Henry VI, Part 1

Summary

Henry VI, Part 1 begins at a coffin. The lords of England stand around the body of Henry V in Westminster Abbey, and before the funeral is finished three messengers arrive: towns in France are lost, the Dauphin has been crowned at Rheims, and Lord Talbot, England's most feared soldier, has been taken prisoner through the cowardice of Sir John Fastolfe. The heir to all of this is an infant. The rest of the play shows what happens when a conquering king is replaced by a child and the men who should govern for him spend their strength on one another. Two stories run side by side. In France, Talbot fights a war of sieges and reversals at Orleans, Rouen and Bordeaux against the Dauphin Charles and a shepherd's daughter, Joan la Pucelle, who claims that the Virgin Mary has called her to save her country. In England, quarrels multiply: Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the Lord Protector, brawls with Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, at the gates of the Tower and in Parliament; and in the Temple Garden, Richard Plantagenet and the Duke of Somerset pick white and red roses to mark a legal dispute that will become the emblem of a civil war. A dying Edmund Mortimer, brought out of his prison in a chair, tells Richard that his family has a better right to the throne than the house of Lancaster. The two stories meet at Bordeaux. Talbot, surrounded, sends for reinforcements, but York and Somerset each blame the other and neither moves. Talbot's son refuses to flee, father and son die together, and a herald, Sir William Lucy, recites Talbot's titles over a corpse that a French bastard calls stinking and fly-blown. Joan, deserted by the fiends she conjures in Act 5, is captured, denies her shepherd father, and is sent to the fire. The play ends not with victory but with a bad bargain: the Earl of Suffolk, who has captured Margaret of Anjou and fallen for her, persuades young Henry to break a marriage contract and take her as queen, intending to rule her and, through her, the king. The play is early Shakespeare, perhaps written with collaborators, and it shows: much of the verse is end-stopped and declamatory, and the scenes are built as debates and set speeches. Yet its design is clear. Heroism in the field is real, but it cannot survive faction at home, and the play makes that point by letting the audience watch a great soldier die because two noblemen would rather be right than help. Students should also know what kind of history this is. Shakespeare compresses three decades, invents the rose-picking, keeps Talbot alive twenty years after Joan's death, and presents Joan through the eyes of the English chronicles that hated her. The library's record of her trial and Shaw's Saint Joan offer the necessary correction.

Top Lessons

• A kingdom lost by its own lords

  The French do not defeat Talbot at Bordeaux; York and Somerset do, each waiting for the other to move first. Sir William Lucy names the cause plainly in Act 4, Scene 4. The scene teaches that pride in being right can be as lethal as cowardice, and that the duty to help a comrade does not wait for the settlement of one's own quarrel.

• The son who would not fly

  Talbot begs John to escape so that the family name will survive; John answers that a Talbot who runs is no Talbot. Their dialogue in rhymed couplets (Act 4, Scenes 5-7) sets two loves against each other, a father's care and a son's honor, and the play does not make either simply wrong. It is worth asking what courage is, and when it shades into a refusal of prudence.

• How a garden quarrel becomes a civil war

  The rose-picking in Act 2, Scene 4 begins as a point of law the lawyers would rather not judge. By Act 4, Scene 1, servingmen are fighting over badges and the king himself puts on a red rose while claiming it means nothing. The play shows how symbols harden private disputes into public parties, and how a ruler's carelessness with them can spread a feud he meant to calm.

• Reading Joan through hostile eyes

  The play's Joan is first brave and persuasive, then a conjurer whose fiends desert her and a daughter who disowns her father. This portrait follows English chronicles written by her enemies. Students should study it as Elizabethan wartime drama, distinguishing what the play claims, what her trial records show, and how later Christian readers came to honor her; the Church declared her a saint in 1920.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The play is not about medicine, but it stages several bodies at their limits in ways a history-of-medicine reader can use. Battlefield injury from gunpowder weapons is shown when a cannon shot takes off Salisbury's eye and cheek at Orleans. Old age is anatomized in Mortimer's dying speech and in Bedford, carried to Rouen in a chair, who dies watching the city retaken. The plays notably do not stage the documented mental collapse Henry VI suffered in 1453-54; any connection drawn between his character here and that later illness is an interpretation, not something the text asserts.

• Act 1, Scene 4

  A French cannon fired from the walls of Orleans strikes Salisbury and Sir Thomas Gargrave; Talbot describes Salisbury's eye and cheek struck off and his loss of speech before he dies.

• Act 2, Scene 5

  Mortimer, carried from his cell in a chair, describes dim eyes, weak shoulders, withered arms and numb feet, then dies after passing on his claim.

• Act 3, Scene 2

  The sick Duke of Bedford insists on being carried to the field before Rouen, citing the example of Uther Pendragon in his litter, and dies in his chair once the town is retaken.

• Act 4, Scene 7

  The wounded Talbot dies holding his son's body; the French discuss mutilating the corpses before Lucy claims them.