random musings about 2 Henry VI
Aug. 2nd, 2024 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainSo, I wrote Henry VI fic about Cade's rebellion, because I think I'm going to take my first shot at teaching (3/4 of) the first tetralogy this fall, and apparently fanfic is one of the ways I think through things before teaching them? At any rate, it's stunning how timely that bit feels. I think I went in thinking "oh, this is going to feel really different after 1/6, and thank God I never published my dissertation, because twentysomething-me was way too much of a Cade apologist." Which I was, but it's also layered in ways that I hadn't anticipated -- Lord Say pretty much says the most tone-deaf things possible without having the least idea they're tone-deaf, in ways that feel uncomfortably familiar if you're a red-state academic who spends a lot of time cringing at blue-state academics.
These are really good plays. I remember being surprised by that when I first read them in my MA program, and I was surpised again upon re-reading. I haven't come back to them that often, in part because they feel so unrelentingly bleak, and one of the things I usually like the most about (older) Shakespeare is how redemptive his vision of people tends to be, how even the characters who do deeply horrible things aren't usually reduced to those things. And you see glimmers of that in 2 and 3 H6, maybe in Eleanor and Queen Margaret in particular, but it's mostly not quite there yet.
Another random thing that surprised me was just how different the rebellion scenes were in the Quarto. I didn't look up the current scholarly consensus on how they relate to each other, but they both "feel" plausibly Shxian to me, like we might be looking at revision-over-time, maybe different versions for different casts? There are a lot of names, and the editors of the Norton Shakespeare seem to think they might be actor-names rather than character-names in some cases, and I actually suspect they may be both / and? At any rate, it turns out that the character who is "Smith the Weaver" in the Folio text is simply "Will" in the Quarto, where he's also described as having courted a woman named Nan -- which is, naturally, where my imagination started running away with me, as in, "oh wow, did Shakespeare actually write himself IN as the play's most vocally anti-intellectual character?" Which would be awesome, if true.
These are really good plays. I remember being surprised by that when I first read them in my MA program, and I was surpised again upon re-reading. I haven't come back to them that often, in part because they feel so unrelentingly bleak, and one of the things I usually like the most about (older) Shakespeare is how redemptive his vision of people tends to be, how even the characters who do deeply horrible things aren't usually reduced to those things. And you see glimmers of that in 2 and 3 H6, maybe in Eleanor and Queen Margaret in particular, but it's mostly not quite there yet.
Another random thing that surprised me was just how different the rebellion scenes were in the Quarto. I didn't look up the current scholarly consensus on how they relate to each other, but they both "feel" plausibly Shxian to me, like we might be looking at revision-over-time, maybe different versions for different casts? There are a lot of names, and the editors of the Norton Shakespeare seem to think they might be actor-names rather than character-names in some cases, and I actually suspect they may be both / and? At any rate, it turns out that the character who is "Smith the Weaver" in the Folio text is simply "Will" in the Quarto, where he's also described as having courted a woman named Nan -- which is, naturally, where my imagination started running away with me, as in, "oh wow, did Shakespeare actually write himself IN as the play's most vocally anti-intellectual character?" Which would be awesome, if true.
