This week, production dramaturg Marshall B Garrett reflects on understanding the text and shaping the world of Henry the Sixth, Part 2…
Odd as it is to say as we step into the second play of the Queen’s Storm rep and the sixth of the Shakespeare’s Histories cycle, Henry the Sixth, Part 2 is where it all begins. A version of the play, titled The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of Lancaster and York, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolk, and the Tragical end of the proud Cardinal of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Jack Cade: And the Duke of York’s first claim unto the crown (a title, I have learned that is too long to tweet), appeared in 1594, and contemporary references to it and its sequel date to 1592, so most scholars date the play to 1591. This blog is about our process in this week of a deep textual dive, so why do I begin with history?
Emily MacLeod, dramaturg for Henry the Sixth, Part 1, wrote an excellent post last week about the process of delving into the verse, and if you haven’t read it, I suggest you check it out. That work absolutely continued this week on Part 2, with investigations of the verse and its (ir)regularities and the ever-delightful paraphrase work by our Histories company. Our Queen’s Storm director, Jordan Friend, even commented at one point that he’d be interested to see a version of the story told through the paraphrase work. I don’t want to give you, dear reader, any sense that the work this week was vastly different. But rather than explain and demonstrate how the scansion process works and aids the productions again, I want to focus on another major question in the work: what do we have to do to “fix” the play to make it work in the full saga?
Before anyone goes on accusing us of “changing the text” – remember that Shakespeare’s play came to us in three distinct forms (Folio, Quarto 1, Quarto 3) and every production needs to make choices about which text to use, which pieces to port in from other scripts. Additionally, and I promise this is the last time I’ll say this, Shakespeare’s Henry the Sixth, Part 2 was originally written as the first of a two-part play, not the sixth of an eight-part tale. So, to honor the story we’ve been telling so far and the story to come, some fixing must be done. The play is full of moments that our cast has and our audience will understand as callbacks to earlier moments. But those callbacks (or previews) to other plays open up the true can of worms that Part 2 presented as part of the full cycle: how to make a play, which was written first but takes place sixth, fit into the other story. Put more simply, how much do we need to fix?
One of the first places we look to clarify the play is in its vast cast of characters. The full text of the Folio version of the play has 53 named characters, plus messengers, soldiers, etc. We made a few simple cuts and conflations of characters to get it down to 44 before getting to table work. As we dug into this text, however, we started to see opportunities to blend characters further. For example, a major character in Henry the Sixth, Part 3 is Young Clifford – a vengeful daughter (in our version – a son in the original text) loyal to Henry and sworn to kill every man, woman, and child of the house of York. Young Clifford has a couple scenes in Part 2, but until her father dies, she really has no notable moments. We found, however, over the course of the play that the actor playing Young Clifford plays half a dozen messengers. When actor Jacqueline Chenault first read a messenger, she suggested that perhaps that messenger may be Young Clifford, early in her career delivering battlefield messages. That prompted a small through-line in our process to discover when it made sense for her messenger to be Young Clifford and when she needed to be a generic messenger – short answer, when all is said and done, is that when she delivers messages for the King, she is Young Clifford. Other instances include a petitioner, slighted by the Duke of Suffolk early in the play, later becoming the Lieutenant that orders his death (a choice supported by the Lieutenant knowing far more about Suffolk than she should) and the Lord Mayor of London doing the work of a few citizens and lords throughout the Jack Cade sequence.
The other place we spent some energy on making the text fit the overall saga was the timeline. Shakespeare dramaturgically hides major historical time jumps in between the plays, assuming his audience won’t trouble so much over the abrupt aging of King Henry or the sudden appearance of a previously unheard-of teenage prince. So what if the end of Part 2 is the end of a battle and the start of Part 3 is the aftermath? It’s a whole different play, so we can have massive amounts of time pass! Or when Shakespeare dramatizes a two-year span of actual history when King Henry was comatose into a single swoon onstage from which he quickly recovers. Time enough for a baby to be born and become a toddler in real life, sure, but not in stage time. While we won’t fully settle into when the time jumps happen until we rehearse the play on our feet, we’ve identified moments in the play when time needs to have jumped by, and penciled in when that might happen.
The final day of table work is devoted to world building at large. We step out of the minutiae of word-level paraphrase and line-level metrics to ask what the overall play feels like. The first exercise within that is to name the overall atmospheres of the play. Traditionally, BST looks at the play in thirds to find where the shifts are, and while those thirds may not be truly even in terms of lines or stage time, they tend to fall pretty close to that. Not so with Henry the Sixth, Part 2. We identified our first third as stretching through the first ninety minutes of the play, up through Act 3 Scene 1, and the death of Duke Humphrey. The second third takes us through the rest of Act 3 and all of Act 4, focusing on the rise of the common people, embodied most fully by the Jack Cade rebellion. The final third is Act 5, when the War of the Roses truly begins.
To find the atmospheres, the cast worked on a shared Google Doc to contribute words that spoke the overall tone of the thirds to them personally, and then highlighted words that others named that spoke to them. We struggled, at first, to settle on a word that encapsulated the first third, but we knew it had something to do with hunting, predation, stalking, circling… something in there. Quickly in the second third, however, the company settled on “frenzy”. Many of the initial words thrown out had something to do with chaos (mania, eruption, pandemonium, explosion) but “frenzy” captured the energy of chaos while keeping the focus that the play has – the commons rising up against the elite, and feeding on one another in the process. The final third also happened quickly. We had some of those same words again (explosion, eruption, combustion) but felt they all had too much of a sense of quickness. Jordan suggested “ignition,” building on another company member’s “ignite” and we agreed. The final act of this play lights the fuse for the next one. So we came back to the first third and began tackling the same words again, when actor Dean Carlson suggested “encircling” – more active than circling, and still holding onto that sense of stalking or predation. We looked at the movement we had – “encircling” to “frenzy” to “ignition,” and saw that we had found the play.
– Marshall B Garrett, Dramaturg