Setting aside the suspicion that The First Part of Henry the Sixth is a collaborative work or perhaps even a "prequel" to Parts Two and Three, the play can be read as if its first few lines were the earliest example of Shakespeare's playwriting. If so, then, what can be learned, right there at the very beginning, by looking closely at Act one, scene one, line one?
Here's the first considerable speech in the play -- just about the very moment, let us imagine, in which Mr. W. S.'s "rough and all-unable" goose quill touched paper. Thirty-seven or thirty-eight astonishing plays lie in the future.
The adventure begins as Gloucester eulogizes the recently-deceased Henry V. The speech is not brilliant, not accomplished; in fact, it's just plain vanilla ordinary. But it's a seed, a kernel.
Gloucester: England ne'er had a king until his time.
Virtue he had, deserving to command:
His brandish'd sword did blind men with his beams:
His arms spread wider that a dragon's wings;
His sparking eyes, replete with wrathful fire
More dazzled and drove back his enemies
Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces.
What should I say? his deeds exceed all speech:
He ne'er lift up his hand but conquered.
A reader or playgoer would have to be superbly insightful to predict that this Shakespeare would become the Shakespeare. This opening speech is a a mighty flat piece of rhetoric.
It's formulaic -- simply a litany or list. First comes an item, a noun (virtue, sword, arms, eyes, deeds) which is then amplified by a hyperbolic qualifier (beams, wings, fire, sun). It's open-ended; it could go on indefinitely. But because it's so much a formula, there's no surprise--there's no mystery or excitement about where Gloucester is heading.
Moreover, for each element in the list, there's a congruence between the unit of thought and the unit of verse. The sentiment of each of the first four items on the list is exactly contained in a five-beat, ten-syllable line of verse--a pedestrian procedure which Shakespeare would soon transcend. And finally, there's an excess of old-fashioned, traditional alliteration: "His Brandish'd sward did Blind me with his Beams" "affects the letter" and browbeats the brain with the letter B. It goes almost without saying that there's nothing in this speech that is particular (Elizabethans would say peculiar) to either Gloucester or Henry. This is Anyduke reciting sentences about Anyking.
But then something truly amazing occurs. Although it looks as though Gloucester is gathering his strength and his breath for a speech that might go on for forty lines and which would celebrate many more of the late kings's amazing attributes, he suddenly changes plans and truncates his intention: "What should I say? his deeds exceed all speech."
Gloucester seems to have run out of rhetorical gas. He is frustrated because he simply doesn't have the words. He throws in the rhetorical towel, so to speak. He surrenders. And he's right to do so, because at this early moment neither he nor Shakespeare has the power to generate a language that is equal to Henry's deeds. Better to stop speaking if you are utterly unable to say what you want to say.
Yet what is the task of such a playwright as Shakespeare?
It is not to do exactly what Gloucester admits that he cannot do? -- to find the words that are commensurate with the deed -- as Shakespeare certainly will when he returns to Henry in the 1598 play which concludes and climaxes this sequence of eight history plays. In a decade, Shakespeare will move from the pathos of "What shall I say?" to a rich eloquence that is up to the task.
"What shall I say?" is therefore an important question -- the most important question of all, in fact -- and the playwright asks it right here at the outset. Readers can watch and learn as Shakespeare little by little, in play after play, gradually invents a rhetorical style in which speech not only equals but eventually comes to exceed all deeds.
A good no-bullshit book about Shakespeare's early writings: "Shakespeare's Apprenticeship" by Robert Y. Turner, the best teacher I ever had in graduate school (or any school).
Posted by: Don Z. Block | August 29, 2020 at 09:35 AM