I
wonder how the king escaped our hands.
-Earl of Warwick
King Henry the Sixth Part III Act
I, scene i Line 1
All right then, we've done it. We've picked the very first line of the play. Totally Random Daily Shakespeare works! I haven't gotten to a last line yet, but I've gotten close, and I'll get there. Now then, I've already mentioned that I don't know much about this play, so don't expect too much engagement on it today. It appears that there is a bit of a scramble going on for the throne in this play and it starts right off with it. 'I wonder how the king escaped our hands.' This line makes me think of Richard Burton's song in Camelot; 'I wonder what the king is doing tonight. He's wishing he were in Scotland fishing tonight.' Ah, but that was King Arthur who didn't even really exist but in legend. And it was Lerner and Lowe doing the writing, not Will. I'm a bit surprised that our friend Will never took on the story of King Arthur. He borrowed lots of old stories of royalty; Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Coriolanus... the list goes on. Oh well.
‘I wonder how the king escaped our hands.’ So those are the
very first words uttered in this play. What do they tell you? We know nothing
about this play (well, maybe you do). We’re given that the setting is the
Parliament House and that the people on stage are six Nobles and some soldiers.
I’m not sure that as theater goers we’d be able to recognize who the noblemen
on the stage are, or what they’re up to, but this first line would tell us a
few things: The king is not among the men on the stage, these men are after the
king, and there appears to be some discombobulation in the kingdom if there are
a bunch of Nobles in parliament with armed soldiers trying to catch the king. The
next lines are these fellows talking about action that has just occurred and
whom they’ve just killed, and in fact one of the fellows has the head of the
Duke of Somerset with him. No, I’m not kidding. The stage direction after
Richard’s line is ‘Throwing down the Duke of Somerset’s head.’ I’m trying to
picture this scene being performed in 1591 and I have to wonder how good the
props were back then. We do know that the Globe Theater burned down in the
early 1600’s in a fire caused by the sparks from a cannon fired off during a
performance of Henry the Eighth. So apparently they tried to get as realistic
as they could with their props. Maybe they used a real head that they got from
a mortuary? Well, probably not, but it’s still an interesting thought. And
after all, this isn’t the first time we’ve run into a head in Totally Random.
Remember Macbeth’s head on a stick? Remember Titus’s two sons’ heads? Lots of
heads in Shakespeare!
So you can probably tell that I’m not going to go into
context today. I’m not prepared to do a lot of reading on Henry VI this
morning. Oh we’ll probably get to it at some point. For goodness sakes, there
are three full plays devoted to Henry VI so we’re bound to get back to the
fellow. But not today. For now let’s be content to think about how well the
first lines uttered on stage that day got things going (along with the severed
head gag). And we’ll leave it at that.
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