Part II<\/em> was better than he and his wife had expected and that the 4.5 hours passed by much more easily than they had anticipated.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I found exactly the same thing to be true. \u00a0The time practically sailed<\/em> by, and I really enjoyed the performance.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Shakespeare\u2019s portrayal, Henry VI \u2014 who repeatedly expresses his wish that he had never become a king \u2014 reminded me of the late\u00a0Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919-1980), the former Shah of Iran, whose daughter I tutored for a year while they were living in exile in Egypt and whom I met and spoke with on one unexpected afternoon. \u00a0From what I read about him, from what I learned about him from his daughter, and from my impressions of him during our conversation, my sense is that he simply wasn\u2019t cut out to be the leader of a country located in that very, very tough neighborhood. \u00a0He wasn\u2019t sufficiently ruthless, and I think that he was rather indecisive (just as Shakespeare\u2019s Henry VI is). \u00a0What decent person wouldn\u2019t<\/em> be, after all, when virtually every choice is bad<\/em>?<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The situation in which Henry VI finds himself in the plays is absolutely awful. \u00a0He\u2019s caught, among other things, between his highly intelligent, domineering, and utterly ruthless wife,\u00a0Margaret of Anjou (whom Shakespeare calls \u201cthe she-wolf of France\u201d), the scheming and ambitious Richard of York, and, beginning to make his fateful appearance, Richard\u2019s son \u2014 also named Richard \u2014 who becomes the third Duke of York and who will then, in the sequel, become King Richard III. \u00a0One of Shakespeare\u2019s characters refers to this younger Richard in Part II<\/em> as a \u201cheap of wrath\u201d and, because of his physical deformity, as a \u201cfoul undigested lump\u201d).<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some of the scenes in which the English inner circle plot to depose or manipulate the king \u2014 and to do each other in, as well \u2014 strongly reminded me of certain academic conspiracies I\u2019ve known.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Of course, Shakespeare\u2019s historical plays should not be taken as objective history. \u00a0Whether inadvertently or by conscious intent, he produced propaganda on behalf of the House of Tudor, under whose rule he wrote \u2014 and part of the task of Tudor propaganda was to blacken the reputation of the Plantagenets, and particularly of the Plantagenet House of York, whom Henry Tudor (Henry VII) had violently overthrown.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nowadays, everyone knows that Richard III was an evil king. \u00a0To a great degree, this perception comes from Shakespeare\u2019s phenomenal success in portraying him as such. \u00a0He may be the playwright\u2019s greatest villain, and one of the greatest pieces of acting that I\u2019ve ever seen was surely Gary Armagnac\u2019s horrifying portrayal of Richard III in the 1994 Utah Shakespeare Festival of the play by that name. \u00a0There may, however, be a horrific injustice here: \u00a0Some argue that Richard III was actually an exceptionally good king, and there is some evidence that he was unusually popular among the common people and that he was long mourned after his 1485 death in the Battle of Bosworth Field against the forces of Henry Tudor.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 For me \u2014 and, I think, for my wife \u2014 the big surprise of the 2019 Utah Shakespeare Festival was the Festival\u2019s production of The Conclusion of Henry VI: Parts Two and Three. \u00a0 Candidly, I wasn\u2019t really looking forward to this particular play, which is an amalgamation of Shakespeare\u2019s Henry VI: Part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>