An important thing for a reader to keep in mind when reading commentary on Shakespeare, and this includes this blog, is that all of it is written after the fact. In other words, the commentator is dealing with a finished product, in this case a play or poem, and working from there. It is a very different situation from the one that Shakespeare was in when he was writing. He was on the other side of the process entirely. I mention this because it occasionally occurs when reading criticism that a mistake in tone reduces the effectiveness of the argument in question. By tone, I mean the writer's attitude toward the subject and toward him or herself. An error in logic occurs when a writer positions him or herself above Shakespeare in some regard simply because he or she came later, and therefore has read Freud, or has used a computer, or some such thing. This doesn't follow. There has not been a writer before or since with the accomplishments of Shakespeare, and a commentator who is not aware of the fact should not be taken too seriously. And if there is not an understanding regarding the difference between writing about a play and writing one, he or she shouldn't be read at all.

People are usually surprised when they learn that the longest soliloquy in Shakespeare doesn't occur in Hamlet, Othello or any of the other plays associated with the technique - I know I was when I discovered that it occurs in the second scene of the third act of Henry VI, Part Three where it is spoken by the third son of the Duke of York, Richard, the recently nominated Duke of Gloucester. In it, the audience discovers that the character, like his father before him (mocked and killed by Lancastrian nobles in a brutal scene in 1.4) has plans to take the throne, but in this case, it's his older brothers more than the House of Lancaster that are in his way. The soliloquy contains many of the qualities that we associate with later ones: the working out of problems and decisions in front of the audience, the psychological realism, as well as the sources of what would become known as the stream-of-consciousness technique. And it's interesting to note that the three Henry VI plays are panoramic in effect, with many important roles, but with none bigger than 400 words or so. But this speech was a turning point for Shakespeare, and this character (who becomes better known as Richard III, and who speaks 1171 lines in the play named for him that follows) was the impetus for it. Here's an excerpt from the soliloquy in question:

Why, then, I do but dream on sovereignty;

Like one that stands upon a promontory,

And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,

Wishing his foot were equal with his eye,

And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,

Saying, he'll lade it dry to have his way:

So do I wish the crown, being so far off;

And so I chide the means that keeps me from it;

And so I say, I'll cut the causes off,

Flattering me with impossibilities.

My eye's too quick, my heart o'erweens too much,

Unless my hand and strength could equal them.

The Henry VI plays were a major determiner regarding the direction of the rest of Shakespeare's career. It seems that scholars are not uniformly in agreement over these being the earliest of the plays, but they were, at the very least, among the first five. They were almost certainly written before Marlowe's English history play, Edward II (completed in 1594) and a big influence on its writing, the opposite from what popular opinion and culture (Shakespeare in Love, for example) tell us about which writer was learning and which was leading the way. And many scholars are now giving their support to what is known as the "early start" theory, according to which Shakespeare began his writing career in 1586, the same year as Marlowe's.

The writing of three Henry VI plays, it seems obvious, also taught Shakespeare a lot, because from the experience he found a way of working that would allow his greatest and most unique strengths to be incorporated into the process, i.e. his ability to find psychological realism in virtually any character in any situation. And from them, a character emerged who was to be the first of his many larger-than-life protagonists. I'll be writing about him tomorrow.

Even though the three Henry VI plays are some of the least performed and appreciated in the canon, their writing was an incredibly ambitious undertaking that had large-scale influence on the rest of Shakespeare's career. Today, I'd like to focus on the thematic content of the plays which treat English wars both foreign (the Hundred Years War) and civil (the Wars of the Roses) as well as the machinations and treacheries that led to them. In fact, one reason that the plays were not performed for most of the last 400 years (they've been seen somewhat more frequently since the 1960s), is their almost unrelenting darkness and brutality. And I'm not sure that this can be attributed to Shakespeare: aside from the telescoping and conflation necessary for dramatic purposes, the events are portrayed with great accuracy. The plays show things as they really were. Their creation must have been quite an affecting experience for a young writer on a psychological level, to say the least. My belief is that Shakespeare's submersion in the violence and chaos these plays contain led to the central mission of his career: the exploration for the causes of war and injustice and the examination of what it means to be human.

The three parts of Henry VI are dazzling plays by any standards other than Shakespeare's. Compared to his best work, there's no question that they come up short, but then that's not really a fair comparison, because the fact is that the writing of these early plays was what allowed him to learn his poetic and dramatic crafts so thoroughly. There's no way that the rest of Shakespeare's work would have been written without the earliest plays: Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, and particularly these three, because I think they were the most responsible for what followed, in terms of both technique and content. Over the next couple of posts, I'll try to convince you as to why, but for today let's simply consider what an ambitious undertaking it was for a young writer to adapt the Wars of the Roses for the stage. Michael Taylor puts it best in one of the notes to his excellent introduction to his 2003 edition of the Oxford Henry VI, Part One: "Many commentators have pointed out the sheer unlikelihood of conceiving a play in three parts at this time. A two-part play such as Marlowe's Tamburlaine was itself a daring venture; a three-part play, so the argument runs, would have been inconceivable. (Although it is always dangerous to talk about the inconceivable when we are dealing with Shakespeare.)"

I've written about the importance of the poetic aspect of Shakespeare's work a few times in the past, I know, but it's under-discussed as a central factor of his work in my opinion, at least in the commentary that I've been reading lately (which is excellent in other ways, however). My point today is the following: The evidence shows that Shakespeare took as much pride in being a poet as he did in being a dramatist (for example, the only works that he took the time to personally publish were the two long narrative poems, The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis), and this forced his play-writing to match the highest qualities of the best poetry. Among the most important of these qualities is its truth-finding nature, because if a poem does not contain honest and accurate thoughts on the human experience, it quite simply doesn't work as poetry. And the fact that Shakespeare was always concerned with making his writing do so also explains one of the central paradoxes of his career: The writer known for his unsurpassed verbal prowess is also the one whose work is the most realistic in its depiction of human nature.

I've seen it mentioned a few times recently that Shakespeare's couplets, both those at the ends of sonnets and those used to delineate the ends of scenes in the plays (where they were used, the most prevalent theory goes, to prepare the actors in the wings for their entrances), are generally considered to be of a lesser quality than the rest of his writing. If we assume this is so, for the sake of argument, one reason for it, in my opinion, is that Shakespeare seems to have been the type of writer who found it technically more inspiring to write toward something rather than to end something. This would also help to explain the similar decision, albeit on a much larger scale, to write the history plays in the order that he did, i.e. working backwards, essentially, via the use of what we now call prequels. But the best explanation that I've seen is found in W.H. Auden's Lectures on Shakespeare (published in 2000), in which he states, regarding sonnet 65:

"Notice how frequently the concluding couplets of the sonnets are poor. Unlike many of even the greatest artists, Shakespeare is not interested in completely flawless wholes. He says what he wants to say and lets the sonnet end anyhow. But that is the fault of the major artist, for a minor one always completes the work carefully. For instance, when we read Dostoevsky, we feel, yes, this is wonderful, this is marvelous, now go home and write it all over again. And yet if he did, the effect might well be lost. Most of us, however, can't get away with that attitude toward our writing." Here's the poem referred to:

Sonnet LXV

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,

But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,

Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out

Against the wreckful siege of battering days,

When rocks impregnable are not so stout,

Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

O fearful meditation! where, alack,

Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?

Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

O, none, unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.