Shakespeare’s Only Devil – The Duchess Experiments with Necromancy in 2 Henry VI

Horror Moments, Shakespeare Edition

‘Horror Moments’ is a series examining horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. The ‘moments’ are published weekly on Thursday mornings, and I share bonus content on the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more on Monday afternoons – don’t forget to subscribe!

[Spoilers: 2 Henry VI (c. 1591), Cat People (1942), Cannibal Holocaust (1980)]

There are quite a few almost-devils in Shakespeare’s plays. Caliban, son of Sycorax the witch, can be read as a devilish monster in The Tempest. I’ve recently discussed the ghosts in Hamlet and Macbeth which are candidates for being deceptive spirits rather than true images of the dead. There are plenty of human beings who embody evil and plenty who seek vengeance after unfair demonisation.

But there’s only one actual devil that appears and speaks and he is on stage for about sixty seconds in a far less well-known play: 2 Henry VI or Henry the Sixth Part Two (c. 1590-1).

It’s one of Shakespeare’s early plays and is not a plot everyone is familiar with so here’s the basic context of the conjuration scene:

It’s the mid-1400s and a power struggle has developed between two factions who want to influence the teenage king Henry VI. His new French wife, Margaret of Anjou, is colluding with her lover, the Earl of Suffolk, to rule through Henry. Standing against them is the popular Lord Protector Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, Henry’s uncle, who thinks he can look after things just fine until his nephew is mature enough to reign on his own.

Unbeknownst to him, his wife is about to pull off a disastrous stunt in an attempt to secure his power. Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, has decided that everything would be better if Henry died, and her husband became king. She turns to black magic to achieve this but is caught red-handed and exiled. Gloucester’s reputation is irreparably damaged, and he ends up being assassinated.

This is all based on the 1548 chronicle of Edward Hall and the historical Eleanor Cobham really was imprisoned for ‘treasonable necromancy.’ Strangely, though, Shakespeare has changed the type of magic she used. Instead of sticking pins in an image of Henry, his version of Eleanor attempts to raise a spirit from hell which will answer her questions. She is aided in this by a witch, Margery Jourdain, and a wizard, Roger Bolingbroke, both real historical figures and what follows is the entirety of the spirit’s time on stage:

Here they do the ceremonies belonging, and make the circle; BOLINGBROKE or SOUTHWELL reads, Conjuro te, & c. It thunders and lightens terribly; then the Spirit riseth

Spirit

Adsum. [‘I am here’]

MARGARET JOURDAIN

Asmath,
By the eternal God, whose name and power
Thou tremblest at, answer that I shall ask;
For, till thou speak, thou shalt not pass from hence.

Spirit

Ask what thou wilt. That I had said and done!

BOLINGBROKE

'First of the king: what shall of him become?'

Reading out of a paper

Spirit

The duke yet lives that Henry shall depose;
But him outlive, and die a violent death.

As the Spirit speaks, SOUTHWELL writes the answer

BOLINGBROKE

'What fates await the Duke of Suffolk?'

Spirit

By water shall he die, and take his end.

BOLINGBROKE

'What shall befall the Duke of Somerset?'

Spirit

Let him shun castles;
Safer shall he be upon the sandy plains
Than where castles mounted stand.
Have done, for more I hardly can endure.

BOLINGBROKE

Descend to darkness and the burning lake!
False fiend, avoid!

Thunder and lightning. Exit Spirit.

Most modern productions cut this scene entirely. It’s a bit too weird, too anachronistically supernatural in what is otherwise a play about history and politics. A recent Royal Shakespeare Company retelling of the Henry VI plays (2022) kept the scene but played up the idea that Jourdain and Bolingbroke were con artists duping Eleanor with a conspicuously fake puppet devil head on a stick.

So why exactly did Shakespeare add the conjuration scene? The answer is as much commercial as artistic. The play was written shortly after Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1588) had been a ground-breaking hit and sparked a vogue for plays that revolved around magicians, conjurations, and devils. It’s likely that this scene was added to give the company an excuse to reuse the costumes, props, and special effects that had so recently thrilled audiences.

Newer bigger theatres were being built in the late 1500s which could accommodate much more impressive displays to thrill large crowds. In-house sound effects (like the thunder and lightning here), trapdoors and perhaps even sulphurous smells could evoke the spine-tingling ascent of a demon from the depths of hell more vividly than ever before. The conjurations had been so convincing in Doctor Faustus that it was rumoured a real devil had been spotted in amongst the actors and now, any reference to magic in a playwright’s source material could become an excuse to bung some of this spectacle into a script.

This got me thinking about instances when a ‘hit’ horror film has sparked a trend of imitators which have copied an iconic moment or special effect, particularly when foisted into a plot to which it doesn’t quite seem suited. Jump scares, for example, date all the way back to films like Val Lewton’s Cat People (1942), the famous ‘Lewton’s Bus’ scene when a tense build up culminates in the sudden screeching of a perfectly normal bus that suddenly flies into view. They are now so overused that they often feel like a cheap way to get a reaction out of an audience just by making a loud noise at them in a generally toothless film.

The video nasty Cannibal Holocaust (1980) was arguably the first found footage film but it also showcased a brand-new set of disgusting special effects. They were so realistic that the director, Ruggero Deodato, was ordered to recreate an impaling scene to show how he had done it and avoid a murder charge.

A host of increasingly silly cannibal movies followed it – to the horror of moral campaigners like Mary Whitehouse - but also a more interesting series of found footage movies which were, conveniently, extremely cheap to make. The Blair Witch Project (1999) which I talked about last week is still arguably the best of these. It had a worldwide gross profit of $248.6 million, an astonishing 4,000 times its budget of $60,000.

There have been hundreds if not thousands of films that have since copied this style, or bunged found footage elements into stories where it doesn’t quite work: ‘why is this person still holding the camera as the monster gnaws their leg?’ Big studios now seem to be imitating themselves, you get the sense that scriptwriters with interesting ideas are asked ‘but could this be an Annabelle film?’ The stunts, effects and scares of copycat films often pale in comparison to the originals, just as Shakespeare’s conjuration feels clunky compared to Marlowe’s far more sophisticated exploration of demonic conjuration in Doctor Faustus.

Nevertheless, I love the messiness of this addition to the story of Henry VI. It’s a reminder of the very practical pressures that shaped plays in England’s golden age of theatre which weren’t so different from the way stories for commercial audiences are produced today. As Shakespeare matured, he got far better at integrating such pressures seamlessly into his work – but we’ve all got to start somewhere.

What are your favourite examples of scenes that feel like this? Let me know in the comments below and until next time,

Happy nightmares everyone!`

Horror moments are posted every Thursday and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Monday afternoons.