Early Shakespeare

Not everyone will regard this as fun, but we enjoyed it: we spent several evenings lately watching our way through Shakespeare's "first trilogy"--Henry VI part 1, 2 and 3, followed by Richard III. The challenge is, of course, that these are early Shakespeare, learner stuff, maybe his first plays--and to some extent (hard to tell how much) , maybe not even Shakespeare (playmaking was and is a collaborative enterprise, and Shakespeare was an unknown beginner.

Yet the rewards, in the context of Shakespeare's life-work, are considerable. They give you a wonderful chance to observe Shakespeare the learner, still finding out who he is, just beginning to learn what he can do.

But this is too dismissive. It's worth keeping in mind that these, though they may be inferior Shakespeare, are inferior only in comparison to later Shakespeare. It's hard to imagine anyone--yes, including Marlowe--who could do more with this material, who could find a way to weave it together into a stageable presentation. And for whatever it may be worth, my own notion is that they survive all the rest of Shakespeare' juvenilia--not as grotesque as Titus Andronicus, not as anodyne as Two Gentlemen of Verona, not a all-round dreadful as Taming of the Shrew.

The big drawback of the Henry plays--this has to be conceded--is that it's a set pretty much without plot in the stage-sense. We get good, straightforward narrative--from the beginning, Shakespeare seems to know how to put together a scene--and, in lieu of plot a kind of theme (a weak monarch leads to disorder). I was going to write "and we don't get character," although this is only part true. We don't get a single, strong, unifying figure like Rosalind or Macbeth. Yet the remarkable is that we do have character--characters that invent and obtrude themselves as if in spite of the playwright--as if in a fit of authorial absent-mindedness. That would be Henry himself, of course, memorable in his weakness, and Margaret his Queen, the first of Shakespeare's powerful and so often troublesome women.

And of course, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, so powerful and so evil and so magnetic that in the end, he explodes into a play of his own--a different sort of a play from the narratives, this time all character, still early, still unpolished, but for all its limitations, the first real indication of what the poet can do.

Oh, and did I mention: the text for the occasion was the old BBC set, The Age of Kings, first released in the 60s (I saw bits of it from a rabbit-ears TV while feeding a baby in the kitchen). It's black and white and features those cheesy production values that carried BBC-TV through the early days of its entertainment life (you can see them as late as I, Claudius, although by then at least they had discovered color). The casting and direction are consistently professional. Paul Daneman, who went on to become a household face in British sitcom, is a superb Richard.