Shakespeare's Kings (4 page)

These were important questions, and in the sixteenth century they could be answered most effectively through the drama. Books were still expensive luxuries, largely the preserve of scholars and wealthy intellectuals; the theatre on the other hand appealed to every class of society and could be afforded by all but the very poorest - the majority of whom would have taken little interest in it anyway. And besides, what a story there was to be told: a dazzling opportunity, even if also a formidable challenge, to any ambitious young playwright. No wonder, as the sixteenth century drew to its close, that history plays became so popular. Before, let us say,
1585
there had been only one worthy of the name:
King John,
written not by Shakespeare but by John Bale, a Suffolk man who became Bishop of Ossory in Ireland, shortly before
1536;
but that was an isolated instance. It was only in the last decade of the century — when, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in
1588,
the feeling of national exhilaration was at its height - that such plays began to appear in any quantity. They included (to name but a few) an

1. 23 April is at least the traditional date. The parish register records his baptism on 26 April, and in those times of high infant mortality baptism normally followed only a day or two after birth. But he certainly died on St George's Day 1616, and there is a pleasant symmetry in the idea that he both entered the world and left it on the feast of England's patron saint.

anonymous drama based on Bale,
The Troublesome Raigne
of
King John,
which was almost certainly the inspiration for Shakespeare's own version;
The Famous Victories
of
Henry the Fifth,
also anonymous;
Sir Thomas More
and
The Downfall
of
Robert, Earle
of
Huntingdon
(whom the principal author, Anthony Munday, chose to identify with Robin Hood); and
Edward I,
by George Peele. Some, obviously, are better than others; but only one, it can safely be said, can be mentioned in the same breath as Shakespeare's, and could be - indeed has been - successfully staged in our own day: Christopher Marlowe's dark and majestic tragedy of
Edward II.

In the four centuries since it was written, the Shakespearean canon has enjoyed varying fortunes. Of
Edward III
we know practically nothing. Printed in
1596,
its
title
page describes it only as having been 'sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London'. Since then its only recorded stage productions have been one in
1986
at the Globe Playhouse in Los Angeles and one in the following year by the Welsh Theatr Clwyd, which, having opened in the little town of Mold, went on to Cambridge and then, rather surprisingly, to Taormina in Sicily. We can only hope that after
400
years of obscurity the play's new promotion to Shakespearean rank will encourage other theatre companies to try it out, and give audiences the chance to judge it for themselves.

Richard II,
too, has had a curious history. After its opening on
7
February
1601
— the eve of the Earl of Essex's abortive rising — it was not appare
ntly
performed again until
30
September
1607,
when it was put on by members of the ship's company of HMS
Dragon
off Sierra Leone - a safer if less probable venue, as it turned out, than the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where a version by Nahum Tate was suppressed in
1681
after only two performances, despite Tate's tactfully having changed the nam
es of all the characters and retitl
ed the play
The Sicilian Usurper.
But the deposition of a king was always a delicate subject, and Charles II can hardly be blamed, in the circumstances, for his sensitivity. Only in the nineteenth century did
Richard
II
finally achieve the popularity it deserved, with Edmund Kean and his son Charles; Charles Kean's production of
1857,
with its tremendous set piece of Richard's woeful entry into London in Bolingbroke's victorious train was, we are told, never forgotten by any who saw it.

Thanks to the sheer irresistibility of Falstaff, the
Henry IV
plays were a success from the start. (Only the Victorians were to find him shocking, as they did almost everything else.) For the same reason, however, producers of later centuries tended to cut most of the political and historical sections and focus the entire play on the lovable old reprobate. Not until
1913
- and then not in London but in Birmingham - did Barry Jackson give audiences the opportunity to hear the full text as Shakespeare wrote it.
¹

Surprisingly, perhaps, in view of the opportunities it offers to a great actor, as well as for its pageantry and stage effects,
Henry
V
was ignored between January
1605,
when it was performed at court during the Christmas revels, and November
1735,
when it was revived by the Irish actor Henry Giffard at his new theatre of Goodman's Fields. The warrior king then became a favourite role for such actors as Kemble, Macready and Charles Kean; David Garrick had played only the Chorus. Less to be wondered at is the play's increased popularity in time of war. Londoners at Christmas
1914
perhaps deserved something a little more thrilling than the fifty-six-year-old Frank Benson as Henry; even this, however, must have been preferable to the production two years later by Marie Slade and her all-woman company, with Miss Slade herself in the title role.
Henry V
shares with
Richard III
the distinction of having been twice made the subject of a feature film. Laurence Olivier's of
1944
— a triumph, considering the difficulties of film production in wartime and a ridiculously small budget — understandably emphasized the patriotic aspect; Kenneth Branagh's, made forty-five years later, went a good deal deeper, removing the glamour and reminding us instead of the mud and the blood and the misery of war.

The three parts of
Henry VI
have always been, as it were, the runts of the litter. We know of no early stage history of any o
f them, unless the 'Harey the vi
', mentioned in the diary of the theatre manager Philip Henslowe as having been performed by Lord Strange's Men on
3
March
1592,
can be identified with Part I. In London, apart from a single performance of Part I at Drury Lane in
173
8
for some 'Ladies of Quality' and a week's run of Part II in
1864,
none of the three was seen in its original form until
1923,
when they were all staged on two consecutive

nights by Robert Atkins at the Old Vic.
¹
Shakespeare-lovers then had to wait another twelve years, until in the summer of
1935
Gilmor Browne, Director of the Pasadena Community Playhouse, presented a festival season of all the history plays. Over the past half-century, productions of the trilogy have still been few and far between. (I have already mentioned the Barton—Hall
Wars
of
the Roses
at the Aldwych theatre, where on Saturday
11
January
1964
I saw, for the first and I fear the last time in my life, an edited version of the three parts of
Henry VI
as well as
Richard III,
all performed in a single day.)

We are left with the greatest play of them all. It seems hard nowadays to believe that
Richard III
was ignored through most of the seventeenth century, and that for
150
years after that it survived only in an extraordinary version by the actor-playwright Colley Cibber, which included bits from
Rich
ard II, Henry IV Part II, Henry V
and
Henry VI Part III,
plus several lines of his own invention. For the play as Shakespeare wrote it audiences had to wait till
1845,
when it was produced by Samuel Phelps; even then, however, they preferred the Cibber version - and when Phelps restaged the play in
1861,
this was the one they got. Not till the end of the nineteenth century did
Richard III
really come into its own, when Frank Benson offered productions regularly between
1886
and
1915.
There can be no real doubt that the first truly definitive Richard was that of Olivier in
1944
- a vision of evil which he preserved eleven years later in his famous film version; though even this, despite his own electrifying performance and those of Ralph Richardson as Buckingham and John Gielgud as Clarence, now seems to me pedestrian when compared with the film of
1995,
shot largely in Battersea Power Station, with Sir Ian McKellen in the
title
role.

But now I am becoming critical, and this is not a work of criticism. Anyone wanting to know more about texts, dates and sources is recommended once again to acquire the relevant volumes of the Arden or the New Cambridge editions, the most authoritative and scholarly in existence.
²
My own object has been far more modest: simply to provide lovers of Shakespeare, enthusiastic but cheerfully non-expert, with the

sort of single volume that I myself should like to have had, when my eyes were first opened to the splendour of these Histories, more than half a century ago.

John Julius
Norwich Castle Combe, November 199
8

Edward III and the Black Prince

[1337-1377]

king edward
. Lorraine, return this answer to thy lord: I mean to visit him, as he requests; But how? not servilely dispos'd to bend, But like a conqueror, to make him bow. His lame unpolish'd shifts are come to light, And truth has pull'd the vizard from his face That set a gloss upon his arrogance. Dare he command a fealty in me? Tell him, the crown, that he usurps, is mine, And where he sets his foot, he ought to kneel: 'Tis not a petty dukedom that I claim, But all the whole dominions of the realm; Which if with grudging he refuse to yield, I'll take away those borrow'd plumes of his And send him naked to the wilderness.

edward iii

On Monday
21
September
1327
Edward Plantagenet, the former King Edward II of England, was murdered at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. He had been deposed eight months earlier, but not before he and his infamous lover Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, had reduced the prestige of the English Crown to the lowest point in all its history. Edward was weak and impressionable, totally unable to assert himself against the ambition and greed of his favourite, who shamelessly used his hold over the King to advance his own fortunes. Had he shown the faintest degree of moderation, had he treated the great barons of the land with even a suggestion of deference and respect, they would probably have accepted the situation philosophically; instead, he rode roughshod over them all, infuriating t
hem with his greed, ostentation
and arrogance. Only two months after his coronation in
1308,
they made their first demand for Gaveston's banishment; the King's reply was to appoint him Lieutenant of Ireland, and little more than a year later the odious young man was back at his side, insufferable as ever.

The barons kept up their pressure, and in
1311
Gaveston was sentenced to permanent exile from the kingdom. Even then he and Edward fought back, and early the following year the King formally announced the Earl's return and reinstatement; in doing so, however, he effectively signed his death warrant. On
19
May
1312
Gaveston surrendered at Scarborough, and a month later to the day he was publicly executed on Blacklow Hill, just outside Warwick. Somehow Edward managed to maintain a tenuous hold on the throne for another fifteen years; but his weakness and indecision, his now habitual drunkenness and his utter inability to control an unending stream of catamites - above all a certain Hugh le Despenser, a would-be successor to Gaveston - made his downfall inevitable. Eventually his own Queen, Isabella of France, together with her lover Roger Mortimer, took up arms against him and he was obliged to capitulate. On
20
January
1327
he was formally deposed, and eight months later, on
21
September, was put hideously to death.
¹