Henry II in Drama: Changing Historical Outlooks

Abstract

all the stories. Henry II, who loved and hated his sons in roughly equal measure, died after one final battle with his surviving heirs, muttering, we are told, last words perfectly suited to biographers and playwrights: Shame, shame on a vanquished king.l But if Shakespeare ever wrote a play about Henry II, it has not survived.2 His only known writing about the early Plantagenets deals with Henry's youngest son, John. In the middle years of the twentieth century, however, several prominent writers have turned to Henry as the central figure for their dramas. These include T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, Jean Anouilh, and James Goldman, along with a half dozen lesser known playwrights who contributed other versions of the same theme, sometimes in single act or short sketch form.3 Earlier, Alfred Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Bancroft, William Henry Ireland, Thomas Hull, Joseph Addison, William Hawkins, Aubrey de Vere, Douglas Jerrold, Alfred Waite, and Arthur Helps, among others, wrote plays involving one or another of the dramatic crises that punctuated the reign of the first Plantagenet. With one exception, this last group dates from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. John Bancroft's Henry the Second was performed in 1692 and published soon after. The actor-director William Mountfort may have assisted in the writing, and John Dryden loaned his name to the production through an epilogue written in a vein distinctly different from the words of the play itself. Concerning Henry, the great Elizabethan dramatists were