there is nothing new to tell. Power and greed, fear and jealousy. Same problems, different century.28
In order to belittle the goal for which so many are sacrificed, the emblems of kingship were completely deglamorized:
The throne the characters spend the evening battling to obtain is a squat, chunky lump, more desirable than the wooden chairs beside it only because it has arms and some rudimentary carving at the top. It goes very well with the crown, which is a flimsy band of metal with a tiny cross pathetically protruding from its front, and the palace carpeting, which consists of dead leaves. Why the rough feel? ... Mitchell is clearly telling us what she thinks of the Wars of the Roses. Rough theatre suits rough people doing rough things in rough times.29