O Thou that judgest all things, stay my thoughts, My thoughts, that labour to persuade my soul

Some violent hands were laid on Humphrey's life! If my suspect be false, forgive me God, For
judgement only doth belong to Thee.
(III, ii, 136 - 140 )
Thus, as Tillyard (p. 182) has pointed out, Shakespeare prepares us for the retribution to be visited
upon the murderer, Suffolk later in the play.
The political doctrine of the Henry VI plays is simple and obvious; most of it has already been
pointed out by Tillyard and others. Shakespeare's primary purpose, as I have already indicated, is
to present a vivid picture of the horrors of internal dissension and civil war as a reminder of the
chaos from which England was liberated by the Tudors and as a warning of what England might
again experience should Elizabeth die with the succession to the throne still in dispute. This horror
of civil war is portrayed throughout the three plays, but perhaps most forcefully in Act II, scene v
of 3 Henry VI, when King Henry, having been driven from the Battle of Towton by Queen Margaret
and the Earl of Warwick who fear the bad tuck he brings, sits upon a molehill and, while lamenting
the cares of kingship and longing for the simple shepherd's life, sees a son bear in the body of a
father he has killed and then a father bear in the body of a son he has killed. Henry, father, and son
chorally lament the tragedy of civil war. To the son Henry says:
O piteous spectacle! O bloody times! Whiles lions war and battle for their dens, Poor harmless
lambs abide their enmity. Weep, wretched man, I'll aid thee tear for tear; And let our hearts and
eyes, like civil war, Be blind with tears, and break o'ercharged with grief.
(II, v, 73 - 78 )
And to the mourning father:
Woe above woe! grief more than common grief! O that my death would stay these ruthful deeds!
O, pity, pity, gentle heaven, pity!
(II, v, 94 - 96 )
The scene, of course, is artificial and stylized, but as an allegorical symbol of the horror and pathos
of civil war it is nevertheless very effective.
Allied with this purpose is Shakespeare's desire to show the seeds of civil war: faction among the
nobles, with rule in dispute, and--worst of all evils that may befall a kingdom--a child king. King
Henry in 1 Henry VI points to the evil which the dissension between Winchester and Gloucester
must breed:
O, what a scandal is it to our crown, That two such noble peers as ye should jar! Believe me, lords,
my tender years can tell Civil dissension is a viperous worm That gnaws the bowels of the
commonwealth.
(III, i, 69 - 73 )
Shakespeare makes it very clear throughout all three plays that Henry VI is by nature
not fit for kingship. It is obvious that Richard of York, if crowned, would make a better
monarch. York's title, moreover, is a better one; Shakespeare is careful to give his
genealogy in great detail, 30 and Henry VI himself admits in an aside ( 3 Henry VI, I,
i, 134 ) that his own title is weak. In spite of this, however, Shakespeare censures
rebellion against the de facto ruler, and an important purpose of the play is to teach the

sinfulness of such rebellion. This may be, in part, an answer to those Englishmen,
particularly Catholics, who throughout her reign pointed to the weakness of Elizabeth's
claim to the throne.
The principal rebel, of course, is Richard of York, but to display the horrors of rebellion
Shakespeare uses chiefly Jack Cade and his followers, who are suborned by York to rebel against
Henry. The Cade scenes in 2 Henry VI are a skillful attempt to present a portrait of disorder, the
very antithesis of God's plan, and to show the effects of such disorder in the commonwealth. Cade
himself says that he and his men are "in order when we are most out of order" (IV, iii, 200 ).
The first of these is the large question of what constitutes a good king. In his condemnation
of York's rebellion Shakespeare enunciates a principle which is to dominate the later Henry IV
plays; that a de facto title is a primary requisite. No matter how superior to the king a claimant to
a throne may be, both in legitimacy of birth and in personal attributes, the rule of the de facto king
must not be challenged, for the worst of all evils is civil war, and even a bad king is preferable to
that. Throughout the plays, and particularly in 2 Henry VI, Shakespeare presents us with
contrasting examples of kingship, a device he is to repeat on a larger scale in his second tetralogy,
where Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V are offered in contrast. In 2 Henry VI Shakespeare gives
us King Henry, Humphrey of Gloucester, and Richard of York for comparison. 32 York has kingly
qualities and a good title to the throne; he is brave and he is crafty, combining the qualities of the
lion and the fox. He lacks, however, the qualities of the pelican: unselfishness and a disinterested
devotion to his country. Humphrey of Gloucester is brave and unselfishly devoted to his country; he
combines the qualities of the lion and the pelican, but he lacks the craftiness of the fox. King
Henry, the actual king, has only the qualifies of the pelican. Thus each of the three is lacking in at
least one essential requirement for successful kingship. The king, as Shakespeare sees it, must be
strong, crafty, and unselfishly devoted to his people. All three men combined, Tillyard holds, might
have constituted one perfect king, but any one of them alone was insufficient and doomed to
failure. That Henry VI is a good man is emphasized over and over throughout the trilogy. Of his
personal piety there can be no question. He is kind, loving, sympathetic; the tears he weeps for the
woes of his country are sincere. But in spite of those qualities which might endear him to an
audience as a man, and which win for him a large measure of sympathy in his misfortunes, he is
unsuccessful as a king. He is wanting in the public virtues, and it is England that primarily pays the
penalty for this shortcoming in its king. No matter how rich in personal virtue a man may be, if he
does not have the public virtue which makes him a good ruler, his country will suffer. Shakespeare
makes this very clear in 3 Henry VI in the death speech of Clifford:
And, Henry, hadst thou sway'd as kings should do, Or as thy father and his father did, Giving no
ground unto the house of York, They never then had sprung like summer flies; I and ten thousand
in this luckless realm Had left no mourning widows for our death; And thou this day hadst kept thy
chair in peace.
(II, v, 14 - 20 )
This theme of the insufficiency of private virtue in the conduct of a state, Shakespeare is to develop
at length in Richard II.
In both plays, Shakespeare asserts that a king will be successful if he acts strongly for
himself. He cannot depend entirely upon his position as God's agent on earth, as does
Richard II in particular, for only if he acts in his own behalf will God lend him assistance.
For a king ever to submit to despair, as Henry VI does throughout, is a defection of royal
duty and responsibility.
When Richard III was written, the character of Richard of Gloucester had already assumed a
conventional Senecan cast, and Shakespeare treated the subject along the lines laid out for him by
his predecessors. He used Holinshed and Hall, 39 both of which drew their material from Polydore

VergilAnglica Historia and More History of King Richard III, the two works which, more than any
others, had helped to shape the tradition of Richard III as a Senecan villain. The entire play is
dominated by the single figure of Richard of Gloucester. In his great soliloquy in the preceding
play, 41 he had already established himself as the cynical villain-hero who would "set the murderous
Machiavel to school," advancing through villainy after villainy until he seized the crown. The
Senecan elements in Richard III have been amply commented upon: the villain-hero with his selfrevealing soliloquies, the revenge motif, the ghosts, the stichomythic dialogue, and not least, the
abundant echoes of Seneca's own plays. The dominating figure of the Senecan villain-hero gives to
Richard III a unity which the Henry VI plays had lacked. Every episode in the play serves to
advance the cause of Richard up to a climactic point, after which every episode serves to hasten his
destruction. But Richard III is more than a Senecan tragedy; it draws upon other dramatic
traditions as well. The play, in large measure, continues the line of Marlowe Tamburlaine. The
theme of Richard III as of Tamburlaine is that of the steady rise of a dominant personality.
Marlowe's hero is triumphant, but Shakespeare's must be cut off and destroyed by the divine
providence which inevitably brings to wickedness its just reward. ." England continues as a kind of
morality hero torn between good and evil forces; in Richard III she suffers the depths of
degradation, and finally through God's grace she is allowed to win salvation by a proper choice: the
acceptance of Henry of Richmond as king. The morality element in the play is particularly evident in
the scene in Richard's tent on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth Field.
The most basic dramatic device in the play for A. P. Rossiter is a ritualistic portrayal of the futility of
Richard's philosophy of individual self-sufficiency and of the triumph of divinely instituted degree
and order. 43 The otherwise incredible scene in which Richard woos and wins Anne Neville (I, ii)
becomes meaningful when seen as a ritual act designed to repeat the theme of Edward IV's earlier
wooing of Lady Grey, rather than as a depiction of historical fact to be taken at face value. 44 The
great choral scene of lamentation in which Queen Margaret, Queen Elizabeth, and the Duchess of
York sit upon the ground and give themselves up to despair (IV, iv) is a ritual scene of which
Schelling (p. 94) wrote that "it would be difficult to find in the range of English drama a scene
reproducing so completely the nature and function of the Greek choric ode." The murder of
Clarence is handled in ritual fashion: his dream and his penitential lament (I, iv, 43 - 64 )
emphasize the divine retribution for sin which his coming murder will illustrate.
That Richmond is the executor of God's purposes is made particularly evident in his prayer:
O Thou, whose captain I account myself, Look on my forces with a gracious eye; Put in their hands
thy bruising irons of wrath, That they may crush down with a heavy fall The usurping helmets of
our adversaries! Make us thy ministers of chastisement, That we may praise thee in the victory! To
thee I do commend my watchful soul, Ere I let fall the windows of mine eyes: Sleeping and
waking, O, defend me still!
(V, iii, 108 - 117 )
In Richard III the doctrine of passive obedience had to be somewhat modified, for the rebellion
against Richard had to be justified. Henry of Richmond was the ancestor of Elizabeth, and his
victory had ushered in the great age which God had granted to England after her atonement for her
sins. Tillyard (p. 212) holds, in explanation, that Richard III, "was so clearly both a usurper and a
murderer that he had qualified as a tyrant; and against an authentic tyrant it was lawful to rebel."
But orthodox Tudor doctrine had never endorsed rebellion against a tyrant. Archbishop Cranmer
had written very clearly: "Though the magistrates be evil, and very enemies to Christ's religion, yet
the subjects must obey in all worldly things." 45 And the 1571 homily Against Disobedience and
Wilful Rebellion said just as clearly:
What shall we then do to an evil, to an unkind Prince, an enemy to us, hated of God, hurtful to the
Common-wealth! Lay no violent hand upon him, saith good David, but let live until God appoint,

and work his end, either by natural death, or in war by lawful enemies, not by traitorous
subjects. 46
Henry IV also is a usurper and the murderer of Richard II, but the rebellions against him in the
later plays Shakespeare unequivocally condemns.
The notion that rebellion against a tyrant may be justified is not an orthodox one, but Tillyard is
correct in finding it implicit in Richard III. Although there is no sign of it in Henry VI, in Richard III
we have an important distinction between lawful king and tyrant, and the implicit doctrine that a
tyrant--a usurper who rules for his own aggrandizement rather than the good of his people and
who is destructive of the commonwealth--is not entitled to the rights and privileges of a lawful
king. This doctrine, as we shall see, Shakespeare was to develop further in Macbeth.
Shakespeare was thus forced deliberately to play down the rebellion motif in his play, and to do this
he used several dramatic devices. In the first place he carefully characterized Richard of Gloucester
as an instrument in a great scheme by which England was punished for her sins before she could
win salvation. Richard is made to serve as a "scourge of God," an evil instrument used by God in
order to execute divine vengeance. All of those murdered by Richard, except for the young princes,
are murdered in retribution for their own sins. 47 When God's purposes have been served, the evil
scourge must himself be destroyed, and for this purpose God chooses another agent through whom
he may operate.
Shakespeare thus uses every dramatic device in order to portray Richard's death as caused by God
rather than by any man. Richmond is God's agent. We have seen this stressed in his prayer before
battle. His personality is deliberately underdeveloped, and his role in the play is a passive one; he
is instrument rather than actor. On the symbolic, ritual level, we do not have a king killed by a
rebellious subject; we have rather a "scourge of God" destroyed by his creator as soon as he has
fulfilled the purpose for which he was created. A similar symbolic means of toning down his
rebellion theme Shakespeare later was to use in Richard II.
King John, like The Troublesome Reign, is concerned primarily with the right of succession to a
throne, the right of a people to deprive a ruler of his crown, the right of subjects to rebel, and the
right of a king to be answerable for his sins to God alone; and ali of these matters are related to
the immediate problems of Elizabethan England. 50Although Shakespeare's play condenses the two
parts of The Troublesome Reign into one play, and although it differs greatly from its source in
language, only two lines being identical in the two plays, in its characterization and pattern of
events it varies only in certain small details which serve to make its political didacticism even more
effective. To the extent that The Troublesome Reign accomplishes the purposes of the Elizabethan
historian, Shakespeare's play accomplishes them also.
Marlowe's Edward II
Marlowe thus warns that a king must be prudent in his choice of counsellors. He must further be
strong, able to control his nobles, cut off those who oppose him, which Edward manifestly cannot
do. But a successful king does not alienate his nobles in the first place, for they are an important
bulwark of his power. At Edward's brief reconciliation with the barons, Queen Isabel directs an
important bit of didacticism to the audience:
Now is the king of England riche and strong, Hauing the loue of his renowned peeres.
(663-664)
This theme of a king's relation to his nobles is one of the chief political themes in Edward II.
Edward II would be an absolute ruler. He regards his kingdom as personal property which he is free

to give to his parasitic Gaveston if he chooses. He places his personal pleasures above the interests
of his government, and perhaps worst of all, he has no real desire to rule. He will see England
quartered and reduced to chaos rather than forgo his homosexual attachment to his minion. If a
Renaissance absolute monarch required anything to maintain himself in power, it was a paramount
desire to rule and a concern above all else with the maintenance of his power in spite of all
opposition. Paul H. Kocher has found in Edward II two new political considerations which are not in
Tamburlaine: "one is the fundamental principle of Renaissance political science that the sovereign
must observe justice. The second is the elementary awareness that the nobles and commons are
political forces of prime importance." 16 Edward's sins are violations of political ethics which the
Renaissance had come generally to accept. The absolute ruler must rule justly, and this Edward
does not. His people, both noble and common, are a potent political force which may make its
pressure felt in a kingdom, no matter how absolute the ruler may be. An absolute monarch must
be aware of this force, as Machiavelli's prince always is, for if he does not learn to handle it
properly it may overwhelm him. Marlowe thus incorporates into Edward II some awareness of the
parliamentarianism which had been a part of his own English government for several centuries. An
absolute ruler may continue to be one only so long as he knows how to rule: with strength, justice,
and an awareness of both the power and the needs of his subjects.
In Tamburlaine Marlowe had proclaimed that there was no relation between the two, that it was in
the nature of every man to aspire to kingship, that only the man of merit could achieve it. In
Edward II this notion has been greatly modified and tempered, but a slight note of it nevertheless
persists. Although Marlowe probably shares the abhorrence of the barons for Piers Gaveston, he
does not scorn Gaveston for his lowly birth, as Mortimer does ( 335, 700).
It is significant that both Edward II and Woodstock, perhaps the two most fully-developed history
plays before Richard II, and certainly among the most significant formative influences upon
Shakespeare, are unorthodox in their political doctrine. Both plays together represent the
beginnings in England of a real historical tragedy. In Edward II we have the tragedy of a man
whose personal shortcomings destroy him, and who in his fall may arouse the pity and awe of an
audience in full degree, but who to the very end is unaware of the reasons for his fall. In
Woodstock, on the other hand, the tragedy of Richard is cast in the traditional morality pattern, for
Richard stands for England, who suffers for his misdeeds, and the parallel tragedy of Woodstock is
that of a good man destroyed by a set of external circumstances whose evil he recognizes, but
which his loyalty to the crown prevents him from effectively opposing.
WAR
With a just cause a king may go to war without remorse and with expectation of victory, for God
will always give victory to the lawful cause, as the French themselves admit (III, ii, 35 -37 ). But
when victory has been achieved a king must be merciful to his enemies. Queen Philippa pleads for
the lives of the burghers of Calais, arguing that mercy is a kingly quality (V, i, 39 - 46 ), and in his
granting of mercy to them Edward recognizes that this is what reason must dictate. Thus we again
have the theme so prominent in the Countess of Salisbury scenes of reason's victory over passion
as a primary requisite of kingship:
Although experience teach us this is true, That peaceful quietness brings most delight When most
of all abuses are controll'd, Yet, insomuch it shall be known that we As well can master our
affections As conquer others by the dint of sword, Philip, prevail: we yield to thy request;
These men shall live to boast of clemency,-And, tyranny, strike terror to thyself.
(V, i, 47 - 55 )