SHAKESPEARE'S “HENRY VI”: THE BEST VIDEO VERSIONS FOR THE COMPLETIST

A little research on the Internet, particularly on Reddit and in The New York Times, shows there are many Shakespeare fans trying to see every one of his plays performed somewhere, somehow, by somebody. Such completists have perhaps no bigger challenge than finding a production of all three plays in Shakespeare’s early King Henry VI trilogy. The plays are rarely produced, very long, and usually when performed chopped into two plays instead of three. This makes seeing Shakespeare’s trilogy in any form close to his intention almost impossible. I saw the plays in two parts in New York City in 2018 performed by the National Asian American Theatre Company, a credible production. But I hankered to see it in a format that, however edited, retained some character of the playwright’s three-part vision and structure. The fact is, very few of Shakespeare’s fans around the world live in a city like New York and even there it isn’t performed often. So, for completists, the DVD market is essential.

Three recommendable DVD versions, from 1983, 2016 and 2022, are available. Fans do exist for a couple of older video versions that are possible to catch glimpses of online, like the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1965 black and white production, or like the modern-dress English Shakespeare Company version from 1990. But the video quality isn’t very good for either of these. The three DVDs I’m recommending all have pros and cons. It depends on what you’re looking for which one will work best for you. I ended up watching most of all three of these video productions, though I did browse the long 1983 version, and will summarize here which version is best suited for which audience.

The Henry VI plays center on the title king, who came to power too early at nine months old, and grew (in Shakespeare’s telling) into a virtuous but weak king, surrounded by the Machiavellian scheming of the dukes, wives and other players who seek to take him down amid the famous “War of the Roses.”

Though it is the most comprehensive filming available, well-reputed, and mostly deservedly so, the BBC’s 1983 “Television Shakespeare” production is perilously long, with each play running close to four hours. It is available to stream on Kanopy, or to purchase on DVD. I recommend it to anyone whose priority is to see the full series as written by the Bard, but it was a bit much to recommend to the people with whom I was going to watch the plays.

Thus, I was pleased to discover that the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2022 had recorded its COVID-pandemic-era production of all three plays and released them as a DVD set. The plays are edited, but lightly, running about 2 hours and 40 minutes each. For the most part they preserve Shakespeare’s three-part structure, although they unnecessarily tagged the somewhat dull end of part two onto the beginning of the rousing part three. If you’re looking for an edited version that nonetheless retains the character of Shakespeare’s vision, this is not a bad selection. I must warn you, however, that part one was filmed at the height of the pandemic and is not even in a theater, as are the other two parts. Part one is filmed in a rehearsal space at Stratford-Upon-Avon, and while this detracts surprisingly little it does put this version at a severe disadvantage relative to the other filmed versions. It is directed by Gregory Doran and Owen Horsely.

Also worth considering is The Hollow Crown TV series from 2016, which covers all of Shakespeare’s history plays, even though the Henry VI section is badly chopped down into two two-hour parts, cutting some of the best material. It’s worth considering because it has the best cast of all available versions (Tom Sturridge, Benedict Cumerbatch, Sophie Okonedo, Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins), is filmed on location with the highest production values, and makes the best use of some of what in other hands is among Shakespeare’s dullest writing. If you are a more casual Shakespeare fan, and don’t care to see the full saga, this is the one for you.

However, the cuts do cause pain. Harold Bloom, the late great critic of English literature from Yale, was not a fan of the Henry VI plays, calling them “bad,” but he did like one character in each part: Joan of Arc in part one, the rebel Jack Cade in part two, and the future Richard III in part three. The Hollow Crown series (directed by Dominic Cooke) cuts the first, Joan of Arc, down to almost nothing. It cuts Jack Cade altogether (!), which is a severe loss. It does much, however, to highlight Richard in part three, hyping their superstar casting of Cumerbatch in the role.

I don’t agree that the plays are bad, probably because I’ve seen these well-staged versions of the sections that bored Bloom in print. But I do agree with him on all three of his favorite characters. Joan of Arc, called Joan la Pucelle here, is the victim of Shakespeare’s jingoism in the first play, with a less than fully positive portrayal because she is of course French and therefore at odds with the English heroes. The jingoism is most evident in Joan’s final scene, when she is burned at the stake. Desperate to avoid the flames, she protests that she is a virgin, then protests that she is pregnant (quite a reversal, as the sneering English soldiers are quick to point out), and then changes her mind more than once as to who its father is. These comic moments, amid the terrible auto de fe scene, seem strangest in the 2022 RSC version, as Joan is played with a hero’s strength by Lily Nichol. In the 1983 series Brenda Blethyn makes Shakespeare’s more complicated vision come to life, emphasizing Joan’s humble lower-class origins as well as her strength. The Hollow Crown cuts the jokes out of the stake scene, making it suitably uncomplicated for a mass audience (Shakespeare’s portrayal of Joan is offensive) but depriving us of a take on Shakespeare’s jingoistic intent. Laura Morgan’s other scenes as Joan in this series are cut to almost nothing.

I found the Jack Cade scenes in part two to be the most engaging in the entire series of plays. Cade is believed by most historians to have been a low-born peasant. He led a popular uprising in 1450. The sequence with Jack Cade boasts the Henry VI plays’ most famous one-liner: “Let’s kill all the lawyers.” In Shakespeare’s telling Cade seeks not only to kill the lawyers but also anyone who can read or speak Latin. His attack on the educated has been compared to Trump, though it originates from the opposite end of the social ladder. The 2022 RSC version plays him for laughs, with Aaron Sidwell making of the character a highly eccentric idiot. This portrayal makes it impossible to believe he would have motivated riots by his fellow peasants. The BBC version does the best job with the Cade scenes, as Trevor Peacock captures both the comic aspects of the character and his intelligence. There is an unintentional classism in Sidwell’s rendering, and Peacock’s makes us see the potential of the power of the masses. Meanwhile, the uprising, and its bloody end, are by far the biggest gaps in the Hollow Crown series.

Cumerbatch is the best of the three Richards. Shakespeare reserves some of the Henry VI plays’ liveliest and most engaging writing for this villain’s soliloquies. As in Richard III, the hunchbacked Richard weighs his lust for the crown against the prospects of a romantic life: “I’ll make my heaven in a lady’s lap and deck my body in gay ornaments, and ‘witch sweet ladies with my words and looks. O miserable thought, and more unlikely than to accomplish twenty golden crowns!” Fans of Richard III should definitely see Part Three of King Henry VI, or at least the second half of The Hollow Crown. Ron Cook is somewhat dull compared to Cumerbatch in the 1983 Television Shakespeare version. Arthur Hughes in the RSC version, though he’s given a tiny hand to approximate Richard’s deformity, is a hunchback only when hunched over. And while his diminutive stature lends an amusing smallness to little Richard, his screen presence is also a little small for so large a role, compared to Cumerbatch.

The Crown series does not leave its editor’s butchery to Harold Bloom’s favorite moments. It also smushes together the characters of Somerset and Stratford together into one character, and if that wasn’t confusing enough for viewers who are trying to follow along in Shakespeare’s scripts, it also leaves a minor character named Stratford who serves little purpose. This is a shame because Stratford’s role, picking out a wife for Henry VI upon victory in France and then sleeping with her to gain access to the King, is among the most engaging. The Hollow Crown also changes the manner of death for the newly-dubbed Somerset. I didn’t much miss his being beheaded by pirates, but being beheaded by opponents in the War of the Roses doesn’t spare us Queen Margaret’s grief or the beheading, so I prefer the original.

Queen Margaret ranks among Shakespeare’s best female bad-asses: When Henry meekly gives away the kingdom to his opponent the Duke of York (another of my favorite scenes in the whole series), she leads his armies herself to regain the crown for her son. Her scheming throughout the series recalls Lady Macbeth. Okonedo in The Hollow Crown does the best job with the various complications of this wonderfully wrought character; Julia Foster in the 1983 series was basically forgettable. Minnie Gale’s overacting got frankly annoying in the 2022 RSC version. I wished all of them had attempted a little French flavor in accent, but naturally this is hard to accomplish while speaking Shakespearean dialogue. Only one French character in any of the three DVD series attempted this sort of French flavoring, “Lewis, King of France” in the 2022 RSC version. It was a breath of fresh air when it happened, as one longs for Shakespeare to make the combatants in the wars between France and England more culturally distinct.

Aside from Cade, the series’ most interesting character is Henry himself: right-minded, deserving of power, and yet dissembling, emotional and eccentric. All three Henrys are exciting portrayals, but my favorite was Peter Benson in the 1983 BBC version directed by Jane Howell. Playing up the eccentricity, and the daintiness of this effete king, Benson gives the most powerful performance despite being too old for the young king. Sturridge is eccentric too (he usually is, in most roles) but in a totally different way: His emotional vocal affectation makes the king seem sort of mentally slow. This may be unintended, but adds a new dimension to the character. Mark Quarterly in the pandemic RSC version mostly lets Shakespeare’s writing act the character of Henry for him; he’s the least interesting of the three but among the most likeable of all of the performances among his fellow castmates. That series is somewhat overacted, probably in part because of the three it is the only one filmed in front of a live audience. Once one adjusts to this cession to the demands of projecting on the live stage, however, the virtues in the performances come through.

In the end, the strongest suit of The Hollow Crown is that it makes scenes which Bloom calls unmemorable into the best of high drama, making one understand how the “Game of Thrones” TV series chose the three plays as their inspiration in plotting. For real Shakespeare fans, some combination of the three DVD series is must-see viewing.