If you’ve heard much about the Henry VI plays, it is probably that they are sloppy and strange, early works that lack nuance and skill. The character Clifford—first known as Young Clifford, when he enters Henry VI, Part 2 alongside his father—seems like an example of the plays’ flat morality, a straightforwardly vicious character driven by a lust for violence. But Clifford represents one of their many complex views of young men raised and shaped by constant war, offering a glimpse to those who may not know the Henry VI plays of what makes their commentary on combat and violence so interesting.
‘My heart is turned to stone’
Whether characters who reappear in multiple plays should really be seen as the same character is a question we’ll surely return to. But Clifford’s first two scenes of the two plays in which he features mirror themselves so neatly, it’s hard not to feel like Shakespeare was very deliberately asking us to remember him.
Clifford first appears suddenly in the final act of Henry VI, Part 2. He enters alongside his father, and cannot resist interjecting insults as the play’s two political factions—led by King Henry VI and the Duke of York—attempt futile negotiations over York’s claim to the English throne. In the ensuing battle, Clifford Senior is killed. Even though we have barely met the younger Clifford, he is given a soliloquy of mourning—one that, oddly, asks us to understand that this character we barely know is undergoing a profound transformation:
Even at this sight
My heart is turned to stone, and while ’tis mine,
It shall be stony. York not our old men spares;
No more will I their babes. Tears virginal
Shall be to me even as the dew to fire;
And beauty, that the tyrant oft reclaims,
Shall to my flaming wrath be oil and flax.
Henceforth I will not have to do with pity.
[...]
In cruelty will I seek out my fame.
This is the Clifford we will come to know in Part 3, where he is reintroduced in an all-but-identical way: shouting insults while King Henry attempts to negotiate peace.
In both scenes, Clifford is also a mirror of York’s sons, the boisterous heirs of the man who killed his father. They too shout insults and encouragement from the sidelines; they too eventually vow revenge for their father’s death in battle, and exact it with deliberate viciousness.
No one in the play ever seems quite able to acknowledge this obvious parallel. Neither group can ever admit that they are guilty of everything they blame their enemies for doing. These unruly and vengeful sets of sons inherit their father’s names, claims… and something more. As they step into the forefront of the conflict in place of their fallen fathers, they carry a different kind of cruelty, forged from loss. In his strange mourning soliloquy, Clifford provides a kind of explanation for the events to come, an embodiment of the way war feeds on itself by giving rise to young men who have more and more reasons to never stop fighting.
‘Now burns my candle out’
Clifford dies only two acts into Henry VI, Part 3, but he makes an indelible impression in that time, serving at the Queen’s right hand and helping her exact brutal revenge on the Duke of York in one of the play’s most famous scenes. He’s also a useful ally in other respects: “My love and fear glued many friends to thee,” he laments as he dies, addressing the absent King Henry. We see more than once that he commands followers, this emblem of war’s way of constantly renewing itself giving rise to even more armies of his own.
As he dies, Clifford blurs the line between theatre and reality. Battles are often the least real moments of play: we know the fights are choreographed, even when they don’t look it. We know that no one is actually dying. But when the York brothers find Clifford’s body on the battlefield, they can’t decide if he is dead or not. As they prod and jostle his body, trying to provoke him to speak and insisting that he is just pretending, their confusion becomes our own: the actor is just pretending—right? Looking at a body onstage, how can you tell the difference between a real death and a faked one?
A character shaped by death, who has trailed nothing but death and violence in his wake, seems to defy theatrical possibility in order to actually die. The insistence that he’s only faking makes the death seem more and more strangely true, a hard line drawn between the kinds of fake stage deaths we’ve seen before and this death, whose reality Shakespeare spends so long confirming.
If Clifford’s death is strange and vague, his dying words ring with the kind of clarity Shakespeare’s characters only ever seem to acquire as they die. His final lines are recognition—recognition almost no other characters achieve—of the cyclical nature of his actions, the role he has played in the ceaseless circle of violence. He calls out to his enemies to finish the job:
Come, York and Richard, Warwick and the rest.
I stabbed your fathers’ bosoms; split my breast.
Want to hear more?
Forgive a brief digression, but if you’re interested in hearing a recording of Clifford’s final speech, along with others from Henry VI, you should check out this album by Ellie Wilson, the composer for Shakespeare’s Globe’s productions of Henry VI and Richard III last winter. The album combines her music with soliloquies delivered by the production’s actors, and all proceeds will benefit the Globe, which like so many theatres is struggling to survive these socially distanced times and the imposition of second lockdown here in the UK. If you buy the album this Friday, 6 November, all of Bandcamp’s fees will be waived, so all the money will go right to the Globe.
You can also read some of my own writing about the productions in the album notes, particularly focused on how we used music to enhance the world of these plays. The Globe has been a true research home for me for several years, and I’m really happy to have the chance to help support them in a small way. Plus, the music is extraordinary, as you can hear from the sample track right here.
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