Apologies for the unannounced (and frankly, unplanned) hiatus! While I keep trying to get my life in order, I’m very excited to share a guest post from Kate Pitt over at Good Tickle Brain.
Spare a thought for poor Lord Saye. The ill-fated lord’s entrance in Henry VI Part II is often overlooked because he arrives at the same time as Queen Margaret. Margaret makes consistently dramatic entrances across the four Shakespeare plays she appears in and there is an excellent chance that someone is about to be stabbed, slapped, or screamed at if she is nearby.
In this scene, Margaret enters carrying the severed head of her very dead ex-lover the Duke of Suffolk, and talks affectionately to it while her husband King Henry desperately tries to work out how to put down a major rebellion.
Saye is in the middle of all this and spends most of his first scene (and he’s only got two) standing around awkwardly while the King and Queen talk to everyone who isn’t him. It can’t feel great to be ignored in favor of someone who is missing his trunk and all of his limbs, and when King Henry finally turns towards Saye it is to point out that the advancing rebels would very much like to turn his head into a tote bag just like Suffolk’s.
Cue the awkward laughter and a messenger running in with the news that the rebels have arrived and everyone present who still has their heels should immediately betake themselves to them and get out of town. King Henry reminds Lord Saye that everyone hates him (because he raised taxes and can speak French) and he should probably join the bravely-running-away royals.
Lord Saye however, declares that he will stay and face the rebels. He is innocent after all. Why should he flee when he has done nothing wrong? At this point, practiced Shakespearean audiences will be reaching for the popcorn. Declaring innocence never ever (ever) works when attempting to avoid unpleasant consequences in Shakespeare and indeed, Lord Saye is captured less than forty lines later and dragged before the rebels to be interrogated.
Jack Cade, the leader of the rebellion, accuses Saye of such abominable crimes as printing, teaching grammar to children, and dressing his horse in excessively fancy horse-clothes. Saye is definitely not guilty of the first indictment, as this scene takes place in 1450 and the first books in England weren’t printed until at least twenty-five years later.
Regardless, the rebels continue to hurl increasingly ridiculous accusations at Lord Saye – “thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb” – while he confidently bats them aside by speaking Latin and quoting Caesar’s Commentaries. Not necessarily the best strategy when negotiating with angry men with pikes, but Saye also demonstrates that he can speak eloquently in plain English:
Tell me, wherein have I offended most?
Have I affected wealth or honor? Speak.
Are my chests filled up with extorted gold?
Is my apparel sumptuous to behold?
Whom have I injured, that you seek my death?
These hands are free from guiltless blood-shedding,
This breast from harboring foul deceitful thoughts.
O, let me live!
Lord Saye’s contention that his hands are “free from guiltless blood-shedding” is equivocal, given that he menacingly indicates elsewhere that he has definitely shed some blood: “Great men have reaching hands. Oft have I struck those that I never saw, and struck them dead.” There were rumors that Saye was involved in the murder of Henry VI’s uncle Duke Humphrey, though Shakespeare depicts that death as definitely Suffolk’s fault.
In addition to being a cunning politician and a huge classics nerd, Lord Saye is also a war hero. Jack Cade contemptuously challenges him, “when struck’st thou one blow in the field?” but Saye fought with Henry V in France. He is now in his mid-fifties and past his fighting days (the rebels mock his palsy) but Lord Saye feels that his prior service to his country should save his life.
Cade disagrees…
Read the rest here, and make sure to check out Part 2 as well!