The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth

Abstract

II Henry VI is about the collapse of Henry VI’s government and the coming of civil war. The play is set wholly in England, in the comparatively recent past, and the story told is so terrible that the dramatist has to do more than ‘show’ incidents, anticipating the audience’s simple response. There is nothing unexpected about French perfidy, or about the misbehaviour of powerful men during a boy king’s minority; but how is the war of English with English to be explained? For a long time after a civil war the reunited country feels that renewed faction is possible, and it has the war’s language on the tip of the tongue. Thirty years ago in some parts of Cheshire little boys soon knew whether they were for King or Parliament, and on Oak Apple Day some little cavaliers wore oak leaves to school. That war was three hundred years ago. We can be sure that among the audiences surrounding the stage where Henry VI was first performed, many spectators knew which of the roses they would wear for choice. The motives of York and the rage of Clifford will have been personal matters to those people, and the plays must have touched their lives in a way that had no precedent in the secular theatre. Not that Shakespeare wrote from a Yorkist or Lancastrian point of view; like Walter Scott’s Jacobite novels the history place are remarkably impartial.