Henry VI Part 1: The Francophone Menace

I had been dreading reading this as I find the histories to be pretty hard going, and this is considered by all and sundry to be one of the worst of the Shakespearean canon and in all likelihood written by a whole bunch of people. Also, everything I know about English history I have gleaned from Blackadder and torrid costume dramas and I don't think that they are very reliable sources. However! Turns out that having read George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books has put me in a pretty good place to get my head around a confusing cast of characters who keep running off to kill one another.

The beginning: it's never a good sign when a play about a king's reign begins with a bunch of royals saying that the king who has only just now died (Henry V, or Dad-Henry) was the greatest of ALL TIME and that there is no possible way to top his awesome French-thrashing greatness, especially when the new king (Henry VI) is in reality just a teeny tiny infant (although in this play old enough to be married?). After some wailing and cosmic fist-shaking, a bunch of bad-news-bearers crash the funeral and here is what they say:

1. The English are being caned in France and morale is shit. The soldiers aren't dummies and they are understandably irate that their noble commanders are so at odds with one another that they couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery let alone manage a full scale war.
2. France is kicking back: Charles the Dauphin has been named king (and he has a posse; see below re: Joan la Pucelle)
3. Lord Talbot, the awesome English military commander, was outnumbered four-to-one by the smelly treacherous frogs and has been injured and captured (although he put up a good fight because he is a paragon of English patriotism and bravery and shoutiness).
4. Everything is generally terrible.

To make matters worse, internal rivalry is about to make everything at home untenable too: Uncle Gloucester (Lord Protector) and Great Uncle Exeter are about to be stabbed in the back by devious Great Uncle Bishop-then-Cardinal Winchester the evil scheming Catholic, who plans on pinching the new infant king and being a Church-backed boss man. Gloucester and Winchester swear at each other a lot and make their men fight each other, because clearly there's not more pressing issues to attend to.

MEANWHILE IN FRANCE: witchy devil whore Joan la Pucelle (i.e. of Arc) turns up, kicks ass, takes names, and beats the newly ransomed Lord Talbot in hand to hand combat like a boss before leading the French to victory. Boo the French.

FYI this is how Talbot is portrayed throughout the play:

so Joan la Pucelle schooling him is a pretty big deal.

That is what happens in Act I. Action packed. It took me quite a long time to get that far because I was annotating family trees so that I could keep track.

From here this play - by which I mean this interconnected series of scenes that don't really cohere into a story - feels like a combination of the Wars of the Roses Greatest Hits: The Early Years, The French Say the Dastardliest Things! and some pretty frothy Talbot vs. the world fanfic. Talbot kills French people against enormous odds! Talbot roars like an animal and scares his captors! Talbot berates idiot nobles who are getting in the way of a solid English victory! Talbot tries to tell his son to go home and not die in a vicious war because he is noble and also loving but his son is brave just like him and he refuses so they fight together cheek by jowl and then Talbot rescues his son from peril and they fight some more!

... until they are totally overrun by the French, in part because bickering between Team White Rose and Team Red Rose has held up reinforcements, and  Talbot's son dies:

And in that sea of blood my boy did drench 

His over-mounting spirit; and there died

My Icarus, my blossom, in his pride.

and then Talbot cradles his dead son and dies of his own injuries and Barber's Adagio for Strings plays in the background while everyone cries at the death of old fashioned English noble warriordom.

Right afterwards, though, is an unintentionally comical bit where Sir William Lucy (for the English) turns up to casually chat to Charles the Dauphin - "helloooo, anyone around?" - to figure out who won and who has what prisoners. I imagine two columns of soldiers spitting and shaking hands saying "good game good game good game" as they step over the "stinking and flyblown".

Act V summation:

• Joan la Pucelle,who up until this point has been been portrayed really beautifully, is now literally consorting with demons (not just figuratively, like in the pretty sexually pointed taunts of the English), and she is captured and burned at the stake. Boo. (Interpretation of these scenes varies.)
• Charles (who has reclaimed half of France) submits and there is an uneasy truce.
• Nice, conciliatory King Henry, who has been conspicuous by his absence, is now nearly a grown up. While negotiating a peace he is convinced to marry superbabe Margaret of Anjou, who was captured by and is now having an affair with the sneaky Earl of Suffolk, who wants to control the kingdom via her - i.e. scandal! (Spoiler: in later plays she will prove herself to be one of the top female badasses in all of Shakespeariana.)

...the end.


Verdict: This took me ages to read. I quite liked bits of it, there are two more parts to come (plus Richard III, to make a Wars of the Roses tetralogy) and Wikipedia was the winner on the day.