Henry VI, Part 2 Trivia Quiz

Answer: kind-hearted

Shakespeare's Henry is gentle, naive and peace-loving, making him a fine dramatic foil to the cynical and Machiavellian brutes who surround him. One could call him childlike: his response to the evil and violence surrounding and threatening him is to wring his hands and impotently quote St Matthew, "Blessed are the peacemakers".

The nineteenth-century critic G. C. Verplanck praises Shakespeare's "meek and holy Henry, whose gentle lowliness of spirit is brought out with a prominence and beauty beyond what history alone would have suggested to the Poet". Today's audiences - like Shakespeare's original audiences, perhaps - would tend to see Henry as ridiculous rather than beautiful in his role of King. "Morals are out of fashion" here, comments the modern critic Andrew Dickson, suggesting that Henry is "a medieval character adrift in a Renaissance play".

Henry appears philosophical, almost sanguine, in the face of every piece of gloomy news that reaches him of yet another English disaster in the Hundred Years' War (God's will be done," he says meekly). These French wars, in fact - so central to the action of "Henry VI, Part 1" - recede into the distance in this play as the civil disorders at home and the widespread discontent with Henry's government take centre stage. The gentle Henry has enough on his plate in England.

Answer: Margaret of Anjou

This forthcoming marriage is going to prove an unmitigated disaster to king and country alike, as Shakespeare's first audiences - well briefed in the vicissitudes of English medieval history - will have been well enough aware of. There is therefore rich dramatic irony in Henry's gracious reply to Suffolk: "...thou hast given me in this beauteous face/A world of earthly blessings to my soul,/If sympathy of love unite our thoughts".

Suffolk, who has himself quickly become Margaret's lover, is presented as being hugely unpopular with the Yorkist faction at court, partly because he has arranged a marriage for the king which will not include the usual dowry and which will also involve considerable loss of English territory in France. As the Duke of York - who himself harbours secret ambitions for the crown - punningly puts it: "For Suffolk's duke, may he be suffocate/That dims the honour of this warlike isle!"

Answer: Warwick the Kingmaker

Warwick, who becomes even more central to the action in Part 3 of the trilogy, must be a wonderfully rewarding part to play on stage, a cold and calculating politician who keeps his devious stratagems to himself, later is to change sides to devastating effect more than once, and will effectively decide the identities of successive English kings. Here in Part 2 he impresses his strong and vigorous personality on the audience right from the start of the action, using in the process a typical Shakespearean punning device:

"Unto the main! O father, Maine is lost;
That Maine which by main force Warwick did win,
And would have kept so long as breath did last!
Main chance, father, you meant; but I meant Maine,
Which I will win from France, or else be slain."

Shakespeare extracts glorious humour from the two-faced treachery in the hearts of almost everybody at the court, in the way the characters repeatedly praise one another to their faces and then immediately trash any individual as soon as he has left the stage. Warwick's support for York is so secret, in fact, that even York himself does not seem to be aware of it - or perhaps he does not believe it, having noticed that Warwick is habitually not what he seems. Hardly anybody at the English court, in fact, appears to trust anybody else.

Answer: she gives the Duchess of Gloucester a box on the ear

The deadly enmity between these two hugely proud and ambitious women, Margaret and Eleanor, is another important ingredient in the drama. Neither of them can stomach the high status enjoyed by the other, and here the Queen pretends she mistook the Duchess for a serving-maid who failed to pick up her fallen fan, but nobody except her credulous husband believes this transparent lie. Eleanor retorts, scarcely caring perhaps whether she is heard or not, that "Though in this place most master wear no breeches/She shall not strike Dame Eleanor unrevenged".

After this ominous incident, the attendant lords continue their persistent wrangling, and even mere commoners enter the court fighting, with the King apparently lacking the will or ability to prevent them. Shakespeare presents us with a vivid picture of a once orderly society falling to pieces about our ears.

Answer: he will die by water

This prophecy is duly fulfilled later in the action with Suffolk, like so many other characters in the play, making a bad end, murdered at sea while his adversaries indulge in vicious puns on his surname of "Pole", which was pronounced I believe like "pool": "Ay, kennel, puddle, sink, whose filth and dirt/Troubles the silver spring where England drinks".

Eleanor of Gloucester will be banished to the Isle of Man for her nefarious interactions with the spirit world. It is - Andrew Dickson suggests in "The Rough Guide to Shakespeare" - as if witchcraft belongs to the old medieval world, and has in the new cynical times become quaint and ineffective, rather like duelling (which is, Dickson believes, parodied in the play in the drunken brawl between Master Horner and his servant Peter). As with the supernatural episodes involving Joan of Arc in "Henry VI Part 1", Shakespeare's authorship of the witchcraft scene has occasionally been questioned, some commentators feeling that it is less well written than anything else in the play.

Answer: the King is arrested and taken to the Tower of London

The King's arrest and imprisonment is portrayed in the third Henry VI play, not the second. In this present scene, Gloucester is taken away to be murdered. Upon hearing of the killing the King rouses himself to upbraid Suffolk - soon to be dispatched to his grisly death at sea - with the words, "Upon thy eyeballs murderous tyranny/Sits in grim majesty, to fright the world".

The Queen, Suffolk's secret lover, then makes a very long, very good and very hypocritical speech (some of the complexities of which are well discussed on wikipedia) after which Warwick, another false friend of Henry's, addresses Suffolk as "Pernicious blood-sucker of sleeping men". Suffolk, banished from England, is left onstage alone with the Queen for a final love scene with his partner in crime.

Answer: Jack Cade

Even those members of the audience who know Cade will play a part in this drama may often feel a twinge of surprise at his sudden entrance, and this in spite of the fact that the Duke of York, who once employed Cade as a soldier, has briefly mentioned during the preceding action that he has arranged an uprising of peasants against Henry's rule. Shakespeare makes Cade a ridiculous, uproariously comic, figure (one imagines his role would have been assigned in the play's first performances to some well-known clown of the early 1590s): there is certainly nothing remotely heroic or tragic about this illiterate Kentish peasant who wants to be King. (There is a rich irony a little later in the action when King Henry enters and announces sadly, "Was never subject long'd to be a king/As I do long and wish to be a subject".)

Inspired by his henchman Dick's programme of "killing all the lawyers", Cade sits down to develop his revolutionary manifesto. "Here," he says, "sitting upon London-stone, I charge and command that, of the city's cost, the ... conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of our reign." He proceeds to pronounce a death sentence on the unfortunate Lord Say with the terrible words, "Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school!" Say and Sir Humphrey Stafford are both summarily executed by the mob, as is the poor Clerk of Chatham, whose crime is that he knows how to read and write ("Away with him," cries Cade, "hang him with his pen and inkhorn about his neck.")

Alexander Iden, "a Kentish gentleman", finds Cade trespassing in his garden after the confused failure of the peasants' rebellion and, like a true English gentleman, immediately kills the intruder for his audacity in so doing. When the action moves back to London this allows Shakespeare to indulge his talent for dramatic entrances with the stage direction "Enter Iden, with Cade's head". This echoes another such stage direction a little earlier when the Queen walks onstage carrying her lover Suffolk's severed head.

Answer: Bishop of Winchester

The Bishops of Winchester owned brothels in Southwark during the Middle Ages, their girls being popularly known as "Winchester geese". Shakespeare makes no use of this particular historical detail, but it is probably no accident that he makes the play's only Cardinal a villainous figure, since anti-Catholicism was rife in England in the early 1590s (encouraged by the government): Christopher Marlowe was able to present without official complaint his Roman scene in "Doctor Faustus" in which the Pope and his Cardinals are made to look utterly ridiculous by Mephistopheles's mischievous tricks.

Shakespeare's Cardinal is a very evil man indeed, closely involved in all the plotting and counter-plotting of the play, and he makes a bad end - on his agonised deathbed he signally fails to ask God for forgiveness of his many sins, and in fact there is a distinct Marlovian touch when the watching Henry observes of the Cardinal that "He dies, and makes no sign" - with Warwick tersely adding, "So bad a death argues a monstrous life".

There are other hints of anti-Catholic sentiment in "Henry VI Part 2", as Andrew Dickson has remarked. Simcox, the man who claims to have had his sight restored by miracle - and is believed only by the gullible King - is quickly exposed as a fraud and a trickster, and the audience may here feel an almost tangible sense that the age of miracles, in the old Catholic tradition, is truly past. This perceived anti-Catholicism will probably have been just one of the many ingredients which, scholars believe, made "Henry VI Part 2" an immediate smash hit when the first performances were given on London's Bankside.

Answer: Richard Plantagenet, the future Richard III

The scene in which Shakespeare first introduces the prince who, in "Richard III", will grow into one of his most famous and unforgettable dramatic monsters, is particularly rich in vicious verbal abuse and vilification (in fact, it is the scene in which the Yorkists first openly lay claim to the English throne). First Richard's father York, finding that Henry has deceived him, angrily confronts his sovereign:

"False king! Why hast thou broken faith with me,
Knowing how hardly I can brook abuse?
King did I call thee? No, thou art not king,
Not fit to govern and rule multitudes..."

before addressing Queen Margaret in terms still stronger: "O blood-besotted Neopolitan,/Outcast of Naples, England's bloody scourge!"

The two Richards, father and son together, reveal in their very way of speaking that they may well both - unlike the wretched encumbent - have what it takes to be a King of England in those dark times. York remarks, in words which look forward to the later machinations of his son Richard as King, that "My brain, more busy than the labouring spider,/Weaves tedious snares to trap mine enemies". In York's soliloquies, however, the poetry sometimes rises above the swamp of evil that the actions on stage continually present to us. One does not perhaps need to have Yorkshire blood coursing through one's veins in order to enjoy this:

"Then will I raise aloft the milk-white rose,
With whose sweet smell the air shall be perfum'd,
And in my standard bear the arms of York
To grapple with the house of Lancaster;
And force perforce, I'll make him yield the crown,
Whose bookish rule hath pull'd fair England down."

This might be contrasted with Henry's vapid and pathetic "Come, wife, let's in, and learn to govern better,/For yet may England curse my wretched reign."

Answer: The First Battle of St Albans

On the morning of the battle Warwick, after swearing by "my father's badge, old Nevil's crest,/The rampant bear chain'd to the ragged staff" (still today the proud emblem of Warwickshire), advises Old Clifford that he "were best to go to bed and dream again,/To keep thee from the tempest of the field". When battle commences, however, York denies Warwick the opportunity of killing Clifford by quickly and efficiently performing the deed himself. We are also shown on stage the death in battle of the Duke of Somerset - cut down by young Richard, that well-known "heap of wrath" and "foul indigested lump".

With the King and Queen in disorganised flight, the Yorkist leaders meet triumphantly and prepare to march on London. Warwick proclaims that "Saint Alban's battle won by famous York/Shall be eternis'd in all age to come". The "Wars of the Roses" are under way and the theatre spectators, rather like the readers of a serialised Dickens novel in the nineteenth century, are left - if the actors have done their work - with their mouths watering for the next episode.