Shakespeare's Political Drama

The History Plays and the Roman Plays

Alexander Leggatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780367238759
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134956029
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

There is political interest everywhere in Shakespeare. Macbeth and Hamlet are concerned with kingship, Measure for Measure with law, The Tempest with power. Shakespeare is consistently interested in rulers, law, questions of authority and obedience - as well as the politics of personal relationships. In this book Alexander Leggatt concentrates on the ordering and enforcing, the gaining and losing, of public power in the state, in the English and Roman histories. He sees Shakespeare as concerned both with things as they are, and with things as they ought to be: his depiction of public life includes clear appraisals of the one, and powerful images of the other. It is the interplay of the two that makes the drama.

1

Henry VI

The first scene of the Henry VI trilogy is a formal ceremony, the funeral of Henry V.Bedford’s opening speech dignifies the occasion with a note of cosmic tragedy—‘Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!’ (I. i. 1) —and goes on to rebuke ‘the bad revolting stars, / That have consented unto Henry’s death’ (I. i. 4–5). He later imagines Henry, now a star himself, combating ‘with adverse planets in the heavens’ (I. i. 54) to preserve the welfare of England. His life on earth is already acquiring the status of myth. Gloucester declares:

His brandish’d sword did blind men with his beams:

His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings:

His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire,

More dazzled and drove back his enemies

Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces.

What should I say? His deeds exceed all speech:

He ne’er lift up his hand but conquered. (I. i. 10–16)

This not only recalls Marlowe’s Tamburlaine but anticipates later Shakespearian heroes who transcend the human—Coriolanus, in particular. But, as in Tamburlaine, the price for attributing all this grandeur to one man is that when he dies there is nothing left. Exeter brings us down to flat mortality: ‘Henry is dead and never shall revive. / Upon a wooden coffin we attend’ (I. i. 18–19). As the scene proceeds, with the coffin still onstage,¹ messengers bring news of English losses in France. In history nothing happens as fast as that; but the economy of the theatre allows a tight connection between the death of the hero and the collapse of his achievements.

Before the end of the scene we are introduced to a new hero as the hopes of the English turn to Lord Talbot. But Talbot is not a king. In fact the first half of 1 Henry VI, like the Roman plays, is set in a kingless world. The infant Henry VI is unseen and rarely mentioned; the French have only a Dauphin, who behaves as first among equals. With the supernatural (and kingly) hero dead and transformed to myth, Shakespeare turns our attention to a remarkable man: one who can generate legends but is himself nothing more, or less, than a good field commander operating in the normal conditions of war. With Henry V as a giant shadow in the background, Shakespeare gives us a full and realistic appraisal of Talbot, the myth and the reality. The messenger who brings news of the Battle of Patay describes an epic hero operating in a state of military confusion:

No leisure had he to enrank his men;

He wanted pikes to set before his archers;

Instead whereof sharp stakes pluck’d out of hedges

They pitched in the ground confusedly

To keep the horsemen off from breaking in.

More than three hours the fight continued;

Where valiant Talbot, above human thought,

Enacted wonders with his sword and lance:

Hundreds he sent to hell, and none durst stand him. (I. i. 115–23)

This description of Talbot suggests a need to imagine a hero on the scale of Henry. But he is not, as Henry is, invincible. When the messenger announces a fight between Talbot and the French, Winchester anticipates the outcome—‘Wherein Talbot overcame, is’t so?’—only to be told, ‘O no: wherein Lord Talbot was o’erthrown’ (I. i. 107–8). The account of Talbot’s scrambling desperation evokes the practical realities of war. We hear the same note of desperation when during the English rout at Amiens Talbot cries, ‘My thoughts are whirled like a potter’s wheel; /I know not where I am, nor what I do’ (I. v. 19–20).² When he is winning, on the other hand, all a common English soldier has to do is cry ‘A Talbot!’ and the French run away in comic fear (II. i. 77SD–81).

Talbot shows at times an exalted sense of his own heroic identity: we first see him standing on a turret, exalted above us, describing how he refused to be exchanged with a prisoner of lower rank. But in battle he is usually more practical than this. During the siege of Orleans he is contrasted with Bedford, for whom everything depends on one man. Bedford, at the late king’s funeral, declared, ‘arms avail not, now that Henry’s dead’ (I. i. 47),³ and now he wants to fall in line behind the new hero. Talbot has other ideas:

Bed. Ascend, brave Talbot; we will follow thee.

Tal. Not all together; better far, I guess,

That we do make our entrance several ways,

That if it chance the one of us do fall,

The other yet may rise against their force. (II. i. 28–32)⁴

Success in battle is the achievement of the group, not the individual; hero-worship must not interfere with tactics. The importance of this idea is emphasized when we first hear of Talbot: though he fought, as we have seen, with supernatural courage, he lost the Battle of Patay because of the desertion of Sir John Falstaff (I. i. 130–5).

Given the strong message that with Henry’s death the English are finished, the recapture of Orleans is Talbot’s most impressive achievement; he turns what had looked like the inevitable tide of history. In the aftermath of that victory Shakespeare sets forth the nature of Talbot’s greatness in one of those stylized set pieces he uses throughout the history plays to bring key ideas into focus. The Countess of Auvergne invites Talbot to her castle. His friends jocularly tell him to prepare for a love encounter (II. ii. 44–58), but the challenge to his manhood takes a different form. The Countess’s messenger raises the real question when he asks, ‘Which of this princely train/Call ye the warlike Talbot…?’ (II. ii. 34–6). Octavius Caesar will try the same insulting ploy on Cleopatra: ‘Which is the Queen of Egypt?’ (Antony and Cleopatra, V. ii. 12). There is nothing in the character’s appearance to match his reputation. The Countess herself makes it clear that while her purpose is to capture Talbot she also wants to satisfy her curiosity about him: ‘Fain would mine eyes be witness with mine ears/To give their censure of these rare reports’ (II. iii. 9–10). She professes herself disappointed:

I thought I should have seen some Hercules,

A second Hector, for his grim aspect

And large proportion of his strong-knit limbs.

Alas, this is a child, a silly dwarf!

It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp

Should strike such terror to his enemies. (II. iii. 18–23)

The question is one of shadow and substance. The physical body of Talbot is a disappointment in view of his great reputation, just as the appearance of the actor himself may not live up to the legend of the character he is portraying; behind the challenge to Talbot, Shakespeare is dealing with one of the fundamental problems of historical drama, characteristically calling attention to the difficulty rather than smoothing it over.⁵ No actor could look like the Henry V described in the opening scene; the actor playing Talbot does not have to, for his ordinariness is just the point. As the Countess interprets the shadow-substance theme, Talbot’s picture embodies his legend, and both are shadows; the real thing is the little man in front of her:

Long time thy shadow hath been thrall to me,

For in my gallery thy picture hangs;

And now thy substance shall endure the like. (II. iii. 35–7)⁶

Talbot replies that she has it backwards. The man himself is the shadow; Talbot’s substance lies in his army, which he summons by winding his horn:

How say you, madam? Are you now persuaded

That Talbot is but shadow of himself?

These are his substance, sinews, arms, and strength. (II. iii. 60–2)

In the Roman plays the relations between the hero’s shadow and his substance will not be resolved in this way. Talbot’s appraisal of his greatness is self-deprecating and realistic; for once we are not challenged to believe that the great legend is literally true. But the final note of the scene is paradoxical: while Talbot asks the Countess to feast his soldiers as well as himself, she persists in honouring the single hero: ‘With all my heart, and think me honoured/To feast so great a warrior in my house’ (II. iii. 80–1). Perhaps she has accepted his argument and the words ‘so great a warrior’ are meant to include them all; but I rather think she still has eyes for Talbot alone. His demonstration of his power was theatrically exciting: he sounded his horn and the stage filled with soldiers. And the realism of his insistence that his greatness depends on others is itself impressive. He is the sort of great man, like Washington and Wellington, whose legend includes tales of modesty.⁷

But where Talbot is great he is also vulnerable, as the single hero is not. While Coriolanus alone can take on a city, Talbot needs enough of what Wellington called ‘that article’, the common soldier, and he is destroyed at Bordeaux when the wrangling York and Somerset deny him men.⁸ Not only destroyed, but in the bitter words of Lucy, who is trying to shame the quarrelling lords into action, ‘bought and sold’ (IV. iv. 13), a chivalric hero finally and fatally dependent on the mundane, brought down by politicians whose arguments are arguments for doing nothing. The long rhymed sequence Talbot shares with his son John expresses their values of honour and piety in a manner that is slow and frigid to modern taste. But Nashe testifies to its power for its original audience,⁹ and it has the effect of stylizing the idealism of the Talbots to sharpen the contrast with the crass and fussy excuses we hear from York and Somerset. Talbot, like Henry, is expanded into a legend as he dies, and in the process we get a double view of him. As he challenges Bordeaux, the French general defending the city greets him:

Lo, there thou stand’st a breathing valiant man

Of an invincible unconquer’d spirit:

This is the latest glory of thy praise,

That I, thy enemy, due thee withal;

For ere the glass, that now begins to run,

Finish the process of his sandy hour,

These eyes, that see thee so well coloured, Shall see thee wither’d,

bloody, pale and dead.

Drum afar off.

(IV. ii. 31–8)

Shadow and substance again: the reality of the hero dissolves into the picture of his corpse. The power of the speech comes from its quiet, its gentleness, and its eerie certainty of doom, confirmed by the distant drum. There is a more extravagant effect later when Lucy asks for Talbot, taking twelve lines to list all his titles, and Joan replies, ‘Him that thou magnifiest with all these titles, /Stinking and fly-blown lies here at our feet’ (IV. vii. 60–76).¹⁰ But, like the long sequence with John, this at least fixes Talbot for our contemplation, making him a vivid double image of greatness and mortality. What follows is more subtly disturbing. Too late to save their own hero, the English unite to capture and kill Joan; but this achievement is wiped out by the larger movement of history as, before the English can consolidate their victory, a peace is signed that allows the French a useful breathing space. As history goes on, Talbot, whose name was on every tongue while he lived, is forgotten. King Henry’s argument for peace—

I always thought

It was both impious and unnatural

That such immanity and bloody strife

Should reign among professors of one faith

(V. i. 11–14)

—though unimpeachable as a statement of Christian pacifism, sets at nought everything Talbot has stood for. When at the opening of Part 2 Gloucester recapitulates the history of the English effort in France, he makes no mention of Talbot (Pt 2, I. i. 77–96). It is as though the great man had never lived.

Talbot is impressive; but he is a hero in a practical world in which he is first destroyed and then forgotten. His arena of action is a war that Shakespeare on the whole conceives quite realistically. Bedford declares, ‘An army have I muster’d in my thoughts, /Wherewith already France is overrun’ (I. i. 101–2), but armies of the imagination are no more use here than they are in Richard II. (In Henry V, as we shall see, the imagination is a more powerful weapon.) The messenger who brings the first news of loss in France fixes the blame on ‘want of men and money’ (I. i. 69) and goes on to a brutally frank description of the dithering at home that is leading to disaster abroad (I. i. 70–7). Salisbury, ‘mirror of all martial men’ (I. iv. 73), is killed by a sniper—a painfully unheroic death. The French look even less dignified when at the siege of Orleans they ‘leap over the walls in their shirts’ (II. i. 38SD). The fortunes of war are unpredictable. The dead march that opens the play is contrasted with ‘Sound a flourish’ (I. ii. SD) for the first French scene, exemplifying what looks like the historical inevitability of English defeat and French victory. But while the tide of history may be flowing in that direction we are mostly aware of cross-currents. The Dauphin’s opening words are ‘Mars his true moving, even as in the heavens/So in the earth, to this day is not known’ (I. ii. 1–2), and in fact the first battle we see is an unexpected English victory.

The English indignation at having to cope with a French sorceress-‘Heavens, can you suffer hell so to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Note on the Texts
• 1. Henry VI
• 2. Richard III
• 3. Richard II
• 4. Henry IV
• 5. Henry V
• 6. Julius Caesar
• 7. Antony and Cleopatra
• 8. Coriolanus
• 9. Henry VIII
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index