Shakespeare's Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage (review)

Shakespeare's Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage offers a critical overview of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III. While touching on matters (such as critical reception and recent performance history) to be found in many general introductions, it focuses primarily on Shakespeare's artistic transformation of his historical source materials. The author of this volume identifies herself with "a generation who rejected dictatorial ideologues" (6-7), and implicit in the method of her study is the "belief" (stated explicitly only on the book's dust jacket) "that a more constructive starting-point for research is the exploration of the technical problems raised by turning heavy narratives into performable plays, rather than of the political motives that could inspire a playwright's representation of national history."

Reminding readers that the "tetralogy" formed by these plays is a modern invention (created at the 1864 Shakespeare tercentenary celebration in Weimar, where Franz Dingelstedt presented the eight history plays as two sets of four), Goy-Blanquet accepts this artifice as a premise, side-stepping such inconvenient problems as the dating of the three Henry VI plays, the possible multiple authorship of 1 Henry VI, and the relationship of the Folio plays to the "bad" quarto The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster (1594) and the "bad" octavo Thetrue Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke (1595).Endorsing Michael Hattaway's hypothesis that the three parts of Henry VI were composed in chronological order by Shakespeare between 1589 and 1591, she asserts that, whether "the plays may or may not have been designed originally as a cycle, . . . they grow to something of great constancy" (17). "Editorial politics," she notes, might prefer "the collaborative over the isolated work of art," but the "meaningful design" of the plays could have been imposed only by the "solitary despotism" of "an artist of no mean talent" (16-18).

Goy-Blanquet surmises that Shakespeare may have been led to the prose chronicles by his reading of The Mirror for Magistrates (1559); she notes his substantial use in 2 Henry VI of Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1563); andshedismisses the notion that Holinshed's Chronicles is a more "secular" or intellectually sophisticated text than Hall's Vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (1548). She believes that in most cases Hall served as Shakespeare's primary source. Many of the principles she sees as governing Shakespeare's use of history will seem familiar. These include his basic fidelity to his sources as well as his independence in "rearranging facts, compressing or expanding details, and . . . infusing historical episodes with meanings his sources had never imagined" (37). While some of these techniques may be intrinsic to the dramatization of diffuse historical narrative, others, such as the perception of causality and design, she argues, are Shakespeare's historiographical improvement on Hall's "pedestrian interpretations" (258). On this rather sweeping condemnation of the sources, Goy-Blanquet bases her view of Shakespeare's achievement—his transformation of Hall's explicit, self-contradictory moralizing into implicitly ironic juxtaposition and his shaping of muddle and confusion into order and thoughtful complication.

More interesting than these generalizations are some of the results of Goy-Blanquet's examination of Shakespeare's technique in action. Henry VI, Part 1, she argues, "avoids Manichaeism" in juxtaposing Talbot and the English against Joan and the French by means of a "double system of interpretation," in which Shakespeare shows that where the demonic French are united, the heroic English are politically divided and thus self-defeated (40, 54). "[T]he most brilliant construction of the sequence" is Henry VI, Part 2, in which Shakespeare learned to organize events and to embody historical interpretation in a single artistic design, centered on the fall of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (57). By transforming the "moral comforts" of Part 1 into "shrewd political judgment," Part 2 also becomes...