What is your favorite shakespeare history play? 😊 im just starting on them and find all the Henry's a bit daunting!
Shakespeare anon my beloved, thank you for your patience. I got so excited about this ask I wrote you a whole essay. Bear with me, I know it's a lot of information, and we're mostly talking about the history Shakespeare is writing about rather than his plays themselves.
You have come to the right place! The history plays can be tricky. The language is often more difficult and not as well written as the comedies and tragedies, and the plots rely on the audience understanding political intrigue of the last 200 years or so. While Shakespeare's audiences were all familiar with these pieces of their history, we dont usually have the same level of understanding about it today, and that means we can miss important plot points without realizing we have. But don't worry! The history is super interesting (it's what Game of Thrones is based on!), and the plays are still well worth the read.
I'm partial to Richard III. The character of Richard is one of Shakespeare's most complex and compelling villains - he's charming and ruthless and brilliant. He deceives everybody, and in classic shakespeare protagonist fashion he speaks directly to the audience and tells us everything going on in his mind. I did my undergrad thesis on his monologue that opens the play ("Now is the winter of our discontent...") so if you're interested, I can do some text analysis of that.
But Richard III tells the very end of the War of the Roses. While it was one of the earlier history plays to be written, there are eight in total for which the War of the Roses is the overarching plot (King John and Henry VIII are the only history plays not included in this arc) - Richard II, Henry IV part 1 and part 2, Henry V, Henry VI parts 1 2 and 3, and Richard III. Understanding what's going on with this is key to making sense of the history plays.
A brief history of the War of the Roses:
The War of the Roses is basically one giant family all fighting each other. All of these contenders for the crown are descended from Edward III, who had five sons, and different branches of the family split off from different sons - in the family tree, found here, you can see the Lancasters in blue, the Beauforts in green, and the Yorks in red. The "houses of Lancaster and York" are the major players of the War of the Roses between Henry VI and Richard Duke of York (you can see them both in the middle of this family tree), but first, let's talk about how we got there, and I apologize in advance for them all having such similar names.
Edward III's oldest son is Edward the Black Prince. He's the heir to the throne, but he dies before his father, leaving his son Richard II. Richard II inherits the throne when Edward III dies because his father was the first son, rather than the crown going to one of Edward III's younger sons (as it would've if the Black Prince didnt have any children). The problem with this is that Richard II isnt a particularly good king, and he doesnt have any children. So the Lancaster branch of the family, headed by Henry Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt the Duke of Lancaster, leads an uprising against Richard and takes the throne, becoming Henry IV. This is the first move in setting up the War of the Roses, though nobody knows it yet.
Henry IV is a pretty good king, but his son Prince Hal spends most of his time drinking and goofing off with his friends when he should be learning how to inherit. I'll let you discover what happens there, as it's the plot of the Henry IV plays, but Hal does eventually inherit and become Henry V in a smooth succession. All seems well.
Meanwhile, England and France are at war - The Hundred Years' War, to be precise, which actually lasted from 1337 to 1453. This has been going on since the reign of Edward III - Edward III's mother Isabella was French, and the only remaining relative of the French king, so there was some dispute in France about whether Edward III should be allowed to claim the French throne through Isabella (the French nobility decided not, as there had been president that women had no claim to the throne, and also Edward III was still a child at this time and his mother and her lover were widely suspected of murdering his father Edward II - see Marlowe's Edward II). France was divided over inheritance rights, and fighting surged up and was repressed multiple times. Wiki details this all pretty well.
When Henry V inherits the English throne, England and France are at peace; Henry decides to hell with that and invades France in 1415 (the Battle of Agincourt), and they win! Henry takes a bunch of land for England, marries the French king Charles VI's daughter, and signs a treaty with him that names all his heirs also heirs to the French throne. The french Dauphin (Charles VII) is disinherited.
Henry V spends the rest of his life traveling around France conquering bits and pieces and visiting French court with his wife. In 1422, Henry V dies, leaving his infant son Henry VI to inherit the throne. Charles VI dies two months later. Now a baby is king of both England and France, and things start to fall apart.
The English start losing in France. In 1429, a girl named Joan of Arc makes her way to the exiled Dauphin, the disinherited Charles VII, and convinces him that she will win back France for him. And she does. With Joan leading the troops, the French take back Orleans and a series of other cities, and Joan personally crowns Charles VII king of France. Unfortunately Joan got too confident for the men surrounding her to be comfortable with, and when she was captured by the English in 1430, her French friends made no move to save her. After Joan's death, the English continue to lose dramatically to France. The financial cost is attributed as one of the causes of the War of the Roses, along with Henry VI's weakness as king. (Shakespeare fudges these dates a bit - he tends to smoosh events together so they can all happen in one play).
While Henry VI was a weak ruler, his wife Margaret of Anjou was not (shes the inspiration for Cersei Lannister). She and Henry's advisors handled most of the actual ruling of England. (If you'll remember our family tree, this is the Lancaster branch in blue). Richard, Duke of York and son of Edward III's fourth son (the red branch), sees Henry VI's weakness and decides he'd be a better king. He does technically have a claim (remember, they're all one big family of Plantagenets), but he's certainly not next in line, especially as Henry VI has a son. But Richard of York gathers his sons and his supporters, decides his emblem is the white rose (to contrast the Lancasters' red rose - this is where we get the roses in the name of the war), and leads an uprising. Richard of York dies in 1460 during battle (Margaret captures him) and his claim is carried on by his oldest son Edward IV. In fact, the crown gets stolen back and forth a few times, and things are shaken up by the Earl of Warwick (thee guy to have on your team, his nickname was The Kingmaker) changed his support from the Yorks to the Lancasters. Henry VI briefly held the throne again, but in 1470 Edward IV returned, presumably had Henry VI killed, and reigned peacefully until his sudden death in 1483.
Edward IV's younger brother is Richard III. When Edward dies, his son Edward V reigns for 78 days before being deposed by Richard III. This sparked a lot of controversy, and many York supporters deserted to the Lancastrian side. It wasnt a particularly organized rebellion, but in the chaos, Henry Tudor, son of Henry VI's half-brother Edmund Earl of Richmond and the leader of the Lancastrian cause, returned from exile and eventually defeated Richard III in battle, becoming Henry VII and starting the Tudor dynasty. Henry VII married Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV, thereby uniting the two houses of Lancaster and York (the Tudor emblem is a red and white rose) and ending the War of the Roses.
Shakespeare takes a lot of artistic license with the history - we have no evidence that Joan of Arc was a witch nor that Richard III was an evil hunchback (historians actually think now that the appearance of a hump was due to a combination of scoliosis and using a battle axe as a preferred weapon). But we cant attribute all these changes to Shakespeare! As we're well aware of today, the media affects how we perceive history and current events, and back then was no different. During Henry VII's reign, there was a staggering amount of propaganda written to defame Richard III and cement Henry's right to the throne. This is where we get the evil hunchback image Shakespeare made so famous, as well as the suggestion that Richard had his nephews murdered in the Tower of London. Equally, all the talk of Joan of Arc being a witch was spread by her enemies to cause her fall from power (Joan is fascinating and one of the medieval figures we have the most documentation from the time for; I studied her at uni, pls feel free to ask more questions). Shakespeare's portrayal of her in Henry VI part 1 is fascinating because she starts out seeming as good and noble as she appears, and then three quarters of the way through the play shes suddenly summoning demons. This is weird because Shakespeare's characters dont lie to us the audience; they lie to each other, and usually tell us they're going to, but they dont deceive the audience. There's some debate about whether Shakespeare was co-writing the play, hence the sudden change in characterization, or if someone reading a draft said "Will mate you cant make Joan a hero, shes French! We hate the French!" but either way I find it fascinating. All this to say, Shakespeare takes artistic license with the historical facts, but as always the record keepers are also taking license with the facts.
That's a lot of information and names and dates to keep straight, I know. You may find it easier to watch the plays as you read them - I did! There are lots of good versions on film, though theyll all have cuts from the text. Here are some of my favs:
The Hollow Crown (covers the whole arc from RII - RIII and has a ton of british actors you'll recognize)
Kenneth Bragnagh's Henry V
Ian McKellen's Richard III
If you can find these stage productions online, Antony Sher as Falstaff in Henry IV at the RSC and David Tennant as Richard II are well worth the watch.
If you're interested in Richard III as a character and/or have interest in how actors bring characters to life, I highly recommend Antony Sher's Year of the King; it's his journal from when he was in rehearsal preparing to play Richard at the RSC in the 1980s, a production that skyrocketed him to fame in British theatre because he revolutionized a character that had been pigeonholed by Laurence Olivier's portrayal. Sher played him on crutches, researched with both doctors and physically disabled people about Richard's disability, and did extensive psychological work; he's brilliant, and his journal is a really interesting delve into Richard as a character and Shakespeare's depiction of him.
Anon I know I just threw so much information at you, but I hope this helps you feel like youve got more of a grasp on what to expect, and please come back if you have questions or want to chat!
