SHAKESPEARE AND THE EARL OF WARWICK: THE KINGMAKER IN THE HENRY VI TRILOGY By Helen Patricia Maskew A Thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham For the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The Shakespeare Institute The University of Birmingham January 2009 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis is an appraisal of Shakespeare’s characterisation of Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, colloquially known by his soubriquet ‘kingmaker’. Shakespeare’s reification of the reputations of characters from the regal history of late medieval England substantially maintains our interest in historical figures such as Warwick. By a process of dramatic and literary osmosis, Shakespeare infiltrates the national consciousness with such figures, refreshing individual and collective memory. The majority of the thesis is taken up with an examination of key scenes which I consider most successfully explore the roots of Warwick’s reputation. Finally, I will consider Warwick’s role in performance, though a discourse with three actors who have previously been assigned the role. I will examine their various approaches to the characterisation of the part. In the course of distilling Warwick’s clearly defined characteristics, Shakespeare examines fundamental questions of the delegation of right to rule and the accepted qualities required for effective leadership. In this context, the dramatist follows the course of events by which the Kingmaker achieved the agnomen which continues to define him as a symbol of medieval potency. DEDICATION To my grandchildren ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the help and support I have received from the following. Firstly, and most importantly my supervisor, Professor Kate Mcluskie, whose wise advice and constant encouragement kept me on track and enthusiastic throughout the research and writing up. I would like also to acknowledge the help and guidance received from my first supervisor Dr. Catherine Richardson, who was crucial in setting me off in the right direction. I thank the three actors, Don Carrier, Phil Corbitt and Patrice Naiambana, who most patiently and intelligently answered my questions, and a double thank you to the latter for his detailed and perceptive thoughts both before and after over two years in the role of Warwick. Members of the Shakespeare Institute library staff were consistently generous with their time and advice, as were the staff at both the Shakespeare Trust and the Warwick Record Office. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends, all of whom have been very constructive and supportive in their comments. CONTENTS Dedication Acknowledgements Contents Introduction 1 – 18 Chapter One 19 – 62 Establishing the Reputation Chapter Two 63 – 109 Establishing Warwick in 1 and 2 Henry VI Chapter Three 110 – 153 Status through Metaphor Chapter Four 154 – 199 Kingmaking Chapter Five 200 – 244 ‘No more my king’ Chapter Six 245 – 280 Playing Warwick Conclusion 281 – 290 Bibliography 1 INTRODUCTION This thesis is concerned with the reputation and character of a single historical figure. My purpose is to advance the premise that recondite figures from history such as Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (1428-1471) have been exposed and revitalised most enduringly through the dramatic language of Shakespeare, who through his linguistic arts in the Henry VI trilogy unravels a memorable version of the personality and character of Warwick. Shakespeare imprints on his audience the essence of the character through the poetic language of his drama. In his elegiac theme on the instability of human glory, Daniel Defoe (1661-1731) contemplates its transient nature. He muses on the utilitarian fate of great men, whose bones are ploughed up in the process of husbandry and their converted remains possibly recycled to the meanest use: All are vanished, and their very monuments are mouldered into earth, their dust is lost and their place knows them no more. They live only in the immortal writings of their historians and poets, the renowned flatterers of the age they lived in, and who have made us think of the persons, not as they really were, but as they were pleased to represent them.1 Defoe, in his impeccable style, has almost encapsulated my thesis. This debate is concerned with the legacy left by the personification of a specific historical character by a single dramatist. Shakespeare’s poetic creativity, in his dramatisation of such an eclectic mix of robust characters from history, continues to hold our attention, establishing them in our collective consciousness and ensuring their durability as cultural icons. 1 Daniel Defoe, ‘The Instability of Human Glory’ in Selected English Essays, ed. by W. Peacock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903), pp. 52-53. 2 I will argue that, in the case of Richard Neville, his reputation has withstood the rigours of time because it has been closely nurtured by Shakespeare, through his dramatic interpretation of the varied sources available to him, with their roots in fifteenth century accounts and commentaries. Warwick’s historical narrative, legend and mythology begin in the poetry, ballads and chronicles of late medieval times and continue in the chronicles and histories of the early modern period and their interpretation of the fifteenth century civil wars. They move through later centuries to the present, where they are examined in four distinct biographies, all notably bearing the same title.2 In the most recent by A.J. Pollard, Warwick’s familiar soubriquet ‘kingmaker’ is used as the main title, but is more explicit in its intentions with the addition of ‘Politics, Power and Fame’.3 Warwick retains a legendary status, but alongside his legend are also myths, which bulk up his reputation and make him an ideal subject for dramatic reconstruction. The modern historian Keith Dockray, who gives a detailed and informative résumé of the politics of the historiography of the Wars of the Roses and Shakespeare’s role in them, considers the dramatist ‘a curse’ for the historians of the Wars of the Roses, but also ‘a blessing’. The former because ‘…he immortalised Tudor spin on fifteenth century wars’, and the latter because the plays open to wider view, beyond the universities and élite schools, the whole sweep of the dynastic struggles of the period.4 2 Charles Oman, Warwick the Kingmaker (London, 1891); Paul Murray Kendal, Warwick the Kingmaker (London, 1973); Michael Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). 3 A.J. Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame (Hambledon Continuum, 2007). 4 Keith Dockray, William Shakespeare, The Wars of the Roses and the Historians (Tempus, 2002), p. 11. 3 Warwick’s own dramatic narrative becomes part of what Michael Hattaway describes as ‘the characteristics of Shakespeare’s histories’. He suggests that: Structurally, the plays are indeed various: the earliest, the plays about the reign of Henry VI, are chronicles of civil war, what Edward Hall called ‘intestine division’. Dramatising the events of this reign involved not only making sense of, and giving dramatic shape to, the chroniclers’ accounts of the Wars of the Roses between the Yorkists and Lancastrians, but relating the surges of national politics to the persistent conflict between England and France during the Hundred Years War.5 Shakespeare corporealised Warwick’s chronicled historical provenance in a set of dramatic conditions based on such written reports. There are no portraits, memorials, artefacts which provide additional or alternative evidence to confirm or deny his legend. The Warwickshire antiquarian John Rous (c.1411-1491) provided one of the only few surviving images of Warwick, a rough drawing in the margin of The Rous Roll in which he is portrayed in full armour, giving little away about his true appearance.6 However, the Victorian military historian Charles Oman concluded: At most we may gather from vague phrases of the chroniclers and from his quaint armed figure in the Rous Roll that he was of great stature and breadth of limb.7 The dramatist mediates between the legendary and the mythical to put together a character which explicates Warwick’s desire for renown: his manifest love of show, his seeking of popularity through largesse, and his maintenance of a martial reputation through physical feats of war. The soubriquet ‘kingmaker’ is a later accretion, and it is unverifiable whether it was known to Shakespeare in 1590; what is certain is that Warwick is unique in the Who’s Who of history to bear such an 5 Michael Hattaway, ‘The Shakespearean history play’, in Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. by Michael Hathaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 7. 6 John Rous, The Rous Roll, ed. by W.H. Courthope (London, 1859). 7 Oman, p. 2. 4 agnomen. There are scenes in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy which are pivotal to the development of Warwick as a central character. Set out below, these scenes are both correlations with and conflations of historical events in which Warwick was involved: Play Scene Shakespeare’s Events in Warwick’s Historical date Setting narrative I Henry VI 2.4 Temple Garden, Plucking of the red and Inns of Court, white roses. Polarisation Fictitious London 1425 of politics. 2 Henry VI 2.2 Duke of York’s Duke’s canvassing of the 1452 garden Nevilles’ support 2 Henry VI 3.2 Bury St. Edmunds. Death of Humphrey Duke 23rd February 1447 1447 of Gloucester.