Notes on Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and its Literary Tradition by David Riggs

[Full disclosure: I read the book under discussion almost 2 years ago and am working from notes I took while reading.]

 

The subject monograph by David Riggs contains lots of fine observations regarding how Shakespeare, in writing the Henry VI plays, responded to, drew upon, and cultivated the young tradition of the history play in England. But omg the fussing. Riggs is continually delimiting and categorizing his cases in furtherance of his viewpoint; continually telling us how we must view a thing—in the context of which system of rhetorical assumptions or according to whose interpretation of which contemporaneous source—in order to reach the only suitable conclusion, which he kindly provides, along with the frequent proffer of a premise that 'should always be kept in mind'. If an argument in this book were permitted to grow organically from the evidence presented, it would emerge at the end looking desperately around it at the barren landscape and would kill itself out of loneliness; because all its peers have been detained at Riggs's behest to drill endlessly his Fossean choreography:

 

'When Shakespeare compares Talbot to Hercules [and other such comparisons]... It need not be supposed [with Malone] that the allusions are inserted "merely to shew the writer's learning".  In order to appreciate their specific meanings, however, they must be seen within a narrow ranges of conventions and a special system of values...' [101]  

I am fine through ‘the writer’s learning’, honest. But Riggs’s narrow ranges of conventions and special systems of values begin to sound like cryptohistory, like an earnest Dan Brown promising that he alone can correctly read the glyphs on this ancient artifact. It is unsurprisingly unsurprising to find that, when you’ve frighted and scattered all arguments but one with a shotgun, you have indeed achieved inarguability. Congratulations! This is tantamount to an illusionist forcing a card on his mark, or an elaborate 'math' puzzle that mystifies by burying the fact that the busy and byzantine function f(x) always equals x. Yes, David, if I stopped to define all critical terms in a new glossary and narrowly delimited the legal course of analytic progress, I too could render my unique Shakespearean epistemology indubitable. 

But Riggs's overarching comparison of Tamburlaine and Henry VI does bear some fruit, e.g., the supplantation of virtù (in its sense of innate or driving force, inherited from middle English) by vertue (closer to modern 'virtue': construed as a 'set of ethical imperatives, nurtured and transmitted by a select group of "peers"' [105]). 

 

Riggs also relies heavily upon that rhetorical figure that assumes the validity of his own conjectures: If [x] is so, then [explanation, sometimes labyrinthine, of factors that assume x is definitely so]. Here, for example: 

 

This device calls to mind the canny and urgent instruction to immediately reconfigure any headline or public-facing gambit asking why a thing is thus such that it rather asks whether that thing is so: Why (to borrow an example from memery in memory) is the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf retold over and over in our society, while no one ever mentions Cassandra? (The answer to the question as posed is, of course, 'Because sexism! Grrr!'; whereas the answer to the reconfigured question is 'No, it really fucking isn't.')  

More broadly, though, what the fuck is he even talking about in this passage? His rhetorical thread is in a Gordian snarl. 'If the paradox is not a facile one' becomes 'Is the paradox a facile one?' Well, I dunno, let's step back: Assuming 'the paradox' is that '[York is] both the cause and the remedy of the condition he describes', and assuming that 'condition' is Henry of Lancaster's unfitness for rule, then Riggs is claiming that (1) York is cause and cure of the king's gubernatorial malaise; (2) to be both cause and cure is a paradox; and (3) the paradox is not facile. That's three stop signs the author just blew past without braking, before we get to the part where he attributes the non-facileness of his paradox to 'a whole series of ironic parallels and contrasts' and holy Christ somebody pull this guy over already before he hurts somebody.

'If 3H6 does not degenerate into a pseudopolitical revenge tragedy like The Battle of Alcazar, it is because all of its important characters have, in effect, a double role.' [131] 

Does Henry VI Part 3 not degenerate into a pseusopolitical revenge tragedy like The Battle of Alcazar?

 

All those nits picked, however, Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories does contain some genuinely thought-provoking views. I’d call it a worthwhile read. 

 

To get back to later, maybe: Riggs is 100% full of shit re Hal, pp. 156 and ff.