Promising Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III, the BBC has dusted-off Shakespeare's trilogy of plays about the Duke of York's predecessor, Henry VI. These are early works, maybe not entirely Shakespearian (Marlowe may have had a hand in them) and rarely performed. Viewed objectively, the first part of Henry VI is more like Game of Thrones than Shakespeare and I don't think its accidental that the program is being broadcast on PBS during a hiatus in the HBO hit and in the same time slot. The first episode, nominally based on Shakespeare's script, but immensely shortened and simplified, is, in effect, a giant tease for Cumberbatch's appearance. Having declared his insurgency to the throne, York goes home and calls for his sons -- we see his three handsome boys and, then, a crookbacked shadow, all in black, appears limping through an open door: it's Richard and, with the appearance of his silhouette, the show ends.
A bizarre and remarkable paradox runs through all of Shakespeare's history plays: the institution of the monarchy is ancient, dignified, and sanctioned by divine right. And, yet, in ordinary circumstances no one can become King without first swimming through a sea of blood and treachery. It's as if Mafia chieftains declared that they ruled their rackets not merely by force but by the mandate of heaven. Furthermore, once a King has seized power, everyone is supposed to forget the murderous route that he took to the throne and sanctify him as God's anointed. (There is a similar inclination in America's founding fathers -- in The Federalist, Madison asserts that once the new government has been formed, everyone must regard it as ancient, immemorial and sanctified by Natural Right.) The problem of succession bursts into prominence in an early scene in the film: Henry V, who has conquered large swaths of France, has just died. A Duke rushes into a nearby room to salute his son, the new King -- not just a child, but a mewling new-born infant.
As radically abbreviated for TV, Henry VI divides into three parts. In the first sequence, the shortest, we learn that the chief men in the land are divided into the houses of York and Lancaster and that the feuding factions are represented by roses: York and his allies wear a white rose; Lancaster wears a red rose. The king is under the control of a Regent, an unaligned nobleman named Gloucester who seems "almost damned in a fair wife," a younger minx named Nell. The young Henry VI is pale-skinned, feckless, and congenitally kind: he is the opposite of his brutal war-fighting father and, in fact, at the climax of the play, triggers a civil war because he is too gentle to have anyone executed. In the second part of the show, the scene switches to France for some combat. The French have rebelled under the leadership of Joan la Pucelle -- we know her as a Joan of Arc. Shakespeare was no admirer of the French visionary and he portrays her as a scheming witch, a practitioner of the Black Arts. (Shakespeare's portrait is so nasty that the film vastly abridges this section of the play and removes some of the truly vicious stuff -- for instance, in the play, Shakespeare has Joan claim that she is pregnant when chained to the stake: it doesn't avail her, but is a cruel twist all the same.) The flower of the English knights, a belligerent father and son (I didn't hear their names exactly -- it might be Talbot or Talyard) perish battling the French in a futile battle. Since these knights are affiliated with the white rose faction, the red rose leader, a handsome thug called Summerset delays in coming to their rescue -- thus resulting in their death. Summerset woos a French duchess for King Henry and brings her back to be married to his liege -- there's a little flavor of Tristan and Isolde in this subplot since Summerset and his hostage, Margaret of Anjou, are sexually attracted to one another and, in fact, sleeping together. In the third part of the program, the deal with the French that ended the war in Europe collapses and the English lose their conquered territories. Margaret, who is a traitor, schemes with Summerset to have the noble Regent, Gloucester, assassinated. (Gloucester's weakness is his wife, Nell, a mini- Lady Macbeth who has been spurring him onto to seize power; Gloucester is too loyal to act treacherously, but his wife is accused of witchcraft -- she's performing some voodoo with dolls -- and she is exiled. This treason sets up Gloucester for arrest and murder by the red rose faction). With Gloucester out of the way, it's obvious that Henry VI is too weak to hold the country together and Warwick and York, the leader of the white roses, openly challenge Summerset and his allies, a vicious priest named Winchester, and another guy's whose name I didn't write down. So the scene is set for Civil War.
The BBC stages this all with gusto, using historic sites throughout England -- the Tower of London features prominently. The actors are all effective, of course, and gnaw through their fustian lines with vim and vigor. The script is rife with Shakespearian gibberish of the most extreme sort: at one point, during a battle in which Joan of Arc has personally intervened to stab a British knight in the back, another Englishman cries out: "Would that my eyes were bullets to shoot from my head and pierce your heart!" The scenery is impressive -- a horseman rides along the crest of the White Cliffs buzzed by drone-cameras. There is a battle, rather unsuccessfully staged, with breaks in the sword-fighting for people to speak their lines and while poor Gloucester is being strangled, red-rose Summerset is having sex with the alluring Margaret of Anjou, played by a comely Black actress whose complexion raises interesting genealogical questions about the House of Anjou. In some ways, this is a pageant that is sub-Game of Thrones because constrained by a rather lifeless and over-complex Shakespearian script. But it effectively sets up the Civil War, establishes a milieu for the upcoming star-turn by Cumberbatch, and, in fact, is reasonably absorbing, at least, in its last forty-five minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment