Henry VI, Part 1 Trivia Quiz

Answer: Henry V

In the opening lines of the play, the brother of the dead king, Bedford, laments, "Hung be the heavens with black" because of the death of "King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long! England ne'er lost a king of so much worth." Henry V died at the age of 35 in 1422.

The heir to the throne was nine months old, Henry VI of the title. In true soap opera fashion, Shakespeare and his collaborators have advanced the age of Henry VI in the play, and by its end he is contemplating marriage. The illustration - from an 1864 history book - shows the royal wedding of the parents of Henry VI.

His mother, Catherine of Valois, was the daughter of Charles VI, who was king of France at the time of the events of the play but died that year and had been mentally ill off and on for much of his reign. Catherine's brother was the Dauphin, who became Charles VII. Charles VI had declared Henry V his heir at the time of the marriage, which later gave their son Henry VI a claim to France, beyond the retrieval of ancestral lands.

After her royal husband's death, Catherine went on to have several more children with Owen Tudor, becoming the grandmother of Henry VII, founder of England's Tudor dynasty, and therefore the ancestress of Elizabeth I, the ruler of England when this play was written.

Answer: Joan la Pucelle

A scourge is a whip used to punish or cause great suffering, but Joan sought to be God's scourge against the English for good reason. The historical Jeanne d'Arc, born around 1412 in the midst of the Hundred Years' War between England and France that had ravaged her land, began to see visions and hear voices in her early teens. Spurred by what she fervently believed to be messages directly from God through his saints, the woman called Joan of Arc in English and Joan la Pucelle in this play had two passionate missions in life: drive the English out of France and see to it that the Dauphin who would become Charles VII was escorted safely to Reims for his coronation as king.

At the time she was brought to the attention of the Dauphin, England was winning the war.

The peasant girl who eventually was canonized as a saint inspired France to turn the tide.

Answer: Joan of Arc and Charles VII

The real Joan of Arc was allowed to dress as a man to protect her from being groped or even raped because her appearance might stimulate lust, but no historian today suggests that she was sexually promiscuous. Her fellow soldiers respected and revered her.

It is part of the English propaganda to paint her as evil and immoral, and Talbot's words are just one example of many jibes that are more dissonant to modern audiences than they would have been to Shakespeare's original hearers. The word "pucelle" means "virgin", reflecting Joan's nickname "The Maid of Orléans" and implicitly associating her with the Virgin Mary; however, in early modern English the word "puzzel" was a word for a prostitute or otherwise disreputable woman. Different texts of the play vary the spelling of the two words, but the nasty pun remains.

The equally ugly pun directed against the Dauphin (the crown prince of France) disrespects him as a fish at best, since dolphins would not carry the positive connotations for Talbot or Shakespeare as they do for us.

The dogfish is a particularly unattractive small shark, a bottom feeding scavenger.

Answer: Wars of the Roses

While England is still winning the Hundred Years' War in France in Act 2, a new war is brewing in a rose garden in England. Audiences would know to look back at the past - when Richard II (York) had been usurped by Henry IV (Lancaster) - and to look ahead to the Wars of the Roses that would divide England during the next generation.

In this scene, captured dramatically in the illustration, Richard Plantagenet - who will become the Duke of York and father of King Edward IV and King Richard III - aggressively thrusts a white rose in the face of John Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, who plucks a red rose, which represents the House of Lancaster.

The two houses would be united by the time this play was written, through the marriage between Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, the grandparents of Queen Elizabeth I.

Answer: stones

The conflict within the English nobility quickly affects their men, as in Act 3, Henry VI finally enters the play in person for the first time and cautions his officers (who enter clutching their red and white roses), "Civil dissension is a viperous worm that gnaws at the bowels of the commonwealth".

As if to prove the point (and his weakness and inability to stop the inevitable), Henry is interrupted by the noise of the common men who serve the Duke of Gloucester and the Bishop of Winchester yelling "Down with the tawny coats!" and "Stones! stones!" as they throw rocks at each other. According to the Lord Mayor of London: "Forbidden of late to carry any weapon, [they] have fill'd their pockets full of pebble stones and banding themselves in contrary parts do pelt so fast at one another's pate that many have their giddy brains knock'd out...." After they enter - "with bloody pates" - the serving men even say that if they had no stones they would attack each other with their teeth. So, while Joan of Arc and her demons get the blame for England's sudden turn for the worse in the Hundred Years' War, the play hints at other possible reasons.

Answer: Joan la Pucelle

There's some irony in Joan pretending to be a peasant, since the audience knows that she began life as a peasant girl. It is in the battle for the walled city of Rouen that we see the confrontation between Lord Talbot, who is supposed to be the straightforward English knight who fights with honor, and Joan la Pucelle, who is accused of "treachery" and witchcraft.

Many insults are thrown back and forth, but the idea that the English fight fair and the French cheat predominates. English good, French bad.

The English manage to get the city of Rouen back, but Bedford dies and Talbot becomes commander of the English forces. This all prepares the audience for the next scene, when Joan will persuade one of the allies of the English to become a turncoat.

Answer: Burgundy

Historically, the Dukes of Burgundy (in at least two generations) played both sides against each other and played a large role in keeping the war going for so long. In the 21st century, we tend to think of France as always being the unified nation we know today, but a major reason the English kings felt justified in claiming the French crown was the fact that France was made up of several feudal states, some of them traditionally part of an empire that the English kings saw as their own ancestral lands. Burgundy was one of these feudal states that theoretically owed fealty to the king of France, but the whole debate was over who was king of France.

Henry VI, with roots in Anjou and arguably in Normandy, had a claim, and Burgundy thought it was in the best interest of his own family to support him.

Henry was also the son of Catherine of Valois, the daughter of Charles VI, and his father had been named heir. The legitimacy of the Dauphin, crowned Charles VII in the course of the events of this play, had been called into question. Paris was even under English control during much of this time! When the tide begins to turn for the Dauphin, Burgundy sees which side his bread is buttered on and changes sides.

In the play, this happens because Joan la Pucelle deviously uses her wiles to turn him to the dark side. Historically, Burgundy did not change sides until 1435, after Jeanne d'Arc had been dead for four years.

Answer: Lord Talbot

John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury and 1st Earl of Waterford was born in the 1380s and died at the Battle of Castillon in France during the Hundred Years' War on 17 July 1453. He was designated Constable of France during the time Henry VI was making a claim for the French crown, during the years that are crunched together in Shakespeare's play.

He was known for his prowess as a soldier, Talbot went down in history as the "English Achilles" although his skills as a general have been reexamined. The blame for English defeat has been placed on Sir John Falstaff (or Fastolf) who is perhaps most famous as the cowardly character that gave Shakespeare the idea for an even more interesting comic character in the plays in the "Henry IV" group. Literature twists history in ways that are difficult to untangle.

Answer: She is pregnant.

Women convicted of crimes under English law were able to have the death sentence delayed by "pleading the belly" - a fact that women in literature are quick to use, often with a comic effect; for example, in Daniel Defoe's "Moll Flanders" and in John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera" characters take advantage of this custom.

Historically, the reprieve sometimes led to a pardon or transportation to a penal colony once these were an option, so it was well worth a try. When she and Mistress Quickly are arrested in Act 5, Scene 4 of another Shakespeare play - "Henry IV, Part 2" - Doll Tearsheet pleads the belly by screaming at the beadle, "I'll tell thee what, thou damned tripe-visaged rascal, an the child I now go with do miscarry, thou wert better thou hadst struck thy mother, thou paper-faced villain." As in this play, the plea does not work, and it may be that the author meant the audience to find it hilarious when Joan of Arc pleads her belly in "Henry VI, Part 1", as it is in the later play.

In Shakespeare, Joan first denies her father, claims to be high-born and a virgin, and a few lines later claims, "I am with child, ye bloody homicides: murder not then the fruit within my womb, although ye hale me to a violent death." She goes on to name several different French noblemen as the father, and York implies that even if she is pregnant, she'll be put to death anyway: "Strumpet, thy words condemn thy brat and thee." She ends by uttering a curse against England, as she is led away to be burned.

Answer: Suffolk

The supposed adultery between Margaret of Anjou and the Duke of Suffolk, William de la Pole, was never hinted at in any writings that endure from their lifetimes, although rumors did fly about Margaret and the paternity of her son, Edward, because many doubted that the sweet but mentally erratic Henry VI was capable of fathering a child.

Other lords - but not Suffolk - were mentioned as possible fathers of Edward. The beautiful and precocious Margaret was fifteen at the time of the marriage, while Henry was a seemingly innocent twenty-three.

In the Wars of the Roses, she became an important figure on the Lancaster side, leading an army in battle as Joan of Arc had done in France. Her son Edward was killed in battle or executed at the Battle of Tewkesbury, and she was imprisoned then ransomed, remaining in France.

In Shakespeare, she is depicted as a power-hungry sociopath, and Shakespeare again plays fast and loose with history by having her in the English court to be a presence in "Richard III". Both Margaret of Anjou and Joan of Arc become exaggerated as monstrous women in the hands of William Shakespeare. For good or ill, both were strong women taking action in the midst of war.