2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Rose Rage

… or: the three Henry VIs and Richard III

Life is very very hard right now. Unprecedentedly hard on all fronts. And so I wanted a “hard” reading project this year. By hard, I mean, something involved that requires a plan of attack. I don’t need to be RELAXED. I need to be ABSORBED. My reading project of 2026 is a chronological (as much can be determined, anyway) read of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s been a while since I’ve done this. I’m keeping notes, too, which gives the project a “scholarly” feel, like homework, like I’m memorizing for some test that will never come. I thought it might be fun to jot down my decidedly un-scholarly notes and also put together a list of quotes – from the plays and/or people writing about the plays. Just to track my progress. I have a couple books I refer to: Marjorie Garber’s wonderful Shakespeare After All, the collection of essays Auden gave in 1946 about the plays, Mark van Doren’s Shakespeare, Harold Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare, and William Hazlitt’s book The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays. I’m using my Riverside Shakespeare, which I bought in college, and so glad I did.

I started with Henry VI, parts 1, 2, and 3. Of course which came first in his canon is undetermined and different editions put them in different orders, but in general the early plays are Two Gentlemen of Verona, Comedy of Errors, Henry VI, Titus Andronicus. After Henry VI, of course, comes Richard III, the first major work in the timeline, the first really important play (although the others have their importance: maybe you coudn’t write a Richard III if you hadn’t written Henry VI, parts 1, 2, and 3 yet.)

Henry VI is pretty rough going at times. There’s no humor! Not even anything witty! Nothing! 18th-century Shakespeare scholar Maurice Morgann referred to Henry VI part 1 as “that drum and trumpet thing”, which is pretty funny. But it’s also an accurate description. Except for the rabble-rousing Jack Cade in Part 2, nobody talks like a real person. It’s all declamatory rhetoric. (I remember my Irish-American dad saying to me, in college, when I first read the history plays, his tone dripping with Irish scorn – “it’s just royalist propaganda”. He’s not wrong.)

Suddenly, in the 3rd Henry VI there appears, almost from out of nowhere, the Duke of Gloucester, fourth son of the king, he who would eventually be known as Richard III. Trying to assign anything specific to Shakespeare in terms of his process is a fool’s errand so this is just an observation. Reading the plays chronologically (as much as possible, at any rate. I think there’s speculation that Henry VI part 1 was written after parts 2 and 3, essentially as a prequel) is revealing: it’s as if by the time Shakespeare arrived at Henry VI part 3 he had his sea legs under him, and became more interested in a single character than in laying out the plot. It’s almost as though Richard took Shakespeare by surprise too.

The other plays start with a crowd onstage, “drum and trumpet” flourish, kings and lords laying out what’s going on. But in the mighty Richard III, the next in the cycle, the play starts with Richard alone onstage, saying “Now is the winter of our discontent”. If you read these plays in order, you’re like “Where the hell did YOU come from?”

That first soliloquy is 40 lines but just five sentences. He can’t stop himself from talking. Confiding in us. Letting us in on who he is, how he sees things. He makes us complicit. He’s so evil, but he’s fun and mischievous, winking at us as he goes about some new outrageous plan – and succeeds! (Until he doesn’t.)

Richard’s last soliloquy in Act V of Richard III after he sees the ghosts on the battlefield of everyone he killed (or had killed) is where he shatters. Guilt and shame are foreign to him: he can’t absorb it, falling back on himself. I just counted: the soliloquy is 30 lines and he says the words “I”, “me” “myself” 38 times. He is literally a mirror crack’d – me me me me – he is the only person who exists. What does a tyrant do when he is confronted with the wrong he committed? Of course: self-pity. Suddenly Richard is saying stuff like, “When I die no one will mourn me.”

You’re right, Richard. Maybe don’t kill everyone and people will love you.

Richard III is a monster of a part in a monster of a play. There’s a reason why actors who play the role have injured themselves – for good – contorting their backs physically with no break for five long acts. Shakespeare would get better at this with his other massive plays featuring a central character. He was an actor and a man of the theatre. He understood pacing so he eventually built in breaks. The actor playing Hamlet, or King Lear, has breathers, there are scenes where he’s not involved and can catch his breath backstage. There’s the phenomenal scene with the three Queens (sounds like the finale of Ru Paul) – cursing their son / grandson. It’s a very long scene where the actor playing Richard can go have a smoke break and relax his contorted body.

It’s wild to read a play by Shakespeare where there is no comedic element, and not even a song. Songs are so important in Shakespeare! These “drum and trumpet” plays probably have horns blowing offstage but that’s all the music we’re going to get.

Also: from the jump, Shakespeare devotes care and stage time to the women. They are diverse, they are good, bad, selfish, lustful, earnest, they are victims and they are warriors. So many great women characters from out of the gate.

Reading them in order is not exactly fun but it is fun to “meet” the Duke of Gloucester in Henry VI part 3 and recognize immediately that something else is going on with this character, something has been activated in the writer – imagination, creativity, FUN, even. You can FEEL Shakespeare suddenly get interested.

Quotes on the plays

 
 

“The overt danger posed by Joan [of Arc] can be identified, vilified, and, by the end of the play, effectively purged. The more covert danger posed by the conventionally feminine Margaret has more lasting effects. It will linger throughout the entire series of plays, and throughout subsequent English history, till it, too, is finally matched and overcome by the triumphant reign of another martial virgin, the English monarch Elizabeth, a rightful ruler, both feminine and powerful, who is herself both king and queen.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“If Shakespeare in the strength and plumage of his youth had taken fewer chances he would not have done so much.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“[Jack Cade’s language] reveals an ear so sharp that the language, in its subtle, idiomatic precision, sounds not written but transcribed.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“[Henry VI, part 2] is a very rank-conscious play.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“[Henry VI, part 2] is self-conscious about its own dramatic nature — what is usually called ‘metadrama’ — is underscored by its structure and composition as a series of events unfold each of which could be called a staged performance or a play-within-the-play.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

Auden in his famous 1946 lectures laid out the animal schemata of the characters/conflict thus:
York: has the best claim to the title. Combines the lion and the fox
Henry: weak, a pelican
Gloucester: disloyal, combines the lion and the pelican

“[Henry VI, part 2] consistently plays these ‘folk’, or common, characters off against the noblemen, to powerful theatrical effect”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Warwick’s last words [in Henry VI, part 2], seeming to signal a close to the wars are here, as always in these history plays, laden with an irony unintended by the speaker but clearly perceptible to an audience.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“With our first glimpse of [Richard III] — a ‘heap of wrath, foul-indigested lump’ [V.i.157] — we feel and fear his power, and with his first soliloquy we recognize a new advance in Shakespeare’s art. He speaks in his own voice, not in the stiff, forensic verse that almost all the other characters share.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“The political chaos of Henry VI is the embryo of the cosmic chaos of King Lear.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Across Shakespeare’s entire dramatic activity, Henry VI, the king who longed to be a shepherd, reaches out a hand to Prospero, the Duke who presided over the enchanted isle.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Henry is a prophecy, and in a sense of progenitor of the most saintly character Shakespeare ever created — the divine Desdemona.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The third part of Henry VI is difficult because it portrays complete disorder and gets a little tedious.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“[Richard’s soliloquy in Act III, scene 2] is Shakespeare’s first great soliloquy.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“[Richard III’s] brilliant emergence as a character from this crowd ofpersons who are all so appallingly alike is the most interesting thing about the secone and third part of Henry VI. He has the power to make them prologues to his own play.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“With [Richard] wriggling under his hand, Shakespeare is ready to write the youthful masterpiece of Richard III.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Player’s hyde, Supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you – and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shaescene in a countrie.”
— Robert Greene, Croatsworth of Wot, Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592) – this quotes Richard in Act I, scene 4. So … Shakespeare was not welcome on the scene, maybe?

“Even if young Richmond is ‘England’s hope’ in a historical sense, the theatre’s future clearly belongs to Richard of Gloucester. His astonishing soliloquies, his refusal of self-pity even as he mines it for an audience, his energy and his pleasure in plotting all bodes well for audiences, whatever they do for the ‘England’ depicted in the plays.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The audacity of youth is everywhere apparent in the big unwieldy canvas [of the Henry VI plays].”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“Henry VI does not dominate the plays that bear his name.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“The spectacle [in Richard III] is of a lithe serpent coiling and uncoiling along the grey base of a masonry not to be weakened at last even by all the poison he can set working.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The chorus against Richard consists clearly of women’s voices…The wailing women of Richard III are its principal chorus, and there is none more powerful in Shakespeare.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“[Richard] is what no one was in Henry VI, except himself, witty; his energy, like that of Shakespeare’s best heroes, is mental. He is therefore both fearful and fascinating.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“We feel the presence of the future author of Macbeth.”
— Harold Goddard on Richard III, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Like all but one of the kings in these History Plays, Richard has failed to come to terms with the nocturnal world — the other side of life — the unconscious.”
— Harold Goddard on Richard III, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“As the last oe in a series, [Richard III ] becomes predominantly a study in nemesis.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Richard III’s [opening] monologue is not unlike Adolf Hitler’s speech to his General Staff on August 23, 1939, in its utter lack of self-deception. The lack of self-deception is striking because most of us invent plausible reasons for doing something we know is wrong.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Instead of being a true mirror to his self, [Richard] is a fake mirror, one that makes people look and see what they want to see.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Richard should woo less as a lover than as an actor — to show his mental superiority, and power of making others the playthings of his purpose.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“… we bore our feeble but, at that time, not useless testimony to the merits of this very original actor, on which the town was considerably divided for no other reason than because they WERE original.”
— William Hazlitt on Edmund Kean as Richard III, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

^^ I LOVE that observation. I see this a lot of time in the critic world.

“Many Shakespeare plays, as we have already noticed and as we will continue to see, begin with a small scene of secondary characters who set the themes and the tone for the greater events to follow. In Richard III the stage belongs, from the first, to Richard.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Richard portrays himself as an innocent in a world of schemers and deceivers — although, in the verbal equivalent of the Devil revealing his cloven hoof, he cannot quite keep the hissing serpent out of the final line — ‘silken sky, insinuating jacks!'”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Form and content always mirror each other in Shakespeare’s plays, and this is especiallyself-evident in plays that take as their subject some version of civil war.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Just as [Richard] is a chameleon and a Proteus, so the play of which he is a protagonist (and, paradoxically, antagonist) is also a shape-shifter, engaging the genres of history, tragedy, and comedy in turn.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Richard III is in fact a new kind of character for Shakespeare, a character with a complex, fully developed, and internally contradictory ‘personality’ — in short, a character conceived in terms recognizable from the standpoint of modern psychology.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“It is also, not incidentally, a magnificent piece of poetry, one that anticipates Shakespeare’s late romances, specifically Pericles and The Tempest, both plays about shipwreck, death, and loss.”
— Marjorie Garber, on Clarence’s “dream soliloquy, Act I, sc iv, Shakespeare After All

“No societies have sprung up to defend and lionize Richmond. He wins the crown, but not the play.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“For true success the villain must be a hero, too, must be a better man than we at the same time that he is worse. By nature he must be incapable of inflicting death, as Othello and Hamlet are, and as Macbeth must once have been. That is why his doing so will terrify us — why Othello, for example, will seem so much more destructive than Iago.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

Quotes from the plays

Chosen just because I like them. Every other line is quotable in Hamlet, but in these early plays it’s slimmer pickins.

Henry VI, part 1

The day begins to break and night is fled
Whose pitchy mantle over-veil’d the earth.
— BEDFORD, Act II, sc ii, 1-2

PLANTAGANET: Hath not thy rose a canker, Somerset?
SOMERSET: Hathnot thy rose a thorn, Plantaganet?
— Act II, sc iv, 68-69

And here I prophesy this brawl today,
Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden,
Shall send between the Red Rose and the White
A thousand souls to deth and deadly night.
— WARWICK, Act II, sc iv, 124-127

Good Lord, what madness rules on brain-sick men,
When for so slight and frivolous a cause,
Such factious emulations shall arise!
— KING HENRY VI, Act IV, sc i, 111-113

Lotta “brain-sick” men running around, then, now, and always. So fucking sick of “brain-sick men” being in charge.

‘Tis much, when sceptres are in children’s hands;
But more, when envy breeds unkind division
There comes the ruin, there begins confusion.
— EXETER, Act IV, sc i, 193-95

So doth the swan her downy cygnets save,
Keeping them prisoner underneath her wings.
— SUFFOLK, Act V, sc iii, 51-52

SUFFOLK: If thou wilt condescend to be my —
Queen Margaret: What?
SUFFOLK: His love.
— Act V, sc iii, 119-121

Oops.

Because you want the grace that others have,
You judge it straight a thing impossible
To compass wonders but by help of devils.
— JOAN OF ARC, Act V, sc iv, 46-48

This play does Joan dirty!

Henry VI, part 2

Watch thou, and wake when others be asleep,
To pry into the secrets of the state —
— YORK, Act I, sc 1

Pirates may make cheap penny worths of their pillage
And purchase friends and give to courtezans,
Still reveling like lords till all be gone.
— YORK, Act I, sc i, 221-223

When such strings jar, what hope of harmony?
— KING HENRY VI, Act II, sc i, 64

Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep
— SUFFOLK, Act III, sc ii, 53

Erect his statue and worship it,
And make my image but an alehouse sign.
— QUEEN MARGARET, Act III, sc ii, 80-81

I took a costly jewel from my neck,
A heart it was, bound in with diamonds,
And threw it towards the lad. The sea receiv’d it.
— QUEEN MARGARET, Act III, sc ii, 106-108

Enough, sweet Suffolk, thou torment’st thyself,
And these dread curses, like the sun ‘gainst glass,
Or like an overcharged gun recoil,
And turns the farce of them upon thyself.
— QUEEN MARGARET, Act III, sc ii, 329-332

Starting to get some figurative language and extended metaphors.

Ah, what a sign it is of evil life,
When death’s approach is seen so terrible!
— KING HENRY VI, Act III, sc iii, 5-6

Away, burn all the records of the realm, my mouth shall be the parliament of England.
— JACK CADE, Act IV, sc vii, 13-15

I feel remorse in myself with his words, but I’ll bridle it. He shall die, and it be but for pleading so well for his life.
— JACK CADE, Act IV, sc vii, 105-7

Priests pray for enemies, but princes kill.
— RICHARD, ACt V, sc ii, 71

Henry VI, part 3

And, father, do but think
How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown,
Within whose circuit is Elysium
And all that poets feign of bliss and joy.
— RICHARD, Act I, sc ii 28-31

O, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide.
— YORK, Act I, scene iv, 140

^^ See above dismissive comments from Robert Greene.

I cannot weep for all my body’s moisture
Scarce serves to quench my furnace-burning heart.
— RICHARD, Act II, sc i, 9-80

But Hercules himself must yield to odds.
— MESSENGER, Act II, sc ii, 53

the wound that bred this meeting here
Cannot be cur’d by words.
— CLIFFORD, Act II, ii, 121-122

But thou art neither like thy sire nor dam,
But like a foul misshapen stigmatic,
Marked by the Destinies to be avoided,
As venom toads or lizards’ dreadful stings.
— QUEEN MARGARET, Act II, sc ii, 135-138

Why stand we like soft-hearted women here,
Wailing our losses whiles the foe doth rage,
And look upon, as if the tragedy
Were played in jest by counterfeiting actors?
— WARWICK, Act II, sc iii, 25-28

Thou setter-up and plucker-down of kings.
— EDWARD to WARWICK, Act II, sc iii, 37

Measure for measure must be answered.
— WARWICK, Act II, sc vi, 55

Commanded always by the greater gust,
Such is the lightness of you common men.
— KING HENRY VI, Act III, sc i, 88-89

He plies her hand, and much rain wears the marble.
— RICHARD, Act III, sc ii, 50

Why, then, I do but dream on sovereignty
Like one that stands upon a promontory
And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,
Wishing his foot were equal with his eye,
And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,
Saying he’ll lade it dry to have his way.
— RICHARD, from his first big soliloquy, Act III, sc ii, 134-139

And yet I know not how to get the crown,
For many lives stand between me and home.
— RICHARD, from same, Act III, sc ii, 173

^^ Chilling. A long time ago I dated a guy who was somehow, murkily, in line for the British throne. He said, “A huge number – an extraordinary amount – of people would have to be murdered but yeah, I’m in line.”

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry “Content” to that which grieves my heart.
— RICHARD, Act III, sc ii 182-183

Those aren’t words. That’s a VOICE.

I hear, yet say not much, but think the more.
— RICHARD, Act IV, sc i, 83

For few men rightly temper with the stars.
— WARWICK, Act IV, sc vi, 29

He’s sudden, if a thing comes in his head.
— KING EDWARD on RICHARD, Act V, sc v, 86

The owl shriek’d at thy birth, an evil sign
The night-crow cried, a boding luckless time.
— HENRY VI to RICHARD, Act V, sc vi, 44-45

Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born
To signify thou cam’st to bite the world.
— HENRY VI to RICHARD, Act V, sc vi, 53-54

Let hell make crook’d my mind to answer it.
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word “love,” which graybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me. I am myself alone.
— RICHARD, Act V, sc vi, 79-83

God, can’t you just FEEL it?

I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down.
— RICHARD, Act III, sc ii, 182-191

Richard III

In the opening soliloquy, I love this phrase: “weak piping time of peace.”

Shine out, fair son, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass.
— RICHARD III, Act I, sc ii, 262-263

Why strew it thou sugar on that bottled spider,
Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about?
Fool, fool, thou whet’st a knife to kill thyself.
The day will come that thou shalt wish for me
To help thee curse this poisonous bunch-back’ed toad.
— QUEEN MARGARET, Act I, sc iii, 241-245

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol’n forth of Holy Writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.
— RICHARD, Act I, sc iii, 335-337

He tells us exactly who he is. He lets us in on the joke.

Hear me, you wrangling pirates.
— QUEEN MARGARET, Act I, sc iii, 167

CLARENCE: O, do not slander him for he is kind.
MURDERER: Right, as snow in harvest.

But now two mirrors of his princely semblance
And crack’d in pieces by malignant death,
And I for comfort have but one false glass.
— DUCHESS OF YORK, Act II, sc ii, 51-53

CITIZEN 1: Come, come, we fear the worst. All will be well.
CITIZEN 3: When clouds are seen, wise men put on their
cloaks;
When great leaves fall, then winter is at hand;
When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?
Untimely storms makes men expect a dearth.
All may be well; but if God sort it so,
’Tis more than we deserve or I expect.
— Act III, sc iii 31-37

Oft have I heard of sanctuary men
But sanctuary children never till now.
— BUCKINGHAM, Act III, sc i, 51-56

^^ Same.

Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity,
I moralize two meanings in one word.
— RICHARD, Act III, sc i, 82-83

HASTINGS: What news, what news, in this our tott’ring state?
CATESBY: It is a reeling world indeed, my lord.
— Act III, sc ii, 37-38

Who is so gross
That cannot see this palpable device?
Yet who so bold but says he sees it not?
Bad is the world, and all will come to nought,
When such ill dealing must be seen in thought.
— SCRIVENER, Act III, sc vi, 10-14

But I am in
So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.
Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.
— RICHARD, Act IV, sc ii, 63-65

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk.
— TYRRELL on the two dead Princes, Act IV sc 3, line 12

^^ This is one of the worst images in this whole violent play. The “disappeared” princes are haunting. And listen, I’m Irish, I don’t like any of these people, and my ancestor stood up to Queen Elizabeth and actually WAS a “wrangling pirate”, but … the princes were lured to the tower, and were never heard of again. It’s presented so chillingly in the play, because their uncle Richard is so warm and welcoming and basically frames it as “I’ll be with you in a moment, just wait for me in the Tower.” I came across this painting in college when I was first reading these plays and I couldn’t shake it. I actually wrote about all of this a little bit in my review of the not-very-good film The Lost King.

QUEEN MARGARET:
Tell over your woes again by reviewing mine.
I had an Edward till a Richard kill’d him
I had a Harry, till a Richard kill’d him.
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill’d him.
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard kill’d him.
Duchess of York:
I had a Richard too, and thou didst kill him.
I had a Rutland too, and thou didst kill him.
Queen Margaret:
Thou hadst a Clarence too, and Richard kill’d him.
— Act IV, sc iv, 39-46

This is the RuPaul Three Queens scene. Where the actor playing Richard can take a smoke break.

Richard yet lives, hell’s black intelligencer.
— QUEEN MARGARET, Act IV, sc iv, 71

Bett’ring thy loss makes the bad causer worse;
Revolving this will teach thee how to curse.
— QUEEN MARGARET, Act IV, sc iv, 122-123

TEACH THEE HOW TO CURSE.

QUEEN ELIZABETH:
Yet thou didst kill my children.
Richard:
But in your daughter’s womb I bury them;
Where in that nest of spicery they will breed
Selves of themselves, to your recomforture.

^^ That is fucking diabolical. And disGUSTING. “nest of spicery”. He is vile.

March on, march on, since we are up in arms,
If not to fight with foreign enemies,
Yet to beat down these rebels at home.
— RICHARD III, Act IV, sc iv, 528-530

Yeah. Playbook. Sounds a little familiar. Like I said: vile.

And if I die, no soul will pity me.
And wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?
— RICHARD III, Act V, sc iii, 201-203

Conscience is but a word that cowards use.
— RICHARD, Act V, sc iii, 309

Ain’t THAT the truth.

This’ll be an ongoing series as I make my way through.