The Wars of the Roses was a 1963 theatrical adaptation of William Shakespeare's first historical tetralogy (1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI and Richard III), which deals with the conflict between the House of Lancaster and the House of York over the throne of England, a conflict known as the Wars of the Roses. The plays were adapted by John Barton, and directed by Barton and Peter Hall at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The production starred David Warner as Henry VI, Peggy Ashcroft as Margaret of Anjou, Donald Sinden as the Duke of York, Paul Hardwick as the Duke of Gloucester, Janet Suzman as Joan la Pucelle, Brewster Mason as the Earl of Warwick, Roy Dotrice as Edward IV, Susan Engel as Queen Elizabeth and Ian Holm as Richard III.
The plays were heavily politicised, with Barton and Hall allowing numerous contemporaneous events of the early 1960s to inform their adaptation. The production was a huge critical and commercial success, and is generally regarded as revitalizing the reputation of the Henry VI plays in the modern theatre. Many critics feel The Wars of the Roses set a standard for future productions of the tetralogy which has yet to be surpassed. In 1965, the BBC adapted the plays for television. The broadcast was so successful that they were shown again, in a differently edited form, in 1966. In 1970, BBC Books published the play scripts along with extensive behind-the-scenes information written by Barton and Hall, and other members of the Royal Shakespeare Company who worked on the production.
Theatrical
Rewriting The most significant initial alteration to the original text was to conflate the four plays into a trilogy. This was not unprecedented, as adaptations from the seventeenth century onwards had employed truncation when staging the sequence, especially the Henry VI trilogy. In 1681, John Crowne adapted 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI into a two-part play called Henry the Sixth, The First Part and The Misery of Civil War. Henry the Sixth comprised Acts 1–3 of 2 Henry VI, with material added by Crowne himself, focusing mainly on the death of Gloucester, whilst Misery adapted the last two acts of 2 Henry VI and a shortened version of 3 Henry VI. In 1699, Colley Cibber's The Tragical History of King Richard the Third used scenes from 3 Henry VI as a form of prologue to rest of the play, establishing a tradition still in use in filmic adaptations of Richard III (see, for example, James Keane and André Calmettes's 1912 version, Laurence Olivier's 1955 version or Richard Loncraine's 1995 version). In 1723, Theophilus Cibber's King Henry VI: A Tragedy used Act 5 of 2 Henry VI and Acts 1 and 2 of 3 Henry VI. In 1817, J.H. Merivale's Richard Duke of York; or the Contention of York and Lancaster used material from all three Henry VI plays, but removed everything not directly related to York. Robert Atkins adapted all three plays into a single piece for a performance at The Old Vic in 1923 as part of the celebrations for the tercentenary of the First Folio. In 1957, also at The Old Vic, Douglas Seale directed a production of the trilogy under the title The Wars of the Roses. Adapted by Barry Jackson, the trilogy was again altered to a two-part play; 1 Henry VI and 2 Henry VI were combined (with almost all of 1 Henry VI eliminated) and 3 Henry VI was performed in a shortened version.
John Barton's adaptation would divide the plays up in a new way. The first play (Henry VI) featured a shortened version of 1 Henry VI and roughly half of 2 Henry VI (up to the death of Cardinal Beaufort). The second play (Edward IV) featured the second half of 2 Henry VI and a shortened version of 3 Henry VI. This was followed by a shortened version of Richard III as the third play. In all, 1,450 lines written by Barton were added to roughly 6,000 lines of original Shakespearean material, with a total of 12,350 lines removed. Barton defended the controversial decision to cut from and add to the text on the grounds that the Henry VI plays "are not viable as they stand," arguing they needed to be adapted "in the interests of audience accessibility."Quoted in As an example of the alterations, in the original text, the character of the Duke of Exeter appears only in 1 Henry VI, whereas in The Wars of the Roses, he appears throughout all three plays, as a constant ally of Henry VI and the House of Lancaster. Numerous characters were also removed, such as Warwick's father, the Earl of Salisbury, a major character in 2 Henry VI, and some of the battle scenes were amalgamated to cut down on stage combat (such as the First Battle of St Albans and the Battle of Wakefield, which take place in 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI, respectively).
In his introduction to the published script of the plays, Peter Hall defended Barton's edits, arguing "there is a difference between interfering with the text of the mature Shakespeare and with the text of the Henry VIs. These plays are not only apprentice work, uneven in quality; we cannot be sure that Shakespeare was their sole author." In tandem with Barton, Hall also argued the plays simply didn't work in unedited form;
Although some scholars were highly critical of Barton's edits, others praised them, arguing they improved on the originals. G.K. Hunter, for example, who was critical of the production itself, praised the editing, commenting that Barton was able to "cut away the superfluous fat, tap out the unhealthy fluids, and rescue from the diffuse, stumbling, dropsical giant, a trim, lithe, and with-it figure, sharp and resilient." Frank Cox referred to the plays as "a triumph of scholarship and theatrical awareness," arguing that "by inspired weeding, contradiction, and even in places by brazen invention, he has created from a seldom revived mass of sword-rattling chronicles, a positive addition to the canon of popular works."Quoted in Robert Speaight argued the additions were so well integrated into the existing material, he was at times unable to distinguish between the original Shakespearean blank verse and Barton's new verse, whilst J.C. Trewin noted that although the changes to the plays represented the most drastic alteration to Shakespeare since the days of the Restoration, the resulting production was of such a consistently high quality that any such changes could be forgiven.
Politics In terms of the dramaturgy of the plays, Barton and Hall were both equally concerned they reflect, but not directly refer to, the contemporary political milieu. According to Trevor Nunn, when Hall founded the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960, he "insisted upon one simple rule: that whenever the Company did a play by Shakespeare, they should do it because the play was relevant, because the play made some demand upon our current attention."Quoted in This was very much in evidence during the production of The Wars of the Roses. Both Hall and Barton felt the civil chaos and breakdown of society depicted in the plays were mirrored by the contemporary political situation, in events such as the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Hall argued that "we live among war, race riots, revolutions, assassinations, and the imminent threat of extinction. The theatre is, therefore, examining fundamentals in staging the Henry VI plays."Quoted in He also stated that during pre-production, "I realised that the mechanism of power had not changed in centuries. We were in the middle of a blood-soaked century. I was convinced that a presentation of one of the bloodiest and most hypocritical periods in history would teach many lessons about the present." Similarly, in her introduction to the Folio Society edition of the trilogy, Peggy Ashcroft challenged William Hazlitt's dismissal of the Henry VI plays as a depiction of England as a "perfect beargarden", writing "perhaps because we are more aware than ever before what a beargarden the whole world is, we see in these plays a microcosm of so many of the violent and tragic conflicts of our own time. The romantic view of Shakespeare, popular with the Victorians and lasting almost to the first half of this century has now changed, and we have become more aware of Shakespeare's political absorption and inspired interpretations of man's difficulty in governing himself and others."Quoted in
Barton and Hall were also influenced by certain politically focused literary theory of the time; both were subscribers to Antonin Artaud's theory of the "Theatre of Cruelty", and both had attended the 1956 London visit of Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble. Brecht's influence on The Wars of the Roses was especially pronounced, and many scholars have since cited Brecht's theories on drama in general, and historical drama in specific, as the impetus behind the 'rediscovery' of the Henry VI plays in the 1960s. For example, Ton Hoenselaars argues that Brecht
Another major influence on the production was Jan Kott. Hall had read a proof copy of Kott's soon-to-be-influential Shakespeare Our Contemporary, prior to its publication in Britain, just before he began rehearsals for The Wars of the Roses. He was strongly taken by Kott's theory regarding Shakespeare's conception of the "Grand Mechanism" of history; as history continually revolves, each claimant to the throne rises, only to be subsequently deposed and crushed in an ongoing cycle. In the programme notes for Henry VI, Barton and Hall included a quotation from Kott, which they felt was especially relevant to their production;
In Shakespeare's histories, the Grand Mechanism is manifested nowhere more clearly than in the rise and fall of Richard III. Kott argued that "Richard is impersonal like history itself. He is the consciousness and mastermind of the Grand Mechanism. He puts in motion the roller of history, and later is crushed by it. Psychology does not apply to him. He is just history, one of its ever-repeating characters. He has no face."See This concept of Richard as a faceless personification of the process of a cyclical history became extremely important in Ian Holm's performance. Whilst some critics felt that Holm was physically too slight to play such a 'large' character, this was precisely the point. Holm's Richard is not the dominating larger-than-life presence of the third play as he appears on the page, but is instead a small figure, nurtured by, trapped within and ultimately destroyed by the times that have produced him. Holm himself has stated "I played Richard very much as a cog in the historical wheel, and not as an individual character. We tried very hard to get away from the Olivier/Irving image of the great Machiavellian villain."