So this is the Putting Shakespeare series in this week, I'm going to talk about the early history of play. The second part of Henry, the sixth one going to be asking is how far or in what ways could we see this as an independent play? Do you remember when Alan Bennett's play, The Madness of George the Third was made into a film?
It had to be retitled The Madness of King George because apparently American producers saw no one would go and see it if they hadn't seen the madness of George and the madness of George, too. What I want to try and think about is that question of surreality in this play.
Who would go to a play called 206? And to think about Syria ality in Shakespeare's history more generally and then to ask how and in what ways, with what methods we might be able to interpret a play whose title tells us right from the start that it is incomplete or provisional or dependent on other texts. So the second part, Hemley, the sixth, is an early play. New Oxford Shakespeare that I've been talking about quite a bit this term, which came out in 2016.
And these are sort of latest look at the chronology and the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. So that edition, the new Oxford Shakespeare, dates the second pilot, Henry, the sixth to around 15, 19, 15, 19. So that makes it the first history play, Shakespeare wrote. It comes the Oxford Shakespeare. It's preceded only by two gentlemen of Verona and Tax Tronic. That's. I talked a couple of weeks ago about recent arguments about collaboration, all's well that ends well.
And in this play, too, we have a recent intervention on collaborative writing. The suggestion in the new Oxford Shakespeare is that Marlowe, Shakespeare and probably another writer and identified work together on this play. I'm not particularly going to engage with the question of joint or collaborative authorship, except when I talk briefly about conjuring and witchcraft later in the lecture.
But it's a thing worth thinking about, not least because the critical or the interpretive implications of those new authorship designations published last year hasn't really been process. So you could be at the forefront of thinking, you know, in what way is 206 Malo's in play? How would it look different if we knew that Marlos model was one of the writers of it? How to Shakespeare's early work look different?
I'm stressing that because it's one place where there's some leeway possible for you field to catch up. So let's start with an outline of what two Henry six is about. This is a highly episodic play, United. If it's united at all by the theme of disunity, basically the whole play is about dissent, disagreement and the many challenges to a weak King Henry. The six may have the play's title, but it doesn't have anything about it.
Under control, factions at the court pitch Henry's formidable French wife, Margaret, against his Uncle Gloster. A rebellion of the people led by Jack Cade makes inroads into London. The Duke of York leads an army against King Henry. So the Commonwealth is at war in a turmoil of different groupings, which will eventually resolve themselves in the play's final battle sequence into the Yorkist.
And the Lancaster wins the white roses and the red that we know as the protagonists in the Wars of the Roses. The shape of this play is broadly about the rise and fall of different characters. So rather than being upped around one character, it's a series of kind of waves of rise and fall. Gloucester, Suffolk, the Cardinal Jack Cade. And thus it follows something of the shape of mediaeval tragedy, which is known as Dade County bus tragedy.
Catapults the genre of the four the princes. But it does that in a kind of wave effect, which includes several characters rather than just one. These characters are not necessarily literally princes, but the point about their county was tragedy in the mediaeval sense is that it is about socially elevated protagonists. The full all of these characters, the tragic fall of characters in a cosy bus tragedy is as much about social disgrace as it is about moral or spiritual decline.
The play ends with a battle at St. Albans in which the Yorkist party are victorious, and they vowed to follow the defeated Henry and Margaret, who have fled to London. The play's very last lines are sound drums and trumpets and to London. All and more such days as these two ask before. So the couplet urges us to conclusion all before. But the actual sense of the lines is much more contingent. They promise to head off to London to continue the fight against the King.
More such dates as these seems to establish the ending of the play as a pause for breath or a lull in the action rather than a structured conclusion. So I want to think a bit more about that notion of completeness or c reality for the next part of the lecture. Now what to think about the publishing history of the play.
So to approach the question of spirituality in reading and then to think about the theatrical culture of the early fifteen nineties to think about the implications of surreality for performance. So first, publishing history. Last week, we saw that the Merry Wives of Windsor adapted its title between Quarto and Foleo publication. Something Much More Extreme happens to this week's play. The title to Henry six and a six. Part two comes from the First Folio in sixteen twenty three.
You'll remember that this posthumous publication is divided into comedies, history and tragedies under the histories category. It's restricted to plays with the source material from mediaeval English history from King John who reigned in the man who reigned in the 13th century through to Henry the fifth in the 15th. It doesn't, for example, include King Lear or Macbeth, which were also based on historical sources.
Nor does it include plays based on Roman histories. So the genre of history, as invented by the first phobia, is English and mediaeval. Henry the Eighth is a chronological outlier at the end of the list. It be what the Folio compilers have done is to reorder Shakespeare's history plays in chronological order of the monarchs and historical events discussed. So they put the plays on Richard the Second and Henry the fourth before those on Henry the Sixth, even though they were written afterwards.
So to put it another way, like George Lucas making Star Wars, Shakespeare starts with the end of the story, the Wars of the Roses ending in the accession of Henry the seventh Richmond at the end of Richard the third. And then it has to do a series of prequels. Richard the second. Henry the fourth. Henry the Fifth. Like the Star Wars films. The order of the story trumps the order of composition when the plays are retitled or the numbered as a long series.
And the titles change in the First Folio to focus more precisely on them that the monarchs as the organising principle. Thus the play that was published in CORTO in 15 98 as the history of Henry the fourth with the Battle of Shrewsbury between the King and Lord Harry Percy. Sir named Henry Hotspur of the North with the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaff that become simply the first part of King Henry the Fourth.
Those other titles who got title page building in the Quarto fall away to a more hierarchically ordered sense of historiography in the Folio. What counts is the names of the Kings. So it's the Folio catalogue that gives us the three parts of Henry the six. But this is the first time that the play we're talking about today as the second part of Henry the Sixth had been published under this title. It's the first time the play called The First Part of Henry the Six have been published at all.
Now, this book gets a bit complicated, but let's have it. Let's have a go. The Foleo compilers allocate us a three part play and read the six parts one, two and three. Three texts which previously had different designations. There's a two part play plus a single play. So the trilogy in the Folio was originally two plus one. The Folios Part two was originally published as the first part of the contention betwixt the two famous houses of York and Lancaster.
With the death of the good due comfrey, the punishment and death of the Duke of Suffolk, the tragical end of the proud Cardinal of Winchester with the notable rebellion of Jack Cade.
That's in fifteen ninety four. So the first part of the contention betwixt the two famous houses of Lancaster, the play the Folio calls part three, came out the following year in fifteen ninety five as the true tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the death of good King Henry the sixth with the whole contention between the two houses of York and Lancaster.
In 16, 19, these two plays the plays broadly that the FOLIA calls Henry six, Part two and three were published together as the whole contention between the two famous houses, Lancaster and York, with the tragical ends of the good Duke Humphrey, Richard Duke of York and Henry, the six divided into two parts, a newly corrected and enlarged.
So the title, the whole contention and the idea of divided into two parts suggests that these two parts comprise a single narrative movement rather than being two distinct and separate plays. You can follow all this tightly from the website I've mentioned before. Shakespeare documented the org, which has title pages of all Shakespeare's plays in print, as well as other documents.
Parker's Life and Works. The play that the Foleo prefixes to this part as Henry, the six part one, had not been previously published, and thus both compositional chronology and Titli have been redrawn in order to produce a three part play in the Folio.
One of the functions of the Folio sustained retitling here is to foreground the character of Henry the Six, perhaps implicitly, to consolidate his hold on the throne despite or perhaps because the king's relatively minor role in these three plays that bear his name. The business of the three phrase is the sustained, dramatic and political challenges to Henry's sovereignty.
But the Folio reinstates the king's name. The head of his plays against the flow of the stories within the plays, which are really about the extent to which Henry does not control the narrative of his own country. Now, performing Shakespeare's history plays in longer or shorter sequences became in the twentieth century, but not before the most common way to see them on stage.
I'll talk about in a minute. It's pretty unusual to see Henry the sixth Part two as a stand alone play in a theatre repertory. Now. Serial performance in the theatre was in step with a certain line of critical thinking. He NWT Yards influential reading of Shakespeare's history plays in a book published in 1944. Established Sequential Interpretation as the norm, Tilyard read Shakespeare's history plays as two distinct series, which had a collective political interpretation.
He divided the history, plays into two tech challenges groups of four. The first was the Henry the six plays and Richard the third and the second Richard the second. Henry the fourth. Part one and two. And Henry the fifth. And what Juilliard stressed was the cumulative unfolding of what he influentially called the Tudor myth, the Tudor myth, the after idea about the obsession of the Tudors on the defeat of Richard.
The third was narrative bias across all the history plays as the providential restitution of rightful sovereignty accorded, to tell ya. This had been interrupted by the murder of Richard for a second and then expiated through all the bloodletting of the wars of the roses.
So it was an argument about sequential reading, which was very much Foleo base, because it was about reading the plays in the chronological order of historical events rather than experiencing them in the order of their composition. And we might just in brackets, note the dates of Tilyard Book 1944. It might have been exactly the point at which you would have wanted to see a whole series of terrible, violent events leading inexorably, providentially to a happy conclusion.
So Tilyard writing as much about the end of the Second World War as he is about the wars of the roses. But the printed sequence of history plays had for too large an ideological under conservatively ideological interpretation. Broadly, everything was gonna be okay if you took the history as a unit and kept on reading to the end. And fertility at the end was the coronation of Richmond, December the 7th.
First to the monarch at the end of the play, Richard the third. So Tilyard is an extreme formal and ideological surreality. The moral and structural conclusion of the action is deferred until the play he imagines as the final episode in the sequence. Richard, the third. So the whole sequence of the history plays into the artery is to your optical and the turnoffs is the accession of the Tudors. I talk a little bit about this high pressure teleology and how it distorts or even deforms.
Richard, the third in the lecture on that plane and it might be worth remembering in passing that the use of the word tetralogy as a subdivision to Shakespeare's history plays comes from Tilyard and is already perhaps inflected with this conservative Taleo logical ideology. So let's look back to the Corto complications, bringing out the second part time, Henry, the sixth, as the first part of the contention betwixt the two houses of York.
And Lancaster also acknowledges it's not a complete perp play. It's the first part, part of a series. But the suggestion that something will come after the play is less destabilising, I think, to its integrity than the suggestion that something has already come before. So that's to say a political part. One has a claim to work on its own terms, even if unfinished, to play playful part two perhaps doesn't.
Because you already feel you're running to catch up. If you if you if you pick up the story with part two. That quarter publication also doesn't mention King Henry at all. We get to as part of the extended title that I read out, that series of episodic rise and fall narratives that I already mentioned, Humphrey Suffolk, the Cardinal, the rebel Jack Cage. And the play is titled For Struggle Contention between York and Lancaster Rather Than After the Nominal King.
So the quarter makes it clear that what the subject of the play is is struggle and dissent, not a monarch. And I think the title also emphasises the linear connectedness of its events, the destruction of the good view. Humphrey leads to the destruction of those who brought him down, suffered and the cardinal without Humphrey. York is left unchecked and the rebellion of Jack Kemp players and foreshadows his rise.
The publication in 16 19 of this play, together with Part three, the play published as the true tragedy of Richard Duke of York as a two part play called The Whole Contention, suggests that in the early 17th century, these two plays and these two plays alone in Shakespeare's histories were thought to have a particular serial affinity. There are no other joint publications of Shakespeare's history plays during this period.
There's no Henry. The fourth part one and two published together, for instance. So many critics have felt that the claims to serial unity of the Henry the Sixth plays are stronger than any similar claims we might make for the later historians. So the publishing history of this play seems, I think, to point to its intrinsic dependence on other plays. It does not look like a stand alone play in print. The Folio suggests that there is a necessary episode both before and after this one.
The 50 94 Quarto suggests this is the opening part of a longer sequence, and the 16 19 publication suggests that that sequence consists of two plays the plates the Folio calls having the six parts, two and three. I hope you still make too many numbers in this election. Let's move from thinking about publication to thinking about performance.
Now, we know that from the beginning of the 15 nineties, there is a vogue for two part plays in the theatre, most famous, perhaps a marlos to Tamburlaine plays printed by Richard Jones in 50 90 as Tamburlaine, the great title page says, divided into two tragical discourses as there were sundry times showed upon stages in the city of London to tumble in the great divided into two tragical discourses.
So some two part plays are presented as this one is in print, at least as one big play divided into two. But probably there were as much about the commercial success of the first part as they were a preplanned, artistically motivated structural decision. That's to say they were more like Legally Blonde two or X-Men two sequels that tried to recap the financial success of the first part than they were like Peter Jackson's Tolkien trilogies,
films conceived from the start as multipart narratives. Now, we know from modern examples of Part two films that the relationship between the two parts tends to be less about narrative completion than about repetition. The second part tries to do what was so successful about the first part. Again, you don't really need to know the first part because the second part does it essentially the same.
And that, incidentally, is probably why Part two tend not to succeed, because the aspect of the first part that by definition they cannot reproduce is its originality. But Henslow, his diary. The Diary of Philip Henslow, which is a document of performance and of the finances of the admiral's man at the rose at the rivals to Shakespeare's company, gives us some different information.
Pantalones list of performances in the early 50s, 90s, give a number of examples of two part or sequel plays being performed on consecutive days. So that's something much closer to the modern performance tradition. We might be able to get tickets for plays that don't seem to be in a sequential relation to each other for the same day or for consecutive days. Plays called the first part of Hercules and the second part of Hercules plays don't exist anymore.
Were regularly performed in tandem, as if really to get the full story of Hercules, you would want to go to both parties. And there are similar entries for parts one and two of Tamburlaine and of a play Hensler called Caesar. During that period. So that makes it clear that for Henslow, at least consecutive programming of related plays or serial plays was relatively common. But the diary also makes clear that PAD or sequel plays could also be performed independently.
There are numerous separate entries divided by days or weeks for each distinct part of Tumblin, so that suggests you could go and see Tomberlin Part one in May and Tomberlin Part two in June, or indeed vice versa. The evidence from performance scheduling does suggest both that there was a commercial space for consecutive programming and that both parts of two part planes were seen as autonomous and sound standing.
So there was apparently an audience for a serial experience and an audience for separate experiences. The players could be, but weren't necessarily seen as interdependent. Now, we don't have any similar evidence about Shakespeare's history plays, and we don't know whether they were ever originally performed on consecutive days or in a kind of scheduling programme which stresses the fact that are serial.
Instead, we can see that see reality in the Foleo is an editorial process, rather perhaps than a theatrical one. The specific editorial interventions of the Foleo text serve to build a sequence of plays out of a number of previously separately printed, variously performed, individually titled Works. More recent collected editions of the plays in the 20th late 20th century tend to organise Shakespeare's plays by chronology rather than by genre.
And if you look at two in addition, which does die, you can see a much more broken up pattern for these plays. The Oxford edition gives us the second and third parts of Henry the six Titus Andronicus, then the first part of Henry the six, then Richard the third, which is the second Merry Wives of Windsor. So you can see that that's a very different order of plays from what the Folio gives us, which suggests the history are grouped together.
This fractured experience of the English history plays in time gives more structural and dramatic significance to the individual plans as complete theatrical experiences. It suggests that if you a play goer in the early 50 nineties, you may well have seen these historical plays spread out at long intervals, interspersed by lots of other plays by Shakespeare and by others. So it wouldn't really necessarily experience them in the theatre as a series.
But there are ways in which the history plays content, not just the stuff I've been talking about, but titles and publishing lend them to forms of serial reading. So in the second part of Henry the Six, for instance, we begin with the introduction of the French Princess Margaret, who is married to King Henry. She's been brought from France by the Earl of Suffolk, who has wooed and married her by proxy for King Henry. So that's the play. That's the way the second part of the six begins.
Now, the end of the first part of Henry the Six gives us Suffolk wooing Makara because it gives us the bit immediately before this. And and it's the scene in which we realised that Suffolk is not only wooing by proxy, but he's wound for himself. Suffolk and Margaret's affair continues until his death in part two.
So we might feel that when the second part of Henry the Sixth begins with the introduction of Margaret to Henry with Suffolk present that we ought to know about, that this is already you know, we look at how this has happened in the French court from the end of the previous play. I'm not completely sure that's true. The fact that we know there is a part one makes us feel that Part two must be dependent on it.
But in fact, the major theme of Part one, which is Tolbert victories over Joan of Arc, is never mentioned again. It's never mentioned in part two, nor is Joan of Arc, because if we've completely forgotten that backstory. Perhaps we could see Suffolk's wooing of Marguerita something similar.
After all, from the opening part of Henry, the six part to the introduction of Margaret to Henry, we can easily imagine back what must have happened before, because that's what we do in all of Shakespeare's plays. All Shakespeare's plays begin in media res in the in the middle of things. And we have to deduce what happened before the play begins, just as we have to imagine that something may happen after the play ends.
Part of the job of interpreting plays is to get a handle on the part of the plot that is just out of sight. For example, why does King Lear set up the love test to test his daughters? If we knew there was a King Lear part one, we might expect that that would tell us. And that therefore, the King Lear we've got to now call King Lear part two looks incomplete. But we know that's not the case. The point about King Lear is that we don't know for sure what happened before.
Part of our job in reading the play is to try and put it together from what we have and from what we can glean from the characters in the in the current plan. That's part of the work of the pleasure of Shakespeare's drama. So the fact that there are plot elements and events that precede this play called the second part of the six isn't at all unique to a history play.
It's an aspect of Shakespeare plays more generally, which have a strong sense that things have happened before we came in on that story. And similarly, the idea that not everything is tied up and finished at the end has its parallels in other Shakespeare plays, where we're not expecting that there will literally be another play that will tell us what comes next.
These narrative hooks backwards and forwards starts to say, take on more prominence in our understanding of the history of play structure because we're already conditioned to think that the plays connected to the other players that follow or precede it in historical sequence. And these are these are the same forming devices that in a different kind of play would be read as gesturing outside the frame of the drama to an ongoing life for the characters before and after this particular segment.
So so far then, I've been talking about Henry 206 as a serial drama, using some of the information from its publishing history in individual then serial quarto form and its inclusion in retitling in the 16th 23 folio. We can see from this that there's lots of evidence to suggest that the play isn't quite a fully autonomous artistic creation, but that it is part of a larger narrative.
And depending on your narrative tastes, you could say that that larger narrative comprises one additional play or two or three or eight, depending how extend if you want the historical serial to be to. What Tilyard felt was that this was a sequence of eight plays.
But what I wanted to try and do now for the rest of the lecture is to try and argue for the opposite of that, to argue for an internal coherence and consistency to this play that would enable us to look at it, to experience it and to enjoy it as an autonomous play. That's just one one play that we might read or go and see and not a play which is automatically dependant and therefore incomplete.
I've said that the elements of that second part of the six, that gesture backwards to prior events or forwards to future ones look like the formal properties of serial narrative making use of prolapse sense or anticipation and other lapses or retrospection to structure a larger sweep of history. But I've also suggested that similar gestures outside the frame of a particular play in other genres look like aspects of verisimilitude.
We're just getting a slice of these characters lives or like the unknowability about motives. That is such an important part of Shakespeare's plays. We very rarely know in Shakespeare. Why characters do certain things. We know instead what the consequences are. There is no Shakespeare play I can think of that doesn't refer to events that happened before the play begins or leave open some aspect of what might happen next.
So if we were to try and ignore those elements of the second part of Hannant, the sixth author suggests that they don't need the other episodes to be stabilised. What might the plane look like? So I want to spend the rest of this lecture talking about the claims. The second part of Henry the Six has on our attention. And I want to talk particularly about its structure, its depiction of rebellion and briefly about its female characters.
I'm not actually sure it's in that order. Do rebellion first. Now, Jack, Cades, rebellion in the play is the shadow version of the numerous threats to monarchical government posed by the play's different factions. That's to say, oh, there is an uprising of common people who are identified by their occupations. I do think it's absolutely distinct in kind from the rebellions and uprisings of the noble characters in the play.
So the popular uprising of the people amplifies and echoes other insurrections against authorities. Now, Kate, representation in the play is really interesting. I think he is mentioned, but he does not appear until at four. So one aspect of an episodic play is the characters are not woven through the entire structure, but they appear in quite localised parts of the play.
And Kate is part of the play is really apt for. One argument about that episodic plays in the early 15 nineties is that they can be rehearsed. It's a practical one. They can be rehearsed separately. You don't have characters who interact with all the other characters in the play. You have little groupings of characters and they can rehearse that bits and then put them all together relatively easily. So there may be a practical reason for this episodic construction.
When he does appear in Act four, he claims to have royal blood and boasts what he will do when he is crowned king. So like everybody else in the play, he wants to be king and all shall eat and drink on my skull. And I will apparel the mall in one livery that they may agree like brothers and worship me their Lord. The first thing you do remarks is Comrade in arms Dick the Butcher famously, let's kill all the lawyers.
And this statement takes Kate's utopianism with something more violently Class-Based and distinctly anti intellectual. As the messenger tells the King about the rebels arrival in Sabat all scholars, lawyers, courtiers, gentlemen they call false caterpillars and inten their death. The rebels kind of clark because he is able to write and they turn to capture noblemen with the charge particularly of subsidising education.
Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the use of the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school. And whereas before our forefathers had no other books but the score on the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used and contrary to the king, his crown and dignity that has built a paper mill. Really interesting how clearly Kate's rebellion has set not in fact so much against the King as against the educated classes.
And what's different about those classes is not the richer, but that they're educated. In the BBC television version of the play, directed by Jane Howl in the 1980s and interpolated book burning scene at this point reminiscent of Nazi Germany, demonised Kate and his rebellion.
And there are lots of critics who argue that Shakespeare's representation of the rebels, especially if Kaid is notably more savage and less sympathetic than his sources in the Chronicle history by Apollinaire Shadow that would call. So this might fit with a general sense of anti populism in Shakespeare's plays. The disdain with which he treats the self-interested Roman populace in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, for instance. There's lots of evidence that Shakespeare is no Democrat.
Recent performance tradition is quite a good way to trace this negative version of Kay as a populist or thuggish leader of an ignorant mob. And it's also worth thinking why this character was cut entirely in the BBC, its recent Hollow Crown series. But as in other Shakespearean examples, there is a more nuanced or perhaps sympathetic Kaid in one early text than the one the editorial tradition tends to privilege.
We've already talked about the different title and therefore the different placing of this play in the quarter, the full year. I just want to mention the difference in the staging of page death in these two versions to remind you of how worthwhile it can be to look at specific scenes in different texts, different early texts where they exist, and to suggest that these contrasting presentations give two different versions of the rebel leader in the Folio text of sixteen twenty three.
Cade is fleeing for his life after the break up of his rebellion. He climbs into a walled garden to find food. He has a soliloquy which begins five on Ambition's Enter the landowner, Alexander Eden, who is musing to himself about how his garden is his own kingdom. You can see clearly the analogy between Kate's intrusion to this walled garden and the larger threat caused by rebellious nobles to the monarchy.
Eden asks Who would live turmoil in the court when such pleasant walks as his garden are available? He proclaims himself unconcerned by wealth and worldly success. Cage, though, fears that Eden will earn money from killing him. The two men fight. Kate is slaying. It's only day Eden realises who Kate is that he's this notable rebel. He vows to cut off Guy most ungracious head, which I will back in triumph to the king.
The very next scene shows the Duke of York leading a rebel Irish army coming to take the crown from Henry's head. So in that characteristic patterning of the play, no sooner is cage threat contained through his stack than another one rises up hydra like. This time it's the Duke of York. What this offers is a cage who is confident and assertive even as he dies, fighting the man who represents the rural landowning class in the quarter.
The encounter is rather different. There's no wry soliloquy from Cade. And instead, the stage direction sets up an unequal contest. Enter Jack Cave at one door and up the other. Master Alexander Edan and his men and Jack Cave. Lines down, picking of herbs and eating them. It's one of a number of quite expansive stage directions in the quarter of this play that I think would be worthy of investigation on their own. But what it gives us is a doubly disadvantaged. Okay.
He's outnumbered by Edon master Alexander Eaton and his men and he is overshadowed or loomed over. He's lying on the ground like an animal eating leaves while eating. Then his men stand up. You can see that that stage picture is absolutely a picture in which Eden, Eden and his men have the upper hand. And Cade is a pathetic, diminished rather cat. Even a sympathetic character is the underdog. Good Lord, how pleasant is this country?
Says Eden. Which sounds when on the stage is a starving man trying to live off grass, struggling next to him, rather complacent, imagining the scene on stage. As I say, it's hard not to admit some pity for Kate's wretched state. The power balance of this version of the scene is distinctly different from the Foleo version we looked at before.
And it seems that if we were trying to assess how Shakespeare depicts Kate, it would be important to analyse the emotional differences between these two possible stagings. Now, if Jack Kate is one of the play's most remarkable characters, perhaps it's other particularly stage worthy stage won't be a dramatic moment. Is the representation of Eleanor, the Duchess of Gloucester, Elena's husband, Gloucester, is Henry's uncle and the Lord Protector.
She has ambitions to become queen. And dreams that she is being crowned in Westminster Abbey with Henry and Margaret meeting beforehand. There's no love lost between Queen Margaret and Eleanor, who take every opportunity to have a bit of a catfight in order to achieve her ambitions. Eleanor consults with a witch, Marjorie Jordan, and a conjurer called Roger Bolingbrook.
There's a magic scene in which Bowling Brook conjures up a spirit inside a circle who answers questions about the fate of the king and his ministers. While Eleanor watches from above, it's been set up to discredit and destroy Eleanor. But it's a highly dramatic scene that could be usefully compared with Macbeth, which is perhaps more interestingly, given that work on the play's authorship that I mentioned at the beginning with Marlos Dr. Fasters.
It certainly looks, Bonnie. It looks as if he sets up a magic circle to conjure spirits very much as far the stars. While striking about it, though, is the prominence of roles for women in this play. Shakespeare's histories are often criticised for their masculine cast and for the way they place women like Hotspurs wife Kate in the first part of Henry, the fourth in subservient or marginal positions away from the power play.
That structures the main narrative. This is not true of the Henry the six plays or of Richard the third, and the role of powerful political women is one of the play's real sources of in-transit, i.e., not serial interests. The final point I want to bring out is something about the place structure.
Throughout the second part of Henry the Six, there are shared images and the poetry of repetition is easy, for example, to pull out images of rising and falling that accompany and articulate that their canticles structure. But what might be more compelling about the play is the dramaturgical equivalent of those poetic repetitions. A sense of overlayed action amplified through repeated stage tumblin.
We might call this a material or physical form of concatenation, the kind of poetic repetition, verbal repetition which is here rendered visual. There are lots of ways to imagine repeated a quick stage business in this play groups of characters and stage arrangements.
But it just want to pick out two props in particular. The first prop is the bed in which to Comfrey is murdered, which becomes a few scenes later, the same bag who's drawn curtains reveal the Mårten cardinal who is haunted by Humphris ghost. The shared prop. That's to say, does the visual work of connexion and causation. That can be hard to follow in the play's tangled rivalries and affiliations. But the visual connexion makes the connexion between these two actions.
The death of Humphrey and the death of the cards is quite clear. And the second problem is that of the severed head. Gloster dreams that the heads of Summerset and Suffolk were placed on his own broken stuff, and this turns out to be a kind of premonition Cades. As we've seen, it's taken off to London by Alexander Eden. Suffolk's is delivered to his lover queen Margaret. The curiously laconic stage director in the quarter reads, Enter the key reading of a letter.
And the queen with the Duke of Suffolks Head and the Lords say with others. It was a rather brilliant version of these planes performed by Edward Hall's company Propellor called Rose Rage. And they used red cabbages and cleavers to signal that chopping off of heads was an amazing kind of a sound of chopping through that dense cabbage, which suggested this repeated action of cutting the cutting off of heads.
So what these and other examples might suggest, these examples of internal repetition or Echo might suggest, is that there is an alternative reading at play in the second part of Hamlet, the sixth one that is less linear to your logical and potentially cereal. And instead more circular, reiterative or symbolic, a pattern of overlaps and reiterations and symbols rather than a linear episode in an ongoing narrative.
Some of the associations and the horizon of expectations to use, Gerow says redolent phrase about how genre works. The horizon of expectations about history suggests that this is going to be eventful and purposeful, perhaps. What's potentially interesting for us now is to think about other critical methodologies down the cereal that might help us make sense of this blunt,
obscurely powerful play. So we've been talking about the extent to which Henry, the six, Part two could be seen as an autonomous, outstanding play by investigating the ways its life in print and performance suggests interdependence and a connexion to other plays. But I've included some discussions of the serial of as a format and of the kinds of formal properties of prolapsed this and other lapses that we might expect from a serial play.
Then I've tried to think about a more circular and less linear kind of appreciation of this play, as if what we see is actions which repeat, modify, deepen an emblem, ties, it seems, rather than progressed than in purely narrative terms. Next week's My Last Lecture. In this series, I'm going to look at the play. The new Oxford Shakespeare puts Shakespeare's very first. The two gentlemen of Verona haven't quite decided that the thing's going to try and talk about its best character.
The dog they're trying to keep.