Shakespeare’s Histories at Brave Spirits Theatre has returned to the (virtual) rehearsal room for The Queen’s Storm repertory with Henry the Sixth, Part 1! This week, production dramaturg Emily MacLeod shares a few discoveries from the company’s first week back at text work…
As one story ends, another always begins, the epilogue to Henry the Fifth reminds us:
Queen Katherine (Nicole Ruthmarie) holding the infant Henry VI at the end of Brave Spirits’ Henry the Fifth. Photo: Claire Kimball
“Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown’d King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France and made his England bleed…”
Brave Spirits Theatre’s production of Henry the Fifth (whose run was sadly cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic) ended with a bit of a teaser to the next chapter in our epic two-season project: the infant Henry VI in his mother’s arms transformed into a grown man (played by Duane Richards) taking his place on the English throne with his uncles on either side of him. Just as the end of Henry the Fifth evoked events to come, the next play, Henry the Sixth, Part 1 looks back at the charismatic previous ruler by staging his funeral in the very first scene. The shocking demise of King Henry V, who never got to meet his son, sends the English nobles and their tenuous claims in France into a state of disorder and disarray. This “upheaval,” a word our ensemble has assigned to describe the beginning events of this play, feels all too familiar to us right now, in a country ravaged by a pandemic, economic downturn, racial injustice, climate crisis, and forthcoming national election. This week, as Brave Spirits launched into virtual rehearsals for the Queen’s Storm repertory, our second season of Shakespeare’s Histories, we started with this scene in Henry the Sixth, Part 1 and marveled at how petty squabbles and inept leadership in government inevitably result in negligence and highly preventable deaths.
In our traditional fashion, we have started with tablework, in which we delve into the text with deep scrutiny and precision. Because Zoom rehearsal fatigue is very real, we have broken with custom by not calling the cast every day for the whole duration of the meeting. This way, we are still able to focus scene-by-scene on scansion and paraphrasing Shakespeare’s language by putting the lines into their own words. Some actors choose to do a more straight-laced, literal “translation” whereas others get a little more creative (often leading to very funny, and sometimes profane, results).
By scanning each verse line and looking at which words are stressed versus unstressed, we can get a sense of a character’s emotional state. If a character speaks in regular verse (with a rhythm that alternates between unstressed and STRESSED syllables), we might interpret that the character is particularly good at speaking, and knows it. When Joan of Arc’s bewitching words turn the Duke of Burgundy onto the French side, she speaks in almost perfectly regular iambic pentameter:
see, SEE the PIN-ing MAL-a-DY of FRANCE:
be-HOLD the WOUNDS, the MOST un-NAT-ur’l WOUNDS,
which THOU thy-SELF hast GIV’N her WOE-ful BREAST.
Or, if a character is in a disordered or heightened emotional state, we might see a lot of irregular verse, like in the very first scene, where the Dukes of Gloucester, Bedford, and Exeter are lamenting the untimely death of their brother and nephew Henry V. Bedford’s first lines each start with a trochee (a pair of syllables that is STRESSED / unstressed, like this):
HUNG be the HEAVENS with BLACK, yield DAY to NIGHT!
COM-ets, im-PORT-ing CHANGE of TIMES and STATES,
BRAND-ish your CRY-stal TRESS-es IN the SKY…
Henry’s death, which has disrupted the natural order of things, disturbs the rhythm of the language too. This atmosphere of upheaval is reflected in the jostling and unpredictable poetic meter.
Another feature of the language in this play is the use of rhyming. While it is pretty customary for a Shakespeare play to feature some rhymed lines, like a couplet to end a scene, those plays written earlier in his career like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, or Henry the Sixth, Part 1 have characters who often speak in rhyming verse. There is a particular spotlight on rhyme in two scenes of Henry the Sixth, Part 1 that feature the renowned English warrior John Talbot and his son (also named John). Talbot tries to convince his son to save himself from what is all but certain defeat and death on the battlefield in France. Just like Romeo and Juliet, who compose a rhyming sonnet together when they first meet, the Talbots show their affection through the use of rhyme:
TALBOT: If we both stay, we both are sure to die.
JOHN: Then let me stay and, father, do you fly.
We wondered if it might be the poetic equivalent of a father and son playing catch, sending and receiving rhymes like a ball bouncing back and forth. We also noticed how, in our cut of the play, Talbot does not “play along” with the rhyming game until he is convinced to let his son stay and fight alongside him. While at first glance, the use of rhyme in this scene might make it feel cheesy, and could be played for laughs, we found
on further examination that it quickly endears us to these characters who, in the very next scene, suffer a tragic loss just as Talbot feared. The structure of the language again functions as a shorthand for us to connect emotionally to what is happening in the story.
By doing such a deep dive on the language of this play, we tapped into hidden depths in many cases that we didn’t see initially. Jordan Friend, the director of The Queen’s Storm, at the beginning of the week showed the ensemble clips from the films of Armando Ianucci, an expert political satirist known for Veep and The Death of Stalin. That dark comedic strain is certainly present in the machinations of the nobles in Henry
the Sixth, Part 1; many scenes devolve into name-calling and almost childish bickering. But in the midst of this enmity and dissension, moments of real pathos and humanity emerge. We look forward to navigating these tonal shifts as we move forward into the other three plays of our cycle. Next stop in the rehearsal process is continuing tablework for Henry the Sixth, Part 2!
— Emily MacLeod, Dramaturg