Henry II in Drama: Changing Historical Outlooks

Henry II in Drama: Changing Historical Outlooks Thomas M. Jones William Shakespeare, who often wrote about those who “sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings,” did not himself entertain Globe audiences with one of the saddest of all the stories. Henry II, who loved and hated his sons in roughly equal measure, died after one final battle with his surviving heirs, muttering, we are told, last words perfectly suited to bio­ graphers and playwrights: “Shame, shame on a vanquished king.”l But if Shakespeare ever wrote a play about Henry II, it has not survived.2 His only known writing about the early Plantagenets deals with Henry’s youngest son, John. In the middle years of the twentieth century, however, sev­ eral prominent writers have turned to Henry as the central figure for their dramas. These include T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, Jean Anouilh, and James Goldman, along with a half dozen lesser known playwrights who contributed other versions of the same theme, sometimes in single act or short sketch form.3 Earlier, Alfred Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Bancroft, William Henry Ireland, Thomas Hull, Joseph Addi­ son, William Hawkins, Aubrey de Vere, Douglas Jerrold, Alfred Waite, and Arthur Helps, among others, wrote plays involving one or another of the dramatic crises that punctuated the reign of the first Plantagenet. With one exception, this last group dates from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. John Ban­ croft’s Henry the Second was performed in 1692 and published soon after. The actor-director William Mountfort may have as­ sisted in the writing, and John Dryden loaned his name to the production through an epilogue written in a vein distinctly dif­ ferent from the words of the play itself. Concerning Henry, the great Elizabethan dramatists were 309 310 Comparative Drama uniformly silent. Later, as the multitude of possibilities for tragedy became apparent, three centuries of audiences and critics watched the variations in plot that this raging, tragic figure provided through facets of his personal, political, and institutional life. Three distinct episodes from Henry’s career have provided the raw material. Often two or more of these episodes have been woven as plot and sub-plot into a single play, but usually the author has chosen one of the three for primary development. Of these, the situation most frequently and effectively used has been the personal and institutional conflict between the king and his erstwhile close friend and constant companion, Thomas Becket.4 Among recent plays, Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and Anouilh’s Becket are the best known examples, and Fry’s Curtmantle uses the Becket episode prominently. Tennyson’s Becket and de Vere’s St. Thomas of Canterbury similarly used that conflict during the last century. A second episode, widely popular with Victorian and preVictorian audiences, involves Henry’s alleged affair with Rosa­ mond Clifford, the “Fair Rosamond” of ballad and fable. In this well known and much embroidered tale, the king concealed his beloved mistress in a secret bower near Woodstock, where an intricately designed maze prevented the jealous queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, from discovering her rival. Eventually Eleanor, a woman of emotions violent enough to match her husband’s, did unravel the secret and managed to poison Rosa­ mond, whose remains thereafter had to be guarded by sympa­ thetic nuns at nearby Godstow. While there doubtless was a Rosamond, and while a person of that name was buried at Godstow, appropriate details of this legend were fabricated by story tellers of the later middle ages.5 The earliest of the plays, Bancroft’s and Mountfort’s Henry the Second, uses that story as its central plot, as does Addison’s opera “Rosamond,” written a few years later. In the nineteenth century, Swinburne returned to the same plot in his verse play Rosamond. The theme was perfect for the pre-Raphaelite world view.6 An opera, “Fair Rosamond” by John Barnett, a “musical burlesque extravaganza” by Thomas Proclus Taylor, and a range of short and long plays from the middle and late nine­ teenth century employed that legend as their basic plot. The third part of Henry’s many-sided existence that has Thomas...