Events on the ground ... make it clear that, as the chorus in Henry V said, England is bleeding ... some people are garrotted or suffocated. The purple-faced ghost of Richard Cordery's Gloucester is one of several men Boyd asks to wander the stage after their deaths. But what these spooks are watching is an abattoir England in which character after character is stabbed or sliced. An innocent victim of the brutish, vivid recreation of the Cade rebellion gets his liver cut out. Aidan McArdle's Crookback cheerfully tosses aside a dying foe's tongue. His murder of Henry VI leaves so much blood on the stage that the cast must virtually wade in it for its curtain-call.59
Of the 2006 revival Benedict Nightingale claimed, "Boyd's revival strikes me as less gory than the version he staged in 2000." Despite this, he concludes "yet we end up with Crookback and his brother ripping out a foe's tongue, eye and penis."60 In 2006 Richard of Gloucester was played by Jonathan Slinger--a "mesmerisingly horrible young Crookback Richard."61
"Foule Fiend" and the "She-Wolf" of France
Shakespeare feels compelled, in this trilogy, to personify that evil in the form of two aggressive warrior women, the French soldier-sorceress Joan la Pucelle (Joan of Arc), and Henry's ferocious and sexually powerful queen, Margaret. This gives the plays a horrifying and yet oddly recognisable gender politics, as teams of men surge across the stage roaring their contempt for "effeminate peace," and yet vent their implacable hatred on women who dare to dabble in war.62
Political crisis in Shakespeare's work is deeply imbedded in the breakdown of the family. The family was seen as a microcosm of the state in both literature and in reality. Those who stepped outside the social norms would be punished for their deviant behavior--especially women who assumed a dominant role over their husbands. Henry VI includes a number of women whose "unnatural" behavior symbolizes the chaos and unnatural order of the state.
Our perception of Joan la Pucelle/Joan of Arc today is drastically at odds with the portrayal of the witch in Shakespeare's plays. For the modern actor playing the part, ambiguity as to whether Joan's inspiration is either divine or demonic is something which can add an extra dimension to an otherwise two-dimensional character. In 1977, Charlotte Cornwell's performance divided critics, but incorporated the various elements of this legendary character:
The French declare her "France's saint," the English call her a witch, and her performance underscores these ambiguities. She takes a child's delight in seeing through the Dauphin's attempted deception, but when she begins to laugh, the laughter is a disturbing cackle. We become aware that she is clutching a fetish that hangs from her neck. She is alternately seductress, fishwife, and Amazon, beating first the Dauphin and then Talbot into the ground, enticing Burgundy back to the French, throwing her boots and berating the soldiers for their slackness. But when the French hold out a torch of victory before her, she starts back, terrified. She has disdained to kill Talbot, telling him "Thy hour is not yet come," but when that death finally arrives, she spends a long minute alone on stage, staring at the body, aware that her own usefulness to France is exhausted and that her hour has come.63
Fiona Bell in 2000 played Joan as a young woman who had found power in the supernatural to escape an abusive father, and to overcome prejudices of class. This, however, was only a veneer of strength that failed her when she was faced with her own inadequacies. The turning point for this Joan was Act 4 Scene 7 when Sir William Lucy pays tribute to the dead Talbot and his son:
3. Terry Hands' 1977 production of Part I, with Charlotte Cornwell as Joan la Pucelle: "The French declare her 'France's saint,' the English call her a witch, and her performance underscores these ambiguities."
I ended up laughing at Lucy throughout the whole scene. He refuses to give in to her and continues to venerate the dead soldier, and they end up trying to outdo each other, her laughter becoming more and more deranged ... [Talbot] has been brave and courageous, unquestioningly performing his duties to the crown. He is the antithesis of Joan ... she will never achieve the status she needs. She is put face to face with pure nobility, who can see her for what she is, or for what she feels herself to be. I think it crushes her, and the only way she can hide her fear is to laugh at Lucy ... she knows that the end is in sight ... 64
Margaret appears after Joan's death as if her spirit has been resurrected to plague the English throne. She possesses many of Joan's qualities: as an object of desire, an instrument for ambitious lords, as the warrior queen, the "she-wolf" of France. The parallels with Joan and with witchcraft were obvious to the Elizabethan playgoer. In Michael Boyd's staging the link between Joan and Margaret was taken further by having the same actor play both parts--Fiona Bell in 2000, Katy Stephens in 2006:
Fiona Bell begins the trilogy as a vigorous Joan of Arc, a figure Shakespeare notoriously saw as a Satanic witch and cross-dressing fiend, but spends most of it as a Margaret beneath whose pale, demure looks lie arrogance, fierce ambition and sadistic delight in her enemies' setbacks.65
Katy Stephens was described as "beautiful and formidable as Joan la Pucelle"66 and "fiercely Amazonian"67 as Queen Margaret. The "dual" casting of Joan and Margaret had a deliberate effect in emphasizing the nature of Margaret's character, as well as providing a through-line in the three plays. Margaret descended in a picture frame at the end of Part I just after Joan had been burned at the stake. Bell explained:
In this production Joan informed Margaret throughout. [Boyd] had transposed two scenes (Part I, Act 5, Scenes 3 and 4), which resulted in Margaret's first entrance coming directly on the heels of Joan's burning. I would appear, literally in a puff of smoke, as though emerging from the embers, a new, more advanced model of Joan. The metaphysical world is ever present in these plays ... It was the impression that this idea gave ... rather than the actuality, that was important. It added another dimension to Margaret and reinforced the milieu of the plays, the under-carriage of which is a never-ending, nigh-on-apocalyptic struggle between good and evil.68
Similarly, in 1988 the first appearance of Margaret was moved to immediately after the execution of Joan. Penny Downie, who played Margaret, explained:
Our intention was to show Margaret in a sense taking over where Joan left off, a new Frenchwoman to be a scourge to the English. With Joan of Arc at the stake and dead bodies on the stage, I came on covered in a brown cloak, hungry, a scavenger on the battlefield, like a sewer rat sniffing for the remnants of the picnic that York and Warwick had been eating while Joan was burning.69
In 1963 Peggy Ash croft's performance as Margaret became central to the tetralogy. Tackling the part aged fifty-six, her skill as an actor and her maturity made her the more dominant partner in the trilogy. Although David Warner received great plaudits for his performance, Ashcroft's development from young French princess to matriarchal harridan dominated and pulled together the plots of the three plays:
The extraordinary thing about Ashcroft's performance is its development. The young bride brushing aside with a girlish gesture the embarrassment of her dowry-less arrival in England; the foreign queen tentatively sitting at a remote corner of her husband's council chamber; the dominating partner fighting his battles; the stricken mother deprived of her own child--all these facets are there and they seem to grow inevitably one from the other.70
John Barton also cut the plays to emphasize the strength of her individuality: Reignier, her father, was cut from the meeting with Suffolk and bargaining on the battlefield; she was invited to join the "council board," the council-of-war table around which the lords sat; "in explicit language added by Barton, Margaret takes the initiative in calling for Humphrey's impeachment, and goes on to plot his death, in conspiracy with her lover Suffolk."71 Importantly the final scene in the first play ended with Margaret entering with the head of Suffolk:
Bending her wild grief and anger into a protective embrace of her weak husband, and breathing defiance to their enemies, she charges him:
Steel thou thy heart to keep thy vexed kingdom,
Whereof both you and I have charge and care.
4. In Part III of Terry Hands' 1977 production, Helen Mirren's "deviant sexpot" as Margaret taunts Emrys James as York: "Margaret is all the more horrible in that her torturer's body moves as sensuously as ever it did in loving Suffolk. She caresses York's face--but leaves it smeared with his child's blood."
These salient lines, which Shakespeare might have written, had not Sackville and Norton and Barton thought of them first, leave us with no doubt of whose play this has become, as the royal couple exit to confront England's uncertain future at the final fade-out.72
In 1977, Terry Hands' casting of the young Helen Mirren as Margaret meant that the emphasis moved to Henry, played by the more experienced Alan Howard. The casting of Mirren also deliberately added an overtly sexual element to the relationships in the play. On meeting Henry she was as entranced by him as by Suffolk: "Helen [Mirren]'s Margaret is less harridan than deviant sexpot, never more intimate and loving than when a murder is rising to its climax."73 After the murder of Suffolk this sexuality became perverted into sadistic pleasure:
Margaret is all the more horrible in that her torturer's body moves as sensuously as ever it did in loving Suffolk. She caresses York's face--but leaves it smeared with his child's blood. She watches his agony in twitching, feline fascination. When he collapses in her lap, she rocks him maternally before clasping a sword and thrusting him through, a final erotic release.74
The linking of sex with violence in the character of Margaret was also built into Fiona Bell's portrayal in 2000. There were clear indications that Joan la Pucelle was sleeping not only with the dauphin but with any member of the French court who was politically expedient. With instruction from Michael Boyd to "keep the memory of the burning [of Joan] with me when ... playing Margaret," Fiona Bell recalled how the brutality of York's torture of Joan was repaid by Margaret in Part III:
The burning scene was directed to be very vicious. With the words "And yet, forsooth, she is a virgin pure" [Part I, 5.4.83] York would stab me in the genitals and show his hand with the blood on it, ironically suggesting that he has broken her hymen. Their cruelty helps set these Englishmen apart from the likes of Henry V and the two John Talbots, and shows they are no better than the young girl they are torturing:
Where York mutilates Joan, Michael [Boyd] had Margaret's henchmen slashing at York with their knives throughout his speech. If Margaret eschewed her sensuality with Suffolk's death, I think it is replaced in Part Three with a visceral delight in the pain of her enemies. I thought she should be practically salivating when she is humiliating York and definitely be sexually aroused.75
At the Center of This Maelstrom Sits Henry76
Looking back on his role as Henry VI in 1993, Ralph Fiennes remarked:
My main recollection of the part was of this pathetic figure, lovable but frustrating because, although he was clearly a good man, he was completely unable to control the forces of ambition and dissent around him.77
Henry is a man at odds with the world in which he lives, unprepared and unable to compromise his own ideals and morality in order to rule. His failure to match up to his father is an inability to carry on the ethos of war into civilian life. The nobles, who have been fighting foreign wars, now see their chance for power and in their desperate attempt to attain it turn their feudal energies in upon themselves.
Henry's first major difficulty as a ruler is his age. Surrounded by people of greater years and with more experience, in Part I he is often painfully out of his depth. In 1977 Terry Hands emphasized Henry's youth in the staging, making him appear almost childlike:
the new King Henry (played throughout the trilogy by Alan Howard), [is] a vulnerable child, his throne much too large. His feet would dangle as if they didn't rest on a step. When he kneels to be crowned he needs help to rise to his feet. His uncles flank his throne--as they did his father's coffin--shouting the ancient abuse at each other over his bowed and bewildered head. He is no match for the stamping, strutting little York who sniffs his rose and plots his plots. Because Henry shrinks from kingship, the kingdom fractures. There is no more eloquent emblem for dissolution than this: Henry's venerable uncles fall to fisticuffs, using their staves of office to beat each other over the head.78
5. Ralph Fiennes as Henry VI in Adrian Noble's 1988 RSC production: "My main recollection of the part was of this pathetic figure, lovable but frustrating because, although he was clearly a good man, he was completely unable to control the forces of ambition and dissent around him," with Penny Downie as Margaret.
6. In 1963 in Peter Hall's RSC production: David Warner gave a touching performance as "a novice-like figure in a coarse gown pitiably reliant on Gloucester for advice."
In 1963 David Warner gave a touching performance as:
a novice-like figure in a coarse gown pitiably reliant on Gloucester for advice and, at moments of tension, given to sweeping the whole company with a sweet nervous smile in anxiety to win everyone's approval. In the second play his situation is changed and his original appeal gives way to mere pathos ... 79
David Oyelowo was the first black actor to play Henry VI for the RSC in 2000. However, it was his youth that set him apart from the other nobles in Part I:
Oyelowo's Henry as a young boy clutches his royal robes for reassurance as he forces himself to be bold. With age he gains authority but, fatefully, puts his reverence for justice above his subjects' need for a leader they can hold in awe.80
As Henry ages, his determination in upholding of Christian law again puts him at odds with the real world, a barbaric world which pays lip service to God only. As critic Benedict Nightingale observed:
Oyelowo's fine, gentle Henry is alone in his love of peace and even lonelier in the quiet wisdom he acquires as the evening progresses. It's as if the Dalai Lama were not just caught in a cannibal orgy but married to the hungriest eater.81
For the opening of Act III Scene 1, the King and Queen stood together at one end of the stage, awaiting the entry of the peers through the huge double doors opposite. After a tense pause filled with an ominous drumbeat, the doors opened and four ranks of straight-backed, stern-faced men strode forward. The two parties faced each other. No sign of deference or submission was given by the peers, who looked more like a fighting squadron than obedient subjects. At last, Henry made a slight movement forward and the peers scattered, making brief bows. It was clearly never going to be easy for the gentle Henry to master this group's power and independence.82
For the Complete Works' revival in 2006, Henry was played by another black actor, Chuk Iwuji, described as "a Henry VI with the simplicity, charity, kindness and moral outrage that fits a Christ-figure who discovers he is living in Golgotha."83 Henry takes his role as the anointed Deputy of God on earth seriously, determinedly sticking to the principles of a spiritual rather than a political leader. Ralph Fiennes commented:
his whole dilemma was that he could not find a way to assert his rule through purely Christian values. The area an actor has to tackle in playing the role of Henry VI is faith ... At times this approach leads Henry into vengeful, "Old Testament" actions; at others he follows an approach of forgiveness, tolerance, and pacifism.
Alan Howard similarly pointed up Henry's failure but also emphasized his growing isolation from the world which surrounds him in Part II and Part III with bouts of madness: "His swoon on hearing the news of Duke Humphrey's death left him in a catatonic trance, from which Margaret strove to rouse him by means of her long, highly rhetorical speech."84 The division of purpose between kingly duty and his faith created a schism in Howard's Henry; aware of who he ought to be but unable to forget who he really is:
His childish curls are gone. His voice, once tremulous, making every sentence seem to end in a question, is now firmer. He rises to moments of majesty, but then backs off from them bewildered, as if he did not recognize himself as the man who had just spoken. When he asks Gloucester to resign his Protectorship, the entire court is stunne
d. But Henry has no stomach for blood and no joy in power. He becomes a figure of increasing detachment, sitting on the fringes smiling wanly--it is all so absurd!--a painfully bemused spectator viewing the chaos he has no power to control.85
Henry's nemesis or alter ego takes the form of Richard of Gloucester:
They are both isolationists. Hunchbacked Richard is "myself, alone"; Henry longs for shepherd's weeds. But Henry knows what dying Warwick learned, that pomp is only "earth and dust," while Richard is willing to "Torment myself, to catch the English Crown."86
Primarily a fighter, Richard is a creature of war: "In the field of battle, if nowhere else, he has transcended his disabilities: here he is the fastest, moves with the greatest alacrity, is the most lethal, and yet the effort takes less toll of him than anyone else."87 The murder of Henry by Richard can often be the most disturbing and deeply shocking part of the play. On one level, Richard's prominence in the cycle comes to a head as he disposes of his family's enemy; on another, Good comes face-to-face with Evil in a metaphysical battle of wills.
Preempting the "make love not war" attitude of the 1960s by facing violence with loving gestures, David Warner's Henry (1963) maintained his Christian ethos to the end, planting: "a kiss of forgiveness on murdering Richard's cheek ... a sublime end. This Henry is the archetype of every honest CND demonstrator who ever sat down in Trafalgar Square."88 Deprived of the pleasure of the kill by Henry's taunting and his furious and maniacal reaction, the unsatisfied Richard "further mutilated his body after the murder: and like some terrible puppy scrabbles at and worries the dead body with his hacking dagger."89