Most welcome, bondage! For thou art a way,

The Tempest

All the infections that the sun sucks up

Here’s neither bush nor shrub

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves,

Henry VIII

So farewell – to the little good you bear me.

The Two Noble Kinsmen

Banished the kingdom? ’Tis a benefit,

Why should I love this gentleman? ’Tis odds

I am very cold, and all the stars are out too,

Yet I may bind those wounds up, that must open

Index of First Lines

Introduction

The news that Henry VI has ordered him to Ireland to put down an insurrection comes as a hammer-blow to the Duke of York, yet he soon sees that it presents him with an opportunity. With an army marshalled in his command, he will be practically a king himself – if only he can muster up in himself the determination he will need to press his high ambitions:

Now, York, or never, steel thy fearful thoughts,

And change misdoubt to resolution;

Be that thou hopest to be, or what thou art

Resign to death; it is not worth th’ enjoying.

Let pale-faced fear keep with the mean-born man,

And find no harbour in a royal heart.

Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought,

And not a thought but thinks on dignity.

(Henry VI, Part 2, III, i, 331–8)

We are for the moment removed from the alarums and excursions of history in the making, the dramatic confrontations of the Tudor court, yet in York’s musings we glimpse another, inward action which is if anything more frenetic, more urgently driven.

Although set back from the main dramatic narrative, Shakespeare’s soliloquies are generally anything but interludes. Nowhere do we come closer to the centre of things than we do in those moments in which characters speak when alone, or unaware of being overheard – in conversation, as it were, with themselves and with their audience. Episodes often of the utmost privacy, of introversion, presented publicly on the open stage, they present the paradox of the theatrical performance at its starkest: how is it that a single speaking voice can contain such infinite possibility? ‘I have been studying how I may compare/This prison where I live unto the world,’ says Richard II, and as he does so we seem to leave the narrow confines of the apron stage to see the whole human universe spread out before us. What could be more thrilling than that moment in the theatre when all extraneous circumstance seems to melt away into the wings and the individual consciousness is left in confrontation with the eternal problems of existence? ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…’, says Macbeth – and suddenly it seems as though time were standing still as the once-ambitious thane sees his entire career reduced to a tale of futility – a play, indeed – his lady dead.

Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage