The Hollow Crown’s “2 Henry VI”: Perspective and Personal Sovereignty

Elizabeth E. Tavares (Pacific University)

The second episode of the new Shakespearean miniseries, The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, makes clear that the producers concretely thought about what the television serial medium can offer these plays beyond production values. While the first episode employed the editing technique of cross-cutting to underscore the ways in which a king might be slingshot between factions (thus rendering his decisions always in terms of a lesser evil), the second episode, “2 Henry VI,” uses point-of-view (POV) framing to suggest the consequences of a government dictated by personal motivations rather than that of the commonwealth.

The episode makes great pains to link itself to the premiere as well as foreshadow themes to come. It opens with a cross-cut, moving between an extreme close-up of an anxious Henry VI’s (Tom Sturridge) eyes and then looking out from within the beaver helm of Richard (Benedict Cumberbatch). The king is about to lose a battle with the York faction, but gain back the attentions of his wife, Queen Margaret (Sophie Okonedo) with the sacrifice of Somerset (Ben Miles). With this editing technique, a shift is signaled. Rather than focusing of the factional sway of competing interests around a weak king through cross-cutting, this episode attends to the ways in which the personal—revenge, desire, ambition—proves a similarly poor model of governance by putting viewers in the shoes of individual participants.

The…