 Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Table of Contents OVERALL ANALYSES Character Analysis Henry VI Henry VI has to be considered as a major character since the play is named after him. Although his part in the play is not very big, it is nonetheless very significant. The portrait drawn of Henry VI is never flattering. Although he plays a prominent part in the play it is not in his nature to play a dominating role. Henry’s intentions are always good but he is powerless to do anything good. As an infant, when the play opens, he shows his helplessness before his discordant nobles in the very first scene in which he appears. As the fortunes of the quarreling factions ebb and flow, he is humiliated again and again. Peace loving but unable to keep the peace, he is a monarch who must helplessly watch while he losses everything. The play balances pathos against irony. Henry is a marginal and ineffective figure, but a few of his utterance point beyond weakness and incapacity to a deeper truth which few of those around him show any sign of grasping. It is clear when he says, "O, think upon the conquest of my father/ my tender years, and let us not forgo/that for a trifle that was bought with blood! When Gloucester urges him to marry the daughter of Earl of Armagnac, Henry shows all the right attitudes. He protests that he is young and studious, at better ease with his books than in "Wanton dalliance." But he will do as his counselors advise and as his responsibilities call him, "I shall be content with any choices, / Tends to God’s glory and my country’s weal." But Suffolk’s account of Margaret’s charms is so beguiling that the virtuous Henry feels the sting of brutish desire, "I am sick with working of my thoughts," and it is in vain that Gloucester reminds him of his earlier pledge to Armagnac’s daughter. This shows that the young King, for all his occasional wisdom, is but a youth possessed with an adolescent’s heart and fancy. He turns a deaf ear to all the practical reasons against marriage to Margaret of Anjou and allows Suffolk to persuade him to do what he already desires to do. Henry is a young man with the fatal flaw of weakness in his character that holds within it the seeds of his destruction. This is exemplified in his ineffective influence over his nobles and his capitulation to his capricious fancy regarding Margaret. Table of Contents | |
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