ABSTRACT
Henry VI Part 1 focuses on the troublesome Anglo-French relations during Henry VI’s reign and seems to ‘show how the history of a nation is never to be understood in isolation’. 1 It implies that the incidents of the Wars of the Roses, so central to Shakespeare’s history plays, are deeply enmeshed in the events of the Hundred Years War. Henry VI Part 2 , by contrast, focuses obsessively on things English. Against this background, Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter term the Henry VI trilogy ‘arguably Shakespeare’s most English works’, while E.M.W. Tillyard holds that the main character of these dramatic pieces is none other than England itself, a fact that becomes especially obvious in the second part of the trilogy. 2 Significantly, the action of Henry VI Part 2 does not leave England at any point. There are no excursions to Wales or Scotland here, and the very instant the rebellious Duke of York sets off for Ireland in order to raise an army against Henry, he disappears from our view altogether. Although there is one scene that promises to take us beyond England – Suffolk, found guilty of conspiring against the king, is sent into exile – the advance is stopped in its tracks just when the conspirator is about to cross the border. Off the English coast, pirates capture the vessel that is supposed to carry him to France, and immediately afterwards a storm forces them to seek refuge on Goodwin Sands. Even on the high seas, England’s border presents an insurmountable barrier in a play that in its geographical fixation on England could not contrast more starkly with its wide-roaming precursor or a later history play such as Henry V, with its bird’s-eye view of the ‘vasty fields of France’ (Prologue, 12) and ‘two mighty monarchies, / Whose high upreared and abutting fronts / The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder’ (Prologue, 20–22). Henry VI Part 2 , by contrast, follows the logic of a dramatic close-up, zooming in on England until the fault lines within English society itself become visible.
