Shelter-In-Place Reading Roundup: Weird Shakespeare Histories

Michael Abubakar as the Bastard in the 2019 RSC production of King John. Love the jacket! Photo by Steve Tanner.

After the initial panicky weeks of the pandemic, when my brain settled down and I recovered my ability to read, my friend Rachel invited me to join her “Shakespeare in Quarantine” book club. There are five of us in three different timezones, and we’re making our way through the complete works, reading one play a week and then discussing it over Zoom. To keep things interesting, we’re reading the plays in random order, dictated by the whims of the all-knowing Boot (i.e. we draw slips of paper with the play titles from a cowboy boot). The only exception to this rule is the Henriad sequence of 8 history plays, which would be too confusing to read out of order. So instead of having slips of paper that say Richard II and Henry IV Part I and all the rest, we have 8 slips that merely say “Henriad,” and if we draw one of those, we’ll read the next play in the sequence. We’re currently halfway through the Henriad sequence and halfway through the canon as a whole.

This leaves two history plays as the odd ones out: King John and Henry VIII, neither of which I’d read or seen before the Boot ordained it. I can find it difficult to write about Shakespeare’s best-known plays (how can I do them justice, so deeply woven into Anglo-American culture as they are?) but because the more obscure plays don’t have the cultural baggage or, frankly, the genius of a Hamlet or a Midsummer, I enjoyed writing down my thoughts on them.

Henry VIII by William Shakespeare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

If you are a playwright or historical novelist, and you want to write about Richard III or Henry V or Julius Caesar, you are going to have to reckon with Shakespeare's portrayals of those men. His plays have defined how these monarchs are viewed in the popular imagination, and if you dare to take them on as subjects, people will see you as writing in response or reaction to Shakespeare.

Meanwhile, Henry VIII, his six wives, and the machinations of the Tudor court are enormously popular subjects for biography, fiction, drama, and television to this day -- and hardly anyone seems to know or care that Shakespeare (collaborating with John Fletcher) wrote a Henry VIII play too. You would think that when The Tudors was on television, Shakespeare theaters around the world would have rushed to produce Henry VIII in the hopes of attracting Tudor-crazed audiences, but that doesn't seem to have happened.

That's because even desperate, mercenary theater producers are smart enough to see that Henry VIII is kind of a lousy play. The historical period it covers (Henry's efforts to divorce Queen Katharine and marry Anne Boleyn, founding the Church of England in the process) is so juicy, but the play seems to focus on the least interesting parts of the story. Instead of digging deep into Henry's and Anne's thoughts and feelings, the play devotes most of its running time to gossip, pageantry, and patriotic bombast. I can see how an early-1600s London audience would have watched this eagerly, but it is very difficult to imagine a 21st-century audience caring about most of this.

The possible exception is in the play's depiction of Katharine, its most human and sympathetic character. Shakespeare and Fletcher could easily have demonized her because, after all, she was a Catholic, a foreigner, and the wife that Henry needed to cast off in order to marry Anne and produce baby Elizabeth. But instead, Katharine gets the play's best speeches and most compelling arc, pleading her case with dignity and intelligence. Perhaps, perhaps, an enterprising director or producer could salvage Henry VIII by drastically cutting it down and reshaping it as The Tragedy of Queen Katharine.

The Life and Death of King John by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was more than a little wary of King John when I sat down to read it. It’s the least-read Shakespeare play according to Goodreads (narrowly edging out Timon of Athens ) and has an even lower rating than the dreadfully boring Henry VIII . So I was surprised and delighted when the first scene introduced a charming character who leapt off the page: Philip, Richard the Lionheart's long-lost illegitimate son and the cheekiest bastard in all of England. The Bastard sasses everyone from his legitimate half-brother (“Your face hath got five hundred pound a year / Yet sell your face for five pence and ’tis dear”) to the Duke of Austria (“But, ass, I’ll take that burden from your back / Or lay on that shall make your shoulders crack”), and delivers several funny, frank, cynical soliloquies.

And the Bastard isn’t the only sass-meister in King John. The formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine—John’s mother and the Bastard’s grandmother—doesn’t have a lot to do, but still gives the impression of being a wickedly smart and powerful old lady. Meanwhile, Constance, who is fighting to get her young son Arthur (John’s nephew) placed on the throne, also gets in some good zingers: “Do, child, go to it grandam, child. / Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will / Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig.”

Really, I wish the whole play were about the Bastard and Eleanor and Constance being sassy together, à la The Lion in Winter (a play which involves several of the same characters about 20 years earlier). But unfortunately, the play is titled King John. John is a weak, colorless, inconstant character, and it’s hard to take an interest in his plight. He actually gets a pretty vivid deathbed speech at the end, but I still don’t know what to make of his fate. It’s neither the deserved death of a villain nor the tragic death of a hero—as with so much in this play, it just kind of happens.

Much of the rest of King John seems to consist of dry runs for scenes in later, better Shakespeare plays: the siege of a town in northern France ( Henry V ); a soothsayer delivering ominous prophecies to a king ( Julius Caesar ); the threat of eye-gouging body horror ( King Lear ). And there are several passages where Shakespeare’s taste for rhetoric and wordplay gets the better of him and becomes confusing rather than insightful (“For that which thou hast sworn to do amiss / Is not amiss when it is truly done; / And being not done where doing tends to ill, / The truth is then most done not doing it”).

That Bastard, though. As he himself says, “Blessèd be the hour […] when I was got.”